The Top 22 User Research Tools & Software in 2024
Building an impactful UX research practice requires you to adopt the right set of user research tools. These tools can assist your product team and user researchers in various ways during the research process with participant recruitment, designing unmoderated studies, managing user insights, and more.
Selecting the appropriate UX research tools is crucial for improving the overall research process and maximizing the impact of research. Depending on your team's stage and research requirements, there are several user research tools available to choose from.
In this guide, we introduce the top 22 popular UX research tools available in the market and their use cases.
Overview of UX research tools and software
The ratings are based on Capterra. Below are some of the best UX research tools that are available.
Our evaluation process involved firsthand experience with these user research tools combined with comments and reviews from online platforms and research communities. Additionally, we analyzed each tool's website to highlight key features, strengths, and weaknesses.
List of User Research Tools
1. Hubble
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Hubble is a comprehensive user experience management platform offering a unified suite of tools for continuous user research. Its features include usability testing, prototype testing, card sorting, and in-product surveys, enabling product teams to collect customer feedback at every stage of product development.
Hubble simplifies the UX research process of setting up and launching unmoderated studies, enabling you to gather actionable insights early in the design process. With direct Figma integration, you can easily import prototypes and customize your studies using a curated library of over 200+ questions and 50+ templates. Hubble also supports a variety of user testing methods, including A/B tests, card sorting, tree testing, and live site testing to suit your project’s specific needs.
Study results can be reviewed through session recordings, AI-powered summary generation, and various data visualization like graphs and heat maps to highlight how users interact with your product. Relevant usability metrics such as task success rates, time spent on tasks, and others are displayed for a comprehensive overview for analysis.
“Hubble has been a powerful user research tool for our product design team to continuously validate our hypothesis. Our UX designers rely on Hubble to share and test our design concepts and prototypes with users, helping us continue to build powerful features for our recruiters and candidates."
Jaclyn Kershner
Director of Product Management at Greenhouse
See the full customer story
Hubble further streamlines your UX research process by having you access to over high-quality, pre-screened 8+ million participant panel via Respondent and User Interviews integrations. Whether its B2C or B2B, you can recruit participants that fit your persona criteria instantly in a single app.
📌 Key Features
- Usability testing, Figma prototype testing, in-product surveys, Informational Architecture testing, card sorting, tree testing, access to 8+ million participants via Respondent and User Interviews
💰 Pricing
- Custom pricing for enterprises and $500 per month for starting organizations
💡 Best for
- Unmoderated usability testing, in-product surveys, participant recruitment and running studies in a single platform
🌟 Rating
- Overall score: 4.9/5
- Ease of Use: 4.7/5
- Value for Money: 4.9/5
- Customer Service: 5.0/5
Streamline your UX research with Hubble
Run surveys and remote usability testing with access to 8+ million recruitment panel to collect valuable customer insights within a single app
2. Userlytics
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Userlytics is a user research platform that helps you conduct user research by testing live website, prototypes and mobile applications. The user research tool supports usability tests, card sorting, moderated tests, unmoderated tests and many other types of research for teams.
📌 Key Features
- Moderated and unmoderated usability testing, user experience studies, prototype testing, live conversations, card sorting, tree testing
💰 Pricing
- Custom pricing
💡 Best for
- Unmoderated usability testing, prototype testing, surveys
🌟 Rating
- Overall Score: 4.6/5
- Ease of Use: 4.5/5
- Value for Money: 4.7/5
- Customer Service: 4.9/5
3. Loop11
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Loop11 accommodates user testing on desktop, mobile, and tablet devices, offering both quantitative and qualitative research methods.
It also integrates with popular prototyping tools such as Figma, Adobe XD, InVision, Axure, and JustInMind. Unlike Hubble, Loop11 lacks features for panel recruitment and in-product surveying, as well as broader experience management capabilities.
📌 Key Features
- Online usability testing, prototype testing, benchmarking, A/B testing, IA testing
💰 Pricing
- From $199 per month
💡 Best for
- Unmoderated usability testing, surveys
🌟 Rating
- Overall score: 4.5/5
- Ease of Use: 4.5/5
- Value for Money: 5.0/5
- Customer Service: 5.0/5
4. Lyssna
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Lyssna (formerly Usability Hub) is one of the popular usability testing tools that offers a range of testing tools, including first click testing, design surveys, preference tests, and five-second tests, allowing you to collect user feedback effectively.
Lyssna provides its own participants so that UX researchers and UX designers can recruit directly within the platform based on relevant target audience.
📌 Key Features
- Remote user testing, first-click testing, design surveys, preference tests, five-second tests, participant recruitment
💰 Pricing
- From $75 per month
💡 Best for
- Various UX research methods including prototype testing, first-click test, and card sorting
🌟 Rating
- Overall Score: 4.7/5
- Ease of Use: 4.7/5
- Value for Money: 5.0/5
- Customer Service: 4.9/5
5. Maze
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Maze is a UX research tool that empowers teams to collect user insights. Maze offers participant recruitment, product research, and reporting. Similar to Lyssna, Maze offers a suite of user testing features to help UX researchers collect relevant user research data.
📌 Key Features
- Moderated and unmoderated usability tests, card sorting, surveys, and own recruitment panel
💰 Pricing
- $95 per month and custom pricing for enterprise
💡 Best for
- Running various methodologies and recruitment provided from own research participants
🌟 Rating
- Overall Score: 4.4/5
- Ease of Use: 4.2/5
- Value for Money: 4.1/5
- Customer Service: 3.8/5
6. Lookback
Lookback is a UX research tool that allows you to engage in live user interviews, enhancing the UX research process through live screen recordings of user interactions. This versatile platform enables you to conduct moderated, unmoderated, and remote research, all while offering a collaborative dashboard to centralize your research data and customer feedback.
One of Lookback's standout features is the automatic recording of sessions, allowing you to revisit them at your convenience. Furthermore, you can create highlight reels to easily share valuable insights with team members.
Additionally, the team plan offers the flexibility to conduct both remote and in-person research, test prototypes, and invite observers to participate in real-time.
📌 Key Features
- Remote real-time user research, moderated and unmoderated testing, collaborative dashboard, live note-taking
💰 Pricing
- From $25 per month
💡 Best for
- Convenient recording and note-taking functionalities
🌟 Rating
- Overall Score: 3.4/5
- Ease of Use: 3.6/5
- Value for Money: 3.0/5
- Customer Service: 2.2/5
7. dscout
dscout is a remote qualitative UX research platform designed to facilitate the gathering of real-world insights from existing users. Among its key components, dscout Live features remote user interviews to collect actionable insights from real users.
Additionally, dscout Diary allows you to conduct diary studies, providing a glimpse into users' day-to-day product experiences through video or photo documentation. Furthermore, dscout Recruit simplifies the process of recruiting research participants, eliminating the usual challenges and costs associated with traditional recruitment methods.
One of dscout's notable advantages lies in its ability to streamline the most time-consuming aspects of interviews by offering research-focused features, including participant scheduling, automated transcriptions, the presence of on-call observers, and an interactive timeline for note-taking and creating clips.
📌 Key Features
- Unmoderated research, remote user interviews, participant recruiting, automatic transcriptions, on-call observers, interactive timeline for taking notes
💰 Pricing
- Available upon request
💡 Best for
- Streamlining research from recruiting, scheduling, note-taking, and analyzing qualitative data
🌟 Rating
- Not available
8. User Interviews
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User Interviews is a participant recruiting platform that enhances your product decision-making by providing effortless access to high-quality participants. This platform is recognized for its ability to enable you to create your own participant pool or tap into their extensive panel, consisting of more than 350,000 carefully vetted research participants, who can be filtered by their respective professions.
Among its capabilities, User Interviews offers functions such as screener surveys, interview scheduling, and tracking participation from your current user base. The median turnaround time for this platform is approximately 2 hours, although this timeframe may vary depending on the specific project requirements.
📌 Key Features
- Participant recruitment, screener surveys, scheduling interviews, messaging participants, automatic incentives, participation tracking
💰 Pricing
- From $40 per session or $250 per month
💡 Best for
- Recruiting high-quality participants and participant scheduling
🌟 Rating
- Overall Score: 4.4/5
- Ease of Use: 4.1/5
- Value for Money: 4.3/5
- Customer Service: 4.8/5
9. Respondent
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Respondent is a UX research tool dedicated for providing high quality participants for moderated research, unmoderated research and user interviews. Respondent has more than 3 million participants from 150 different countries, available for any type of UX research participation.
Respondent offers features such as screener surveys, scheduling interviews, integrations with calendars and tracking participation. On average, you can recruit research participants in hours. Respondent also offers B2B and B2C services, allowing for a wide variety of participants for recruitment.
📌 Key Features
- Screener surveys, participant recruitment, moderated studies, unmoderated studies, scheduling interviews, messaging participants, participant incentives, tracking completion
💰 Pricing
- From $39 per session or custom pricing for enterprise
💡 Best for
- Streamlining research with participant recruitment and scheduling, recruiting participants across the world
🌟 Rating
- Overall Score: 4.5/5
- Ease of Use: 4.7/5
- Value for Money: 5.0/5
- Customer Service: 4.4/5
10. Askable
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Askable is another user research tool for participant recruitment based in Australia. Askable allows you to conduct in-person research, remote video user interviews and online unmoderated tasks. It also offers screener surveys to filter participants based on demographic parameters and you can also select between consumers and professionals.
Askable offers ways to integrate with existing UX research tools such as Lookback, Loop11, Userzoom, Optimal workshop and many others to streamline your design process.
📌 Key Features
- Screener surveys, participant recruitment, moderated studies, unmoderated studies, scheduling interviews, messaging participants, participant incentives, tracking completion
💰 Pricing
- $100 for in-person, $80 for moderated interviews and $20 for unmoderated tasks
💡 Best for
- Recruiting participants along with integrations with other UX research tools
🌟 Rating
- Overall Score: 5.0/5
- Ease of Use: 5.0/5
- Value for Money: 5.0/5
- Customer Service: 5.0/5
11. Ethnio
Ethnio is one of the UX research platforms that can be used to find participants. Ethnio allows you to create screeners to intercept people on your website or app so that you can find the right internal research participants. Ethnio offers various ways to screen users and also an automated scheduling options that help streamline the overall UX research process of finding and screening target audience.
Within the research platform, Ethnio also features a tool called Research Incentives, a calculator that helps you reward your participants by instantly paying them using different online services.
📌 Key Features
- Central participant database, participant recruitment, incentives, participant management screeners, intercepts, scheduling options
💰 Pricing
- From $12 per seat per mont
💡 Best for
- Recruiting participants and targeting with intercept feature
🌟 Rating
- Overall Score: 5.0/5
- Ease of Use: 4.0/5
- Value for Money: 5.0/5
- Customer Service: 5.0/5
12. KardSort
kardSort is an IA user testing platform that offers moderated, unmoderated, and hybrid card sorting.
kardSort provides a simple drag-and-drop function which makes card sorting easy for researchers and participants alike. You can start and launch a card sorting session very quickly, it's platform is simple enough to allow for running effective unmoderated card sorting tests
📌 Key Features
- Moderated, unmoderated and hybrid card sorting, pre and post-study interviews, tool tips
💰 Pricing
- Free
💡 Best for
- A flexible option for a free card sorting platform
🌟 Rating
- Not available
13. Optimal Workshop
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Optimal Workshop offers set of UX research tools to run information architecture tests. With OptimalSort, you can understand how your users want to organize and categorize information.
Optimal Work also includes a feature called Treejack, which is a tool helps you conduct tree testing to understand if users are currently getting lost on your site and where they expect to find key information.
📌 Key Features
- Card sorting, tree testing, first-click testing, IA testing, online surveys, qualitative research, participant recruitment
💰 Pricing
- From $191 per seat per month
💡 Best for
- Running various methodologies, including tree testing and card sort
🌟 Rating
- Overall Score: 4.5/5
- Ease of Use: 4.0/5
- Value for Money: 4.4/5
- Customer Service: 5.0/5
14. UXArmy
UXArmy is a comprehensive UX research platform designed to make gathering user insights easy and effective. From unmoderated usability testing to in-depth interviews and surveys, it helps teams refine their designs with actionable data.
📌 Key Features
- Unmoderated usability testing (with or without video recordings)
- Moderated research: user interviews and focus groups (up to 3 hours long)
- Card sorting and tree testing
- Surveys
- Multi-language testing
- Participant recruitment services
💰 Pricing
- UXArmy's pricing is flexible and tailored to your needs. Whether it’s a single test or an ongoing subscription, it has plans to fit teams of all sizes.
💡 Best for
- UXArmy is ideal for teams looking to streamline their research process, validate designs, and make data-driven decisions—whether you're a startup or an enterprise team.
🌟 Rating
- Overall Score: 4.5/5
- Ease of Use: 4.4/5
- Value for Money: 4.5/5
- Customer Service: 4.4/5
15. Great Question
Great Question is a user research tool that allows you to build a panel and recruit participants, launch interviews and send surveys.
The platform allows for screener questions to filter participants, panel management to build and manage each of your participant profiles and a repository feature to archive and share research results with team members.
📌 Key Features
- Research panel building, recruiting participants and running preferred research method
💰 Pricing
- From $49 per month
💡 Best for
- Running research for qualitative data
🌟 Rating
- Not available
16. Hotjar
Hotjar is a remote research tool which allows you to gather insights to real-time user behavior via heatmaps and screen recordings.
Hotjar also offers a variety of UX research method including feedback surveys and interviews. Its analytics helps with processing quantitative data to drive relevant insights based on user feedback.
📌 Key Features
- Heatmaps, screen recordings, unmoderated research, in-product feedback widgets and follow-up surveys
💰 Pricing
- From $32 per month
💡 Best for
- Great web analytics tool with heat maps and click maps to visualize user behavior
🌟 Rating
- Overall Score: 4.7/5
- Ease of Use: 4.6/5
- Value for Money: 4.5/5
- Customer Service: 4.5/5
17. Kissmetrics
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Kissmetrics is a UX research platform that helps product team members track user behavior across your product site.
By providing information about how customers interact with your product, Kissmetrics helps you acquire qualified prospects, convert trials to customers, and reduce churn.
📌 Key Features
- Event tracking, user identification, custom reports dashboards, segmentation, session analytics, and user funnels
💰 Pricing
- $0.0025/event or customized plans (starting at $25.99 per month for 10k events)
💡 Best for
- Event tracking and user analytics with dashboards
🌟 Rating
- Overall Score: 4.1/5
- Ease of Use: 3.4/5
- Value for Money: 4.1/5
- Customer Service: 3.7/5
18. Mixpanel
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Mixpanel is another analytics tool that lets you track user behavior and understand user journey. Mixpanel provides all the detailed quantitative data needed to uncover trends and understand what improvements you can make onto the platform.
Mixpanel is a great tool for getting UX research insights that the entire team members can understand and use, offering great UI and easy ways to collaborate.
📌 Key Features
- Event tracking, user journey analysis, funnels, event, user identification and segmentation
💰 Pricing
- Free plan with limited features and paid plans starting from $20 per month
💡 Best for
- Powerful dashboard with various analytics feature
🌟 Rating
- Overall Score: 4.5/5
- Ease of Use: 4.0/5
- Value for Money: 4.1/5
- Customer Service: 4.2/5
19. SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey is one of the most widely-used survey tools that simplifies the process to collect customer feedback and user research through online surveys. Its user-friendly interface allows for extensive customization, ranging from the survey's branding and background to font styles and URL settings.
For non-UX researchers that are not familiar with surveys, SurveyMonkey's AI-powered feature, SurveyMonkey Genius, offers tips and assistance to optimize your surveys, ensuring that you obtain valuable insights swiftly and efficiently.
📌 Key Features
- Fully-customizable online surveys, market research solutions, Genius AI solution with advanced survey logic, online form embedding
💰 Pricing
- Free plan with basic features, team plans start at $25 per user/month
💡 Best for
- Quick surveys, CRM integrations, and AI-powered survey generation
🌟 Rating
- Overall Score: 4.6/5
- Ease of Use: 4.6/5
- Value for Money: 4.5/5
- Customer Service: 4.4/5
20. Typeform
Typeform is an another platform for user surveys designed to assist you in creating distinctive forms for efficient information collection.
Typeform seamlessly integrates with your existing workflow, simplifying the process of gathering customer feedback. It offers a smooth and effortless experience for the users you are surveying, making it particularly valuable when prioritizing a user friendly experience to gather insights.
📌 Key Features
- Simple form builder, branded forms, key integrations, varied question formats
💰 Pricing
- Typeform starts at $29 per month for one user and 100 responses per month
💡 Best for
- Easy to use, focus on creating interactive and engaging surveys to increase response rates
🌟 Rating
- Overall Score: 4.7/5
- Ease of Use: 4.6/5
- Value for Money: 4.4/5
- Customer Service: 4.1/5
21. Jotform
Jotform is another user surveys tool, delivering many templates for streamlining your customer feedback procedures. While it shares several essential features with the other survey tools mentioned, Jotform offers additional solutions, including a no-code app creator and an online storefront builder.
Jotform expedites the creation of customized surveys, making it an excellent all-in-one solution, especially when financial resources are limited.
📌 Key Features
- Intuitive form builder, ample integrations, report generations, workflow automation
💰 Pricing
- Free plan with survey limits, paid plans from $39 per month
💡 Best for
- Easy to use, easily customizable themes and diverse widgets
🌟 Rating
- Overall Score: 4.7/5
- Ease of Use: 4.6/5
- Value for Money: 4.6/5
- Customer Service: 4.4/5
22. Userpilot
Userpilot is another user feedback tool that provides different features for in-depth user research.
Userpilot offers a range of features that allows gathering, analyzing and acting on customer feedback easier. Userpilot also offers an integrated solution, allowing researchers to recruit participants through various methodologies including in-product modals, surveys and others.
📌 Key Features
- User feedback surveys
- User segmentation and targeting for surveys
- Dashboard and anlalytics to monitor quantitative data and user behavior
💰 Pricing
- Free plan with survey limits, paid plans startig from $249 per month
💡 Best for
- Easy to use, easily customizable themes and diverse widgets
🌟 Rating
- Overall Score: 4.7/5
- Ease of Use: 4.5/5
- Features: 4.6/5
- Value for Money: 4.7/5
- Customer Service: 4.7/5
Selecting the best user research tools and software
When searching for UX research tools, there are several key characteristics to look out for. When evaluating a UX research tool to adopt, consider the following factors:
- Ease of use: The tool should be intuitive and user-friendly, allowing not just user researchers but other product team members to easily navigate and utilize diverse features without extensive training.
- Collaboration features: UX research is a team effort that involves multiple stakeholders in the process. Assess how the UX research tool facilitates collaboration and communication among team members, whether multiple users can simultaneously collaborate on a project, and how it shares research findings.
- Versatility and set of features: When you are looking for a paid tool, the tool should be able to offer the features that you seek. Look for a tool that offers a range of UX research methods and capabilities, such as surveys, interviews, usability testing, and analytics, to accommodate diverse research needs.
- To learn more about usability testing tools, we recommend our article on the best usability testing tools.
- Cost-effectiveness: Assess the pricing structure of the tool and whether it offers value for money based on your organization's budget and research needs. The pricing for each UX research tool will have vendor-specific pricing models and vary widely.
- Integration: User research tool is meant to streamline your design and user feedback collection process. Consider whether the tool integrates with your existing workflow and tools commonly used in your organization, such as project management systems, collaboration tools, or analytics platforms to streamline the research process.
- Integration with design tools like Figma and Adobe XD are common and important for easily importing your design files to the testing tools.
- Data security and compliance: Ensure that the tool prioritizes data security and compliance with relevant regulations, such as GDPR or HIPAA, to protect sensitive user information.
- Customer support: Consider the quality and availability of customer support provided by the tool's vendor, including documentation, training resources, and responsive customer service.
- Scalability: As your team and need for research grows, make sure the tool can support both the large amount of research data that is being collected without affecting the internal collaboration aspect.
- Trial & pilot the tool: Last but not least, make sure to ask for a free trial of the tool. Many UX research tools will offer free plans for users to explore and get hands-on experience on the tool. Get a chance to use the UX research tool and validate your use cases for the tool before getting committed.
When selecting a tool, it's imperative to consider your specific research needs, the types of research methods or stages you'll be employing, as well as your available resources and budget constraints. By carefully comparing and evaluating tools based on these criteria, you can make informed decisions that align with your research objectives and maximize the effectiveness of your studies.
Streamlining UX research with Hubble
If you need a comprehensive UX research tool that can help you run usability tests, recruit internal and external participants, launch in-product surveys with user segmentation, get started now with Hubble.
Hubble provides product teams with a unified platform for participant recruitment, experiment design, and data collection and analysis. It offers a diverse range of research method suitable for various stages of product development. Beyond usability studies, Hubble supports additional research methods such as concept testing, card sorting, A/B split testing, and in-product surveys.
You can customize studies and seamlessly import Figma prototypes for user feedback collection. Whether recruiting live users for direct feedback from surveys or utilizing an external recruitment panel, Hubble enables efficient data collection and features to analyze user research data. Furthermore, the platform incorporates AI capabilities to summarize and visualizes results supplemented with features like video recordings, task success rates, heat maps, and time spent on each task, facilitating deeper insights into research outcomes.
Setting up studies in Hubble is easy with pre-built templates and dedicated Slack community to share ideas and get customer support. With Hubble, you can continuously manage your user experience, helping collect powerful user insights.
Streamline your UX research with Hubble
Run surveys and remote usability testing with access to 8+ million recruitment panel to collect valuable customer insights within a single app
Additional resources
While we've introduced several popular UX research tools, it's important to note that there are numerous others worthy of consideration. For instance, for research repositories, platforms like Notion and Dovetail offer robust features for organizing research studies and analyzing research data. Additionally, for interview transcription, tools like Otter.ai provide AI-powered transcription services to streamline the data analysis process.
To explore more about other popular tools, see below:
