What Is Growth Hacking?
Growth hacking is a digital marketing approach centered on driving rapid business growth by experimenting with different cost-effective strategies.
With growth hacking, you quickly scale the techniques that are proven to help build your customer base. And stop using the ones that aren’t working.
While growth hacking is usually associated with startups, any kind of business can use it to scale their brand.
Further reading: 9 Ultimate Growth Hacking Strategies + Examples
Growth hacking tools make it easier to plan, execute, and monitor your growth-centric marketing efforts. So you can stay laser-focused on the best ways to get more customers and revenue.
There are a lot of growth hacker tools out there. And trying to find the perfect match for your business can feel overwhelming.
Keep these foundational components in mind when evaluating software to narrow down your list and deliver a strong return on investment:
- Scalability: The growth hacking tool you choose should be able to keep up with your business’ changing needs over time
- Ease of use: Growth hacking is all about speed—you don’t want a tool that’s going to take forever to learn how to use
- Integrations: Connecting your growth hacking software with your existing tech stack makes it easy to get the info you need, when you need it
- Customer support: The last thing you want is a technical glitch or software question to hold you up from working
And to save you some time Googling, we’ve put together a list of the best growth hacking tools on the market today:
1. Site Audit
Semrush’s Site Audit tool helps you uncover and fix technical SEO issues that impact user experience and your ability to rank well on search engine results pages (SERPs). Like slow page speeds or a disorganized page structure.
Resolving these behind-the-scenes issues can help you grow your web traffic, brand credibility, and customer base.
Site Audit scans your website for more than 140 common technical issues. And generates a report listing out all the issues it found.
And the best part?
It gives you clear tips for how to address them.
Just enter your domain name and hit the green “Start Audit” button.
In most cases, you’ll be fine using the basic audit settings. But you can also customize the settings to handle more advanced components, like crawler settings.
Once you’ve configured the settings to your liking, click the “Start Site Audit” button.
The tool will then audit your website and generate a detailed report within 24 hours. The larger your website, the longer the audit can take.
At the top, you’ll see your overall website health score. (The higher, the better.)
Scroll down and you’ll see links to “Thematic Reports” that break down different SEO problems:
You can click on the individual reports to break things down by category. Or click the “Issues” tab at the top to see a list of every problem the tool found.
The “Issues” tab divides technical problems into three categories:
- Errors: critical issues you need to fix as soon as possible
- Warning: issues of medium severity to consider fixing after addressing errors
- Notices: minor instances where your website deviates from SEO best practices
To learn more about a specific issue, click on the “Why and how to fix it” link.
You’ll see an explanation of the problem and a suggested solution:
After resolving issues, you can re-run Site Audit by clicking the “Rerun campaign” button.
Then, you can keep track of your improvements over time by clicking the “Progress” tab. Here, you can see a historical chart of your audits. Which you can customize to show progress on different issues.
What We Like
Site Audit’s detailed, actionable recommendations help you resolve technical problems. So you don’t miss errors and your site can get more traffic from search engines.
Pricing
The Site Audit tool is available on all Semrush plans. But the plans differ in the number of projects you can set up, the number of keywords you can track, and the number of reports you can generate.
Here’s the pricing for the three plans:
- Pro: $129.95/month
- Guru: $249.95/month
- Business: $499.95/month
2. Organic Research
The Organic Research tool from Semrush is one of the best tools for growth hacking. Because it makes it easy to monitor SERP competitors’ performance and the keywords they rank for.
Then, you can use these insights to shape your own SEO strategy and decide on the most strategic keywords to target.
Here’s how to use it:
Enter a competing domain and hit the “Search” button.
You’ll then see a summary dashboard. To review the keywords your competitor ranks for, go to the “Positions” tab.
Then, you can filter the keywords by position, volume, keyword difficulty, search intent, and SERP features.
To export the keyword list, click on the “Export” button.
Further reading: Organic Keywords: What Are They & How to Find Them
What We Like
Organic Research’s extensive keyword filtering capabilities make it quick and easy to find search terms that’ll drive the most growth for your business.
Pricing
Like Site Audit, Organic Research is available on all Semrush plans. But the plans differ in the number of projects you can set up, the number of keywords you can track, and the number of reports you can generate.
Here’s the pricing for the three plans:
- Pro: $129.95/month
- Guru: $249.95/month
- Business: $499.95/month
3. Link Building Tool
Gaining more backlinks from reputable brands helps you strengthen your own company’s reputation among new and prospective customers. And drives more visitors to your website through better search engine rankings.
The Link Building Tool from Semrush makes it easy to uncover new link building opportunities and automate outreach campaigns.
Here’s how to use it:
Enter your domain and hit the “Start Link Building” button.
Next, enter up to 10 target keywords.
Then, enter up to 10 competitors.
Hit the “Start Link Building” button at the bottom.
The tool will show you a list of domains that might potentially link to your website. The AS column refers to the domain’s Authority Score, a Semrush metric that measures the SEO power and quality of a website. Generally, the higher the number, the stronger the site.
Review all the prospects. Remove any you don’t think are a good fit with the trash can button. Or advance ones you’re interested in to the next stage by clicking the “To In Progress” button.
If you navigate to the “In Progress” tab, you’ll be able to set an outreach strategy for every prospect and contact them by clicking the “Contact” button.
What We Like
The Link Building Tool makes it easy to organize your outreach efforts. You can stay on top of the status of each backlink opportunity with automated stages, from “In Progress” to “Monitor.”
Pricing
Like Site Audit and Organic Research, Link Building is available on all Semrush plans. But the plans differ in the number of projects you can set up, the number of keywords you can track, and the number of reports you can generate.
Here’s the pricing for the three plans:
- Pro: $129.95/month
- Guru: $249.95/month
- Business: $499.95/month
4. HubSpot Marketing Hub
HubSpot Marketing Hub is an all-in-one solution that streamlines marketing tasks designed to attract, engage, and convert website visitors.
For example, you can quickly create contact info forms to capture leads through your website. These can be customized to fit your brand guidelines.
And once you’ve captured leads from your forms, personalized email sequences help you guide them through the marketing funnel. You don’t have to build anything from scratch—the drag-and-drop software has plenty of email templates to start with.
You can easily automate those email nurture sequences with Hubspot’s customizable workflows. Which make sure you hit the right inbox at the right time.
Also, adding Hubspot’s live chat to your website means you can quickly route leads and customers to the right people on your team. In turn, improving their experience with your brand.
What We Like
HubSpot Marketing Hub supports all phases of the customer journey in one convenient platform. So, you get a lot for your investment.
Pricing
HubSpot Marketing Hub offers a free plan that includes one email automation, 2,000 email sends per month, and limited form functionality. Paid plans include:
- Starter: starts at $20/month
- Professional: starts at $890/month
- Enterprise: starts at $3,600/month
Further reading: How to Win People Over with Compelling Email Content
5. ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign offers a suite of automation tools for growth hacking, helping you drive growth through personalized customer journeys.
Creating personalized experiences for website visitors improves conversion rates, increases the rate of repeat purchases, and helps you get a positive return on investment (ROI) on your marketing campaigns.
ActiveCampaign uses your customer and email subscriber data to create customizable emails and nurture sequences. It has more than 250 built-in templates you can use as a starting point. And its drag-and-drop interface is great for beginners.
Like Hubspot Marketing Hub, ActiveCampaign also automates marketing workflows. Choose from adjustable, pre-set workflows or build your own. Clear, drag-and-drop sections like “Sending Options” and custom fields give you complete control over the process.
Take this example of an email workflow that’s automatically triggered a few hours after a visitor adds a product to their cart but doesn’t complete the purchase:
And you can A/B test your workflows to see which ones successfully get users to take action.
ActiveCampaign features the same kind of easy, customizable templates for landing pages as well.
What We Like
ActiveCampaign offers you more than 800 pre-built marketing workflows to experiment with. So, coupled with the A/B testing feature, you can quickly figure out what works and what doesn’t for consumers.
Pricing
ActiveCampaign offers a free 14-day trial.
Paid plans for ActiveCampaigns’ email and marketing automation suite include:
- Lite: $39/month
- Plus: $70/month
- Professional: $187/month
- Enterprise: custom pricing
6. Optimizely Experiment
True to its name, Optimizely Experiment helps businesses run experiments.
With Optimizely Experiment’s visual editor, you can quickly make different layouts and text options for A/B tests. There’s no need to code from scratch.
It also offers extensive experiment collaboration features that allow you to:
- Log ideas
- Manage your experiment backlog
- Prioritize experiments
- Communicate with stakeholders
These include shared workspaces, collaborative experimentation calendars, and a results repository.
What We Like
Optimizely Experiment’s personalization features allow you to combine first- and third-party data to deliver personalized experiences to your website visitors. This, in turn, helps you drive more revenue from your experiments.
Pricing
Optimizely Experiment’s pricing isn’t publicly available. You’ll need to reach out to the company’s sales team to get a quote.
Further reading: 20+ SEO Experiments to Get More Organic Traffic
7. VWO
Similar to Optimizely Experiment, VWO is an experimentation platform designed to help businesses optimize customer journeys. It supports web and mobile app testing.
With both a visual editor and a code editor, VWO Testing is great for both beginners and those with experience coding their own tests. VWO makes it easy to run A/B tests, split tests, and multivariate tests—all helping you get to the heart of what truly resonates with prospects.
VWO includes detailed reports on every experiment. And you can compare those results in a convenient, single source of truth.
Besides VWO’s core experimentation offering, there’s also VWO Personalize, which helps you create personalized web experiences informed by existing customer data.
And to continue honing your customer knowledge, VWO Insights lets you track user behaviors through heatmaps, session recordings, and surveys.
Session recordings let you follow along with how users navigate your site and uncover any issues they have. And heatmaps show you which parts of your website grab users’ attention the most.
From there, you can optimize your website to give users more of what they want. And make sure they can seamlessly take key actions, like completing forms or purchases. Creating this positive experience can help you improve conversion rates.
What We Like
VWO’s data-driven platform lets you learn from your customers and better meet their needs. Which helps drive more growth. And there’s no steep learning curve to use it.
We also love VWO’s AI-powered copy generator that drafts variations of marketing copy instantly, speeding up the process of launching experiments.
Pricing
VWO offers different pricing plans depending on which product you’d like to use (VWO Testing, VWO Insights, VWO Personalize, or VWO Rollouts). The pricing for all plans is based on the number of monthly tracked visitors.
VWO Testing and VWO Insights both include a free Starter plan. But VWO Personalize and VWO Rollouts are only available with a paid subscription.
8. Hotjar
Hotjar is a user behavior analytics platform that consists of three core growth hacker tools: Observe, Ask, and Engage.
Observe helps you better understand user behavior through session recordings and heatmaps.
Ask makes it easy to collect website visitor feedback with pop-ups and surveys. This type of concrete feedback can help you better shape your marketing strategy to meet consumer needs. And you can build your leads and stay in touch with them.
Engage is all about helping you connect with existing and potential customers through 1:1 interviews. You can seamlessly plan, schedule, host, and record them through the software.
For the interviews, you can either recruit your own participants or take advantage of Hotjar’s participant pool—a database of more than 200,000 consumers across 130 countries and 25 industries.
Image Source: Hotjar
Further reading: The Complete Guide to (Effective) Customer Analysis
What We Like
Hotjar simplifies the process of qualitative research. For example, its AI Survey feature generates surveys automatically based on your inputted goals and then summarizes the findings for you to review.
And the faster you can gather customer feedback, the faster you can take action to better meet their needs and grow your brand.
Pricing
All Hotjar products come with a free Basic plan, making them one of the few free growth hacking tools out there besides Semrush. The pricing for paid plans differs between products:
- Observe
- Plus: $39/month
- Business: $99/month for 500 daily sessions
- Scale: $213/month for 500 daily sessions
- Ask
- Plus: $59/month
- Business: $79/month for 500 monthly responses
- Scale: $159/month for 500 monthly responses
- Engage
- Plus: $350/month
- Business: $550/month
- Scale: custom pricing
9. Mouseflow
Like Hotjar Observe, Mouseflow offers session recordings and heatmaps to monitor user behavior.
But can also use Mouseflow to collect and analyze user feedback. And track every step in the user journey.
For example, it shows you exactly where visitors drop off on your website as well as the percentage of drop-offs and conversions per stage. It also gives you a friction score for each stage based on common signs of user disinterest or frustration (e.g., bounces, rage clicks, etc.).
What We Like
Mouseflow offers a unique form analysis feature that shows you exactly where users give up on filling out your lead capture forms. So, you can modify your form fields to make it faster for users to submit, helping you generate more leads.
Pricing
Mouseflow offers a limited free plan. Paid plans include:
- Starter: $39/month
- Growth: $129/month
- Business: $259/month
- Pro: $499/month
10. Drift
Drift offers a bunch of features to help you identify, engage, and convert your target customers.
Using a piece of tracking code placed on your website, Drift shows you a clear Activity Feed of who’s visiting your site, what pages they’re visiting, and when they’re visiting.
Image Source: Drift
You can then use this information to help your sales team prioritize their outreach efforts.
Drift’s AI-powered chatbot also helps guide users down the funnel, quickly connecting them to employees who can answer more questions or offer product demos and information.
You can add the bot to your existing landing pages. Or you can create new ones using their no-code page builder.
What We Like
Drift’s personalization capabilities and chatbot engage users from the start and streamline the process of connecting leads to sales. And their user-tracking abilities help you create more accurate buyer personas.
Pricing
Drift offers the following plans:
- Premium: $2,500/month billed annually
- Advanced: custom pricing
- Enterprise: custom pricing
11. UpGrow
UpGrow is a project management tool designed specifically for growth teams. Use it to keep track of all your experiments, results, and who’s working on what.
Keep experiments moving along with clear tags for owners and run dates as well as comment features that make it easier to connect with co-workers.
UpGrow also helps you figure out which experiments to pursue first with its prioritization scoring feature that supports popular scoring models like Impact, Confidence, Ease (ICE).
What We Like
Not every experiment you run will be a success, but you’ll learn something from each one. With UpGrow, you can create a searchable database of all your key findings to share with your whole team.
This type of hub helps your team continuously improve experiments with objective data instead of educated guesses. Which means you can grow your customer base more effectively.
Pricing
UpGrow offers a free 14-day trial. Paid plans include:
- Essential: $32/month
- Advanced: $87/month
- Agency: $330/month
12. Zapier
Zapier’s no-code automation platform lets you streamline different growth-hacking tasks and create workflows across different apps and software.
Creating workflows using Zapier’s drag-and-drop editor is easy. All you need to do is add a trigger (e.g., a new lead generated from Facebook Ads) and an action (e.g., post a message in Slack).
There are also hundreds of pre-built workflows built by the Zapier team and its user community. Use them as is or tweak them to suit your unique growth hacking needs.
What We Like
Apart from the drag-and-drop builder and pre-built templates, Zapier also offers an AI-powered way to create workflows. Just type in what you’d like to automate, and Zapier will create a custom workflow for you in seconds.
Pricing
Zapier offers a free plan that’s limited to 100 tasks per month.
Paid plans include:
- Starter: $29.99/month
- Professional: $73.50/month
- Team: $103.50/month
- Company: custom pricing
13. Hello Bar
Hello Bar lets you install bar, modal, slider, and full-screen pop-up calls to action (CTAs) with just one click. Making it easy to capture new leads without disrupting users’ web experience.
Hello Bar has over 100 customizable pop-up templates to start with, giving you control over everything from fonts to colors. Choose which pop-ups show to users based on categories like their location, device type, and which page they’re visiting.
And Hello Bar supports A/B testing, giving you clear data on which pop-ups drive the most action among your audience.
Further reading: 30 Attention-Grabbing Call-to-Action Examples
What We Like
Hello Bar’s Design Assistant feature matches your pop-up’s colors and font with your website’s styling automatically. This helps create a seamless brand experience for users.
Pricing
Hello Bar offers a limited free plan.
Paid plans include:
- Growth: $29/month
- Premium: $49/month
- Elite: $99/month
14. Proof
Proof’s growth hacking tool suite leverages concepts like social proof and FOMO (fear of missing out) to nudge visitors into taking action. And the company claims its features have average conversion rates from between 8 to 15 percent.
The first feature is Hot Streaks—a pop-up that displays the total number of people who’ve recently taken a specific action on your website (e.g., bought a product).
Then, there’s Live Visitor Count, which shows how many people are currently looking at your website.
The third one, Recent Activity, displays a live activity feed showcasing customers who’ve taken a specific action on your website.
Proof is very easy to set up. All you need to do is copy and paste a piece of code, and you’re good to go.
What We Like
Proof’s handy A/B testing feature helps you choose pop-ups that resonate the best with visitors.
And you can see your website’s conversion rate with and without Proof’s tools. Which is great for measuring progress and demonstrating value to stakeholders.
Pricing
Proof has a 14-day free trial.
Its paid plan starts at $29/month for 1,000 unique visitors. Pricing goes up with the number of unique visitors you need to track.
15. Unbounce
Unbounce is a platform designed to help marketers build and improve landing pages quickly.
It offers two different landing page builders: a beginner-friendly, drag-and-drop landing page builder and an advanced AI-powered builder.
Both builders support dynamic text replacement, where the landing page copy changes automatically for visitors who arrived after clicking on a certain brand ad.
Similar to Hello Bar, Unbounce also lets you design and add pop-ups to your landing pages to encourage users to take actions designed to drive sales and leads.
What We Like
Based on information like location and device, Unbounce’s AI-powered Smart Traffic feature will automatically display the landing page version that has the best chance of getting those users to convert.
Pricing
Unbounce offers a 14-day free trial.
Paid plans include:
- Launch: $99/month
- Optimize: $145/month
- Accelerate: $240/month
- Concierge: $625/month
Further reading: SEO for Landing Pages: Best Practices to Rank on SERPs
16. Instapage
Instapage is a user-friendly solution for building and A/B testing landing pages.
Struggling to come up with the right look or words? No problem. Instapage has over 200 templates to choose from. And its AI-powered content generator can help you write compelling copy in seconds.
Instapage’s landing pages also support dynamically generated content, which changes based on which ad a user clicked on to take them to your website.
What We Like
Instapage’s “Instablocks” are convenient ways to save and reuse page elements when building multiple landing pages. For example, you can create a signup form or a testimonial carousel block once, and then just pop it into different page templates.
Pricing
Instapage has a 14-day free trial.
Paid plans include:
- Build: $299/month
- Convert: custom pricing
The best growth hacking tools empower you and your team to work smarter—not harder—in growing your customer base.
But they aren’t catch-all solutions. Remember: At the heart of growth hacking is discovering how to best connect with different people and meet their needs. And that still requires human experience and judgment from your team’s end.
If one (or all) of the Semrush tools sound like a good fit to support your growth hacking goals, try our free trial.
