UpGrow growth experiment management | An independent review

Article written by

Stuart Brameld

Similar to our GrowthHackers Projects and Truenorth.io review this article is an in-depth review and analysis of the UpGrow experiment management tool.

We’ll start by highlighting some of the pros and cons but go into far more detail throughout the article.

Information is correct as of August 2023. Note UpGrow.co (the experiment management tool), UpGrow.io (the digital marketing agency) and UpGrow.com (the Instagram tool) are completely separate and unrelated companies. Growth Method has made every attempt to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information provided below.

Pros

Nice signup and user onboarding workflow
Auto-save works nicely throughout making for a good user experience
Nicely designed
Ability to customise scoring
Advanced filters and tags

Cons

Experiment panel can feel cluttered
Complex pricing
Built on the Bubble no-code platform
No integrations
Still some early bugs and issues to fix
Lacking enforced best practises

What is UpGrow?

According to the UpGrow homepage:

"Upgrow is the Experiment Management Tool for Growth Teams to keep track of your experiments, learnings and related tasks. Streamline your team’s process & double your output."
upgrow.co

The product is positioned towards smaller growth teams:

“Upgrow is developed based on the past decade of consulting high-growth companies and optimizing their processes. I made this tool as there was no easy-to-use, affordable tool like this for (smaller) growth teams to really take their growth process serious.”
Ward van Gasteren

Who is behind UpGrow?

UpGrow is a new product built by Ward van Gasteren. Ward is a growth hacking coach based out of Breda in the Netherlands. He writes regularly on this blog in addition to providing coaching and consulting services.

UpGrow features

Let's take a look at some of the early core features and functionality.

Getting started

A self-serve onboarding process walks you through the process of signing up, creating your company and account, getting started with the product and creating your first experiment.

The checklist walks you through the following 7 steps:

Set up company
Create your account
Watch tour
Create first experiment
Customise process
Invite your team
Choose a plan

Home

Once you have created your company and account you are taken to the main overview screen which is where you see Experiments. There is no concept of Ideas and Experiments in UpGrow, everything is an Experiment but with a customisable stage.

By default the stages are as follows, though these are customisable from the settings area:

Idea
Prepare
Live
Complete

Creating a new experiment

Similar to project management tools such as Asana, as well as experiment management solutions like GrowthHackers Projects and Truenorth, UpGrow uses a right-hand panel for managing experiment details.

Here you can add and edit all of your experiment details such as Owner, Start Date, End Date, Description, Hypothesis, Tasks, Tags, Scores and more.

Experiment scoring

Experiment scoring in UpGrow uses the ICE framework and operates in a very similar fashion to other experiment management tools.

Be aware: Adding more than 3 criteria makes scoring more time-consuming & more complex, so it might slow you down and increase your overhead.

Experiment filtering and tags

UpGrow has extensive tagging and filtering capabilities. UpGrow comes with the ability to tag experiments, and a number of tag categories come pre-defined (Customer journey, Experiment type, Website area, Goal metric, Tactic, Project and Other).

Experiments can then be filtered by Status, Score, Planning, Tags and Owner. So, to find all Ideas that are not yet experiments, you would filter by Experiments where status is Idea.