Octopus.do review 2024: app features, pricing, pros & cons

Octopus.do promises a lot in addition to sitemaps — from being a website planner to lo-fi wireframing – but does it deliver? The takeaway from our Octopus.do review is yes and no. An Octopus sitemap works well for smaller, simpler projects but it won’t be a great fit if you’re looking for something to plan your entire site, nor will it be useful as a genuine wireframing tool.

Octopus.do review 2024: Is the octopus sitemap tool any good?

Octopus.do is a decent option for creating sitemaps. While it does have some notable limits that we’ll get into in this Octopus.do review, there’s still quite a bit you can accomplish with it towards your sitemapping needs. Before digging into the specifics, let’s get some basics out of the way.

Octopus.do pricing plans

When looking to add a new tool, price is always a consideration so let’s talk numbers before anything else. Since this is a SaaS product, you’ll have the option to either pay per month or be billed annually for your Octopus.do subscription.

That said, how much does Octopus.do cost? Let’s quickly review Octopus.do prices:

How much does Octopus.do cost for nonprofits?

As per their FAQs, there’s unfortunately no discount in place for non-profit organizations although students and educators are eligible for reduced pricing.

If you’re doing the critical work of an NGO or nonprofit, Slickplan does offer discounts for you. Just shoot us a note here.

Are there any Octopus.do coupon codes or promo discount vouchers?

Is there any other way to save some cheddar on Octopus.do? After browsing around, it doesn’t look like any coupons or promo codes are hiding out there.

In terms of pricing though, note that there’s a big gap between their Team and Agency plans, that’s a spot where Slickplan actually offers a "stepping stone" plan.

Octopus.do free vs paid: what’s the difference?

The differences between their free and paid options are significant. The functionality is so limited, with no access to a symbol library or even the ability to add notes, that it likely won’t suit the needs of many.

The absolute minimum for a freemium offer but the cool thing is that you can use it straight from their landing page. A hat tip for the ease of use there.

Importantly, they do not have a trial for their paid plans and refund requests require you to provide "the exact reason" you’re seeking one…so you better be absolutely sure you want to take the leap.

On the other hand, at Slickplan we have a basic, permanently free sitemap generator and offer 14-day trials for every plan.

Octopus.do overview: what is Octopus.do & what is Octopus.do used for?

First and foremost, it’s a tool to create sitemaps, specifically visual sitemaps, and used as an aid in your website planning process.

They also include a tool for estimating project costs which is certainly unique as well as the ability to create low-fidelity wireframes (pro plans only). However, calling this true wireframing is a Stretch Armstrong level stretch and probably not something even a UX beginner would find useful. It’s really just stacking uneditable blocks. Uneditable meaning you can only use the blocks they provide as they are. No shifting elements. You can’t even put them next to each other.

Nonetheless, the wireframing is a blessing and a curse because once you have some semblance of a wireframe in motion, other elements of the website and the user experience pop into mind.

What’s the user flow? What specific content will users see and where exactly will it go on the page? What does the UI design look like, etc?

Trouble is you can’t entirely answer any of those questions solely within Octopus.do. You’d need another tool for diagramming, design and true content planning.

At Slickplan, those things come standard in our Pro plan and above.

Octopus.do features list

From the standpoint of making sitemaps and building website structure, Octopus.do is among the better options out there. Here’s how the features of Octopus.do compare to Slickplan.

Features included in Octopus.do & Slickplan:

1. Interactive visual sitemaps

Getting your high-level website structure in order is a critical step in building out your future site, same goes for app structure. Seeing the interplay of all the individual pages matters for developing a cohesive experience.

But it’s the ability to get into some of the details on each page that really starts to add meaning to the project.

Both visual sitemap tools, Slickplan and Octopus.do, give you the ability to interact and add granular info & items to each page.

Octopus.do offers the option to add things like notes, internal links and wireframe elements. With Slickplan you can link internally and externally as well as add notes, properties, page types, diagrams, Google Analytics and actual page content via our Content Planner (rather than just a wireframe block that you can attach a note to).

2. Drag & drop editor

Drag-and-drop editing is one of those features that everyone takes for granted nowadays but being able to move items around on a whim and act in the moment when ideating is a simple but huge feature.

3. Site crawler & sitemap XML import

These two go hand-in-hand so we’re counting them as one feature.

And it’s a biggie from the standpoint of convenience.

If you’re working on a rebuild of a site or making silo architecture improvements for a client, being able to quickly bring in their existing sitemap is mission critical.

The alternative is painstakingly recreating it manually. Talk about a nightmare.

With a site crawler and free visual sitemap generator you can just punch in a URL or upload an XML file and, boom, a sitemap appears.

Not so fast.

All site importers and crawlers are not created equally.

Octopus.do describe theirs as "very simple"…and they’re right.

In fact, it’s so simple that only people working on the most basic of sites will find it useful (but if you’re working on a basic site, you likely don’t need a sitemap generator to begin with).

With theirs, you have no way to set any parameters or choose any properties that would create a useful sitemap.

At best you’ll end up with a map with page labels, lacking any customization, links or metadata.

Ours, meanwhile, was built for customization.

Made for pros and companies who need a map they can work with — with options for filtering directories, crawling private sites, adding links and metadata, importing content metadata and more.

This tool isn’t for spitting out a map just for the sake of having one.

4. Auto Save

Is there anything more frustrating than making a ton of progress on a project only to have your browser crash and lose all of that work?

Devastating.

And a waste of time because you have to do the same work again (if you can remember everything you did).

Luckily, whether you go with us or them, your work is saved automatically after every single change.

5. Figma integration

Bridging the gap between planning and design with as little friction is not something many sitemapping tools do well.

Integrations with (most) everyone’s favorite design tool, Figma, is a massive step in that direction.

With Octopus.do you can paste a link from your sitemap project into Figma and it converts that into a preview of your design.

In other words, it’s not your design that you’re seeing, it seems to be an auto-generated design preview that Figma produces. While that’s useful for getting an idea of what your page layouts look like, it doesn’t show your actual designs.

Slickplan’s Design Mockups tool, on the other hand, integrates with Figma in such a way that you can bring your actual designs from Figma into Slickplan to collaborate on them along with your sitemap. Drop-pin comments on the exact design elements are instantly visible in both Slickplan and Figma so your comments are seen by all key stakeholders.

So while we both offer Figma integrations, they aren’t created equally and the Octopus.do alternative will leave many wanting for more.

Features included only in Octopus.do:

6. Project cost estimator

This is a nifty little addition for getting a rough idea of what your website or app project might cost. Think of it as an Excel spreadsheet with basic formulas to add up the hours and costs for each part of the development process, i.e., design, testing, SEO, project management, etc.

As you build out each page on your sitemap, you can add the hours you think it will take to do each task and the estimator automatically adjusts. It’s pretty neat.

Advanced features found only in Slickplan:

7. Customization

Being able to customize how your sitemap looks makes it sooo, so much easier for yourself, your team and your clients to understand and follow. And that’s the point, isn’t it?

With Octopus.do, you can change the color of the content boxes you add to a page and that’s essentially it.

No branding options, no logo upload, no real ability to change the look of a sitemap.

Meanwhile, with Slickplan, you can fully customize the visual design of your sitemap as well as add logos so you can present fully branded maps when showcasing solutions to those clients.

8. Google Analytics

When you’re aiming to improve a site for yourself or a client, decisions have to be driven by data. Only with Slickplan can you incorporate SEO metrics directly into your sitemap and see exactly how each page performs and details like the source of traffic.

That info allows you to make sure pages that already perform well can keep it up and tells you which need to be improved and optimized with links or content upgrades.

9. SEO tools

It’s tough to be competitive without having an eye on your SEO and taking the steps necessary to continuously improve it.

To be fair, with Octopus.do you can fill the meta tags for all of your pages. The title, description, H1 through H6, that sort of thing.

But that’s just one small part of the SEO puzzle.

Slickplan’s (free) suite of SEO tools includes an XML sitemap generator and sitemap validator, an HTTPS/HTTP header checker, a robots.txt generator, a redirect checker and even a UTM builder so you can track your ad campaigns in Google Analytics.

That’s a lot more puzzle pieces.

10. Batch editing

In our view, this is a fatal flaw.

If you have a massive site with dozens or hundreds of pages and you want to make a meaningful edit across an entire information silo, you must have the ability to make bulk edits.

With Slickplan you change the labels, colors and features of as many pages as you need simultaneously as well as move as many pages around as you want.

You can only move one page at a time with Octopus.do and only in early 2022 did they add a bulk editing feature. Unfortunately, all you do with it is change block colors.

11. Real-time in-app collaboration

Most, if not all, sitemapping tools out there confuse multi-user access with genuine collaboration.

Yes, it makes it easier to collaborate if your team can all access the project but real collaboration is more than everyone being able to see the sitemap and make comments.

With Octopus.do and Slickplan any changes you or a team member makes are shown in real-time on everyone else’s screen too.

But that’s not quite what we’d consider full spectrum "real-time, in-app collaboration", just part of the story.

Only with Slickplan can you collaborate on content, diagram your user flow & journeys together and actually follow each other’s exact movements in the design phase (think Figma) in one workspace.

Only in Slickplan can you get real-time messaging and have in depth conversations as you would in Slack. With Octopus.do you’re getting comments that trigger email notifications.

Commenting is great. Conversations are better.

12. Integrations via API

Efficiency matters and the most efficient workflow is the one that allows you to use the tools you’re already comfortable with.

You can integrate Slickplan directly with your own tools and applications via our developer API to keep your projects moving along friction-free.

Put differently, using Octopus.do requires you to manipulate your process. Slickplan doesn’t.

13. Content Planner

Have a great design and a website map that makes sense but still have tons of visitors bouncing?

It’s probably your content.

Content is what converts.

At Slickplan we’re well aware of this so we created a dedicated tool; Content Planner where you can create the layout of each page with a simple drag-and-drop editor, assign a team member to write the actual content within Slickplan, add media & metadata and even get started from our templates if you’re stuck.

On top of that, you can collaborate on each piece and project manage your entire content operation.

It could easily be a separate, paid tool but given how important this is for developing a genuinely great site, we include it with all but our Basic plan.

With Octopus.do you can add a symbol for where the content would be within your layout, but you can’t add content beyond attaching a note.

14. CMS import plugins

Sure, Content Planner lets you build out your content exactly as you see fit.

Then what?

You have to get it into your CMS of choice, right?

Otherwise, it’s just endlessly copying and pasting.

We’re not fans of that option so we built plugins for WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, ExpressionEngine and concrete5 that allow you to import your finely crafted content directly in your CMS of choice.

And if you use something else, our API is always available.

If Octopus.do doesn’t give you any options to create content, it certainly doesn’t give you a way to migrate content into a CMS. You can export your sitemaps as a PDF, PNG, TXT or XML though, something Slickplan does too.

15. Diagram Maker

For your site to be the most useful to your target audience, you need to understand their journey. Developing user flows that highlight key decision points is a key tool for helping you put together intuitive sitemaps.

Our Diagram Maker tool is designed specifically for that.

But visualizing user flow is just part of it. With this collaborative tool, you can also diagram out complex concepts, data points, business processes and anything else where visuals paint a clearer picture.

Very much not a part of Octopus.do’s features.

16. Design Mockups

Since we mentioned this earlier when discussing Figma, we won’t harp on it too much again.

To reiterate though, being able to tackle the entire development process — including design — within one tool is a big deal.

In our Design Mockups tool, you can centralize all your UI layouts and web designs PLUS the discussions that shape them. Whatever feedback you give in Slickplan, automatically pops up in Figma and vice versa.

Octopus.do only gives you a Figma-generated preview of your page layout.

Octopus.do pros and cons

TL:DR, here are the advantages and disadvantages of Octopus.do:

Octopus.do advantages

• Can use free version straight from landing page
• Unique complementary tools like project cost estimator
• Can add sticky notes anywhere in a project

Octopus.do disadvantages

• Visual sitemap generator tops out at crawling 1,000 pages
• Can’t restore deleted projects
• No information on how much storage you get with any plan (up to 500 GB with Slickplan)
• No CMS integrations
• Only handles part of the website planning process and does not include tools for developing content or diagramming UX/UI ideas
• Figma integration relies on Figma to create design previews
• No API for creating your own integrations

Octopus.do complaints & praise (Octopus.do reviews from real customers)

User reviews of Octopus.do tend to be more positive than negative on balance.

In general, people liked the simplicity of the design, how easy it is to use and the project cost estimator.

As for negative Octopus.do reviews, a notable one that came up was the pretty significant price gap between the Pro and Team plan ($10 to $40) and the even larger gap between Team and Agency ($40 to $120).

Review of Octopus.do support

By all accounts, it seems that they do a solid job with customer support. There’s a robust help center that goes into the features, an FAQ page that’s largely devoted to account & pricing questions as well as an email address for additional questions. Simple but effective and without complaints to speak of.

Is Octopus.do worth it? Our conclusion

So, is Octopus.do worth it?

All in all, we’d lean towards not really unless you’re working on fairly small and basic sites. The inability to edit pages in bulk makes any big website work painful compared to Octopus.do alternatives like Slickplan, for example. Not being able to brand sitemaps makes client work, especially proposals, seem amateurish.

The most interesting feature is their project cost estimator which lets you price out each element on any given page. That is effective and honestly pretty cool.