An NPS survey tool that lives on your site
Measure Net Promoter Score with a small embedded widget — the 0–10 question, tracked over time, no email blast and no separate survey app required.
What an NPS survey tool actually does
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is one question with a big reputation: “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?”, answered on a 0–10 scale. The number is easy to collect and easy to compare over time, which is exactly why product, support, and growth teams keep coming back to it.
An NPS survey tool is the thing that asks the question, stores the answers, and turns them into a single trendable score. The catch is in how it asks. Most tools mail the question out in a campaign. widgetful does the opposite: it’s an embedded NPS widget that lives on your site or inside your app. You create a widget, paste one script tag, and responses stream into a dashboard — no email send, no deliverability worries, no plugin.
How NPS is calculated (promoters, passives, detractors)
NPS isn’t an average. You bucket respondents by their 0–10 answer, then take a difference of percentages:
| Score | Bucket | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 9–10 | Promoters | Loyal enthusiasts who’ll refer you and keep coming back. |
| 7–8 | Passives | Satisfied but unenthusiastic — easily tempted away. |
| 0–6 | Detractors | Unhappy; the people most likely to churn or warn others off. |
The formula is simply:
NPS = %promoters − %detractors
Passives count toward your total response volume but drop out of the math, which is why a wall of 7s and 8s drags your score toward zero rather than lifting it. Because it’s a difference of two percentages, the result lands anywhere from −100 (everyone is a detractor) to +100 (everyone is a promoter). A positive score generally means you have more fans than critics; beyond that, the only benchmark that truly matters is your own number last quarter — comparing across wildly different industries and survey methods is where most NPS analysis goes wrong.
Embedded vs. email-blast NPS
This is the decision that shapes your whole program, so it’s worth being concrete about the trade-offs.
| Embedded / in-app (widgetful) | Email-blast NPS | |
|---|---|---|
| Timing | Asks in the moment — right after someone uses a feature or finishes a flow. | Asks whenever the inbox is checked, often days later. |
| Context | You know the page they were on; the experience is fresh. | Context is gone; people answer on a vague overall impression. |
| Deliverability | Not a factor — there’s no email to land in spam or bounce. | Spam filters, bounces, and unsubscribes silently shrink your sample. |
| Friction | One tap on a widget already in front of them. | Open email → click → load a survey page → answer. |
In-the-moment context is the real win. Someone who just hit a confusing step and scores you a 4 is telling you something specific and actionable; the same person, emailed a week later, mostly remembers “it was fine.” If your program is fundamentally outbound — large lists, multi-channel sends, deep CRM workflows — a dedicated email platform is the right tool, and our Delighted alternative page walks through exactly when to pick which.
How it works
Create an NPS widget in the dashboard, write your follow-up prompt, and decide whether the comment box appears for everyone or only detractors. Then paste one snippet just before the closing </body> tag on any page:
<script src="https://cdn.widgetful.com/w.js" data-key="pub_yourkey" defer></script>
Swap pub_yourkey for your widget’s key and you’re live. The embed is tiny vanilla JavaScript loaded with defer and served from the edge (cdn.widgetful.com), so it won’t drag your page down. It works anywhere a script tag does — plain HTML, Rails, Next.js, WordPress, Shopify, static sites. Prefer to skip the clicking entirely? A coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, and friends) can create the account, build the widget, and verify the install via our machine-readable docs at /install.md and /llms.txt before you even sign in. Full steps live in the install docs.
The follow-up comment is where the value is
The score tells you that something is working or broken; the comment tells you what. widgetful’s NPS widget pairs the 0–10 question with an optional free-text follow-up, and you can scope it to detractors only. That’s a deliberately useful pattern: a happy 10 rarely needs prompting for an essay, but a 3 with a sentence of explanation is the single most valuable thing the whole survey produces. Asking promoters “what do you love?” is also fair game when you’re hunting for testimonials — the point is to choose, not to bolt a comment box onto every response by reflex.
What you get in the dashboard
- Score over time. The headline NPS, tracked as a trend line so you can see whether a release, a price change, or a support push actually moved it.
- A 0–10 histogram. The full distribution, not just the rolled-up number — two teams can share an NPS of 30 with completely different shapes, and the histogram shows which one you are.
- Comments in context. Each free-text reply, with the page it came from, exportable to CSV anytime.
- Promoter / passive / detractor breakdown. The percentages behind the score, so a shift is traceable to a real movement between buckets.
Live tallies update instantly via a Durable Object, and aggregates roll up through Analytics Engine — the same edge architecture that keeps ingestion fast and cheap no matter how many responses you collect. The embed is cookieless and does no cross-site tracking, which keeps your consent banner simple; the details are in our privacy policy.
Realistic ways to use it
- SaaS dashboard. Show the widget to logged-in users who’ve been active for a couple of weeks — long enough to have a real opinion, recent enough to remember why.
- Post-onboarding. Fire NPS once a user finishes setup and reaches their first “aha” moment, to measure whether onboarding actually lands.
- After a support interaction. Drop it on the “your ticket is resolved” page to catch sentiment while the resolution is fresh.
- Pre-renewal. Surface it to accounts approaching renewal so detractor comments become a save-list instead of a surprise churn.
- E-commerce post-purchase. Ask on the order-confirmation page, where the buying experience is top of mind.
How to get data you can trust
- Don’t ask everyone on every page. The fastest way to ruin NPS is survey fatigue. Place the widget on one or two meaningful surfaces, not site-wide, and sample rather than carpet-bomb.
- Time it to experience, not to traffic. A first-time visitor has no recommendation to give. Wait for genuine usage before you ask.
- Give people a rest. Once someone has answered, leave them alone for a good while — re-surveying the same person too soon poisons your trend.
- Read the histogram, not just the headline. A score creeping up while detractors hold steady (passives converting to promoters) is a very different story from detractors flipping to promoters.
- Always act on detractor comments. NPS that nobody follows up on is vanity. The comment box exists so the score leads somewhere.
- Keep the method constant. Change the wording, timing, or audience and your trend line breaks. Pick a setup and hold it.
NPS is one instrument, not the whole dashboard. Pair it with a quick feedback widget on docs pages and a broader customer feedback tool setup, and every widget in the embeddable widget catalog ships on every plan — see pricing for what scales.
Questions people ask
What’s a “good” NPS?
Honestly, the one that beats your own previous number. Absolute benchmarks vary enormously by industry, audience, and survey method, so chasing someone else’s headline figure is mostly a trap. Track your own trend and judge changes against it.
Why does my score swing so much early on?
Small samples. With few responses, a couple of detractors can move NPS by tens of points because it’s a difference of percentages. The score stabilizes as volume grows — which is another reason to let it accumulate rather than reading day one.
Can I collect a comment only from unhappy respondents?
Yes. The follow-up comment is optional and can be shown to detractors only, so you capture the “why” behind low scores without nagging your promoters.
Will the widget slow my site down?
No. It’s tiny vanilla JavaScript loaded with defer and served from the edge, and responses are ingested on Cloudflare Workers — fast and cheap at any volume.
Does it set cookies?
No. The embed is cookieless and does no cross-site tracking, which keeps it easy on privacy and on your consent banner.
How is this different from a session-replay or heatmap tool?
Those tools watch behavior; NPS asks for an opinion. They’re complementary — if you want the behavioral side too, see our Hotjar alternative. widgetful’s job is the asking, cleanly and cookielessly.
What does it cost to start?
Nothing. The free plan includes 1,000 responses a month with no card, and the full widget catalog is on every tier — paid plans add volume, unlimited history, custom domains, and webhooks. You can start free and have NPS live in about a minute.
Try it on your site
Create a widget, paste one snippet, and watch responses roll in. The free plan is genuinely free — 1,000 responses a month, no card, live in about a minute.