Card sorting is a universal time-tested exercise and there are different ways to conduct a card sort study. The pricing varies accordingly. A great thing about card sorting is that you can do it with any budget, however, the effectiveness may vary. 

As we already know from this card sorting guide, there is offline and online card sorting.

Offline card sorting

The cheapest one. A great option for somebody who doesn’t want to invest any money in research as you’ll just need some paper and a pen. However, it’s considered to be quite old-fashioned nowadays with all the technology available.

There are a few downsides of this method:

• It’s much slower 
• It’s harder to get the respondents, as you can’t just share a link or use the participant pool
• It’s less insightful. There will be no advanced analytics which makes it complicated to gather meaningful insights.

Online card sorting

A perfect option, if you ask me. It can be done from wherever you want: home, office or any other place. 

It’s a lot faster both for you to set up and for the respondents to sort. 

There is no problem with getting respondents. You can share a link to your study via social media or email, add a widget to your website and offer a reward or just get some people from the user panel.

The biggest advantage of online card sorting is it’s advanced analytics. All the results are presented in the form of matrixes, diagrams and dendrograms that are not only insightful and deep, but also easy to read and understand.

All of the pros mentioned above make online card sorting a little bit more pricey than the offline one. However, there are still options for any budget. 

The prices vary from $100 to $300. Here’s a quick pricing overview of the best card sorting tools.