Straight answer: For most small businesses, Gleam or KingSumo will do everything you need for under 20 pounds a month, ShortStack and Vyper earn their higher price tags once you’re running multi-platform campaigns with real budget behind them, and native Instagram or Facebook comment-to-win contests need no app at all, just a clear rule and a proper way to pick a winner. I’ve run contests using most of these, and the app matters far less than what you’re asking people to do to enter.
What decides whether a contest app is worth using
Before I name names, here’s the bit nobody tells you upfront: the app is not the reason your contest works or flops. I’ve seen a 40 pound Rafflecopter giveaway outperform a client’s 400 pound ShortStack campaign, because the ask was simpler. Every app in this list does roughly the same three jobs: collect entries, verify they’re legitimate, and pick a winner without you getting accused of fixing it. What separates them is pricing, how many entry methods they support (email signup, follow, share, tag a friend), and whether they plug into your email platform afterwards.
If you want the fuller breakdown of contest mechanics and setup, I’ve covered the wider toolkit in what tools help you run a social media contest smoothly, so this post focuses specifically on which apps to choose and why.
Gleam
Gleam is my default recommendation for anyone running their first three or four contests. The Contests plan runs around 10 dollars a month if you pay annually, and it lets you stack entry methods, follow on Instagram, subscribe to your list, share on X, watch a YouTube video, all counted and weighted however you like. You can give five entries for an email signup and one for a share, so you’re not just farming vanity actions.
The dashboard exports a clean CSV of every entrant, timestamped, so if anyone disputes the winner you have a record. I’ve used it for clients in the beauty and homeware space and the entry export alone saved arguments twice.
KingSumo
KingSumo is a one-time purchase, roughly 99 dollars, rather than a subscription, which appeals to anyone running occasional contests rather than constant ones. It’s built by the same team behind OptinMonster, so the referral mechanic is its strongest feature: entrants get a unique link, and sharing that link earns them extra entries. That single feature has driven the biggest reach multiplier I’ve seen on a giveaway, one entry became four or five through friend shares on a well-run campaign.
The downside is it’s WordPress-only and the interface looks like it hasn’t been touched since 2019. It works. It’s just not pretty.
Woobox
Woobox has a free tier if you’ve got under 2,000 Facebook fans, which makes it the cheapest real option for a brand new page. Paid plans start around 37 dollars a month once you outgrow that. It handles Instagram hashtag contests, photo contests, and quizzes, and the templates are more polished out of the box than Gleam’s.
Where it falls short is reporting. You get entries, but the analytics on where traffic came from are thinner than Gleam’s, so if you’re trying to prove contest ROI to a client or a boss, you’ll be exporting data and building your own spreadsheet anyway.
ShortStack
ShortStack sits at the top end, plans start around 99 dollars a month, and it’s built for agencies and brands running contests as a repeated marketing channel rather than a one-off. You get custom landing pages, A/B testing on entry forms, and integration with most major email tools out of the box. If you’re running quarterly contests with real ad spend pushing traffic to them, the price makes sense because the conversion tracking pays for itself.
For a single Instagram giveaway with a 200 pound prize budget, it’s overkill. I wouldn’t recommend it until you’re running contests as a planned, recurring part of your calendar.
Vyper
Vyper leans hard into the referral and leaderboard mechanic, similar to KingSumo but built for scale and with proper fraud detection built in, which matters more than people think once a giveaway prize gets big enough to attract bots and fake entries. Pricing starts around 99 dollars a month. I’d only reach for this if the prize is significant enough, think a laptop, a holiday, several hundred pounds in value, that it’s worth the fraud checking. For a 50 pound gift card giveaway, you’re paying for protection you don’t need.
Native Instagram and Facebook, no app at all
Here’s what most posts on this topic skip over: for a huge share of small business contests, the best app is no app. A comment-to-win post, “tag a friend and follow us to win,” costs nothing, requires no third-party tool, and generates the exact engagement signals Instagram’s algorithm rewards. I ran one for a client, a boutique candle brand near Brighton, using nothing but a Canva graphic and a clear caption. It pulled 1,240 comments in five days on a page with 3,100 followers at the time.
The catch, and this is the uncomfortable bit most contest guides gloss over: 61 percent of the 340 new followers that giveaway brought in had unfollowed within six weeks. Prize-driven entrants are not customers, they’re prize hunters, and an app doesn’t fix that, no matter how polished the entry form is. If your goal is follower count for a slide deck, any of these tools will hit the number. If your goal is people who buy candles, you need the prize itself to be relevant, ideally your own product, not an iPad, because an iPad giveaway attracts people who want iPads, not people who want candles.
For picking a winner fairly from comments, tools like Comment Picker or Woobox’s free comment picker do the random draw and give you a screen recording of the process, which matters if you ever get accused of rigging it. I always screen-record the pick now, after one contest years ago where a runner-up publicly accused me of favouritism. Never again without proof.
Step by step: running a comment-to-win contest without a paid app
- Write the rule in one sentence entrants can’t misread: “Follow us, comment your favourite scent, tag one friend, winner picked Friday at 5pm.”
- State the prize value and exact closing date in the caption, not just the bio, because captions get screenshotted and reshared.
- Add the required disclaimer that the promotion isn’t sponsored, endorsed, or administered by Meta, this is a genuine requirement under Meta’s Promotion Guidelines, not optional small print.
- Use a free random picker tool and record the screen while you draw the winner.
- Message the winner directly and give them 48 hours to respond before redrawing, and say so publicly in the same post so nobody thinks you’ve gone quiet on a promise.
- Post the winner announcement as a Story too, not just a feed post, since Stories get seen faster by people who forgot they entered.
Instagram and Facebook contest rules you can’t ignore
Meta’s Promotion Guidelines require that your contest release Facebook and Instagram from all liability, state the rules clearly, and never suggest the platform itself is running or sponsoring it. You’re also not allowed to require someone to tag themselves in a photo they’re not in, purely to inflate reach, and Facebook can and does remove pages that break this repeatedly. I know one small ecommerce brand that lost their Facebook shop tab for two weeks over a badly worded “tag yourself to win” post. It’s a five-minute fix, add the disclaimer, word the ask honestly, but it’s the step every app-focused guide forgets to mention because it’s not about the app at all.
Matching the app to the platform
Instagram giveaways generally do better as comment-to-win with no app, because friction kills entries and any redirect off-platform loses a chunk of people. If you’re pairing a contest with paid promotion, the tools I cover in which Facebook advertising apps are worth using for beginners pair well with Gleam or Woobox, since you can boost the entry post directly and track cost per entry against your ad spend. TikTok contests work best as a hashtag challenge with a branded tag, and pulling the right ones matters, my post on hashtags that work best across TikTok and Instagram covers which tags get discovered versus which just look busy.
If your contest involves a photo or video entry format on Instagram, it’s worth reading up on the broader app landscape first, my rundown of Instagram apps worth using for business growth covers scheduling and editing tools that make the entry format easier to produce for entrants, which directly affects how many people bother finishing the entry.
What I’d pick, by budget
Under 500 followers and no ad budget: run it natively on Instagram, no app, use a free comment picker, keep the prize under 50 pounds and make it your own product.
Growing page, occasional giveaways, some budget: Gleam, 10 dollars a month, gives you the entry stacking and clean exports without a big commitment.
WordPress site, occasional big giveaways, prefer paying once rather than monthly: KingSumo, one-time cost, referral mechanic does the heavy lifting.
Agency or brand running contests every quarter with a marketing budget behind them: ShortStack or Vyper, the reporting and fraud protection earn the higher monthly fee.
Whatever you pick, save the winning entry screenshots and the entry export somewhere outside the app itself, apps get discontinued, accounts get locked, and I’ve had a client lose access to a contest’s entry data for three days during a support ticket dispute right when they needed to announce a winner.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a paid app to run a social media contest legally?
No. You need clear rules, a disclaimer that Meta isn’t sponsoring the promotion, and a fair way to pick a winner. Paid apps make entry tracking and reporting easier, but they’re not a legal requirement on Instagram or Facebook.
What’s the cheapest app for running a giveaway?
Woobox’s free tier works for pages under 2,000 Facebook fans, and running a comment-to-win contest natively on Instagram costs nothing at all beyond the prize itself.
Why did my contest bring in followers who unfollowed afterwards?
This happens whenever the prize is generic, gadgets, gift cards, cash, rather than tied to what you sell. People enter for the prize, not the brand, and drop off within weeks once they’ve won or lost. Giving away your own product filters for people who want it.
Which app is best for a TikTok hashtag challenge?
TikTok doesn’t integrate with third-party contest apps the way Instagram and Facebook do, so most brands run these natively with a branded hashtag and repost or duet the best entries, tracking participation manually or through TikTok’s own analytics rather than an external tool.
Official documentation
Related reading: 10 best tools to create social media contests and How To Run A Social Media Contest That Grows Your Audience (Not Just Your Follower Count).
