StriveCloud vs Captain Up
What should you do when you’re losing users faster than you’re acquiring new ones? Churn is a major problem for apps. 1 in 4 users leaves an app after only opening it once, and app engagement is lower than ever. Which doesn’t come as a surprise when you know the average person only uses about 30 apps.
So what can you do to be one of these 30 apps? You’ll want to get your users hooked. Opening your apps once or twice a month isn’t good enough, you want to create an experience that keeps users coming back. Gamification for apps takes the elements that make video games fun, and uses them in a non-game context to boost app engagement!
Unfortunately, finding the right gamification tool can be hard. That’s why we’re comparing Captain Up’s and StriveCloud’s gamification solutions.
Here’s what we’ll dive into:
Introducing Captain Up & StriveCloud
What is Captain Up?
Captain Up is a gamification tool that turns visitors into loyal customers. Their platform allows you to gamify your website or apps to improve engagement and boost revenue. Captain Up works with brands such as Ladbrokes and Spindipity to improve customer loyalty.
By providing gamification, social, and communication layers, Captain Up improves web and app engagement to boost conversions. Their gamification tool lets you set-up a gamified layer in the form of a pop-up.
Users earn points and badges for repeatedly visiting your website and can eventually level up. There is also a feed where you can see other user activity. It serves as a tool to attract, convert and retain users across marketing, sales, and service touchpoints.
What is StriveCloud?
StriveCloud is a gamification leader, that specializes in gamification for apps. Their team built a plug-in gamification tool to turn web and mobile apps into experiences that get users hooked.
Quite literally: a gamification tool built for retention and app engagement. The tool seamlessly plugs in with your app, taking your already existing data and turning it into a gamified experience. You can set up personalized milestones to drive active usage, and reward app engagement to motivate behavior. Finally, you can send personalized in-app messages based on the user’s behavior to keep them coming back.
They have worked with brands such as AB InBev, Proximus, and the Swiss Pro League to create highly engaging user experiences that drive app engagement. StriveCloud helped some of its clients cut churn by 23% while increasing daily active usage by 58%.
Features showdown
Both tools have earned their stripes in the gamification world. But let’s take a look at how their feature sets compare.
Captain Up core features
Captain Up’s features can be grouped into four buckets: game elements, social elements, communication, and back-office.
Maximize user engagement with game elements
Captain Up has game elements in place such as points, rewards, and trophies to boost user engagement. While these can be useful, they’re also limited and have quite basic functions. Users can unlock achievements and collect coins. Later, they can trade these coins for scratch cards.
Other reward elements they have in place are multi-currencies and badges. They also have a leveling system to keep users motivated to go forward.
Set up a social community to activate your users
With Captain Up’s gamification tool users can access their profile, scroll through the activity feed, and engage in community discussions.
Captain Up helps you find which users are the most engaged and helps you turn them into ambassadors. By rewarding users for inviting friends or sharing their page, they leverage their community for viral growth.
Communicate with users when it matters the most
With Captain Up, you can send bulk messages, segmented messages, and create customized pop-ups for every user. This allows you to communicate with users at the exact moment they perform the desired action. Use the in-app inbox to notify wins, achievements, and special offers. You can also set trigger-based messages to ensure consistent communication for specific events.
Improve your gamified experience from a built-in back-office
From the back-office, you can manage all game elements and individual users. You can also segment your users based on behavioral insights. Additionally, you can set up rules for challenges or competitions to automate rewards.
If you’re deliberating between two or more approaches to engage your users you can simply A/B test what works best from the platform. You can access insights and analytics from the same back-office and export the data as you wish.
StriveCloud’s core features
The main features StriveCloud uses in gamification for apps are personalized challenges, achievements, rewards, and behavior-based messaging.
Hook your users with a cohesive and gamified user journey
The plug-in gamification tool takes your app user data and gamifies it. You can set personalized milestones to push the user journey forward. Then, reward engagement and active participation through points or badges.
Besides points and badges, StriveCloud allows unlimited virtual currencies and redeemable rewards. You can simply exchange your points for physical or digital prizes in the built-in shop or create a raffle for scalable app engagement.
You can keep users moving forward with a leveling system that’s based on user activity. User progress gets rewarded with experience points and visualized through progress bars. Re-engage your users with in-app quests and personalized challenges to tie it all together.
Finally, there are some engagement boosting features such as hotzones. These are moments within the app where users can earn double the amount of points.
Leverage social elements to drive app engagement & community
People are often triggered by a sense of competition, to feel better or equal to their peers. The plug-in gamification tool allows you to set up competitions within your own app. Users can compare their rankings in leaderboards.
Adding a social feed to your app enables users to see how other users are doing while rewarding interactions will motivate them to communicate with each other. This can be a great way of reinforcing competition or fostering collaboration. Users can ask each other questions or work together towards completing a challenge.
Boost user engagement with personalized communication at scale
With StriveCloud’s plug-in gamification tool you can automatically send behavior-triggered in-app messages, notifications, and emails. This allows you to send the right messages at the right time and to the right user!
You can target users based on their level of engagement to prevent churn or set contextual notifications to activate users at a time that’s best for them. Use it to improve your onboarding experience or to guide users through your app.
Add gamified in-app experiences with an advanced page builder CMS
With the plug-in gamification tool comes an advanced page builder that you can customize without limits. Basically, it’s your own CMS which you can use to add and customize pages in your own app. You can easily add text and image blocks, section sliders, gamification elements, polls & bets in just a few clicks.
Easily manage all your digital products from one simple control panel
Once you plug-in the gamification tool you can gamify any data point from a central control panel. Manage all your web and mobile apps from one place, and add as many digital products as you like! You can continuously analyze real-time user behavior through the analytics dashboard to keep improving your user experience and app engagement.
Learn more about the plug-in gamification tool from StriveCloud on our product page!
Pricing faceoff
Captain Up pricing
Captain Up has a complex and rather untransparent pricing system. First of all, we couldn’t find any pricing on their site so the following information comes from reviews only. Starting from $19 to $99 per license, prices increase up to $ 5,000 per month as you pay for customization, product training, and data import.
StriveCloud pricing
StriveCloud’s pricing, on the other hand, is clear and straightforward. It’s also directly linked to your success. Pricing starts at € 499 per month and grows as you retain more monthly active users to your app. For this price you get access to all the features mentioned above, and more!
This means StriveCloud only grows when you do!
Captain Up VS StriveCloud – which gamification tool is right for you?
Both tools have an incredible amount of possibilities. While Captain Up has an easy and intuitive platform, its features are rather basic. The pop-up format doesn’t feel native to your app and often makes for an interruptive user experience. However, for website engagement and social growth, they seem to do the job.
StriveCloud’s gamification tool plugs into your app and is completely customizable. Additionally, their team will help you set up your own gamification strategy through workshops and a hands-on attitude. Based on their previous experiences with clients they continuously improve the features which creates a lot of opportunities within the platform.
If you want to supercharge your app engagement in a scalable way, go with StriveCloud.
The pros & cons of Captain Up
Captain Up adds a layer of gamification to your website or app to boost user interaction! You can use it to convert your website traffic or boost social media growth. It is intuitive to use and has lots of documentation to help you get started.
Unfortunately, the platform has its customization limits and the game elements are rather basic. The pop-up doesn’t feel like a part of your app and their strictly rewards-based approach might cause users to drop out eventually due to the Overjustification effect.
If you’re looking for a long-term app engagement solution this platform might not be right for you.
The pros & cons of StriveCloud
The plug-in gamification tool by StriveCloud makes every digital experience better. You can easily link it to your web or mobile app and provide a 360-degree gamified user journey from one central control panel.
The tool takes user data and uses it to create gamified user journeys that drive any desired behavior or product KPI. That being said if you don’t have a lot of data, opportunities are lost here. On the other hand, you can use other StriveCloud products to collect more data.
There is also a steep learning curve that comes with their gamification tool. Luckily, they also have a team of experts that come with the tool. The team will help you design and set up an engaging gamified experience that plays on deep human desires and gets users hooked.
So, what gamification tool should I pick?
In conclusion, I would say you get more bang for your buck with StriveCloud. However, picking the right tool depends on the goals you have with it. Do you want to:
Drive website traffic?
Go with Captain Up! Their engagement platform attracts and converts visitors through a simple reward system. It’s ideal to stand out between other sites but becomes less effective in the long term as motivation for external rewards decreases over time.
Grow your social reach?
Go with Captain Up! Their tool helps you boost social interaction. You can link your Facebook or Twitter page to your profile and create challenges to boost the number of likes or shares you get.
Boost app engagement & active participation?
Go with StriveCloud! Their plug-in gamification tool helps you drive the behaviors that make you grow. It’s by far the number one tool to level-up interaction and active usage, as you get to reward users based on their behaviors.
Say goodbye to churn?
Go with StriveCloud! The plug-in gamification tool is built for retention! Making the user experience more cohesive and engaging can slash churn by 23%. Finally, you can put gamification mechanisms in place to prevent dropout or re-engage users with personalized messages and in-app quests.
Find a gamification tool that scales with you?
Go with StriveCloud! Their tool is best used in gamification for apps. Their flexible and growth-oriented model is perfect for apps that want to scale! Boost active usage and app engagement across all your digital products, from a simple control panel!
