Elfsight vs POWR: Pricing and Widget Limits Compared

Buy Elfsight if you want to display the Google reviews you already have, and buy POWR if you want customers to leave reviews directly on your own site. These two are compared constantly and they are not competing for the same job. Elfsight ships a dedicated Google Reviews widget. POWR, as of August 2026, does not have one at all: its Reviews category covers Product Reviews, Star Ratings, Comments and Testimonials, which are all things people submit to you rather than things pulled from a Google Business Profile.

Every price and limit below was read on each vendor's own pricing page on August 31, 2026. Both vendors discount and re-price often, and Elfsight is running a promotion right now, so check both before you buy rather than trusting any comparison table, including this one.

Elfsight vs POWR at a glance

The row that decides this purchase

It is the first one. If you searched for a comparison because you want your Google star reviews on your website, POWR cannot do it and no plan changes that. Elfsight's Reviews category lists Google Reviews as one of its best sellers alongside Facebook Reviews, Yelp, Tripadvisor, Airbnb and an All-in-One Reviews widget. POWR's Reviews category lists Product Reviews, Star Ratings, Comments and Testimonials, and its Sliders category adds a Testimonial Slider. Those are collection and display tools for content that originates with you or your customers, not connectors to a Google Business Profile.

That is not a defect in POWR. It is a different product doing a different job, and for a lot of businesses the POWR job is the more useful one. A Google review is public, short, written for Google rather than for you, and capped at five on any widget reading live from Google's API. A review left on your own site can be as long as the customer wants, can answer a question you asked, and stays where you put it. The mistake is buying one while thinking you bought the other.

Does POWR have a view limit?

No published one. POWR's pricing page gates its tiers on features rather than traffic: removing POWR branding, how often content refreshes, how many social channels a feed can pull from, how many posts it holds, custom CSS, and the level of support. Nowhere on the plan comparison is there a monthly view, load or impression allowance. That is a genuine structural advantage for a high traffic site, and it is the clearest reason to pick POWR over a view metered vendor even when the sticker price is higher.

Elfsight is the opposite, and to its credit it says so precisely. Free is 200 views a month with one widget. Basic is 5,000 views and three widgets. Pro is 50,000 views and nine widgets. Premium is 150,000 views and 21 widgets. A view, in Elfsight's own definition, is one load of the widget on a webpage or via a share link, which is not the same as one visitor. Elfsight also states the consequence in plain words: exceeding the monthly limit will temporarily deactivate your app.

Work that through for a reviews block placed site wide. A marketing site doing 2,000 sessions a month at three pages a session generates 6,000 widget loads, which is over the 5,000 on Basic. The block goes dark, and it goes dark on the traffic you worked hardest to earn, in the week a campaign runs or a post finally ranks. That is the moment the largest number of first time visitors are deciding whether to trust you, and it is the moment your proof is missing. The same failure mode across the whole category is worked through in best review widget for high-traffic websites.

Which is cheaper, Elfsight or POWR?

Elfsight, at the entry tier, if you only need one widget and your traffic stays inside the cap. Elfsight Basic is $4 a month on the current promotion and $6 a month at the regular rate, billed yearly, which is $48 to $72 a year for three widgets and 5,000 monthly views. POWR's Reviews app is $5.94 a month at Starter and $14.19 at Pro.

The comparison flips as soon as either variable moves. Add traffic and Elfsight moves you to Pro at $8 promotional or $12 regular for 50,000 views, then Premium at $16 or $24 for 150,000, while POWR's price does not move with traffic at all. Add a second kind of widget and POWR's per app pricing bites instead.

The pricing trap in POWR's per app model

This one is worth knowing before you build a budget, because the tier names are misleading. POWR prices each app separately, and the same tier name costs different amounts depending on which app you are looking at. Both of these were read from POWR's own pages on the same day:

Same vendor, same tier names, a dollar or more apart. Only Business is constant, because that plan is the one that covers everything in the library, described by POWR as unlimited access to all 60+ apps. So if you are pricing a stack, say reviews plus a popup plus a contact form, you cannot multiply one number by three. You either check three pricing pages or you jump to the $98.99 plan, and the break even for that jump arrives sooner than most people expect: roughly seven Starter apps, or four at the Pro tier.

Elfsight has a version of the same structure and is clearer about it. Its ladder is a single app subscription, so Basic's three widgets means three widgets of one app, with a separate all apps pack sold alongside. The difference is that Elfsight's per app price is the same whichever app you pick, so one number does multiply.

Is POWR really free?

Yes, with branding. Every POWR app has a free tier and the paid tiers list Remove POWR Logo as the first thing you get for upgrading, which tells you what the free plan looks like on your page. The Reviews app on free still includes manual approval, so you can moderate what appears. Content refresh frequency is slower on free (24 hours on the Social Feed app, tightening to 12 and then 3 hours as you go up), and live chat support is a paid feature.

Elfsight's free tier is stricter in the way that matters more. One widget, 200 views a month, and Elfsight branding. Two hundred loads is a testing allowance rather than a production one, so treat it as a trial with no time limit rather than a free plan you could run a real site on.

What neither one gives you

Neither vendor collects video, and neither gives you a testimonial you own outright with permission attached. Elfsight displays reviews that live on someone else's platform, which means they can be edited, deleted or filtered by Google without warning, and you are capped at five on any widget reading live from Google's API. POWR collects reviews on your site, which is closer to ownership, but what you get is the short form a customer types into a widget rather than an answer to a question you asked.

The thing both of these are usually bought to fix is a page that is not converting, and a reviews block is only one of the reasons a page does not convert. It is worth auditing the copy and layout of the page itself before assuming the missing element is social proof, because a widget added above a weak offer changes very little. If proof genuinely is the gap, what closes it is a named customer saying a specific thing about a specific outcome, ideally on camera, which is a different purchase from either vendor on this page. The social proof widget page covers which types of proof carry weight and which get discounted by readers.

Which should you buy?

Three clear cases. If you have a Google Business Profile with reviews on it and you want them on your site, Elfsight is the only one of the two that does it, and the question becomes whether your traffic fits inside the tier you can afford. If you want customers to leave reviews or ratings on your own pages with approval before they publish, POWR's Reviews app is the better fit and its lack of a view meter is a real advantage. And if you are running several widgets, price POWR's Business plan against the sum of the individual apps before assuming the per app route is cheaper.

If you are placing either one on a site builder, check the platform before the vendor. On Webflow, both routes for pasting a widget require a paid Workspace or an active Site plan, so a free Webflow site cannot run either vendor's embed at all. That constraint and the routes around it are covered in Google reviews Webflow. The wider vendor field, including the domain metered and view metered options, is in Google reviews widget, and a closer look at Elfsight on its own is in the Elfsight alternative page. For Elfsight against the other cheap end of the market, see Elfsight vs Common Ninja.