Elfsight vs Common Ninja: Widget Pricing Compared

Buy Common Ninja if you want one reviews widget on one site for the lowest defensible price, and buy Elfsight if you need to know exactly what your view limit is before you commit. Both vendors meter widget views, so both can switch your social proof off in a busy month. The difference that matters is that Elfsight publishes the number for every tier and Common Ninja does not publish it at all.

Prices below were read on each vendor's own pricing page in August 2026. This category discounts aggressively and re-prices often, so check both before you buy rather than trusting any comparison table, including this one.

Elfsight vs Common Ninja at a glance

The one row that decides this purchase

Strip out the design options and the widget catalogs, which are broadly comparable, and one row is left: what you know about the meter before you pay.

Elfsight prices in public and in detail. Free is 200 views a month with one widget and Elfsight branding on your page. Basic is $4 a month at the current promotional rate, $6 regular, for 5,000 views and three widgets. Pro is $8 promotional, $12 regular, for 50,000 views and nine widgets. Premium is $16, regular $24, for 150,000 views and 21 widgets, and the Enterprise tiers run from $24 a month for 300,000 views up to $64 a month for unlimited views and 400 widgets. Whatever you think of those numbers, you can put them in a spreadsheet against your analytics and work out which tier you need.

Common Ninja does not give you that. Its pricing page lists four plans, Free, Essentials at $24.00 a year, Pro at $38.40 a year and Ultimate at $62.40 a year, all billed annually, and it lists no view caps, no widget counts and no feature comparison table. Its Google Reviews widget page confirms the free plan is view limited and describes the consequence rather than the threshold: after a certain number of views the widget may no longer be visible or functional on your website. Upgrading, it says, unlocks additional widgets, premium skins or higher monthly view limits. Higher than what is not stated anywhere we could find.

That is not a reason to dismiss Common Ninja. It is a reason to treat the $24 a year as a price for an unknown quantity rather than as a like for like saving against Elfsight's $48 to $72 a year. If your site gets 800 sessions a month, almost any cap will hold and Common Ninja is straightforwardly the better deal. If you are doing 40,000 sessions and your reviews sit in the footer of every page, you are buying a meter you cannot see.

Is Common Ninja really free?

Yes, and the free plan has no time limit and asks for no credit card. It covers one Google Reviews widget with a monthly view ceiling that Common Ninja acknowledges but does not quantify. When you pass it, the widget stops rendering rather than degrading, which on a reviews block means a blank space where your social proof was. Paid plans start at $24 a year and are billed annually only.

What happens when you hit the view limit?

The widget goes dark. Both vendors describe the same behavior in slightly different words: the embed stops appearing until the month rolls over or you upgrade. There is no throttling, no cached last known good render, and no email that reaches you before it happens rather than after.

The practical problem is that this is invisible from inside your own browser. You loaded the page yesterday, it looked fine, and your session is not what exhausted the quota. The failure lands on the traffic spike you worked to earn: the day a post ranks, the week a campaign runs, the month before your busy season. Precisely when the most first time visitors are deciding whether to trust you, the proof is not on the page.

If you run any view metered widget, it is worth pointing something at the public URL that checks the reviews block is still rendering, the same way you would watch a page from outside your own network rather than assuming it is up because it loads for you. A cap breach is not an outage, so an ordinary status check will pass while the widget is missing. You want the check to look for the content, not the status code.

Which is cheaper, Elfsight or Common Ninja?

Common Ninja, on published price, by a wide margin. Its Essentials plan is $24 a year. Elfsight's Basic plan is $4 a month at the promotional rate, which is $48 a year, and $6 a month at the regular rate, which is $72. So Common Ninja is between half and a third of the cost at the entry tier.

Two caveats keep that from being the whole answer. The first is the one above: you are comparing a known 5,000 views a month against an unstated number. The second is the billing shape. Common Ninja's prices are annual, so the real question is $24 up front against $4 to $6 a month, and if you are testing whether a reviews widget lifts anything at all, a monthly plan you can cancel in week three has value that a cheap annual plan does not.

What both of them do well, and what neither of them does

Credit where it is due. Common Ninja's Google Reviews widget reads your existing reviews and star ratings from your public Google Business Profile, refreshes the list periodically with a manual refresh available, and queues each review for approval in the dashboard so you choose what publishes. It is explicit that it does not write, generate or purchase reviews, which is worth saying out loud in a category where some tools are vague about it. Elfsight's catalog is far broader if you also want a form, a gallery or a chat button from the same account.

Now the ceiling neither vendor can raise. A widget that reads live from the Google Places API gets back a maximum of five reviews per request, in an order Google chooses, and no plan on either side changes that. Vendors that show more have imported your reviews into their own storage and are serving a cached copy on a refresh schedule, which is a different product from a live mirror and worth knowing which one you bought.

And underneath that sits the eligibility question that makes the whole comparison moot for a lot of buyers. Google grants a Business Profile to a business with a physical location customers can visit or a service area it travels to serve. An online only store, a remote consultancy or a course creator has no listing, therefore no Google reviews, therefore nothing for either widget to display. The best widget in the category renders an empty box.

The thing a reviews widget cannot do

Both of these products solve a display problem. The reviews exist on Google and you want them on your page. That is a real problem and one line of embed code is a reasonable answer to it.

What neither solves is the upstream one. A Google review is a star rating and a sentence, written by someone motivated enough to open Maps unprompted. It is not your customer explaining what they were stuck with, what you actually did and what changed afterward. That second thing is what closes a sale on a services page, and it does not exist until you ask for it directly.

That part is what we built. You send one request link after the job, the customer writes a testimonial or records a video from their phone with no login and nothing to install, you approve it, and it appears in a wall you embed in one line with no monthly view meter attached to it. Most businesses should run both: the star rating for recognition and scale, the testimonials for the detail that persuades. If you are on Wix, the placement routes and their plan requirements are on Google reviews for Wix, with the equivalents for Squarespace, WordPress and Shopify. The Elfsight view metering trap is taken apart tier by tier on our Elfsight alternative page, and the general question of what a reviews widget costs you in page speed is covered in testimonial widgets and Core Web Vitals.