How to build your growth hacking toolkit

Growth hacking started as scrappy, one-off experiments to find shortcuts to scale. Today it looks different. AI tools have changed how fast teams can create and test content, and platforms have consolidated (half the tools on our original list have been acquired or shut down).

The best growth teams have shifted from "hacking" to systematic, data-driven experimentation across the full funnel.

At its core, growth hacking is about applying the AARR framework - Acquisition, Activation, Retention, and Referral - to find the highest-leverage opportunities for your product. You don't need 50 tools. You need the right 3-5 for whatever stage matters most right now.

There is no one-size-fits-all growth hacking toolkit. Yours should be customized to your business, your users, and your goals. A mature company may not need as many acquisition apps as a brand-new startup. To find the best tools for your product, apply the same growth hacking mindset: pinpoint gaps, and experiment with different techniques.

The process is simple:

1. Set a goal. Whether you want to double your email list or increase engagement for a new feature, localize an area for growth and set a target.
2. Pick a tool (see list below) based on what you're trying to achieve.
3. Encourage your whole team to try the new tool for at least 30 days. Give it a chance to succeed and measure the impact it has on your funnel.
4. If the results are positive, formally adopt the tool and explore how you can get more mileage out of it.

Apply the AARR framework: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral. Then, pick 3-5 tools per stage.

We've refreshed this list to reflect the current landscape - removing tools that have been discontinued or acquired, and adding the AI and automation tools that modern growth teams actually rely on. Read below for the full list or jump ahead:

• Acquisition
• Engagement
• Retention and referral

Acquisition tools

There are infinite ways to get new users into your product. Pick and choose from the following tools to build better landing pages, automate lead nurturing, and create content that ranks well organically - in short, to get your product in front of new people and show its worth.

• Lead generation: AdRoll, Leadpages, Unbounce, Instapage, HubSpot Sales, Dealfront, OptinMonster
• Content/SEO: SEMrush, Moz, Ahrefs, Buzzsumo, Frase, Wistia
• AI tools: ChatGPT, Jasper

Lead generation and landing pages

Acquiring new users isn't just about filling up your database with as many new contacts as possible - it involves your website, landing pages, and email program. While paid ads drive initial awareness, it's up to your entire digital experience to ensure visitors actually convert.

• AdRoll - Rather than casting too wide a net, leverage retargeting to display ads to a smaller, prequalified set of users. AdRoll keeps track of people who visit your site and displays your retargeting ads to them as they browse other sites online. It's one of the most effective ways to bring back visitors who showed interest but didn't convert on the first visit.
• Leadpages - Make the most of your advertising budget by sending qualified traffic to landing pages built to convert. Leadpages lets you build and A/B test custom landing pages in a drag-and-drop interface, without needing to write code. It's especially useful for smaller teams who need to launch campaigns fast without waiting on developers.
• Unbounce - Another strong landing page builder, Unbounce focuses on conversion optimization with smart traffic routing that automatically sends visitors to the page variant most likely to convert. If you're running multiple campaigns simultaneously, Unbounce's AI-powered optimization can save hours of manual A/B testing.
• Instapage - For teams that need advanced personalization, Instapage lets you dynamically match landing pages to every ad and create internal workflows to review pages faster. Its collaboration features make it a good fit for larger marketing teams juggling multiple campaigns across channels.
• HubSpot Sales - Your sales team can't contact every lead manually. HubSpot Sales lets you automate outreach with auto-triggered email sequences and follow-ups, get notified when people open your emails, and track your pipeline - all in one place. It bridges the gap between marketing-generated leads and sales-ready conversations.
• Dealfront - Formerly Leadfeeder, Dealfront identifies the companies browsing your website and shows you what they're interested in - even if they never fill out a form. It's a valuable signal for account-based growth strategies, giving your sales team warm leads based on actual browsing behavior.
• OptinMonster - Before visitors leave your site, OptinMonster displays customizable pop-ups, slide-ins, and exit-intent offers to capture email addresses. It integrates with most email platforms and CRMs, making it easy to funnel new contacts directly into your nurturing sequences.

Content, SEO, and AI tools

Traditional acquisition tactics, like paid ads and optimized landing pages, are only one piece of the puzzle. Some users need in-depth, educational content to move through the funnel. And AI tools have become the single biggest shift in growth tooling since marketing automation - not because they replace strategy, but because they accelerate execution.

• SEMrush - To generate free, top-of-funnel traffic, invest in a keyword strategy to help your content rank on the first page of search results. SEMrush lets you find the right keywords for your product, track keyword performance, analyze backlinks, and conduct site audits. It's one of the most comprehensive SEO suites available.
• Moz - Another strong SEO toolkit, Moz is particularly well-regarded for its domain authority metrics and link analysis. Its keyword explorer and site crawl tools help you identify technical SEO issues and content opportunities that competitors might be missing.
• Ahrefs - Ahrefs has one of the largest backlink databases in the industry, making it essential for competitive analysis and link-building strategies. Its content explorer helps you find high-performing content in your niche, and its rank tracker shows exactly where you stand for target keywords.
• Buzzsumo - Regardless of what type of content you create, you'll always need a steady stream of ideas. Buzzsumo gives you real-time data on viral trends and top-performing content, helping you identify topics and formats that resonate before you invest time creating them.
• Frase - Embrace a question-driven content strategy by discovering the untapped questions your audience is actually asking. Frase helps you research, outline, and optimize content based on what's already ranking, so you can create pieces that are more likely to earn organic traffic.
• Wistia - While the majority of online content is written, different formats may resonate more with your audience. Wistia lets you experiment with video experiences - record, publish, and promote videos with built-in analytics that show you exactly where viewers drop off or re-watch.
• ChatGPT - The tool that changed content velocity for growth teams overnight. ChatGPT helps with everything from drafting blog outlines and ad copy to analyzing competitor messaging and brainstorming campaign angles. The best growth teams use it to accelerate execution, not replace thinking - feeding it real customer data and strategic context to produce first drafts that are 80% of the way there.
• Jasper - Where ChatGPT is a general-purpose AI, Jasper is built specifically for marketing teams. It offers brand voice controls, campaign templates, and workflows designed for content production at scale. Growth teams use it to maintain consistency across dozens of landing pages, email sequences, and ad variations without bottlenecking on a single writer.

Engagement tools

After you've acquired new users, you don't want to just let them wander around your product trying to find value. You have to bridge the gap between exploration and value-perception. Growth hacking tools can help you get to know your customers better and deliver what they need, when they need it.

• Analytics: Amplitude, Segment, Google Analytics, Optimizely, Hotjar, FullStory, Heap, Mixpanel
• In-app: Appcues
• Email/multi-channel: Mailchimp, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, Buffer, Drift
• Automation: Zapier, Make

Analytics and experimentation

Growth marketing is unique for its emphasis on data. While traditional marketing often focuses on analysis after the fact, growth teams seek out product and behavioral metrics before executing a campaign. You need analytics before you run experiments - think of this as the data foundation for your entire growth stack.

• Amplitude - When product and behavioral data are analyzed together, they surface valuable insights that direct the most relevant messages to your unique user segments. Amplitude is one of the most powerful product analytics platforms, offering cohort analysis, funnel tracking, and behavioral segmentation that help you understand not just what users do, but why.
• Segment - Before you can analyze anything, you need clean, unified customer data. Segment acts as your data layer, capturing events from every touchpoint and routing them to the analytics, marketing, and warehousing tools in your stack. It saves engineering time and ensures every tool is working from the same data.
• Google Analytics - The go-to for website analytics, Google Analytics shows you the flow of user interactions on your site, traffic sources, and the health of your domains. The GA4 update brought event-based tracking that makes it more useful for SaaS teams tracking specific user actions.
• Optimizely - The biggest name in digital experimentation, Optimizely lets you run A/B tests on your website, app, and backend code. If you're serious about data-driven growth, experimentation platforms like this one are non-negotiable - they turn opinions into evidence.
• Hotjar - Hotjar's heatmaps and session recordings reveal exactly how users interact with your pages - where they click, how far they scroll, and where they get stuck. A few small changes to your site based on Hotjar data can make a meaningful difference in conversion rates.
• FullStory - FullStory takes session recording further with its DX data platform, combining session replay with product analytics and error tracking. It's particularly useful for identifying frustration signals - rage clicks, dead clicks, and error flows - that quantitative tools alone would miss.
• Heap - Heap captures every user interaction automatically, without requiring manual event tracking setup. This means you can answer questions about user behavior retroactively, even for events you didn't think to track. For growth teams that need flexibility, that's a major advantage.
• Mixpanel - Mixpanel focuses on product analytics with deep funnel analysis, retention charts, and user flow visualizations. It's especially strong for SaaS teams who want to understand how specific features drive engagement and where users drop off in complex workflows.

User activation and in-app engagement

The gap between sign-up and value realization is where most growth opportunities live - and where most products lose users. Activation tools help you close that gap by guiding users to your product's core value faster.

• Appcues - A customer engagement platform that meets users in the moments that matter. Create walkthroughs, tooltips, and prompts to highlight your best features and communicate value - right inside your product. With in-app messaging, email, and push channels, Appcues covers the full engagement flywheel.
• Its prompt-driven, agentic workflows let growth teams move faster from idea to live experience without engineering dependency. And its AI capabilities surface recommendations that improve campaigns over time.

Email and multi-channel messaging

Once you have enough data to understand user actions and desires, you can start building your engagement plan. Be careful not to focus all your efforts on one channel. In the beginning, your goal should be to tailor your messaging to each channel and see which ones perform best.

• Mailchimp - Email remains one of the most effective ways to communicate with your entire customer base at once. Mailchimp lets you build campaigns ranging from one-off announcements to automated, triggered sequences. Its drag-and-drop builder and audience segmentation make it accessible for teams of any size.
• HubSpot - HubSpot goes beyond email to offer a full marketing hub - blog posts, landing pages, emails, websites, and CRM, all connected. For growth teams that want a single platform to manage multi-channel campaigns, it reduces the friction of juggling separate tools for every channel.
• ActiveCampaign - ActiveCampaign blends email marketing with powerful automation and CRM features. Its strength is lifecycle automation - building sequences triggered by what users do (or don't do) in your product. For SaaS teams focused on free-to-paid conversion or re-engagement, it's a strong fit.
• Buffer - Not all engagement happens in email or in-app. Buffer lets you schedule, publish, and analyze social media content across platforms. It's especially useful for growth teams who use social as a distribution channel for content marketing or community engagement.
• Drift - Some visitors are ready to talk right now. Drift lets you set up conversational chatbots and live chat on your website, routing high-intent visitors to sales in real time. It bridges the gap between marketing and sales by capturing demand at the moment of interest.

Automation and workflow tools

Automation is the connective tissue of a growth stack. Individual tools are powerful on their own, but the real leverage comes when you connect them - syncing data, triggering actions, and building workflows that run without manual intervention.

• Zapier - Zapier connects actions from one tool to another with simple, conditional workflows called "Zaps." This multiplies your product's uses and offers better workflows for both your team and your customers. For example, you can automatically add new trial sign-ups to a Mailchimp list, create a Slack notification when a user hits a milestone, or log form submissions to a spreadsheet - all without writing code.
• Make - Formerly Integromat, Make is the more powerful alternative for complex, multi-step workflows. Where Zapier excels at simple point-to-point connections, Make handles branching logic, error handling, and data transformation across dozens of steps. Growth teams use it for everything from lead enrichment pipelines to automated reporting.

Retention and referral tools

Your users have the potential to grow your business for you. If you focus on what they need and continue to nurture a relationship with them, many will eventually become loyal fans of your product. With the right encouragement, your champion users will go on to tell their friends about your product and multiply that lifetime value.

• Churn prevention: Baremetrics, ChartMogul, Churn Buster
• Support: Zendesk, Help Scout, Helpjuice
• Research: UserTesting, Typeform
• Referral: Extole, Viral Loops

Churn prevention and revenue recovery

Churn is a part of every business, but smart companies get ahead of it by using data to identify trends and triggers. Once you have a model for when and why customers churn, you can develop an outreach plan to get them back into your app. Lifecycle messaging tools (covered in the Engagement section above) tie directly into churn prevention - the earlier you catch disengagement signals, the more effective your re-engagement will be.

• Baremetrics - Financial data can help you build a complete picture of customer behavior, identifying factors that impact churn and retention. Baremetrics tracks your business in real time by aggregating MRR, user churn, failed charges, refunds, customer growth rate, and more. It turns your Stripe data into actionable dashboards.
• ChartMogul - Like Baremetrics, ChartMogul gives you real-time subscription analytics - but it also supports multiple billing providers and offers deeper cohort analysis. If you want to understand how retention varies across customer segments, pricing tiers, or acquisition channels, ChartMogul is a strong choice.
• Churn Buster - Not all churn is intentional. When customers leave because of outdated credit card information or a confusing payment flow, Churn Buster can recover that failed revenue and make the payment process easier. It handles dunning management so your team doesn't have to chase down failed charges manually.

Customer support and self-service

Retention strategies shouldn't always be reactive, beginning only when users show signs of churning. Think of ways you can create positive experiences throughout the lifecycle to build a deeper relationship and encourage retention.

• Zendesk - Zendesk makes it easy to connect with users across channels as soon as they need help. Its ticketing system, live chat, and knowledge base work together to ensure no customer request falls through the cracks. For growth teams, fast support resolution directly impacts retention and NPS.
• Help Scout - Help Scout takes a more personal approach to customer support, with shared inboxes and a clean interface that feels like email rather than a ticketing system. It's a good fit for SaaS teams who want to maintain a human, conversational tone in their support interactions.
• Helpjuice - A good knowledge base doesn't just prevent your support team from getting bogged down with frequently asked questions. It empowers users to solve their own problems and get to know the ins and outs of your product better. Helpjuice helps you get started or scale your current self-service efforts.

User research and feedback

These tools complement your engagement analytics with qualitative depth - the context behind the numbers that helps you make better product and growth decisions.

• UserTesting - Go straight to the source to understand how your customers feel and behave when they're using your product. UserTesting finds a user panel to evaluate your UX, filming the sessions so you can see exactly where people lose interest, get confused, or feel delighted. It's invaluable for validating assumptions before a big launch.
• Typeform - For a simpler approach to collecting feedback, Typeform lets you create polls, surveys, forms, and other interactive experiences that users actually enjoy filling out. Its conversational format gets higher completion rates than traditional survey tools, making it a reliable way to gather user sentiment at scale.

Referral and advocacy

It's not enough to simply reduce churn and re-engage inactive users. Your champion users - the ones who love your product - are your most powerful growth channel. Users who refer tend to have higher lifetime value, and the customers they bring in convert faster because they come with built-in trust.

• Extole - Extole makes it easy to identify your advocates, create personal share codes for them to refer your product, and reward them once you acquire newly referred customers. It handles the logistics of referral programs - tracking, attribution, and payouts - so you can focus on building a product worth recommending.
• Viral Loops - Viral Loops specializes in referral and viral marketing campaigns with pre-built templates modeled after programs from companies like Dropbox, Airbnb, and Harry's. If you want to launch a referral program quickly without building the infrastructure from scratch, it's one of the fastest ways to get started.

Best engagement software for growth teams

Growth teams need tools that connect user behavior to engagement actions. Here are the top engagement platforms ranked by impact for growth teams:

1. Appcues - In-product engagement platform with walkthroughs, tooltips, checklists, surveys, and cross-channel messaging. Best for behavior-based onboarding and feature adoption without engineering dependency.
2. Amplitude - Product analytics with cohort analysis, funnel tracking, and behavioral segmentation. The data foundation for growth experiments.
3. Mixpanel - Deep funnel analysis, retention charts, and user flow visualizations for understanding feature-level engagement.
4. Optimizely - The standard for digital experimentation and A/B testing across web, app, and backend.
5. ActiveCampaign - Lifecycle automation combining email marketing with CRM and behavioral triggers.
6. HubSpot - All-in-one marketing hub connecting blog, landing pages, emails, and CRM.
7. Hotjar - Heatmaps and session recordings that reveal how users interact with your pages.

Key takeaways

• Choose tools based on your growth stage. A startup focused on acquisition needs a different stack than a mature product optimizing retention. Identify your biggest bottleneck first.
• Start with analytics and activation. You can't improve what you can't measure, and you can't retain users who never experience your product's value. Get your data foundation right, then build from there.
• Don't adopt 35 tools at once. Pick 3-5 per growth stage and run real experiments for at least 30 days before deciding what stays and what goes.
• Integrate your tools together. The real power of a growth stack comes from connecting tools so data flows between them. Use integrations, automation platforms, and APIs to build a system that's stronger than the sum of its parts.

Start growing faster with Appcues

If you're looking at this list and wondering where to start, activation is often the highest-leverage stage. Getting users to experience your product's core value faster has a compounding effect on every metric downstream - retention, expansion, and referral all improve when activation improves.

Appcues helps growth teams build in-app experiences - walkthroughs, tooltips, surveys, and multi-channel messages - that guide users to value without waiting on engineering. Book a demo to see how it works.