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 February 2023. UpGrow.co (experiment management tool) and UpGrow.io (digital marketing agency) are unrelated companies. Growth Method has made every attempt to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information provided.

Pros

• A slick signup and user onboarding workflow
• Auto-save works nicely throughout making for a nice 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 from Ward van Gasteren. Ward is a growth hacking coach based out of Breda in the Netherlands. He is most well-known for his blog https://growwithward.com/. In addition Ward provides coaching and consulting, as most recently a growth experiment tool.

UpGrow features

Let’s take a look at some of the 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:

1. Set up company
2. Create your account
3. Watch tour
4. Create first experiment
5. Customise process
6. Invite your team
7. 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.

Whilst the score names can be editing in the settings area, there is currently no ability to change weightings or to add more criteria should you want to use the PXL framework, for example. However, a note in the app does explain the reasoning for this:

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 extension 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.

Results and learnings

Results and learnings enables the capturing of new insights with some predetermined types including:

Insight Types	Example
Suggestion	Suggestion from a colleague or stakeholder
Data insight	Data insight from a tool such as GA4 or MixPanel
Observation	An observation from a third-party tool such as HotJar
Experiment	An experiment completed in UpGrow
Customer	Customer insight following a customer or user interview
Assumption	An assumption (or idea) from a member of your team

VWO take a similar approach though learnings and observations and linked to tests and experiments, which would be a better implementation here. In our experience, requiring manual input of learnings on a continual basis in order to build a knowledge database is a difficult, though an enviable goal.

Settings

Settings and users areas include standard administration functionality including:

• Adding company information
• Added statuses
• Scoring
• Tags
• Users & roles
• Plans and billing

UpGrow pricing

UpGrow pricing ranges from €29 per month on the Essential plan for up to 5 users, to €299/mo on the Agency plan for 20 agency users and 5 clients.

There are over 17 different features listed in the pricing plan details, for more information see https://upgrow.co/pricing/.

Final thoughts

We tested an early version of the UpGrow experiment management tool and based on the roadmap clearly there is much more to come. Clearly a number of bugs and quirks still need to ironed out, and functionality added (such as roles, sharing, integrations and more).

The platform is the first experiment management tool to be built on the Bubble no-code platform, which brings with it a number of advantages and disadvantages, so it will be interested to see how the software develops over time.

UpGrow resources

1. Grow with Ward blog
2. UpGrow website
3. Ward’s talk at Experiment Summit
4. Grow with Ward free resources

Upgrow.co alternatives

Looking for a growth marketing or agile marketing platform? Here are some additional software products you may wish to consider.

Other articles you might like

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

• Using Convert.com for AB testing – an alternative to Google Optimise
• Using VWO for AB testing – an alternative to Google Optimise
• The problem with agency project management software
• In-depth UpGrow Experiment Management Tool review
• The importance of testing velocity (not speed) in growth marketing