Some Background
In the past few months, I’ve received emails from both AddThis and ShareThis to use their respective sharing widgets on our site Menuism.com. Since we were already using AddThis, the first email came from ShareThis, asking us to try out their widget. Not having a great reason not, we gave it a try since it looked like they had some nice financial backing and might be evolving the product a bit more. A couple weeks after switching to ShareThis, I got an email from AddThis asking why we switched away from them. I gave him some of the reasons the ShareThis representative gave me about why they were better (newer faster widget, more personalization, etc.) and he countered with their focus on performance and providing an experience that is improved in a measured way. I decided to give AddThis another try with their updated widget. Soon after this switch I got yet another email from ShareThis asking why we took them off.
Man, these guys are good at keeping track of who’s using them. Time to decide, which is going to be? Both seem to have similar traffic levels and if you look at different websites and blogs the usage seems to be pretty split 50/50. I read a bunch of articles on “addthis vs. sharethis” and didn’t find anything overwhelmingly in favor of one over the other. So here’s my crude and unscientific approach to coming to an answer (you may not be convinced after reading this, but, hey, I tried and it’s good enough for me).
The Comparison
| Criteria | AddThis | ShareThis | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Buttons |  |
 |
AddThis. While they’re both customizable, I find the AddThis button slightly more appealing since it uses the “+” sign instead of the weird boomerang and the small icons of recognizable sharing services makes it clear what the link is for. |
| The Widgets |  |
 |
AddThis. I like the simplicity of AddThis and I like the categorization of ShareThis. This was going to be a toss up, but I think the clean list of links on the AddThis widget is just easier to scan and use. |
| Integration | Simple. Post a HTML javascript snippet where you want the button to appear. | More complex. While you can also just put the HTML javascript snippet in the place you want the javascript to appear, you get faster performance when you put some Javascript in the HEAD of the page first then make javascript calls when you want the button. | AddThis. It takes zero though and 5 minutes to integrate AddThis, while it took me some time to figure out a way to get ShareThis to load without much impact to page load times.
Also, the AddThis widget auto-sense where the widget is in relation to the page edges so it’ll either open to the right, left, top or bottom of the button depending on what shows up best. For ShareThis, you have to be explicit about telling it how much offset to use left or right – that’s not fun. Lastly, when you do the complex javascript integration sometimes the widget doesn’t load if your page isn’t fully finished loading which means clicking the link won’t do anything. |
| Performance | .0176 shares per page view | .00782 shares per page | AddThis. |
| Reporting | Each site you want to track needs a separate account. Tracks activity by type of sharing (bookmark, email, etc.) and also by content, sharing service and continent. | Can track activity for multiple domains with a single account. Tracks not only widget activity, but also number of button views, times a widget was opened and also the ratio of both of those to page views. Also tracks top content and sharing services. | ShareThis. It’s really nice being able to track multiple domains with a single account and the information about widget serves/page view is pretty interesting. |
| PickFu Survey | Comparison of which button people would click on. | Comparison of which button people would click on. | AddThis. Feel free to conduct your own PickFu Market Research Survey. |
Final Verdict: AddThis
I found that AddThis had the best combination of ease of integration, ease of use from a customer perspective, best performance and least impact on the web page loading times. It’s a bit annoying to have an account to track reporting for each website you have, but it’s not that bad nor something I check that frequently.
Just my 2 cents for the whole addthis vs. sharethis comparison. Feel free to come to your own conclusions!
What do you prefer as a user? What do you prefer as a website owner?
Justin
Justin, thanks so much for your post, your honest feedback, and for deciding to continue to use AddThis. We really appreciate it.
A few things to clarify, Compete data only measures traffic to our web site. That doesn’t actually reflect who’s using which button on their Web pages.
Also… you can use the same AddThis button on multiple Web sites/domains. On all of the different AddThis analytics reports, we give you a drop down which allows you to filter and only show the data for a specific site.
In terms of the other desirable data that we don’t provide, stay tuned. You should be seeing an update soon.
Thanks again for the post and definitely hope to see you the next time I’m in LA.
Hey Justin – great post!
I just found an add-this/share-this killer – it’s called OnlyWire. I haven’t read too much about it yet, but it sounds pretty awesome for those who want to give their readers the ability to spread their content not only to one site, rather, this allows readers to spread content throughout their entire network of sites, including bookmarking sites, blogging sites, social media sites and beyond.
I’m not here to promote the site – it’s a premium service – I was hoping you might be interested in creating another great post covering this feature.
@ShareThis & @AddThis: Are you planning to incorporate the ability to share content to multiple sites soon? Perhaps the ability to choose several networks at a time?
great article (thanks for getting the stats for all those of us who rely on google search results for analytical data)…
i’ve tried both and addthis definitely looks better. i also found it much easier to integrate with wordpress themes – sharethis broke one site i did.
thanks to you i will stick with addthis from now. kudos
You should have compared these two to the AddToAny sharing button which is a close rival: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/sharethis.com+addtoany.com+addthis.com/ It loads much faster and offers everything up front. PickFu uses it!
@nimini – the comparison was before we added addtoany to pickfu
I’ve also read that addtoany.com does have the best load performance out of all of them.
Also, AddThis supports SSL support. ShareThis is working on SSL support, but it is still in testing.
AddThis is good but I think they should work on the w3c validation problem.
I think they could pass the variables now in custom tags (addthis:url, addthis:title and so on) using a different way, maybe as get variables in the url.
I don’t think that making a custom dtd is the best solution.
Max.
I’m interested if both use Flash cookies. AddThis Flash cookie is getting slammed by privacy geeks. Anyone know if ShareThis uses Flash cookies?