ShortStack Reviews

It's really simple to set up a competition or landing page quickly, with easy to modify templates and the new theme customisation. You can insert your own codes and scripts to give you even more features than the wide variety there are already.

Data: retrieval and exportation is very limited to a small number of apps, and the lack of an API means that there's no workaround. My company uses email and CRM tools which aren't supported by Shortstack so all data retrieval has to be manual, which isn't great if we want to contact entrants ASAP.

Embedding: there's only an iframe embed option which isn't always ideal. A JavaScript method would be preferable as iframes have limitations when it comes to page resizing.

If you're wanting to explore how competitions and contests can work for your company and you've only got a small budget, then Shortstack is fantastic! Spend some time making your themes and page templates if you're planning to run a few similar campaigns.

We started doing competitions 18 months ago when we got Shortstack, and it's proved to be an invaluable method of lead generation, paying for itself many times over. It's allowed us to expand our prospects database and reach customers we wouldn't otherwise have gotten in front of. It's also helped us to gather user-generated content, giving us more content for subsequent marketing campaigns.

I love how easy it is to build great looking landing pages for our clients. Our web designers can use code to customize a look, but those of us with no coding knowledge can also easily create a nice looking page that get results. With the forms, we are able to seamlessly generate leads for our clients, collect emails through contests and make changes on the go without missing a beat.

There's not a whole lot I don't like, but if I had one complaint, it would be that we can't have more than two users without paying a premium.

ShortStack has been an invaluable tool for our agency. We are able to offer our clients a variety of features through ShortStack that have in turn grown their businesses as well. It's so easy to use and the service and customer support is top-notch.

Shortstack has given us a an easy way to develop a mobile website for a specific campaign without have to code one on our clients website. This saves us so much time, and it's super easy to make changes and updates as we go. It's also been a great tool for email capture and lead generation.

This product is great for giving you the tools to produce what you want, without a need for extensive CSS or programming knowledge. It is extremely user friendly, and the support team is very helpful and responsive. The widget based platform allows you to more easily visualize what is happening, allowing you to think of what else is possible for future ideas.

Although the new template design tools are a major step forward in terms of being user friendly, it can still be difficult to identify what exactly you are changing. It would be very helpful if there was a pop up help icon that gave a brief description and example screenshot of the section the option controls.

Give it a try! You will be shocked at what even the most amateur of users can create with it's intuitive UI.

Shortstack is allowing us to quickly create and run campaigns with little to no involvement from anyone with actual development experience. This saves both time and money in regards to the potential cost of hiring a developer.

If you learn the ins and outs of the tools available to you, you can actually achieve what you want to achieve in most instances.

The interface is fairly confusing and seems perhaps a bit dated. Again, it can be a bit of a learning curve to fully unpack all of the tools in there. Also, the actually public facing element of the database was not terribly flexible or responsive.

Updating the interface and making the front end more responsive.

Shortstack allowed us to run a video competition across different categories and to hide content on certain dates, plus to allow voting on each category. Very useful indeed.

If you run a fast based business with multiple social media/marketing channels, and need to run promotions or special content quickly and without much in the way of technical skills, then give ShortStack a go,

There's nothing significantly problematic which is in the control of ShortStack, the API's offered by social platforms are sometimes a little lacking, but we can normally figure out a way to achieve what we need.

Our current web platform doesn't work well on mobile devices and is quick technical to use (we're fixing that!), but right now, ShortStack lets us build content quickly and easily for mobile targeted marketing.

ShortStack has given our marketing team the ability to create lead generation campaigns without waiting for web development resources. We are agile and can optimize our social channels to grow email marketing lists.

I would like to see some live training events or Q&A sessions for users, in addition to self-serve resources.

I would involve all team members to brainstorm ways to use ShortStack. We created a "wish list" and also approached ShortStack with custom development questions as a collaborative effort. We also make sure to use Shortstack each month to get the most out of our subscription.

We are using ShortStack to grow out customer base and email marketing lists. After promoting sweepstakes or other gated content, we have used names collected to see a 30% increase in sales of new products.

I've been using Shortstack for 6 years now, and I LOVE it. Not only is Shortstack easy to use, even for non developers like me, but their customer service team is ON IT. If I ever have a question, whether it be a dumb question about a widget or a very in-depth question about tracking codes from third-party sites, they have always been quick to get back to me. Even if they don't typically provide guidance for a certain feature (third party tracking) they gathered the whole team together until they found a solution for me.

Haven't found anything I dislike yet! I guess my only complaint is that the software improves pretty often, so just when I think I have it down, there's a new update I have to learn. But that's not a bad thing!

It's high-quality service at low cost. How can you go wrong with that? Shortstack is a MUST for small business and huge agencies alike!

We don't have an on-staff web developer, and with Shortstack, we don't need one! We're able to build giant campaigns for worldwide brands, where more than 300,000 people participate, all on our own. Shortstack makes us look good and keeps our social media fans engaged and excited.

it think the new auto-response function is good.

i think there is not much options on the template style.

If you are tired of using google form, try this.

The most important thing is we don't need to rely on IT department or Google to develop form application anymore, with the easy interface and quite a lot of form elements options, everyone in my team can build the campaign. We can focus more on the idea generation instead of the production time.

When I have a problem, they respond at the support desk very quickly and thoroughly.

I wish it were a little cheaper, but given the support service they provide I guess that's not possible.

They help you create truly professional looking Facebook tabs, apps and contests, and give all the support one could ever want.

They have allowed me to publish a number of apps that constitute very popular tabs for Facebook pages, and to run a number of lead generating contests.

Shortstack can help create a variety of different pages to meet a variety of needs that a company or individual has. A person can have little to no understand of coding yet make a functional and professional looking page for customers or followers to interact with.

Wish there were quick video training sessions to help maximize or further my knowledge on Shortstack. Though maybe these already exists and I have yet to find where I can access them while logged into Shortstack.

We are providing documents, graphics, and information about new products we release on Facebook using shortstack. This gives us a place to have a different page look to better suit our needs.

The free plan is a great fit for our SMB. Shortstack's campaign templates makes getting started easy and their team members were quick to respond to my questions

I wish the builder was a little more user-friendly. It seems pretty simple, like drag and drop but it doesn't really explain what everything is used for. Wish they had tutorial pop-ups that walk you through the features when you build your first campaign.

Would definitely recommend ShortStack for your social media and contest needs.

I was able to put together a customized Facebook Contest in a day when our other vendor fell through. We were able to automate our follow-up process from gathering entries, to thanking them for entering and to make sure they shared this contest with their friends. ShortStack created relevant touch-points throughout our customer's journey that alleviated the need for a dedicated team member to nurture campaign from start to completion.

I love the tech support they provide when I am working on a contest. You don't have to be a technical person to be able to use the software. They are super helpful whenever I have questions and have always been able to provide solutions to any issues I have had. The contests look beautiful and professional as well.

I would like to have more templates available for different themes/holidays.

I would totally recommend ShortStack for any company wanting to gain more customers and have more interaction with their customers using contests. You don't have to have a technical background to use their software and there customer service and tech support is top notch.

We are getting more engagement with ShortStack through contests. We have gained more subscribers to our email newsletter which has resulted in more sales. We are also building our brand utilizing a year long contest with ShortStack to celebrate our 10 year anniversary.

The platform is very easy to use. I used it primarily for building landing pages on Facebook for content and a few times for contests. The campaign builder is intuitive and easy to manage. The one complicated process, which is actually launching the page on a Facebook page, has a detailed step by step tutorial for creating the Facebook app and launching it.

The tagging system is another plus for organizing campaigns when you start to build out lots of pages.

The one time I ran into an issue was adding team members and getting them involved in campaign management. The learning curve was steeper than I would have liked but we were able to manage. This was a year or two ago so things may have changed since then in terms of team setup.

Biggest benefit is the easy creation and launch of landing pages on Facebook. ShortStack makes it very easy to create pages and manage them across multiple Facebook pages.

I like how quick and easy it is to build and even customize a form.

The ONLY thing I dislike is that adding custom CSS isn't as easy as creating a form with the standard builder.

This is a great solution for those looking for a simple form builder to enhance their own workflow.

We often need to collect information and webhook it into our platform. We use ShortStack to create these form.

Many widgets in a user friendly interface!

Lets you completly design your landing pages and contests, making them seriously original, not having to use any pre-established templates, and making it super easy (drag and drop!!!!) to design your own template.

Basically what Im saying is that it will let you go as far as your imagination, and basic intuitive computer skills will let you.

Of course if your outdated and cant even turn on the computer for any other than word or excel, maybe, and just maybe, you wont get it then...

I was having the hardest time finding an app that would let me run a facebook integrated music contest, and couldnt find one. This app is SOOOO friendly, I designed a photo contest, to do the works of the music contest, thats how versatile it is.

Plus, the staff are super friendly, always answering fast and friendly!

Do try, totally worth your buck!

As it automatically does a verification for false voting, it alows either FB or IP adress, I wish it would alow the checking of both boxes, as it would make it so much more secure in only one vote per person contests. All else is GREAT!!!!!

Totally worth trying, at least get the free trial , and try the desgin software for your campaigns, that alone will make you fall for it.

Did a music contest for an electronic music festival, which ran ever so smoothly. Last year I ran it trough another site (not naming names) and it keep going offline, not registering votes, and many more issues. Luckily this year I ran into this FAB app, and had the sweatest experience, Worth every penny ;)

It's difficult to narrow down what I like about Shortstack. I used it for three or four years and was always very happy with results. I probably ran 20-25 different social media giveaways and contests.

I got to a point near the end of my use of Shortstack that I would have benefited from a less constrictive set of templates to build off of.

Find yourself a good designer if you're not one already and the sky is the limit with this app. Additionally, it's so intuitive and easy to learn that you'll quickly start becoming an expert at the development end of Facebook's functionality.

Massively successful awareness campaigns at a relatively meager cost.

We enjoy the ability to look through the various pre-made templates, select the one that best fits the clients needs, and then make modifications to the CSS/interactions. It's both timesaving and efficient.

It is very unfortunate that Shortstack doesn't support the ability to set a Google Map with interactive/clickable locations that would show possible locations for something. There is a workaround feature which is to take a screenshot of actual GoogleMaps, but that doesn't solve the issue for clients who want interactive engagement on their app. (Especially when the client is a global entity)

If you're looking for a good solution to your Facebook campaign needs, this is a tool. Just make sure you study up on your CSS, or at least be willing to do some research. The customer service is extremely helpful so they are always willing to help.

We are currently solving the issue of clients wanting quick solutions that look great while converting their social audience into new business. Shortstack provides a lot of functionality for our clients in a single platform.

We use ShortStack for all of our contests. It makes it easy for us to collect entries from forms on our website and from Facebook posts. We also like being able to schedule visibility so that the forms are not visible after a certain timeframe.

It would be great if ShortStack integrated with more social media platforms. We would really like to collect likes and comments from other platforms such as Instagram and Twitter.

By using ShortStack we are are able to better administer our contests. Using web forms gets complicated and tricky. ShortStack is easy and compiles our entries in a easy to use way.

I love that Shortstack is very user friendly, while also allowing you to change the CSS to fully customize your app to your brand. If you are new to Shortstack, they offer many templates and ideas to choose from to begin customizing. This feature is important to us, as we constantly have interns working with the program that need to be able to quickly learn the features. If you get stuck on anything, Shortstack is just a call, email or instant message away for any questions you may have. They are timely in their response rate, and very friendly and helpful. They even have helpful videos built into the back side of the program to help you successfully build your campaign.

I don't dislike anything about Shortstack. I am 100% happy with the product and happy with the continued support and changes they have made to the program. This has helped our company reach new goals and provide us with rich content for all of our social platforms. I look forward to seeing what they come out with next!

If you are looking to boost your page and grow your company, Shortstack has all the right tools to help you along the way. With everything from quizzes to photo contest, you get a wide variety of promotion material that will keep your fans engaged and happy.

We do most of our digital marketing and social media in house. Shortstack has given us the opportunity to make innovative promotions fast! To sum it up, Shortstack is everything you need. It's customization, affordable, user friendly, and effective!

Almost immediate support

Many many functionalities

Many templates and tools to use for social media

Ease in navigation

Easy to understand how it works

Very good initial training

Nothing to be honest except that it gets a bit expensive at higher levels of usage

A very useful and value for money tool, excellent support, friendly representatives

Facebook contest to clients I would need an IT to host

We are new to the platform but have been so impressed with their quick, customized customer service. Very responsive and so helpful!

There's definitely a learning curve but that's par for the course when you're using something with a high level of capabilities.

lead generation, nice design

After 4+ years as a loyal customer and with dozens of promotions deployed, count me as a Shortstack fan! I appreciate Shortstack's reliability and consistent platform innovation but most of all value the absolute commitment to customer and technical support and truly outstanding level of care provided. It goes above and beyond and that’s a rare thing

I don't think there's anything I could say that I "dislike". In the 4 years of using the product there have been times I'd wished there were certain tools or functionality that existed, but through consistent platform upgrades and new features all of those needs have been right.

I recommend Shortstack often and actually go out of my way to endorse them based on the quality of product and amazing customer support

The challenge is to build and deploy quality Facebook and web-based promotions in a time and cost effective manner. Using Shortstack we've been able to do that consistently and very affordably. We've seen very successful promotions that have been tremendously beneficial to email/data acquisition and in driving social engagement. With the ease of use of the platform we've been able to optimize promotions in real time and gain valuable insight from the integrated analytics.

I like that Shortstack's offers different and simple to use settings for even a non-programmer to start. Styling is also quite straightforward with its drag and drop functions and the preset theme makes it easier to follow. Also the variety of set-themes. The main reason I recommended this platform to my colleagues was also the easy-to-integrate function on to Facebook.

Lack of materials (video, blog post) to follow if I have would like to tweak the functionality of certain actions or widget. Personally, I think more preset themes can be added.

Shortstack help cut down setting up additional sites for our marketing promotions.

The multi-faceted templates that come standard can actually challenge businesses to come up with ways to use them. Where you might first use them for a contest or dynamic contact form, the easy ability to make an ebook available, etc, is great.

Sometimes it’s too easy to create errors or break what you’ve built by going too quickly or not testing. That’s obviously on the client but it’d be great to force that into integration to ensure it meets standards before going live. Lower price points for small business would be nice too

Lead generation, asset delivery are two huge items

Shortstack makes it incredibly easy to build customs landing pages for my blog or my social media channels. I can also use it to capture leads for my business.

The interface can take some getting used to. It can be confusing when you first get started.

To build landing pages, quizzes, and to capture leads for my business as well as for clients.

I love how easy and quick you can set up a very professional looking site that allows you to re-market to those who enter. There is a bit of a learning curve on all the widgets, but once you figure them out it makes developing your entry site a snap.

I honestly have not had any big issues or dislikes with ShortStack.

If you run any kind of sweepstakes or contests online, this should be your go to software!

Gathering soft leads, Brand Awareness, Re-Marketing Database and opportunity to offer direct purchase promotional offers to help increase sales.

The different templates are the best things that ShortStack has to offer. They're best suited for someone who has some experience in code if they want it to be fully customizable.

There's a large learning curve in ShortStack and it is a bit costly. The other issue is that the API integration with Facebook's browser tool has problems for responsiveness.

We're getting much more user generated content based on the campaigns created in Shorstack. An issue we've seen is that projects were scoped based on prior experience with ShortStack, and they tend to change their templates, which changes the scope of work.

I love the support and the ability to do so many great things with Facebook apps. There are great integrations, it is easy to set it up with a Facebook app and the Shortstack team are there to support you through every step of the way.

Nothing really. I found it a bit hard to work out at first, but the support was incredible and got me sorted straight away. Usually support will take days to get a problem resolved. Not at Shortstack. I had several questions, all in separate tickets and Ashley (support person) answered them all promptly, with screenshots and made the learning curve a lot easier.

Definitely give it a try and if you have any problems just contact support because they will definitely help you and make sure you get set up and working really quickly. I even considered paying someone to set it up but Shorstack support had me work it out before the other person had even contacted me!

More leads and lead conversions.

We have benefited greatly from the Photo Contest functionality. It does all the heavy lifting needed in order to pull off all the necessary things for a successful contest.

At the moment there is nothing I can think of.

Being able to utilize their lead gen and contest functionality has enabled us to quickly and efficiently launch marketing initiatives that otherwise we would not be able to accommodate in our budget. Did I mention how user-friendly it's interface is as well as the accompanying knowledgebase that has been built out!

I like that I can customize it to fit my brand style guides. That way the users don't realize that they are a actually on a 3rd party site. They think they are still on our homepage.

I don't like that the interface for building the forms. Can be confusing when creating a form from scratch.

I would highly recommend it, however I think you have to go into it knowing that it is going to take you some time to get it to look right.

We are using it to build forms on site, without having to go to engineering or product teams. That way we can just build the forms ourselves. Saves us time and resources, as sometimes we can get limited to none.

Easy to use and learn, doesn't require any coding knowledge and offers good selection of design themes to suit our brand.

Interface works inconsistently, specifically editing in modal window hasn't worked in recent updates, requiring extra steps to set up campaign.

Shortstack allows us to provide ticket and other giveaway offers to our users through Facebook but also on our website. Has allowed us to expand our email list/contacts and also help clients offering tickets expand their base and reach our to new audiences.

The support team is great and normally gets back to very quickly if you have questions or need help. Plus they have many online tutorials including video.

I really can't think of anything I dislike about it.

Great tool and has different plans to meet your budget

We are providing the application for our client's needs for sweepstakes and contest promotions. So we can offer our clients a quick and inexpensive solution to get them up and running quickly with their promotoin.

I like the templates that you can use best. Something was quickly set up. And the support is also very good

That you can't use the best templates for $200 a month. I'm a startup and just can't afford any more

I still prefer some ideas for further campaigns and it would be great to use the templates without having to pay 400 dollars.

Shortstack is a way for me to get in touch with other customers. I realize new business

The use of widgets in buidling campaigns makes it easy to use, and the availability of an extensive template database, allows us to skip some learning time. Everything os drag and drop and you constantly have the ability to review what you are doing. Also there is small tips available everywhere, if you get stuck.

We haven´t been using the tool for so long, we are in the testing phase and so far nothing really has annoyed me.

Use the trial and error method and spend time using the extensive support Shortstack offers

This is the tool that allows us to create the interaction with our customers that involves them in the product and leads them to give us sign-ups and data enrichment on profile level needed to do proper marketing automation.

The variety of contests types. Plus it is easy for the user to enter. I'm also a fan of the auto responder for entries.

Template variety is still somewhat limited. And the custom CSS option is too complicated. Also there is no way to allow entrants to enter daily without setting it to 12 hours. If you set it at 24 hours, then someone who enters at 4 pm on Monday can't enter again until 4 pm on Tuesday and that confuses people. If you set it to 12 hours then you have cheaters who work the system. It should reset at midnight each day.

Much easier than programming a contest from scratch.

By far and away the support staff at Shortstack is my favorite feature. Their responsiveness and ability to answer any questions that we throw at them is uncanny. The best in the biz!

There's not much that I have found that I dislike about Shortstack. Just being honest!

When our high level developers are working on other projects, Shortstack is a great tool for our digital project manager to use.

The functionality of the system is great, and very intuitive.

There is isn't really much wit the system that I dislike

This system helps us with managing social media contest. It really helps with selecting random entries.

Shortstack is the only tool I've used for Facebook campaign and I like what I can do with it (made an advent calendar last year) which was very successful.

It was a big hassle to get to that point. It's a very complex piece of software to program and the workflow isn't always intuitive. It left me with a few customer grievances, unfortunately. Doors opening at the wrong time and people missing out on offers.

Please make sure you have someone reasonably tech savvy if you intend to do clever stuff like timed releases etc. The interface can be daunting.

Until we started using Shortstack we hadn't really done any capturing of marketing data on Facebook and we added about 7,000 leads to our Mailchimp database through the advent calendar.

With ShortStack, the best part is the flexibility and ease of use. Customizing takes a little more tech savvy, but it is overall very easy to use.

The only problem we have run into is when ShortStack changes or removes a template that we are using, it seems to break our landing page.

We are growing our facebook audience with sweepstakes and giveaways. Our 4th of July photo contest increased our engagement by 10x!

Being able to use the templates that ShortStack has already prepared for use, saves us a bunch of time. Being able to just drop images and text in the places dedicated for them is such a simple process.

I wish there was an easier way to get to the entries, rather than going thru a few steps to do so.

ShortSTack has everything you would need to make and build a successful giveaway / promotion.

Our giveaways, whether it be thru social media or email, ShortStack has helped our company get things done, and in the correct matter. The amount of time we save by using ShortStack helps our bottom line.

Their customer support is phenomenal. If I have a question they answer it usually within 20 minutes! The questions can range from "what's the best type of campaign" or even them fixing my CSS/HTML issues!

There are so many options for things you can do that it almost feels overwhelming. It's a tough line to walk, but they navigate it well.

Give their try a try - it's free and definitely worth it.

I work for a marketing agency. We use shortstack to run Facebook contests on behalf of our clients. Their superstar support team always answers my questions, fixes my campaigns, and makes me look better than I am when it comes to HTML and CSS. They're also always very nice and follow up within 20 minutes of my questions being asked!

How customisable everything is. I can tailor my competitions to be exactly what I need.

We have had issues when using the embed code on our website, it isn't easy to make centred.

It is an easy way to create competition entry pages and being able to use it with facebook is great as that is where our customers engage most highly with us.

Shortstack is a powerful tool to build interactive pages for Facebook apps etc, with widgets and templates covering many of the popular interactive mechanics, with quite a room for customization.

The interface is a bit outdated, sometimes it is hard to figure out how exactly something should assembled together from the available building bricks to get the result you need.

We ran a whole range of lead capture and engagement campaigns and I see the key advantage in being able to quickly put together an interactive page without requiring support from the tech team or outside agency

Shortstack is an easy to use tool to build social media campaigns. We've been using it to build sweepstakes app for Facebook for several years. Very easy to use with lots of drag-and-drop functionalities. Easily collect email addresses and any other form fields you need. Customize to match your brand. All of this at a price that won't break the bank! They even have a free plan for smaller businesses.

No API for real-time integration with our top-tier ESP.

sweepstakes collection pages.

After 6 years of using custom built tools that were expensive and needed a lot of maintenance we decided to switch to Shortstack. So easy to use, affordable and have never had any issues!awes

Nothing - I think it’s a great tool and have never had any issues

Social media giveaways and short forms on web

I love how customizable the platform is. I can make landing pages for almost any business need.

It can be difficult to figure out what you need to click in order to make the adjustments that you want to.

We use the platform to distribute internal information, take votes, run contests, award nominations etc.

We really enjoy the ease of integration into our website. We've been creating tons of landing pages for contests and announcements, with how simple it is to embed.

Having to pay for additional users to access the platform. Might be better to create a package that includes at least 3 users. Maybe include a few more templates for contests.

With the amount of promotions and contests we are creating throughout the year, this platform saves us a lot of the time. Especially with collecting contest entrant data and choosing winners.

It's interface is easy to navigate, there are easy tools and options to use in platform for designing. I especially like the analytics and measurement.

There isn't a lot of innovation. There should be more opportunities to use outside of just Facebook.

They provide the opportunity to gather insights and user data.

Shortstack is easily customizable for both beginners and advanced users

A few little things could be more in depth, more options for forms.

We use it to collect data from customers and to host large contests. We have had great responses and results from the campaigns so far.

The ease of use is great. Also the ability to upload our own graphics.

Everything we've used ShortStack for has been great. Very pleased.

It's been helpful to us in our social media efforts.

Social media contests. Easy to upload our graphics. Tracking and updates are good.