Looking for a Baymard Institute alternative?
Baymard has spent years testing how people actually shop, and the guidelines that come out of it are the best in the field. They are also guidelines: general findings about ecommerce, written for someone who has the time to read them and work out which ones apply to your site. We do the applying. You get a read of your own pages, ranked, in minutes.
Baymard Institute and you x you i, side by side
| Feature | you x you i ResearchPublished research and standards, your real page, and your real search data | Baymard Institute ResearchTheir own usability studies, run with real people over many years |
|---|---|---|
| Conversions More of your visitors buy | ||
| Tells you why people are not buying | Measured | Checks |
| Checks your headline says what you sell | Measured | Not checked |
| Checks your buttons and calls to action | Measured | Not checked |
| Checks your pricing is laid out clearly | Measured | Not checked |
| Checks how your pages are laid out | Measured | ChecksHuman audit |
| Findability More visitors arrive and more of them buy | ||
| Checks the Google basics | Checks | Not checked |
| Checks AI can read and quote your pages | Checks | Not checked |
| Technical health More visitors arrive, more of them buy and more people can use your site | ||
| Checks how fast your pages load | Measured | Not checked |
| Checks it works on phones | Checks | ChecksHuman audit |
| Checks people with disabilities can use it | Measured | Not checked |
| Trust and brand More visitors trust what they see | ||
| Checks your site looks trustworthy | Checks | Not checked |
| Checks your brand is consistent | Measured | Not checked |
| Predicts where visitors look first | Measured | Not checked |
| Clarity More of your visitors buy | ||
| Checks how hard the page is to take in | Checks | Not checked |
| How it works How each tool is run and priced, and what its scores rest on | ||
| Results in minutes, no traffic needed | ||
| Tells you what to fix, in order | Human audit | |
| Compares you to similar websites | Coming soon | |
| One audit, no subscription | ||
| Pricing | $5 per audit, no subscription required | $200 to $700/mo |
The scoring behind your audit is state of the art: more than a dozen machine-learning models, several built on research published in the last two years, benchmarked on held-out data and calibrated to how thousands of real people rated thousands of real web pages. No other audit at this price grades a site this way.
Grounded in research and web standards
- WCAG 2.2 accessibility standard
- Google Core Web Vitals performance standard
- Usability research usability principles
- Web-credibility research trust
- Eye-tracking research visual attention
- Readability research clarity
- Colour science brand consistency
When to choose Baymard Institute
Choose Baymard when you have a team and a checkout worth arguing about. If you employ someone whose job is conversion, the research library is worth its price on its own, and their benchmarks of how large retailers handle checkout are something nobody else has. They also compare you against real competitors today, which we do not yet do. For a serious team rebuilding a checkout flow, Baymard is the reference.
When to choose you x you i
Choose us when you are the team. A guideline that says shoppers abandon carts with unclear delivery costs is true, and it still leaves you looking at your own site wondering whether that is your problem. We tell you: this page, this line, this button, in this order. The audit is $5, paid once, with no subscription required and no annual contract to sign.
What we check that Baymard Institute does not
Every one of these is a row in the table above, ticked in our column and blank in theirs.
- Checks your headline says what you sell
- Checks your buttons and calls to action
- Checks your pricing is laid out clearly
- Checks the Google basics
- Checks AI can read and quote your pages
- Connects to Google Search Console
- Shows which searches moved after your audit
- Links your fixes to your Google traffic
- Shows what AI answers cost you in clicks
- Compares your clicks with last year
- Tracks your score against your Google traffic
- Checks how fast your pages load
- Checks people with disabilities can use it
- Checks your site looks trustworthy
- Checks your brand is consistent
- Predicts where visitors look first
- Checks your writing reads clearly
- Flags copy that sounds AI-written
- Checks how hard the page is to take in
- Results in minutes, no traffic needed
- Emails you what your fixes did, 30 days on
- Scores measured against what real people said, not an opinion
- One audit, no subscription
What a year costs
Same year, both tools, list prices only.
- Baymard Institute Foundation, 3 users, $200 a month
- $2,400a year
- you x you i $5 an audit, 12 audits, one a month
- $60a year
- Difference over a year
- $2,340
And you only pay for the audits you run. One audit is $5, paid once, so a year of monthly checks is a ceiling and not a bill. A subscription is the other way round: you pay it whether you look at it that month or not.
The two tools do different jobs, and the table above says which. This is only what each one asks for.
Baymard Institute list price read from baymard.com on 14 July 2026. Prices change; this one is checked by hand.
Baymard Institute vs you x you i: common questions
Is your research as good as Baymard's?
Their research library is deeper than ours and we would not claim otherwise. The difference is what you get back. They publish findings about ecommerce in general; we run the checks against your site and hand you the list. Our checks are grounded in the same public standards their work draws on, including WCAG 2.2 and Nielsen's usability principles.
Do you benchmark me against competitors?
Not yet, and it is on the way. Baymard does this today and it is a real reason to pick them. What we give you now is a read of your own site against the standards, not against a cohort.
What does it cost?
It costs $5 for one audit, no subscription required. Baymard is a monthly plan that runs from the low hundreds upward, which makes sense for a team with someone reading it every week and much less sense for a site owner with one question.
How fast do I get the report?
Minutes. You paste a URL and the report comes back ranked by what to fix first.
What is the audit based on?
Our own machine-learning models, each tuned on hundreds of real business pages and checked against the web standards professionals use for speed, accessibility, readability, and brand. Where a single-purpose tool checks one slice of your site, every score here comes from published research and is ranked by what actually moves visitors.