7 Best Dovetail Alternatives & Competitors For Product Research

Dovetail is a customer insights hub that helps researchers and product owners efficiently manage research data from various sources in an organized manner, making it easier to store, analyze, and share research projects.

With a complicated user experience and a hefty price tag, Dovetail is a not-so-perfect product research solution for many.

We've compiled a list of comparable tools to Dovetail if you want a modern, user-friendly alternative. We recommend these 7 excellent product research tools and their features.

7 Best Dovetail Alternatives & Competitors in 2024

1. Rapidr
2. Condens
3. Productboard
4. UserVoice
5. UserTesting(EnjoyHQ)
6. Maze
7. Prodpad

But first, let's look at Dovetail's features and capabilities, so we have a common yardstick to compare user feedback software in this list.

What is Dovetail?

Dovetail is a customer insights hub that helps uncover insights from user feedback, customer interviews, support tickets, and sales calls. Dovetail helps teams centralize, organize, analyze, and collaborate on user research data.

Pricing

Starting from $30/month

What is Dovetail used for?

Best for research and customer insights

Features of Dovetail

• Dovetail is used for conducting and managing qualitative research as it brings all research planning, source data, analysis, and reporting together in one place. The transcript feature by Dovetail is commendable.
• It helps make research easier to conduct with templates for different project types and track all your participants individually across as many projects as you want.
• Customers praise their product design, and product adoption is smooth with intuitive information architecture.

7 Best Dovetail Alternatives & Competitors For Product Research

1. Rapidr

Rapidr helps product teams understand what customers need by tracking feature requests and ideas, analyzing & prioritization what to build next, creating a roadmap backed by customer insights, and communicating new features with release notes.

Understanding customers begins by collecting their feedback in a centralized app. Rapidr helps you capture product ideas, requests, and feedback from colleagues and customers with their customer feedback portal and in-app widget.

Next, for analyzing and prioritizing the roadmap based on customer insights, Rapidr helps you slice and dice feedback by customer attributes and sorting by votes.

Lastly, inform your roadmap with the most critical feedback, and let your customers know what's new with release notes.

Pricing: Starts at $49/month.

Use case: Best for product research, feature request tracking, idea management, feature voting, roadmapping, and product changelog.

Features of Rapidr

• Rapidr is an end-to-end user product research and feedback management solution, so you don't have to glue multiple apps together to close the feedback loop. With it, you get a customer feedback management tool, feature request collection software, road mapping software, and release notes software.
• Rapidr is one of the most cost-effective solutions that offer excellent value for money stacked against the other enterprise options on this list. Rapidr's pricing is based on the value you derive from the software instead of per-seat pricing.
• Rapidr's hosted research repository is lightweight, easy to use, and customizable, fitting perfectly with your existing workflows and brand design.
• Rapidr is built to support varying workflows and to match different product development terminology across companies. It's built to be customizable from day one.
• Rapidr can be fully white-labeled on high-end plans. White-labeling removes the "Powered by Rapidr" link from your research portal and emails, which means no visible branding from Rapidr.
• Rapidr is relatively new in the market. But with features rivaling Dovetail at a reasonable pricing plan and in the hands of trusted people, it's an excellent option for anyone looking for a lean, simple, clean product research alternative for product research. They track feedback on their public feedback board.

Reviewers say that compared to Dovetail, Rapidr is:

The good parts:

• End-to-end research-focused solution
• Cost-effective and affordable. Plans start from $49/mo.
• Modern and lightweight interface.
• Easy to use.
• Brilliant Customer Support.
• Quick to set up and run.

The bad parts:

• SOC2 is not available.

Rapidr has changed the way we collect and manage feedback from our users. It helped us to create a single point of entry for all feedback requests across our product and avoid using huge spreadsheets and slack channels. It also helps keep our users and teammates in the loop as we make decisions for the product. - Daniel Wolken (Founder)

2. Condens

Condens is a UX research and analysis tool that helps teams store, structure, and analyze user research data and share findings across organizations. It also has a participant management system to track who you have engaged with for research and analysis.

Pricing: Starts at $15/month.

Use Case: Best for UX research.

Features of Condens

• Getting from raw data to insights faster with the tool by collaborating with teammates on qualitative research and feedback data analysis.
• It supports easy sharing of research findings online with a central UX research repository.
• It supports automatic transcription, video clips, and AI-assisted tagging compared to other tools.
• Lacks customization, product roadmap, and changelog features like Rapidr.

3. Productboard

Productboard is a project management tool that captures problems, feedback, and user research, organizes feature ideas, plans releases, and shares beautiful interactive roadmaps. It consolidates ideas from customers into a prioritized roadmap based on data.

Pricing: Starts at $39/month per teammate

Use Case: Best for project management and roadmapping.

Features of Productboard

• Productboard is a project management tool that combines a user feedback voting board and inbox with prioritization methods and roadmaps.
• Key features include collecting product feedback from email, prioritizing features with a set of frameworks, various product roadmap templates, etc.
• Many integrations such as Slack, Zapier, and Salesforce are supported to manage projects and customer feedback.
• Productboard is a complex project management tool, much less a feature-tracking tool. No doubt, it's excellent, consisting of all the customizations, but configuring the right setting for managing users' research feels like a chore.
• It is expensive. At the time of writing, prices start from $20 a month for one admin and five contributors with limited admin rights and restricted features compared to other feedback management tools.

4. UserVoice

UserVoice caters to enterprise companies that want to gather customer feedback and product research to process support requests and increase customer satisfaction. UserVoice allows companies to create feature request voting boards for customers to share their ideas, opinions, and votes.

Pricing: Contact for a custom quote and talk to sales. Pricing plans start at a whopping $799/ user /month with an annual agreement billed quarterly.

Use case: Best for product feedback management.

Features of UserVoice

• UserVoice gathers data from its customer base, analyzes it, and then presents it to them to make informed decisions about what should be improved or changed.
• UserVoice creates a feedback loop by providing forum software enabled with roadmap functionality.
• UserVoice has streamlined communication with customer-facing and product teams and keeps all product research in one location to increase transparency.
• They allow product teams to see how many customers requested a particular feature and its importance to their business goals. They allow segmentation and create cohorts for different types of users.
• The tool is a little hard to navigate and has a steep learning curve compared to its alternatives.
• Time-consuming and complicated onboarding requires much learning to understand the functionality, complete the setup, and collect user feedback.

5. UserTesting(EnjoyHQ)

EnjoyHQ (part of UserTesting) helps UX and product teams to centralize, organize, and share all their customer insights and user research data in one place. This helps product teams to learn from customers faster by streamlining their customer research process.

Pricing: Contact for a pricing quote

Use case: Best for user testing.

Features of EnjoyHQ

• It is a one-stop solution for all customer feedback and user research.
• It integrates with various customer support systems, NPS, and CRM tools.
• It supports transcription that helps save parts of interviews with relevant titles and find them easily with tags.
• The UI is a little hard to navigate and has a learning curve.

6. Maze

Maze is a continuous product discovery platform that helps teams collect and consume user insights across the product development cycle. Maze allows for best-in-class usability testing using integrations with prototyping applications

Pricing: Includes free plan. Paid plans start at $99/month.

Use case: Best for product discovery and user testing.

Features of Maze

• It helps run unmoderated product research and see responses transform into metrics that validate ideas and support decision-making.
• The tool also supports sharing learnings with stakeholders, customizing content, collaborating, and discussing in comments like Rapidr.
• Maze empowers product and marketing teams to test anything from prototypes to copy or round-up user feedback—all in one place.

7. Prodpad

Prodpad is a product feedback and road-mapping tool where product teams can share feedback about the product, and upvote features with a feature voting board. It helps create a neatly structured roadmap for multiple products with a timeline view that showcases the updated announcements of a particular product.

Use case: Best for product feedback and roadmapping.

Pricing: Prodpad charges $24 per module per editor. If you want to use all roadmaps, ideas, and feedback modules, it totals $72 per month for an editor.

Features of Prodpad

• ProdPad helps customers visualize, collaborate, and easily maintain their roadmaps in one place, replacing spreadsheets.
• It also allows users to create multiple ideas and feedback that can be later used based on priorities. Users love the visualization charts inside the tool, which help teams prioritize projects better.
• ProdPad has a steep learning curve and can be overwhelming for new users compared to Prodpad alternatives.
• Their pricing model seems different as they don't charge per individual seat but on bundles of seats that work out to $72 per user.

Verdict: Rapidr is the Best Dovetail Alternative

For growing product teams, you must decide on a tool to make your customer feedback management and product research process a piece of the cake. Everything should go hand-in-hand, from collection to analyzing research data and prioritizing to releasing software.

Each solution presented here is unique and has a different feature set, which caters to varying use cases that you can't go wrong with as a user-friendly alternative to Dovetail.

We recommend Rapidr as the best Dovetail alternative, which comes with a modern design and tightly nit feature set that stacks fairly well against Dovetail, offers a clean user experience, and has cost-effective pricing plans for product research. Get started now.