Top 10 User Insights Software in 2022

Your users are at the heart of your organization. 

But do you know what your customers are doing? The way they click? Their drop-off points? 

User insights software does a great job of giving you this information in the form of heatmaps, recordings, user testing, and many more.

You can quickly gather quantitative data and qualitative feedback from customers with real-time analytics.

You can also gather in-depth profiles on individual users and identify their pain points so that you can focus on addressing these issues.

The article helps you through a brief review of the top 10 user insights software for your next user research journey.

Let’s dive in! 

 

 

User Insights Software Comparison Table. 

Before we start with a detailed comparison, let’s briefly see how these tools stack up against each other. 

What is the Best User Insights Software?

Here are my top picks for the best user insights software available in 2021. 

1. Qualaroo

Best all-in-one website survey tool (Starts at $80/month). 

Qualaroo is a popular on-site survey tool. It’s all about customer feedback and user research.

You can collect high-quality feedback and understand what your visitors care about most.

It’s most suitable for two types of users: website owners and market researchers. 

Website owners can create surveys and get feedback from their visitors on anything they are curious about. 

Market researchers can use the platform to build surveys and easily conduct user research by collecting insights from their target audience through Qualaroo’s own survey platform.

All of it is possible due to their unique design, which is optimized to get answers from your website visitors. And that too without any emailing or interrupting. 

It does this using the “Nudges” feature – which is a type of pop-up. As a result, the survey questions appear at the right time when potential customers are on your website. 

You can get your visitors to give you star-based reviews, MCQ (multiple choice questions) surveys, or get their complete feedback. There are over 10 question types to choose from, including checkbox, binary questions, textbox, NPS, and a lot more. 

The best part? They use AI-based IBM Watson that poses survey questions based on your visitors’ behavioral patterns, location, browser cookies, and more. 

For instance, you can make a feedback box appear seeking shoppers’ feedback every time they purchase something from your store. 

IBM Watson also provides AI-powered analytics and reports. It even performs sentiment analysis and tracks the mood of your audience. For example, do they see your product in a positive light or negative? You’ll get an answer to all these questions. 

The Question branching feature is also a bonus. This means the tool asks appropriate questions based on how the visitor responded to previous questions. 

Their native integration with popular business tools is also note-worthy. Some of the most popular integrations include Zapier, Google Analytics, Slack, HubSpot, MailChimp, Salesforce, and more. 

Some of its other key features include: 

• No software installation or coding know-how is required. 
• Install a simple code to get feedback on your website, products, and apps. 
• Customize your survey and feedback nudges to align with your brand. 
• Options to choose from over 10 question types. 
• Professional survey templates to start quickly. 
• The ability to A/B test your website pages. 

Pricing Plans: 

Qualaroo offers three pricing plans based on the number of tracked pageviews. These prices are specified for 100,000 tracked page views per month. 

• Essentials ($80 per month) – Unlimited nudges, 1 domain, 1 user admin, basic question types, etc. 
• Premium ($160 per month) – Unlimited nudges, 2 domains, 3 user admins, all advanced question types, NPS, advanced targeting using geolocation, exit survey, mobile nudge, etc. 
• Enterprise (quote-based) – Same as the Premium plan + unlimited domains, unlimited user admins, advanced integrations, report & design APIs, etc. 

There’s also a 15-day free trial available with all the plans. 

2. FigPii

Best for user research using heatmaps and session replays ($49.99/mo – $339.99/mo).

FigPii markets itself as an all-in-one conversion rate optimization platform. And not without reason. 

They help you boost your conversion rate using stellar user insights using: 

• Interactive heatmaps
• Website surveys
• Built-in polls
• Video recordings 
• A/B testing.  
• And machine learning recomendation system

For starters, their heatmap tool makes it easy to visualize the areas of a page where visitors click, how they interact with your site, and where they stop scrolling down. 

You get all three prominent types of heatmaps: scroll maps, click maps, and mouse tracking heatmaps. 

Then they have on-site polls and surveys to do user research and collect data easily. 

You’ll get pre-determined questions that will help you determine what bought your customers to your site? What’s stopping them from converting? What motivated them to place an order? What are they looking for specifically? And a lot more. 

You can even run polls and surveys on multiple web pages simultaneously, and that too for a specific audience using advanced targeting. What’s more, FigPii supports various types of question formats, including single-text, NPS, multiple-choice questions, checkboxes, binary questions, and more. 

And once you have the answers from each visitor, you can finally use FigPii’s analytics & reports feature to visualize and aggregate the data. 

The user insight features don’t here. 

In addition, FigPii offers video recording and session replay features that allow you to record online sessions. It can be used to verify how users behave on your site with in-depth clarity, along with their starting and ending points. 

Pricing Plans: 

FigPii offers four pricing plans: 

• Starter ($49.99/month) – 10,000 visitors per month, unlimited heatmaps, unlimited session recordings, unlimited polls, unlimited number of users. 
• Small ($99.99/month) – Same as the Starter plan + 30,000 visitors per month. 
• Medium ($199.99/month) – Same as the Small plan + 60,000 visitors per month. 
• Large ($339.99/month) – Same as the Medium plan + 100,000 visitors per month. 

All these paid plans also come with a 14-day free trial. To cater to over 500,000 visitors per month, contact their sales team for a custom pricing plan. 

3. VWO

Best for determining customer journeys in detail (Quote-based).

While VWO is primarily an A/B testing tool, they also offer a complete suite of user research tools like heatmaps, session recordings, on-page surveys, form analytics, and funnels. 

For starters, they offer a click map, scroll map, and regular heatmap to visualize the click and scroll pattern of your website visitors. You can even select multiple areas on a web page and compare the number of clicks.

Next, they offer an interactive visual player that records your web pages to help you view precise mouse movements and clicks. The video recording player also allows you to adjust the speed, skip time frames, and add notes or observations right at the stage where you see the customer showing signs of confusion. 

For instance, if you see a customer showing signs of doubts while filling an on-site form, you can add an observation in the recording there and then to resolve the possible roadblocks later on. 

Furthermore, you can access individual visitor profiles and look at their entire journey and history on your website. 

Moreover, they give you a complete overview of your customers’ journeys – that too, in real life. This will help you determine at which stage in the overall sales funnel your customers are dropping off and why.  

VWO doesn’t cut any corners when it comes to on-site surveys, either. You get access to features like NPS score, other multiple question types, multilingual surveys, pre-built survey themes, advanced targeting & segmentation, and more. 

What’s more, they provide conditional branching logic. This means that you can set up a survey so that respondents see different versions of your questions based on their answers to previous questions.

Pricing:

VWO Insights has three quote-based paid plans. 

• Growth – Cross-device heatmap & visitor recording, heatmap comparison, funnel, page & session-level recordings, basic website survey. 
• Pro – Everything in the Growth plan + advanced session recording, exit-intent survey, basic targeting & segmentation, etc. 
• Enterprise – Everything in the Pro plan + advanced targeting & segmentation, white-labeled surveys, API access, dedicated account manager, etc. 

All the plans are available on a 30-day free trial period as well. 

4. Hotjar

Best for real-time customer suggestions (Free – $389/month). 

It gives you heatmaps, user session recordings, form analytics, visitor polls, and surveys – all of which come in handy when trying to improve the user experience on your website.

Starting with the heatmaps, Hotjar offers the standard scroll maps, click maps, and maps to analyze the mouse movement of the visitors. The idea behind the whole concept is to track where people click by measuring mouse movement, clicks, and scrolling behavior on various website elements. 

You can also view and compare engagement on different devices and versions of your site, including mobile site, mobile app, desktop-based website, etc. 

The recordings will help you analyze bounce, exit, rage clicks, drop-offs, and more. 

Then they have a standard survey tool that lets you measure your NPS score and collect data about user behavior and attitudes in order to make informed business decisions. You can either use customizable, pre-built survey templates or start from scratch. 

Until now, all these features offered by Hotjar appear pretty basic. Now what makes Hotjar stand out is their real-time suggestion box. You can get users to rate all your web pages, thereby identifying which pages are underperforming and which ones are performing the best. And all of it is done in real-time. 

Pricing Plans: 

Hotjar has a total of five paid plans based on your requirements. This means they have different plans for personal use, business use, and agencies. 

Personal Use: 

• Basic (Freemium plan) – 2,000 page views/day, up to 3 heatmaps, unlimited surveys & feedback widgets, up to 100 snapshot recordings/day, etc. 

• Plus ($39/month) – The Plus plan is suitable for low-traffic sites. It allows 100 full user sessions/day, continuous Heatmaps, unlimited surveys & feedback widgets, up to 100 continuous recordings/day, etc.  

For Business Use: 

• Business ($99/month) – Suitable for businesses of all sizes, this plan allows 500 full user sessions in a day, unlimited surveys & feedback widgets, continuous heatmaps & recordings, etc.
• Scale ($389/month) – 4,000 daily sessions, continuous heatmaps & recordings, unlimited surveys & feedback widgets, and training with a Hotjar specialist.

For Agencies: 

• Agency – Quote-based

This is a custom-based plan that provides unlimited client sites in one account.  

Also, all of these plans come with a 15-day free trial. 

5. Sticktail

Best to collaborate with team members and share and organize user insights (Free – €299).

Most of the time, there’s no dearth of reports filled with customer feedback, analytics, and user research. That said, most of the information usually remains stuck in your colleagues’ minds.

Now, this is where Sticktail comes into the picture. 

This user insight software collects, organizes, and shares all your customer insights in one place that is accessible to every member of your team or organization. 

Any member in the team can share user insights using images, videos, links, and even gifs among team members whenever and wherever they want. 

Next, the members can organize the insights using tags or by adding them to customer journeys. 

Team members can then search these insights through tags, simple text, titles, or journeys.

You’ll also be glad to know that they notify you every time a new, interesting insight gets added by a member. This eliminates the need to track information manually. 

And if you’re tired of reading blobs of text, Sticktail has a solution for that, too. They let you create a shortened version of your text-based user research sprinkled with interactive media. This spices up the reports and makes them easier to read. 

Finally, you can share these reports with anyone you want using a simple, shareable link. 

However, note that Sticktail only helps you leverage your user insights effectively – they don’t have the tools to extract the actual insight. Thus, you might want to use this tool in tandem with other user insight tools like FigPii, Hotjar, etc. 

The tool helps you maximize the impact of your user insights and make the most out of the information available to you and your team. 

Pricing Plans: 

Sticktail comes with three plans: 

• Starter (Forever free) – Unlimited users, 20 insights, no journeys, no digest emails, no support.
• Business (€299 ~ $362/one-time payment) – Unlimited users, 200 insights, 1 journey, digest emails, standard support. 
• Enterprise (Quote-based) – Unlimited users, unlimited insights, unlimited journeys, digest emails, priority support, single sign-on. 

6. Qualtrics

Best for making sense of your customer survey and feedback results. 

Qualtrics is a powerful user insights/user research software that allows you to collect, segment, and target your users based on surveys and live feedback. It can also help you create network maps and analyze survey results.

They offer over 100 question types and pre-built survey templates to start quickly. In addition, you can distribute surveys through websites, chatboxes, emails, SMS, and social media. 

The ability to target variables from different locations and customer segments also helps you gather the right feedback from the right audience. You can also seek feedback based on your customers’ behavior on your site. 

The tool also comes with a suite of built-in analytics tools, collectively called iQ. These tools leverage AI and machine learning to make sense of data acquired through surveys and feedback and specify what actions to take next. 

For example, the VoiceiQ tool automatically analyzes surveys conducted over phone calls, gauges customers’ sentiments, and even identifies areas of improvement. 

Here’s an example of the statistics you’ll receive: 

Aside from VoiceiQ, you’ve also got: 

• PredictiQ – to predict what your users might do next.
• StatsiQ – overall statistical analysis is done for you and made available in plain language. 
• TextiQ – See user sentiment in every text-based feedback from any source, including survey feedback, social media, website, chatbots, and more. 
• DriveriQ – Identify which actions are driving traffic and having the biggest impact on customer loyalty, spending trends, satisfaction, etc. 

And the list of features doesn’t end here! 

Qualtrics let you collaborate with your team and automatically redirects actions and queries to the right team. 

Other prominent features include the ability to uncover the NPS score, online reputation management, built-in market research software, integration with your existing CRM, ticketing systems, etc. 

Pricing Plans: 

While there’s no pricing information on the official Qualtrics site, Capterra suggests that the tool’s cost starts at $1500/year. 

7. UserZoom

Best for gathering quick feedback from active users (Quote-based). 

It offers a set of user experience optimization solutions built around user research, customer satisfaction, usability, and Net Promoter Score to maximize company growth. 

Aside from user surveys, you can also leverage “Live Intercepts” to invite users who are currently browsing your site to take a study. You can then uncover things like whether they completed their tasks, what led them to your site, and what needs to be improved. 

UserZoom also helps you with: 

• Design Iteration – Optimize your site’s design by gathering feedback via videos, verbally, or through behavioral data. 
• User-Focused Product Decisions –  Make data-driven decisions after analyzing the overall risk and profit potential. 
• User Experience Measurement – They provide standardized measures that help you gauge users’ attitudes and behavior. 

Furthermore, you’ll get heatmaps (or click test, as they call it) to evaluate your site more visually. 

That said, it’s essentially a survey and feedback tool, so don’t expect more advanced heatmap features. If you’re primarily looking for heatmaps, scroll maps, and more advanced heat map-based features, it’s better to stick with tools like FigPii, Hotjar, and VWO. 

Pricing Plans: 

UserZoom offers customized pricing plans based on the volume of daily users, research needs, specific profiles you need to target, and more. 

8. UserTesting

Best for watching the live reaction of users on your website or mobile app (Quote-based). 

this tool allows you to see how actual people use your website. This means you can precisely see what a real person thinks or how they react while interacting with your site or app. 

You don’t need to change anything on your site or show anyone your work-in-progress site; just watch people use it live. 

Watching people live and watching your site from their shoes provides answers to questions like: “Does my design suck?” “What are my users thinking?” “What’s confusing them?” and even “Why aren’t they doing what I want them to do?”

And it requires only a few steps to put everything into motion. 

You have to begin by creating a test plan to ask questions. 

Once you’ve configured the test plan, you can target specific test participants from the User Testing network based on your industry and product. Alternatively, you can even connect with your own real-life audience. 

Finally, engage with participants and users through live video recordings and conversations. You can further transcribe the videos and get more advanced metrics and analysis. 

In addition, you can highlight specific videos, download and share them with your team members. You even get native integration with tools like Slack and Trello, allowing you to directly share specific videos with your team. 

Pricing Plans: 

UserTesting offers two quote-based plans for individuals and enterprises. 

9. User Interviews

Best for gathering feedback from specific research participants (Free – $250/month).

Have you ever been in a discussion with your friend about this or that product? Then you should know how valuable it would be to hear the opinions of real people. Yes, we can read reviews on Amazon, but there’s something more persuasive about live testimonials about a given product or service, that’s user research!

And the “User Interviews” tool helps you do user research without much hassle.

It lets you find and recruit users to interview them and conduct surveys to get their opinion on your product, website, or app. You either search from over 400,000 vetted professionals and consumers provided by User Interviews itself or bring your own users into the research hub by syncing it with your CRM software. 

The platform even allows you to find targeted customers using customizable tags, filters, and lists. You can further narrow down your search using filters like geography, demographics, job title, etc. This helps you get correct feedback from the relevant audience. 

They even have a built-in fraud detection system to ward off bad apples, so you don’t have to worry about the relevance of the feedback. 

Once you get the feedback and receive answers to the questions you were seeking, you can pay incentives directly from the tool. The best part? You don’t have to pay for the sessions that didn’t work out. 

In addition, User Interviews provides several automation tools to streamline your research. For example, you can connect your calendar and schedule sessions automatically. 

Pricing Plans: 

The cost depends on whether you’re using their audience or bringing in your own audience. 

Plans for the audience provided by User Interviews: 

• Pay As You Go ($40/session) – unlimited researcher seats, automatic scheduling & incentive payments, bulk messaging, unlimited screener survey questions, skip logic, Zoom integration. 
• Essential ($250/month) – Everything in Pay As You Go plan + up to 15 sessions per month, screen survey library, unlimited rollover sessions, access to previous participants, etc.   
• Custom Plan – Everything in Essential + customizable contract terms and session volume.

Plans for your own audience: 

• Free Forever – unlimited researcher seats, up to 100 participants, automatic scheduling & incentive payments, bulk messaging, panel-building opt-in form, unlimited screener survey questions, skip logic, Zoom integration. 
• Essential ($125/month) – Everything in Pay As You Go plan + up to 5000 participants, custom domains, email templates, etc. 
• Enterprise (Quote-based) – Over 5000 participants in your CRM. 

10. Wynter

Best for getting feedback on your website, ad, or email copy (Starts $99). 

Used by professionals such as ad agencies, PR agencies, and data analysts from Fortune 500 companies around the world, Wynter helps companies save thousands of hours scouring through internal emails and marketing reports.

They have a pool of vetted and tested B2B professionals that help you test your website copy, ad copy, email content, and more. You can even target and search audience by job title and industry. 

It’s basically user research but the users are data analysts.

It works in five simple steps: 

• Start by uploading the site or ad copy you want to get feedback on. Or you can add an URL. 
• DIscover and pick your target audience from an extensive panel provided by Wynter itself. 
• Pick the areas on your site you want insights on; choose research questions as well. 
• Wait for 1-2 business days to get review results. 
• Finally, make changes based on the user insights. 

One of the best things about Wynter is that the panel has all types of professionals you want to connect with – from beginners to senior management.   

Pricing Plans: 

Tests with B2C panel cost: 

• $99 per value proposition test.
• $249 per full-page message test.

You can also calculate the B2B cost based on your panel size, seniority of the panelists, and the type of test you’re conducting.  

Executive Summary. 

User insights software is the most revolutionary approach to analytics. 

It helps businesses with web applications or online services understand their users and build channels for interaction to improve and enhance their visibility and ROI.

But no single tool is one-size-fits-all. 

For example, if you want to glean user insights, you should try FigPii “Which also gives your machine learning powered recommendation system”, Hotjar, or VWO.

The fact that these tools offer the ability to create on-site and mobile app surveys with all the bells and whistles, such as question branching, geotargeting, and more, is also a bonus. 

If you only want to create surveys, then you might prefer Qualaroo “which also gives you sentiment analysis” and Qualtrics.

To directly converse with your target audience and get their recommendations, go for UserTesting, User Interviews, or Wynter. Wynter is a specifically handy tool to gauge user insights into your website copy.