So, you’re considering buying GrowthHackers Experiments and want to know a bit more before buying it? We’ve tried the software, scoured the documentation and read every single release note in order to be able to provide you with an in-depth overview, without you needing to request a demo or trial.

The GrowthHackers product has been through various name and branding changes over the last few years (GrowthHackers Canvas, GrowthHackers Projects, GrowthHackers Northstar, GrowthHackers Experiments) but rest assured they are all same product.

We’ll start by highlighting some of the pros and cons but go into far more detail throughout the article. You can also view a comparison of GrowthHackers Experiments vs. Growth Method towards the end of the article.

Please note feature information is correct as of December 2022. Growth Method has made every attempt to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information provided.

Pros

• One of the first growth marketing management tools on the market
• Integrations with the likes of Slack, Jira, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Airtable and more
• Includes the ability to design your own idea prioritisation framework and metrics
• Ability to document meeting details
• Well-suited to all growth levers and the entire customer journey

Cons

• Best suited to larger and well-established growth teams
• Expensive compared with other solutions
• Primarily suited to product teams requiring cross-functional work management e.g. between growth and engineering teams
• May be overwhelming for newer and smaller growth teams

1. What is Growth Hackers Experiments?

Growth Hackers Experiments is a growth marketing, or growth hacking management tool that can be used to build a formal growth process in your company.

Speak to any experienced growth practitioner or read any good book on growth marketing, and the core principles remain the same, all centred around high tempo testing:

1. Ideate – come up with ideas for campaigns, strategies and tactics that align with your goals
2. Prioritise – organise and prioritise these ideas using a proven framework
3. Test – test the most promising ideas quickly, in an agile manner
4. Analyse – compare the results of the test with the initial hypothesis and record learnings
5. Optimise / Systematise – use learnings to improve execution and or build always-on systems

2. Objectives

Objectives are essential for keeping a growth team focused on what matters to the business. In Growth Hackers projects you can set both a North Star Metric (NSM) for the business as well as lower-level Objectives required to achieve that North Star Metric.

It is easiest to think of Objectives like goals, KPIs or OKRs, your objectives could be things like:

• Increase product page conversions by 10%
• Decrease website load time speed by 2 seconds
• Increase organic traffic to solution pages by 20%

In Growth Hackers Experiments objectives require a couple of key pieces of information including:

1. The metric goal
2. An initial measurement
3. A target value
4. A confidence level

Once an objective has been created, you can then start requesting ideas and running experiments for the objective.

3. Growth Levers

The best growth teams navigate across departments, breaking down company silos, and are responsible for growth activity across the whole of the customer journey – not just the initial acquisition of a new customer or prospect.

The default growth levers in Growth Hackers Experiments are the standard AARRR metrics (also know as Pirate Metrics), as detailed below. It is perhaps easiest to think of these as a set of idea/experiment tags or categories.

Metric	Description
Acquisition	How do your users find you?
Activation	Do users have a great first experience? Do the users convert?
Retention	Do users come back? Are they engaged?
Referral	Do users refer to others?
Revenue	How do you make money?

It is also possible to customise your Growth Levers within the app by creating, updating or deleting the defaults to suit your requirements. For example, you may decide to organise experiments based on business unit or function:

Now if the HR team require support from the growth team to hire 100 new inside sales reps over the next quarter, they can filter ideas based on the HR growth lever. Or, you may wish to tag experiments based on the different stages of your customer journey, for exmaple:

Now, if management wants to see which stage of the customer journey has used the most growth resources, they can easily view this in a report.

4. Ideation

“The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of them.”

Thomas Edison

Ideas are the leading input to the entire growth marketing process, they are the rocket fuel for growth. Without a consistent, steady pipeline of ideas there’s a lesser chance your team will make an impact because there’s less to test and learn from.

Growth Hackers Experiments provides the ability to capture all of your growth ideas in one place, and provides various sorting, filtering and search capabilities.

With GrowthHackers Experiments, starring ideas is used to nominate ideas for discussion in the weekly growth meeting, alternatively you can open an idea card and click on “Nominate”. This essentially reduces all the growth ideas down to a handful for discussion and prioritisation, in order that the best ones can be selected to become experiments.

5. Prioritisation

In order to choose the best ideas to test, you need a way to prioritise all the ideas you have in the system. Growth Hackers Experiments provides this through various prioritisation frameworks, including the ICE framework (Impact, Confidence, Ease) and PIE framework (Potential, Importance, Ease).

For more mature growth teams, the software also enables you to be able to create your own prioritisation framework using as many criteria as you like.

6. GH Experiments Integrations

When running experiments, Growth Hackers Experiments can connect to various 3rd party tools and software to pull-in relevant experiment metrics – these include behavioural analytics providers, web analytics and more. For more advanced teams, metric data from these 3rd parties can also be used in goals and hypotheses.

Popular Integrations

Below is a summary of the most common native integrations along with a brief description of the functionality provided.

Integration	Description
MixPanel	Visualize Mixpanel metrics directly through Growth Experiments, to define and create hypotheses for experimentation
Jira	This is a two-way integration, where you can create cards in Jira for new experiment ideas as well as pull data back from Jira into Experiments
Optimizely	Pull in Optimizely test information, including variation data summary, metrics, and screenshots to experiments
Google Analytics	Through Google Spreadsheet, Google Analytics metrics measurement can sync to Experiments instead of being entered manually.
Slack	Get notifications to any Slack channel when idea cards are created, commented on, moved through the steps, and more.
Google Sheets	Metrics measurement can be sync with data from a Google Sheet document in addition to being entered manually.
Asana	Similar to Jira, the integration enables users to send idea cards to Asana with just one click.
Amplitude	Visualise your Amplitude metrics directly through Growth Experiments
Google Optimise	Link experiment cards with Google Optimise to see the results directly in Growth Hackers Experiments
Segment	Choose the Segment events to validate your hypothesis and once the test period is complete, data is automatically populated into the card – no manual input required.

Integration types

Some of these integrations are one-way integrations, for example with Optimizely (below) where analytics data is pulled from Optimizely into the experiment for ease of analysis and reporting.

Similarly, if running an AB test in Google Optimise, you can select the events you want to track in Growth Hackers Experiments and once it’s complete, the data will be automatically populated into the card ready for analysis and learnings.

Other integrations, such as the Jira integration, are two-way meaning you can push an experiment card to a Jira issue, and pull data back from a Jira issue into an experiment card. This is intended for product growth teams where there is a need to work closely with development and engineering teams to run experiments, and enables more effective communications across teams.

7. Zapier Integration

In addition to the pre-built native integrations above, Growth Hackers Experiments (previously known as NorthStar) also has a Zapier integration, allowing for automations to be configured with other 3rd party software – such as Basecamp, Airtable, Campfire and more.

For more detail on this, see the article on How to connect Experiments with Zapier and Integrating Airtable using Zapier. It is worth noting that the Zapier integration is extremely limited as it only has 1 trigger action called ‘New Card’, meaning you can only use Zapier to do something in another piece of software when a new card is created.

8. Related Cards

Towards the end of 2019, Growth Hackers Experiments team introduced a new feature called Related Cards. This essentially provides a new field on idea cards where related tests and previous learnings can be linked together.

We find this functionality useful when encouraging early-stage growth teams to adopt a more agile way of working, as it enables them to take larger pieces of worth and break them down into smaller components, but still link them together.

9. Sharing Experiments

Idea and experiment information can be shared with anyone that doesn’t have a login to Growth Hackers Experiments using the share experiments feature. Clicking the ‘share’ button on a card provides access to a public link that can be shared in email, chat, or in a presentation with anyone online.

In our experience, sharing experiment progress and data with stakeholders within the company is incredibly valuable in building relationships. One example we see regularly is growth marketing teams sharing acquisition related experiments with product management and product marketing which helps enormously in building these relationships and understanding of the growth process.

10. Meeting Summaries

If you run your growth meetings directly from GrowthHackers Experiments a meeting report can be automatically generated by the software, these meeting reports include:

• Notes
• Duration
• Learnings
• New Ideas
• New Tests

Meeting summaries are particularly useful for members of the team that are on holiday, or unable to attend the meeting for some other reason.

11. API Access

API access for Growth Hackers Experiments was released towards the end of 2019 and enables users to extract experiment data and send it elsewhere. The release notes indicate this was mainly requested by larger companies with multiple teams working on multiple products where they wanted the ability to generate reports of all experiments being run across the entire organisation.

GrowthHackers Experiments Pricing

Pricing is no longer public but in our experience the pricing on Crozdesk.com is inline with what we have seen with paid plans starting from $849.00 per month. Certainly the pricing has increased significantly since the initial Product Hunt launch in 2016.

GrowthHackers Experiments doesn’t offer any free plans but does offer a free 1-to-1 demo.

GH Experiments Reviews

Currently the only reviews online are at g2.com:

• https://www.g2.com/products/experiments-by-growthhackers/reviews#reviews
• https://crozdesk.com/software/growthhackers-experiments
• https://www.capterra.co.uk/software/207083/experiments-by-growthhackers

The reviews demonstrate the benefits of using a dedicated, purpose-built platform for managing growth marketing and marketing experimentation.

GH Experiments Alternatives

Below is a list of GrowthHackers experiments competitors and alternative software. You may also be interested in our marketing project management software review which includes more general project management software.

GH Experiments vs. Growth Method

GrowthHackers Experiments is best suited to growth engineering and product growth teams, companies with lots of traffic and conversions that need to work with engineering teams to run experiments whereas Growth Method is more suited to marketing and digital teams.

GrowthHackers Experiments	Growth Method
Designed for product growth teams	Designed for marketing growth teams
Best suited to growth functions that work with separate engineering and data teams	Best suited to growth functions that are more autonomous
Uses Silicon Valley startup nomenclature	More corporate/business terminology
From $849/month	From $100/month
Highly complex and customisable	Easier to get started

Resources

• Experiments software on the Growth Hackers blog https://blog.growthhackers.com/experiments-software/home
• GrowthHackers Experiments software playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2lPOota5AIDB544xbn4QTmrdRUc-Ln1h
• Growth university https://university.growthhackers.com/
• Growth software https://growth.software/

Other articles you might like

Here are some related articles and further reading you may find helpful.

• The problem with agency project management software
• The importance of testing velocity (not speed) in growth marketing
• In-depth review of Visual Website Optimizer (VWO) Plan 2023
• The rise of the growth marketing platform in 2023
• In-depth TrueNorth.io Review 2023