10 Best FREE Card Sorting Tools
10 Best FREE Card Sorting Tools
If you are thinking about what card sorting software to choose, take a few notes in mind. There are not many online card sorting tools where you can just share a link and gather data from your target audience.
Keep in mind, all tools have a FREE version of their products, which is usually enough to perform a simple exercise.
Here is the quick comparison of all online card sorting tools in the table.
Best online card sorting tools & software for 2023:
- UXtweak
- Optimal Workshop
- UserZoom
- Proven by Users
- xSort
- Usabilitest
- kardSort
- Miro
- Useberry
My list of online card sorting tools
I reviewed all tools I was able to discover on the Internet. You can find a brief description and summary for each tool below. I hope it helps you to decide which tool is the best fit for your use-case.
UX Tweak ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Supported types: Open, Closed, Hybrid
Remote card sort: Yes
Analytics: Advanced
This is one of my favorites. They support all types of card sorting: open, closed, and hybrid. It’s a great online tool to create and manage your card sorting exercise. It’s easy to share with your respondents using their website widget, and you can even motivate people by setting up rewards.
This tool allows you to fully customize messages you show your visitors. It could be a welcome message, instructions, a thank you message, etc.
On top of that, you can create a custom questionnaire and ask people to fill it out before or after your study. Respondents who don’t match your target audience will not be able to proceed to your UX research.
They offer a number of other cool features such as session recording or unmoderated testing that can bring lots of insights about your UX as well.
Respondent Pool and Recruiter Widget available.
UXtweak Pricing:
Free: Max. 10 respondents and 20 cards per study
Paid plan: $80/month
Optimal Workshop ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Supported types: Open, Closed, Hybrid
Remote card sort: Yes
Analytics: Advanced
The Optimal Workshop suite consists of 5 quantitative and qualitative tools to help you with user research. One of them is OptimalSort, which is a tool focused on card sorting.
If you are looking for more information I found this comparison article – Optimal Workshop vs UXtweak which compares these highly rated card sort tools in more detail.
Optimal Workshop Pricing:
Free: Limited to 30 cards per a study, 10 participants per study
Paid plan: $166/month
Userzoom ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Supported types: Open, Closed
Remote card sort: Yes
Analytics: Advanced
This tool looks cool. They support both closed and open card sort. However, I am missing any guidance on how to create proper card sorting using their product. Their pricing seems to be a little bit complicated, for that reason it might be worth checking out some affordable Userzoom alternatives. They can customize the price base on your needs and volume which is not entirely clear to me, but it might work for your company or project.
UserZoom Pricing:
Free: 14-days trial
Paid: starting at $250/mo for researcher seat and 15 studies per year.
Proven by Users ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Supported types: Open, Closed, Hybrid
Remote card sort: Yes
Analytics: Simple
This tool looks very old. The UI doesn’t seem very intuitive. However, they are releasing a new version by the end of this year, so we will see. What I like is the working demo. You can try it out without registration. They offer open, closed card sorting, and you can use images in cards as well.
Proven by Users Pricing:
Free: Only 3 results per project can be collected. Logo uploads are disabled. Image cards are disabled.
Paid plan: starting at $39.95/month (based on how long do you want to keep the data)
xSort ⭐️⭐️
Supported types: Open, Closed, Hybrid
Remote card sort: No
Analytics: Medium
The good news is this tool is free. The bad news is it’s not an online tool. It’s a desktop app for Mac. You can try it out if it fits your use case. They support open, closed, and hybrid exercises. You can use sub-groups and display statistical results.
xSort Pricing:
Free: Unlimited (Mac app)
usabiliTEST⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Supported types: Open, Closed, Hybrid
Remote card sort: Yes
Analytics: Medium
It seems like a handy online tool for card sorting. You can create an open, closed, and hybrid card sort. They allow you to add images into cards, too, but the big issue is images are so small you can’t recognize what’s on them. This is a big minus. The tool looks a little bit deprecated as well. I was not able to find any pricing, so I assume it’s free for now.
UsabiliTEST Pricing:
Free: Free for now
KardSort⭐️⭐️⭐️
Supported types: Open, Closed, Hybrid
Remote card sort: Yes
Analytics: Simple
It’s a nice free online card sorting tool that covers its purpose. You could hit limitations when you want to analyze data or use images in your card. Overall it could be a good solution if you are on a tight budget and don’t expect to combine your data output with other tools and services.
Kard Sort Pricing:
Free: It’s completely free.
Pen & paper⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Supported types: Open, Closed, Hybrid
Remote card sort: No
Analytics: None
Probably the simplest solution of all. And it works great. You don’t need any software, just create a card sorting session using pen and paper. Obviously, you can’t get feedback online (or it would be complicated), but it’s an easy solution if you want to create a quick test and got some potential respondents around you.
Pricing:
Free: It’s almost free (count the cost of paper and pen 🙂).
Card Sorting using Miro⭐️⭐️⭐️
Supported types: Open, Closed, Hybrid
Remote card sort: Yes
Analytics: None
A digital whiteboard tool, Miro is a great solution for when you want to conduct an online card sort but don’t have the money to pay for expensive tools. Although they don’t offer a dedicated card sorting app, Miro allows for easy collaboration so you’ll just need to invite your testers to your board and ask them to sort the cards. However, keep in mind that there’ll be no analytics generated afterwards. You’ll have to analyze the results yourself.
Miro Pricing:
Free: Miro offers a free forever plan with some limitations.
Paid: Their Starter plan is $8/member/month, billed annually.
Useberry ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Supported types: Open, Closed
Remote card sort: Yes
Analytics: Medium
Although Useberry’s primary focus is codeless prototype analytics, card sorting is still one of their many features. They only allow for 2 main types of card sorting, but it can still work for you. The tool has a pleasant UI and nice analytics for its price. Their free plan is kind of limited, but would probably be enough for a small project.
Useberry Pricing:
Free: 1 project, 10 responses/month
Paid plans: start at $33/month, annual billing
Editor’s note: The article was last updated at January 18th, 2023 to stay relevant and comprehensive.
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