15 Best UX Research Tools for User Researchers - 2023

Making product decisions based on blind assumptions is risky. You don’t want to spend weeks building a new feature or a product only to realize no one wants it. 

UX Research helps avoid such dead ends. Before you build, you get to validate the assumptions you’re building on. Of course, the right UX research tools go a long way in making your research more fruitful. 

Here’s an overview of the 15 of the best UX research tools for you to consider.

Research Panels to Recruit Participants

Recruiting research participants is easily one of the hardest parts of UX Research. It’s probably the most boring part as well.

The easiest way to recruit research participants is by using an existing research panel.

A research panel is a UX research tool that gives you access to potential research participants, offering them compensation in exchange (usually in the form of money or Amazon gift cards). The benefit of using a panel is that you can recruit the right “persona” of users within a very short amount of time (often within 24 hours), with limited scheduling efforts on your side.

💡 Pro-tip: While research panels reduce the amount of scheduling work you’ll have to do, there are a couple of flags with these kinds of products:

1. Some panels are prone to “professional testers”—people who are joining studies just for the money and often lying about what they actually do/their experience with a product
2. It can be challenging to find niche participant types via these panels. If you want to recruit paediatricians in Papua New Guinea, you may struggle with the panel’s ability to provide this type of user!

To identify the right participant out of the “panel”, it’s recommended to “screen” the participants—you’ll ask participants to answer some questions that help you identify if they’re the right fit.

For example, if you’re looking for middle school teachers, your screener may look like this:

• What’s your job?
• If you have been a teacher in the last 3 years, which classes have you taught?
  1. K through 5th-grade
  2. 5th through 12th-grade
  3. College
  4. Masters/PhD
• What region do you work in?

Here are some of the best user research recruiting tools to help you find the right participants!

User Interviews

User Interviews is a UX research tool that connects user researchers and participants.

You can filter out potential participants based on different parameters like age, location, industry, etc., to find the right participants for your studies. In exchange, participants are compensated fairly, incentivizing them to contribute to the research.

User Interviews lets you:

1. Use their pre-existing panel: Their “Recruit” product provides you with a pre-existing panel of potential participants. You can then filter and recruit participants from the panel.
2. Make your own Panel: You can use their “Research Hub” product while recruiting your existing customers whose contact information you already have. You can use Research Hub to store and manage scheduling for these participants. Research Hub will manage emailing, scheduling, and follow-up reminders to users for you. With automated scheduling, their Google and Outlook calendar integration will help you monitor the upcoming sessions. Automated emails are sent to participants when you approve them to participate in your studies. More on Research Hub later.

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Looppanel’s Review

UserInterviews is one of the most established and well-loved recruiting products in the industry. They ensure their panel of participants is reliable and their turn-around times for scheduling calls are amazing (often 24-48 hours!). This is definitely one of our favorite research panels to turn to in a pinch, but they can get pricey if you're on a small budget.

Pricing

The pricing depends on which product you choose. 

If you are subscribing to Recruit, the price depends on the size of your team or company. Apart from the Pay As You Go category, which is charged per session, all other categories are billed annually.

Check out the pricing table below for more details:

For Recruit (panel to recruit participants)

Research Hub

Userinterviews also serve those who want to manage a panel of their own participants for research studies. Let’s say you run a lot of research with existing customers of your product—you can use User Interviews’ Research Hub to store the data of these people and simplify the painful scheduling activities (emailing users, reminders, etc.).

There are multiple tiers to the ‘Research Hub’ product, based on how many contacts (participants) you have in your panel. The price of the product varies by the number of contacts in the panel as well.

If you ever want to increase the contacts limit for your subscription, you can reach out to the User Interviews team. The price figures mentioned below are the monthly rate billed annually. 

‍For Research Hub

Pros:

• For Recruit, it is quite easy to contact a large number of potential participants and if any participant drops out before the session, the software connects the next participants on the list you approved.
• Automated screening, scheduling and incentive distribution. This means you get to skip all that painful back and forth setting up a time, following up to confirm the call, and making sure your incentives are paid out (phew!).
• You can schedule the meeting through Google or Outlook 365 calendars. 
• The customer support team is great— they help researchers with any issues without delay. 

Cons: 

• The screener needs to be more adaptable, with rating scale questions and arrays.
• The screening capabilities lack the sophistication of non-DIY options e.g. "must say 3 of the 6 options." You have to do that manually. 

Customer Reviews & Ratings: 4.6/5 on G2

Respondent

Respondent is another participant recruiting platform that helps researchers conduct research with verified participants in person or online. This platform sources professional participants from different social networks like LinkedIn.

Looppanel’s Review

From everything we’ve heard, Respondent can be a more cost-effective alternative to UserInterviews.com. If you are budget constrained, try recruiting with incentive amounts lower than those suggested by the Respondent website and you may still be able to get participants.

Pricing

Respondent offers two pricing options, 1) Pay As You Go and 2) Credit Bundles. 

In Pay As You Go, the service fee is 50% of your chosen incentive fee (e.g., if you are offering a $100 incentive, $50 of that goes to the Respondent). If you buy a credit bundle instead (credits can be used to “buy” a session with a participant) you pay a smaller percentage fee to the Respondent. 

Pros:

• You can post your project for free and pay after the participants participate in the study. 

Cons:

• It's not user-friendly and can be hard to navigate when you get started.

Ratings: 4.6/5

Survey Tools

Survey tools help in collecting data online from your potential audience. Before you conduct a survey, you must have a clear objective and scope to get the best results.

The following are the best survey tools to run studies:

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a UX research tool that helps users and researchers conduct surveys through emails, web links and embedded forms on their website or via social media. You can conduct your surveys in multiple languages and easily collect the data in one view. 

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Looppanel’s Review

SurveyMonkey is easy to get started with and comes ready with templates you can use to set up your study. If you’re dealing with a simple study, their analytical capabilities will be fine, but for a more complex one, you may end up spending a ton of time analyzing your data in an excel sheet.

‍Pricing

SurveyMonkey has multiple plans you can choose from based on your team size and the scale of your survey.

The basic plan is free which is best for individuals who wish to conduct surveys on a small scale. The paid plan intends to serve teams, but can also be used by individuals and enterprises. People who work at enterprises can contact the sales team for custom plans that support enhanced governance and security.

The cost of each plan has been tabulated below: 

Note: All the plans are billed annually.

Individual Plans

Team Plans

‍Pros:

• Intuitive User Interface.
• Able to conduct surveys in various languages.
• Variety of survey templates and integration with tools like Google Sheets, SPSS, Mailchimp, Displayr, Zendesk and more.

Cons:

• The free version is best to conduct surveys on a small scale, but the cost of paid plans can go up quickly.

Ratings: 4.4/5‍

Google Forms

If you are looking for an easy-to-use research tool for surveys, Google Forms is the best fit. 

Looppanel’s Review

For basic surveys on a limited budget, Google Forms is a convenient and cost-effective option. It does lack advanced customization options, but it’s easy to get up and running with very quickly!  

Bonus: It syncs really well with Google sheets so it’s easy to port your data into a spreadsheet view and start analyzing. 

‍Pricing

Not much to say—it's free!

Pros:

• Free for use!
• No learning curve

Cons:

• Doesn’t offer fancy templates. 
• No display customization options (you can’t customize font size, etc.)

Ratings: 4.7/5

Platforms to Conduct Research

If you’re looking for an all-in-one qualitative research platform that can handle everything from recruitment to running moderated and unmoderated tests, and generating transcripts in one place, you may want to consider the options below.

UserZoom

This platform is a UX research tool designed for UX researchers, marketers, managers and UX designers to get insights on websites, apps, products, and prototypes by conducting studies like 1:1 live interviews, moderated and unmoderated usability tests, click tests, surveys, tree tests and card sorts. 

‍Looppanel’s Review

UserZoom has now been acquired by UserTesting.com, which is an interesting case of the two biggest user research platforms merging. In our view this is the value you’ll get from UserZoom:

• Ability to recruit users
• Run unmoderated tests
• Get transcripts & videos

If you don’t have a budget constraint and want one tool to handle multiple parts of the research flow, UserZoom is a good option.

Keep in mind, you will need to use other tools for analysis so it’s not really an all-in-one platform. Also, with great options like UserInterviews.com, Maze and Looppanel (self-plug, we know 😂), UserZoom is an incredibly expensive alternative with limited additional value.

‍Pricing

UserZoom has custom pricing—you will need to get in touch with the sales team to learn how much a subscription will set you back.

Here are the features included in each type of plan:

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Pros:

• It auto-generates transcripts in the language you choose. Check the UserZoom’s study languages here!
• You can make clips and add notes to your transcripts.
• It lets you conduct mixed methods research since it supports quantitative as well as qualitative research. 

Cons:

• The study limit is 40 per year (for Quick Start Plans), which might not be enough for mature UX teams. The Enterprise plan does let you run unlimited studies. 
• UserZoom comes with a hefty price tag—if you’re considering the product, be prepared to cough up at least 5 figures for access.

Ratings: 4.2/5

UserTesting

UserTesting is an end-to-end research platform that lets you conduct everything from live interviews to brand and messaging testing, usability testing, tree testing, card sorting and clickstream tracking. 

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Looppanel’s Review

Similar to UserZoom, UserTesting’s main value is in recruiting participants for you, as well as bringing multiple research processes to one place. Their moderated tests are now run on Zoom, which makes you wonder whether it’s worth paying their high price tags just for recruiting users.

Pro Tip: We’ve heard they have a problem with “professional testers” who are so used to testing for $ that they’re zipping through your tests and leaving bad data behind. If you’re trialing UserTesting.com—watch out for this!

If you’re looking for a tool that manages multiple processes in one place, UserTesting.com may be for you, just bring a big check book.

Pricing

UserTesting pricing is based on factors like the number of users who need access to the product, business needs and the specific features you want to include. Like UserZoom, they offer custom pricing plans based on your requirements. To understand the price of each plan, you will need to contact their sales team. 

Pros:

• It is easy to recruit participants from all over the world. As a bonus, they eliminate users not paying attention to surveys/questions etc.
• The platform seamlessly conducts moderated interviews and unmoderated research, all in one place.

Cons:

• Ironically, the platform can be clunky to use at times.
• The screener function is not diverse enough to add a variety of questions. 
• Once again, UserTesting.com comes with a significant price tag. Unless you have a significant budget to spend on tooling, UserTesting may not be a viable option for you.
• In some cases, customers have reported the presence of “professional testers” in their panel (people who are randomly answering questions on your tests, just to get paid). This of course can deeply bias your results.

Ratings: 4.5/5

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Moderated user interview tools

These tools are great for 1-on-1 moderated research methods, such as user interviews and usability tests, without a huge price tag. In all likelihood, your company has access to one of them already, or you can get your hands on one for free.

Google Meet

People with a Google Account can use Google Meet and invite up to 100 participants for 60 minutes for free (although your focus groups probably won’t get that large!). Purchasing a business or enterprise plan lets you avail additional paid features like live streaming, recording and administrative control.

Looppanel’s Review

Google Meet is a favorite for many reasons—it is often already part of your company plan or is free for access and it doesn’t require participants to download additional software to join a meeting.

On the flip side, the quality of video and audio is okay at best, so depending on how tech savvy your audience is you may want to switch to Zoom. You also need to be on the paid plan to record calls directly on GMeet. 

‍Pricing

Google Meet has the following pricing plans, ranging from the free plan to higher-end business editions. If your company has purchased a Google Suite plan, one of the below GMeet options may come with it. 

‍Pros: 

• Cost-effective and compatible with businesses of all sizes.
• No plugins or software is required (aka your participants won’t have to install new software to join you on the call)
• Familiar option for users around the world (this tends to make your users more comfortable and less nervous to join an unknown link)

Cons:

• The free plan doesn’t come with recording and transcription capabilities, but you can plug in a product like Looppanel to record and transcribe calls for you
• Audio and video quality can vary (we prefer Zoom for this reason)

Ratings: 4.5/5

Zoom

Zoom is a video conferencing app that you can repurpose for focus groups, moderated user interviews and usability tests. Although it's not a built only for researchers, we think it's one of the most useful options across this list of UX research tools.

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Looppanel’s Review

Zoom has high-quality audio and video streams (yay!), which makes it a popular choice for research sessions. 

But it does have some really strange UX, so if you’re new to it expect it to take a few days to get settled in.

Pro-tip: you can record sessions to your computer even on the free plan (unlike with GMeet), but free sessions will get cut off after 40 minutes so you may want to upgrade anyway.

Pricing

Zoom's basic plan is free, but it caps calls at 40 minutes, which can be very awkward if your interview runs anywhere over 30 minutes. No one likes to get kicked off the call mid-interview.

Their basic paid plan comes for $150 / year which doesn't break the bank and does give you high quality conferencing capabilities and the ability to record your calls.

To get high quality recordings, transcripts, and AI-powered notes for Zoom based user interviews, you can also use a tool like Looppanel which plugs into Zoom and makes research analysis 5x faster.

Pros: 

• An easy-to-use, familiar option for your participants
• High-quality audio and video streams (very reliable)
• Works with great tools like Looppanel (again, very reliable)

Cons:

• Zoom’s basic plan can be limiting if you’re running moderated research. Forty minutes (the limit for free calls) may not be enough to conduct an interview, for example. 
• 5GB of free storage on the paid plan runs out pretty fast. Downloading/deleting these recordings can be a pain.
• Paid plans come with transcription in English, but the quality of transcripts is moderate.

Ratings: 4.5/5

Unmoderated Research Tools

Unmoderated research tools are a category of UX research tools that do not require you to intervene during the actual research session. They provide instructions to users, record their actions, and should ideally be able to ask them predetermined follow-up questions.

This type of research takes less time as participants do not have to be physically present, so you can provide questions to a large number of participants at the same time to complete the test.

Let’s explore the best unmoderated research tools out there.

Maze

Maze allows you to run unmoderated research on your new product or prototype. It supports tests like unmoderated usability tests, website testing, prototype testing, tree testing, surveys, and card sorting.

Looppanel's Review

Maze is pretty easy to set up and get started with. It also integrates with major prototyping tools like Figma, AdobeXD, and Invision—so you can bring your prototypes into Maze with ease.

One issue we have personally faced—Maze limits the number of prototype links you can test in a project to 1, which limits our ability to test alternatives against each other easily.

Bonus: Maze automatically creates a shareable report from your unmoderated tests which is super handy to share directly with your team, without spending a ton of time creating it.

Pricing

Apart from paid features, Maze offers free features that can be used to run tests on a small scale or on the product and see if it meets your requirements.

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Pros:

• Easy to link Figma prototypes for user testing purposes
• Easy to set up and launch a test in minutes
• They have a panel of participants as well, so you can skip the pain of recruiting
• Maze automatically generates a shareable report with your findings from tests—this is really nice to be able to quickly share the results with team members.

Cons:

• Heatmap features don’t work perfectly. 

• Simple prototype works well, but a prototype with advanced features loads slowly for users. 
• You can only use 1 prototype link for the entire study which is limiting if you have multiple prototypes to test in a single study. 
• Their participant panel isn’t great, so you may get “professional testers” who are just trying to finish the task in order to get compensation.

Ratings: 4.5/5

Useberry

Useberry is an unmoderated research platform that allows you to run tests across a variety of methods.

An amazing feature of Useberry is the integration of tools like Protopie, Adobe XD, Sketch, Marvel and InVision (other than a Figma integration, of course). This allows you to test more complex, realistic prototypes with your users, aside from basic Figma prototypes.

UseBerry also offers a wide range of testing methods, you can use your favourite testing methods from the following list:

• Usability Test
• Card Sorting
• Tree Testing
• 5 Second Test
• First Click Test
• Preference Test
• Online Survey

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Looppanel's Review

We have personally adopted UseBerry for unmoderated tests at Looppanel and we find it easy to use and effective. One challenge we have had is around recruiting: you can't get very granular with who you'd like to conduct your tests and based on the results, we've sometimes been suspicious of the quality of their panel.

Pricing

You can get started for free (woohoo!). The basic priced plan after that comes for ~$70.

Check out the detailed pricing here.

Pros:

• Participant recruiting is included (one less thing on your plate!)
• Aside from integration Figma, you can also integrate prototypes from other prototyping tools like Protopie, Adobe XD, Sketch, Marvel and InVision.
• Heatmaps and basic reporting (completion rates) are automatically calculated for you.

Cons:

• If you’re looking for a specific persona of users, sometimes it’s hard to find them on UseBerry. For example, we tried to recruit User Researchers and although they had a category “researchers” the results seemed to indicate that the category was murky.
• Participant filtering criteria are preset and you can’t add screener questions

Ratings: 4.9/5

Qualitative Data Analysis & Research Repository Tools

Once you’ve collected data from a user study, a research repository can be used to organize and analyze it. These UX research tools are hub to store and organise data that you and your team can use for the product improvement process. 

Here’s a beginner’s guide to Research Repositories.

Looppanel

Looppanel is a research analysis & repository product that records your user interviews and generates transcripts and AI-powered notes in minutes. On top of that, we auto-create affinity maps and excel-like views where you can analyze your user interviews with ease.

Not to brag, but we've had customers tell us Looppanel saved them 10 days analyzing user interviews!

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‍Looppanel's Review

Bit biased to review your own product, I suppose?

But here's the gist of it: if you care about speed to insight and want to leverage everything AI can do for you, Looppanel is the tool for you.

Pricing‍

Looppanel has pricing plans to meet all budgets. If you're starting out with a small team, you can get going for as little as $30 / month.

Check out our complete pricing here

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Pros:

• Looppanel’s transcription is one of the best on the market, with a high level of accuracy across accents and regions.
• Our AI-powered notes are 🤌 So if you don't have a note-taker, try Looppanel's AI notes and watch them shave off hours of analysis time.
• You can use Looppanel to collaboratively take notes with your team during user interviews.
• Instantly create and share clips of your user rage-clicking (much better than writing about it in a report)

Cons:

• Looppanel does not solve recruiting today (but we have it on our minds for the future!), so you’ll need to recruit participants through some other means like User Interviews or your own panel.
• Only support audio and video recordings as data input at the moment (e.g., you can’t upload a CSV to the product)
• As one user told us, you might be overwhelmed by how easy we make your job.

If you’d like to try it for free, sign up here!

Dovetail

Dovetail is a popular web-based platform that lets you organize research data, generate and tag transcripts, and collaborate with team members. It is built on the academic approach of qualitative data analysis.

Looppanel's Review

Dovetail takes a very academic, time-consuming approach to research involving complex tagging taxonomies and manual analysis of transcripts. If you're expected to run project in a matter of weeks (or if you don't love re-reading transcripts), it can slow you down significantly.

However they do support multiple types of data if you're looking to store user interviews, excel sheets, and docs in one place.

Pricing

The budget plans mentioned below are the starting price of each category and correspond to the minimum number of users. Increasing the number of users increases the price of each category as well. 

Pros:

• Easy transcription of videos and audio.
• Ability to create complex tagging taxonomies and tag your transcripts with them.
• Ability to store participant data in Dovetail, allowing you to build a database of people you’ve spoken with.
• Import multiple kinds of data, from audio/video recordings to Excel sheets with survey results.

Cons:

• There are some serious limitations on the way you can use the product—you can’t add notes on your transcript or analyze your data by questions in your discussion guide.
• Tagging taxonomies are complex and Dovetail requires you to build them and use them across your team of researchers, and across projects for the product to be useful.
• The starting plan has a limit on the transcriptions that you’ll quickly hit. Subsequent plans can be pricey (and their pricing plans keep changing!) 

Ratings: 4.4/5

EnjoyHQ

This research repository tool enables UX researchers to store and organize data. With the EnjoyHQ tool, you can do unlimited transcriptions, upload files of all sizes and formats with no limit, get metrics insights from your team while using the research repository, and collaborate with multiple teams.

Looppanel's review

We are yet to find someone who truly loves EnjoyHQ. Almost no one we've spoken to actually uses it for analysis. Instead, teams seem to analyze in Miro or excel and use Enjoy purely as a repository.

It's not bad for storage, but it will require manual tagging to make data discoverable, which is additional work to add to your plate. It's also quite pricey if you don't use it for analysis.

One good thing though: Enjoy has a ton of integrations—UserTesting, UserZoom, Slack, email and more.

‍Pricing

EnjoyHQ's starter plan is free, which is great! But as soon as you need to scale you have to speak to their sales team to get a quote (we all know that means $$$$).

Check out their pricing page here.

‍Pros:

• Variety of integrations—everything from UserZoom to Jira, to Typeform—this makes it easy to move data in or out of EnjoyHQ. 
• They start with a generous free plan which works well for a small team.

Cons:

• Ironically, EnjoyHQ can be a bit clunky to use—the everyday experience of using the product can become frustrating for some users.
• Once you scale past the free plan, pricing gets expensive quickly.

Ratings: 3.8/5

Google Sheets

Google Sheets is the default data analysis and storage platform for organizations around the world. In addition to systematically organizing your data, you can add graphs, use formulas, filter out irrelevant data etc.

One of the OG default tools—if all else fails, you’ve got Sheets (or Excel if you’re still there for some reason) .

‍Looppanel's review

We love excel sheets. Really, truly.

However, they aren't built for user research so they come with some drawbacks:

1. You can't link data in a cell to your recording or transcript. So if a team member took a note and you need to find out why, you'll have to start digging through transcripts and video recordings, hunting for the right quote.
2. Creating an analysis view in excel takes a lot of work. You have to re-watch every call and take notes question by question, person by person. This is literally one of the reasons Looppanel was born—you have better things to do with your time than copy-pasting data into excel sheets!
3. Your data is everywhere. Initially it may feel fine to analyze in excel but as you run more studies you're going to struggle to manage them. You'll recordings in a drive, transcripts (maybe) in another tool, notes in docs, excels for analysis, PPTs for presentations! Finding any historical data will start getting difficult very quickly.

Pricing

‍Google Sheets has three budget plans; basic, standard and apps for business. Most likely, your team also has Google Sheets or Excel access through your company, but if not, use the following table to find what works for you.

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Pros:

• The easiest tool to pick up because of its familiarity and flexibility. Your company is probably already paying for it, too!
• The ability to create graphs or quickly edit data is a plus
• Everyone on your team already knows how to use it—this makes collaboration easy

Cons:

• Although excel / google sheets are great, they’re not actually built for research. This means things break quickly when you’re trying to remember why you took a note (it’s not linked to your transcript!) or review data across calls.
• If you’re using Google Sheets, your data is being split across multiple tools—your recording is probably stored elsewhere, notes here, transcripts in a third place. This makes it hard to review calls because you have a jigsaw puzzle of apps and windows open at any point in time.
• It can be overwhelming for collaborators to jump into. They’ve not been analyzing the calls for days. Seeing rows and rows of data in Google Sheets can make their heads spin.

Ratings: 4.7/5

FigJam

FigJam lets you create and organise ideas on a canvas in sticky notes. In addition, you get to leverage a  range of templates, widgets and plugins as well as their integrations with Jira, Github and Asana to streamline your research analysis workflow. 

Looppanel's Review

Sticky notes are beautiful. So pretty. So easy to visualize.

But much like excel, whiteboards like FigJam weren't built for User Research. And much like excel, you'll run into some recurring challenges with FigJam boards:

1. You can't link data to your recording or transcript. So if a team member took a note and you need to find out why, you'll have to start digging through transcripts and video recordings, hunting for the right quote.
2. Creating an analysis view in excel takes a lot of work. You have to re-watch every call and take notes question by question, person by person. This is literally one of the reasons Looppanel was born—you have better things to do with your time than copy-pasting data into sticky notes!
3. Your data is everywhere. Initially it may feel fine to analyze in FigJam but as you run more studies you're going to struggle to manage them. You'll recordings in a drive, transcripts (maybe) in another tool, notes in docs, FigJam for analysis, PPTs for presentations! Finding any historical data will start getting difficult very quickly.

‍Pricing‍

FigJam has the following pricing plan.

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Pros:

• A great canvas for your team to collaboratively work on. It’s particularly good for visual people—you can see your data on stickies and move them around as needed. 
• You get a set of fun features like stamps, stickers, voting, and audio conversations so you can chat with teammates while you’re analyzing. 

Cons:

• Not directly built for research, FigJam comes with its limitations. For one, your data is in a separate place compared to your recordings & transcripts, making it hard to jump back to moments or double-check a note.
• It can be overwhelming for users, especially in large studies. Imagine you’re faced with 500 sticky notes—it gets daunting pretty fast!

Ratings: 4.6/5

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