Youengage (Youengage.me) quiz maker review

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Youengage.me is one of the newest online quiz maker tools on the market. Launching in March, 2021, it’s a Polish company that was founded by Peter Sz. and Damian Kmiecik.

Their vision for Youengage? ‘Imagine if Typeform and Slido had a baby’.

It’s an interesting analogy.

Youengage is a very raw platform that’s trying to combine both synchronous (live quizzes) and asynchronous quizzes, polls, and other content.

Basically, they’re trying to be both a live quiz contest company like Kahoot and an online quiz maker like Riddle (our ‘Editor’s Choice’), Scoreapp, or Involve.me.

The challenge is that the Youengage team is trying to do so much that their overall quality suffers. The platform is promising from a ‘check out all the features we have’ perspective – but once you try their online quiz builder, you find out that they are often poorly thought out or half-finished.

Their pricing is pretty fair – with a free plan. However Youengage also places monthly limits on how much you can use your quizzes or events:

Quiz Maker Review’s rating for Youengage.me:

We know marketers can be pretty busy – so if you’re pressed for time, here’s our overall review for Youengage.me:

  • Range of quiz formats: ★★★☆☆
  • Customization options: ★★★☆☆
  • Lead generation: ★★☆☆☆
  • Data privacy: ★☆☆☆☆
  • Pricing: ★★☆☆☆
  • Overall: ★★☆☆☆

What types of quiz, poll, and calculators?

Youengage.me features six types of interactive content:

  1. Survey – find out how your users feel
  2. Poll – let your audience vote
  3. Score quiz – ask questions using right/wrong answers
  4. Outcome quiz – also called a personality test, gives overall outcomes based on users’ responses
  5. Calculator – designed for product quotes, product configurators, etc.
  6. Form – a simple standalone form

That’s about average among the quiz maker tools we’ve reviewed – and covers the standard uses for quizzes. If you need a wider range of creative options, Outgrow and Involve.me both feature eight formats – while Riddle tops the list with fifteen.

Score quiz: 5/10

Youengage.me’s quiz maker is about average in terms of capabilities and features, letting you:

  • Ask single or multiple-choice questions (‘What does MRR mean for SaaS companies?’)
  • Create text or image answers
  • Assign different scores by answer (‘Answer A = 5 pts, B = 2 pts’)

But we have no idea why their up/down arrows don’t use whole numbers (1, 2, 3) – using these adjust the score by .01 increments (.01, .02, .03). Weird.

However, Youengage definitely lacks the wider range of customization options we’ve grown to expect from advanced quiz maker tools.

This is probably due to Youengage.me being such a young software tool – hopefully, their team will continue to expand their feature set.

Among the key features, Youengage lacks:

  1. No free text questions – Youengage doesn’t support ‘Type the correct answer…’ questions. These are more difficult than multiple choice, and would be a great option for language teachers or running contests.
  2. Only one question type – only multiple choice questions. No ‘put answers in correct order’, ‘tap the hotspot in the image’, and other options.
  3. Can’t gate answers – you can’t delay showing the right/wrong answers until after the form. That’s a good tool for boosting opt-ins.
  4. No random or shuffle feature – currently, quiz takers see the questions in the same order. Youscoreapp, Riddle, and other quiz makers let you shuffle the order – to keep quiz takers on their toes.
  5. No quiz timer – you can’t set a question timer (’10 seconds per question’) or quiz timer (’60 seconds to answer all questions). Check out Involve.me or Riddle if this is a key feature for your use case.
  6. No answer explanations – this is another big flaw. Showing the answer is one thing – quiz takers want to learn WHY the answer is correct or incorrect.

Outcome quiz: 3/10

The outcome quiz – often called a personality test – is one of the most powerful quiz tools for marketers.

It’s the most viral of all the online quizzes. Outcome quizzes let each user discover something about themselves (“You belong in Gryffindor!”) – and people love to share that with their friends.

But done right, outcome quizzes are great for more sophisticated assessments (“Are you depressed?”) or product recommendation quizzes (“What car should you buy?”).

And this is where Youengage.me really disappointed us.

We can’t recommend using Youengage.me for outcome quizzes – unless it is for very basic use cases. Their scoring system is just too primitive for most marketers.

Online poll: 5/10

Youengage’s poll is another fairly standard tool – nothing really new or innovative to report.

On the plus side, it’s easy to create text or image polls for your audience.

We also like Youengage.me’s inclusion of Linear scale and rating questions – for more creative flexibility.

However, the list of missing features or flaws is pretty extensive.

  1. No overall results view – users are very quickly shown the audience responses after voting. However, at the end of the poll, users are just shown a ‘thank you for voting’ screen. It’s a much more powerful user experience to summarize all the questions and current votes.
  2. No security or limiting votes – Youengage.me also does not include any limitations on voting. Users can simply refresh the screen to vote over and over. More importantly, it would be very easy for hackers (or simply bored teenagers) to use bots and scripts to automatically generate tens of thousands of votes.

Survey: 6/10

Youengage.me also offers a survey module, as well as their poll.

It’s pretty capable with a good range of questions – and branching logic to allow marketers to ask the right follow up question to each user, based on their overall responses.

They’re quite similar in terms of question types and features, but we like how Youengage lets you quickly collect and download responses using their ‘Analyze’ step:

Despite being essentially the same tool, we give Youengage a higher score for this module because there’s not such a need for polished outcome result screens.

However, be cautious – their survey is still vulnerable to being hacked, with fake responses generated by hackers. Polls are far more likely to be hacked, however – as people are passionate that their favorite response wins.

Surveys don’t arouse such levels of enthusiasm – so are less likely to be affected.

Calculator: 7/10

Youengage has done a nice job creating a simple-to-use calculator for marketers.

(Also consider Outgrow and Try Interact if you are looking for this type of online quiz format.)

The use cases for this type of quiz are endless.

Here are a few off the top of our heads:

  • Real estate agents could create a simple affordability calculator for their website.
  • Personal trainers could ask ‘How much weight should you lose?’
  • Health coaches could make a ‘Anxiety symptom checker’ – and craft suggestions for clients based on how often they suffer from panic attacks, stress, and the like.

Youengage.me lets your users type in info.

You can also use sliders – which is a nice touch.

We don’t know why they let users enter emails, text, and other non-numeric data – you can’t run any calculations with this info. That’s another strange UX decision by the Youengage team.

Next up – you can use their formula builder to calculate the user’s results.

It’s not the most intuitive – but you can get the hang of it after a few tries.

Image and media options

Youengage.me is about average when it comes to adding different types of media to your quizzes.

Their online quiz builder currently supports:

  • Upload image/GIFs
  • Unsplash stock photography
  • Google image search

You can also search and add animated GIFs using the Youengage Giphy option:

However, Youengage does not support these key media options:

  • Video: No YouTube, Vimeo, or MP4 video upload
  • Audio: No ability to add MP3 audio clips, SoundCloud, etc.
  • Social: Can’t insert Twitter content

This is a key creative limitation. Today’s audiences want (and expect) a more multi-media experience than just text and images.

We hope Youengage’s team rectifies this in an upcoming release – for inspiration, they can look at how other quiz makers do it.

Riddle has the widest range of video/audio/social options – but Involve.me and SurveyMonkey are also worth a look.

Youengage.me – customization options

Youengage gives its quiz creators a solid, if not very extensive, range of tools to customize their online quizzes.

Creating a quiz is just the start of the process. An equally important element is making you have the creative control to fully customize your online quiz, poll, or other interactive content to match your site.

Quizzes that feel like a 3rd-party widget stuck on your site don’t perform well. They feel strange to the user (“Hm, are these ads?”) and also don’t reflect well on your brand.

Only one quiz layout

Unlike most quiz makers, Youengage.me only has one layout style – which is a bit limiting for marketers and their creativity.

However, we like how Youengage gives you several options on how you want to display a quiz’s main image – it previews in real-time.

You can put the image above, below, or the side of the answer options – or make the main image a full-screen one.

Limited fonts – no CSS editor

Youengage.me seems to be making a play for the small business sector of the market – a bit like Outgrow and Leadquizzes.

You can see this in how they address fonts and CSS editing.

True, most solo entrepreneurs or small firms probably don’t need advanced customization.

However, agencies, brands, and publishers will find the lack of advanced customization severely limiting, including:

  1. Only 14 fonts to chose from – that’s a strange choice; it takes just a second to download and add more Google Fonts.
  2. No custom font option – you can’t upload your own or use Adobe Typekit, Fontdeck, and the like.
  3. No CSS editor – this is a BIG oversight. Without CSS editing, you’re pretty much stuck with Youengage’s quiz layouts.

CSS editors give quiz creators near-total freedom to customize almost every aspect of their quiz – from buttons to borders and hover states.

The lack of CSS editing and custom fonts means you can’t fully tweak your Youengage.me quiz.

Youengage.me quizzes, while good-looking, will always feel like a 3rd party widget embedded on your or your clients’ sites.

If you’re looking for advanced customization, we recommend checking out Riddle and Scoreapp.

Lead generation

We’re not big fans of Youengage and their approach to collecting leads with online quizzes.

They only provide six field types:

  • Short text – for things like first name and last name
  • Long text
  • Email
  • Number
  • Phone – essentially a number field. Does not have pre-formatted options [e.g. USA: (###)###-####) ]
  • Website

However, we were very surprised to learn Youengage doesn’t let you add a simple checkbox to your lead forms.

This is a BIG flaw – all lead generation does not comply with the GDPR, CCPA, PIPEDA, & other privacy regulations.

Youengage.me also does not include a ‘skip form’ option for their lead generation questions. That’s another big no-no.

Requiring users to give their email might give you more leads, but you run the risk of:

  • Getting inaccurate or garbage data – people will enter false emails just to find out their results.
  • Annoying your users – requiring a lead form completion is a good way to irritate your audience. Being forced to give your email after participating in a quiz is not a positive user experience.

Youengage.me integrations

We were pretty surprised to see that Youengage only offers two native integrations with their tool. HubSpot is a good choice – but we’ve never even heard of Salesmanago.

That’s very limiting.

After all, a key reason marketers turn to quizzes is to collect quiz responses and emails, then seamlessly send them to their CRM or marketing software for automated and personalized follow-up messages.

But at least, Youengage.me does offer Zapier support. If you have a paid subscription to Zapier, you’ll be able to send your quiz responses to a wide range of other tools.

Limited social sharing

One of the biggest reasons to make a quiz? Tapping into your audience’s social network of friends and contacts.

Quizzes are inherently viral – so most quiz builders let users share their results across the major social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on.

Youengage only supports Facebook – which is a big limitation, especially as Facebook is becoming less and less popular.

Youengage – basic branching logic

Conditional or branching logic (AKA known as ‘question jump’) is becoming an increasingly popular feature with online quiz creator tools.

Instead of showing the same questions to everyone, branching logic lets you craft unique experiences for each quiz taker – based on their particular responses.

For example, imagine you’re creating a ‘What mattress should I buy?’ product recommendation quiz.

If a user answered “Yes” to “Do you suffer back pain?”, you could then ask follow-up questions around what type of back pain – to help deliver perfectly targeted mattress recommendations.

Youengage.me has a good, if basic, question jump feature – you can set up rules that take quiz takers to different questions, depending on their answers.

It’s not as intuitive as a visual question jump builder (like Riddle’s below) – but Youengage’s tool will be enough for simple use cases.

GDPR & poor data privacy – Youengage.me

(Brace yourself – this isn’t going to be pretty.)

When it comes to data privacy and GDPR-compliance, Youengage (Youengage.me) is one of the worst online quiz makers we’ve ever seen.

That’s doubly surprising since Youengage makes a big point on their site that they’re 100% GDPR-compliant.

At Quiz Maker Review, we were pretty disappointed – we were keen to find another fully compliant quiz creator tool besides Riddle. But alas, no – Riddle remains the only quiz maker that passed all our compliance tests for GDPR with flying colors.

Let’s dive in.

Google Tag Manager, Analytics, and Twitter trackers

As step one of our testing process, we created a simple quiz with Youengage.me and disabled all social sharing – so we could analyze what cookies or trackers were present outside of social networks like Facebook.

Youengage immediately failed our test – their quiz embeds load trackers from Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, and Twitter on your site.

Why are trackers so bad?

By allowing a Youengage quiz embed to load Google Tag Manager, you are essentially giving Youengage free range to track whatever they like on your site.

Think of Google Tag Manager as a folder – you can add or remove things at any time. The team at Youengage could easily load more trackers a few months after you embedded the quiz on your website.

You would never know if they had added more dodgy ad trackers that happily collected loads of personal data about your quiz takers.

That’s a HUGE red flag @ Youengage.me – it should be enough for anyone to not use them.

But let’s keep on going.

Sure, we might be being harsh – Youengage might be completely innocent and just use Google Tag Manager and Analytics for anonymous traffic tracking. But, why, oh why would Youengage load a tracker from Twitter?

The only reason we can think of is that they are trying to track your quiz users to re-market to them on Twitter.

Now, why is this so bad?

Collecting user data for 6 months

If your users don’t block these trackers, Youengage will place a Twitter personalization cookie on your users’ computers with a six-month expiration date.

That might not sound bad – but let us run you through this scenario:

  1. You have a quiz where your audience answer questions about their medical conditions (a very common use case for quizzes and personality tests in our experience).
  2. Youengage can their Twitter cookie to collect these responses to show your users ads when they visit other sites – for example, if they answered ‘I want to lose weight’ on your quiz, your users might see display ads targeted for people who want to loose weight.
  3. More creepily, Youengage could also re-sell this cookie data as third-party data to ad networks. Not only are you paying for Youengage and their quiz maker tools, but they could be selling all the info from your audience as an extra revenue stream.

It’s simply beyond comprehension how they can claim to be GDPR-compliant and still engage in these dodgy practices.

Sending personal data to the USA

Next up, we were curious as to where Youengage.me is based, and where they host their quizzes.

We asked Youengage on chat and they told us:

  • “All servers are based in Germany and the Netherlands” (the EU, in other words).
  • But we did a quick trace route and IP lookup for our sample quiz we embedded.
  • It showed us that it was being served from Google servers in Kansas City, USA.

So Youengage.me is either incompetent – or they lied.

We tried to point this out to them – but, well, you can read how well that went:

The GDPR outlaws sending European users’ personal data to the USA – now that the EU/US Privacy Shield was ruled invalid. More recently, there have been big fines on companies using Google Analytics.

That’s another big, big strike against Youengage.

Because if you believe their claims, you’re still financially liable for any fines from the EU – up to 20 million euros or 4% of your revenue, whichever is greater. Ouch.

Youengage’s DPA proves they’re not compliant

Youengage has a privacy policy that’s remarkably vague about where your quiz takers’ personal data is collected and processed. It merely states that the data is stored with a certified and secure provider.

Okay, so it’s Google Cloud Hosting – that’s technically true, Google’s hosting is as secure as it gets.

However… we dug deeper and looked at the data processing agreement Youengage.me offers – another key element to GDPR-compliance.

Here is the only place that Youengage mentions that quiz takers’ personal data is processed outside of the EU:

Section 2.2 Controller acknowledges that Personal Data is provided by it to Processor and collected by Processor outside the European Economic Area (“EEA”) on the basis set out in the Youengage privacy policy.

Seriously, why bother calling yourself a GDPR-compliant quiz maker – if your own data processing agreement proves you’re not?

Youengage uses Intercom – US-based support chat software

Lastly, Youengage.me customer support uses Intercom – which is a US-based support chat tool.

Sure, Intercom states that they are GDPR-compliant – but that’s not remotely true.

Intercom stores the lots of personally identifiable information (PII) from everyone who uses their software chat tool to talk to Youengage:

  1. Name
  2. IP address
  3. Email

Intercom processes this data in the U.S. and can’t be used by any company claiming to be GDPR-compliant.

(Youengage – we’re looking at you, again.)

Heck, they capture your IP address even if you just visit their site with the chat widget, and don’t even send a chat message.

We understand the need to use a chat tool for support. But Youengage is a Polish company – why not use User.com (also from Poland)?

Youengage.me pricing

Youengage has a good pricing structure that’s both fair and transparent.

What we liked:

  • Free plan: Hurrah for their inclusion of a ‘Free’ plan! Like Try Interact, Youengage.me gives free users limited usage (100 respondents per month). It’s a nice feature for casual users.
  • Unlimited quiz creation: You can also create as many quizzes or events as you like.

What we hated:

  • Monthly usage caps: Youengage.me place limits per month on how many people can take quizzes or participate in an event.
    • Starter: 2,500 responses / 500 event participants
    • Professional: 10,000 responses / 1,000 event participants
    • Business: 25,000 responses / 5,000 event participants
    • Youengage is more generous than Survey Anyplace, Outgrow, and Scoreapp – but we’d prefer more quiz makers gave unlimited usage like Riddle across all plans.
  • Customer support limited by plan: Youengage.me also treats customer differently – based on the plan you select.
    • Business plans are given ‘Priority customer support’ – which means that any Starter and Professional users might have to wait for help.