5 Best Alternatives to Lookback in 2024

If you’re a user researcher looking for the best alternatives to Lookback, these are some great choices to make your life easier. 

Lookback is popularly used to gather users’ feedback on a prototype, website, or product. It is built specifically to help research and product teams move speedily and collaborate with the rest of the organization.

Even if you’re perfectly happy with your user research platform, there might be things that bug you, or features you wish it had. It could be a little bit on the pricey side, or not have enough integrations.

We’ve put together a few alternatives just so that you can see what’s out there, especially if Lookback isn’t working out for you anymore.

1. Looppanel
2. UserTesting
3. Userlytics
4. Userbrain
5. Zoom / GMeet + Excel / Miro

What is Lookback?

Lookback assists UX researchers with usability testing and one-on-one user interviews, both moderated and unmoderated. It lets you bring your own users for usability testing and interviews. 

You can collaborate with any number of stakeholders, take live notes, generate highlight reels, and get transcripts of your calls. 

Lookback also supports integration with User Interviews and Respondent (recruiting panels) so you can seamlessly run research with research participants. That’s a lot of really cool features.

Pros:

• Lookback is free to try. You can test it out in one of your usability studies to determine whether it would benefit you.
• You can timestamp key moments and add notes that you can quickly refer to once the call is over.
• They have an observer room that allows team members to view a research session without your participant finding out (creepy, but cool)
• Mobile usability testing can be useful on Lookback. This is still messy to do on Zoom/GMeet sometimes and Lookback offers an alternative to both run the test & record on the user’s phones.

If you want to know how to run a mobile usability test on Zoom/Google Meet, check out this step-by-step guide.

Cons:

• For unmoderated research, users struggled with showing tasks to their audience and recording them correctly. Eeks.
• Lookback users sometimes face poor connectivity while joining and/or during the live session.
• Because you’re running calls on Lookback and not on Zoom, Google Meet or Teams, we’ve heard of higher participant no-show rates. Users get scared of clicking on links from conferencing platforms they’re not familiar with, and they end up not showing up for your studies as a result.
• Limitations on analysis features available. Lookback doesn’t support research analysis well, so you’ll inevitably end up on an Excel sheet or Miro board, splitting your data across tools and generally making life more annoying.
• Bring your own participants. Lookback also doesn’t solve for recruiting, so there again you’d need another tool.
• Lookback doesn’t support all iOS versions. It is only compatible with these ones. 

While we're on the subject, here's a guide on recruiting users for usability testing and interviews.

Why look for Lookback alternatives?

It’s really annoying to migrate from one platform to another, we get it. Why go through the additional hassle? 

One big issue is that your participants are likely to face technical glitches during the research process. As we know, there’s nothing worse than being 5 minutes into a user interview and struggling to get your prototype to load or not being able to hear your participant. So be careful; with Lookbook, your data collection may suffer. 😢

Lookback also doesn’t offer a panel of participants to conduct usability testing or other qualitative research, and recruiting the right participants can be painful.

With Lookback, you’ll also need to resort to a separate tool for research analysis. Because of limited features on this end, you’ll end up back in Miro or Excel to actually discover insights.

Since Lookback only solves for one specific part of the user research process (conducting the interview), you will end up having to patch together multiple tools to get through your user interviews.

5 Best Lookback Alternatives

Here we bring you 5 best Lookback alternatives you can test out: 

Looppanel

Looppanel automatically records your interviews on Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams and delivers high-quality transcripts and *futuristic* auto-generated AI notes. It also lets you collaborate with your stakeholders free of cost, making your research process less time-consuming. 

With Looppanel, you can quickly organise your data with tags and make shareable video clips in a single click, thus allowing you to jump right into trend analysis and save a lot of time. Pretty cool, huh?

Pros:

• Looppanel offers accurate transcriptions and phenomenal auto-generated AI notes for participants, regardless of their accents.
• Looppanel’s built-in analysis feature automatically organizes all your notes for a project in a single place. You can view your notes according to the questions they addressed or the tags you gave them (aka you don’t need to jump to a Miro board—we’ve basically created an affinity map for you).
• You can bring in your stakeholders to take live notes during user interviews, so you capture those juicy quotes as they come up! 
• Plug Looppanel into your Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams calls and we’ll auto-record them for you, so you get the data you need.

Overall, Looppanel makes discovering and sharing insights 5x faster.

Don’t believe us? Ask our customers!

Cons:

• Looppanel doesn’t recruit participants for interviews (we may dive into this area in the future). To use Looppanel, you need to bring in your own users or use a panel like UserInterviews.com.
• You cannot upload CSV files of data onto the product. We currently support audio and video recordings only.

Pricing

Looppanel was built for teams with smaller budgets tackling large-scale challenges.

You can use our free trial subscription plan to test it out. The free trial includes 15 transcripts and all the features offered in our pro plan.

Looppanel has two paid plans, once your free trial is over: Pro and Premium. 

• The Pro plan at $25 per user per month offers 25 transcriptions per month with automatic recording of Zoom, GMeet and Teams calls.
• The Premium plan at $54 per user per month comes with 50 transcriptions and dedicated support for your team.

Looppanel vs Lookback

Although both are top UX Research platforms for conducting user interview calls, Loopanel provides high-quality calls without the technical issues that Loookback users frequently experience.

Here are some of the factors on which the platforms differ:

• Price: Looppanel is ideal for small teams or solo researchers with tighter budgets. We offer 15 transcripts on a free trial and then 25 transcripts at $25 a month. Lookback pricing starts at $25 per month (for freelancers), while the Team plan price scales up to $149 per month.

• Reliability: Lookback requires you to conduct calls on their platform, which comes with major reliability issues. With Looppanel you can continue to run calls on highly reliable conferencing platforms like Zoom, GMeet, or Teams and have them  automatically recorded by Looppanel. 

• Testing method: Lookback supports both moderated and unmoderated usability testing in one platform. Looppanel supports live moderated tests and you can upload recordings on unmoderated tests, but cannot conduct them on the platform. If you want all your studies conducted in one place, rather than using the best-of-breed products for each type of study, Lookback offers you that option. 

• Analysis features: Even though you can conduct moderated & unmoderated tests on Lookback, you will end up exiting the platform to analyze the data elsewhere (usually Excel or Miro). If you use Looppanel on the other hand, everything is in one place—notes, recordings, transcripts, analysis, and insights.

• That AI magic: Looppanel has the advantage of automatically generating AI-powered notes for your calls. This means that you can skip rewatching the entire call 5 times, and jump straight to reviewing the notes, creating clips and analyzing your data.

UserTesting

Focused on both moderated and unmoderated research, UserTesting offers a sizeable panel of users to gather insights about products, services, and apps. It is an end-to-end platform for running user research.

It is compatible with a number of third-party applications, including Slack, Trello, JIRA, Adobe XD, Google Calendar, and Microsoft Outlook.

Pros:

• It is one of the best platforms to interview a pool of participants. The platform recruits a wide range of participants, convenient for UX researchers to carry out tests in less time.
• UserTesting offers the ability to easily create video clips and highlight reels, which is very useful for communicating key lessons to stakeholders. 

Cons:

• UserTesting does take measures against non-serious participants, but according to customer reviews, some participants answer questions just so they can get paid for participating in studies. These are called “professional testers”—their answers are bogus and can seriously affect your study’s validity.
• The platform can be difficult to navigate and clunky.
• It’s pricey! 

Pricing:

UserTesting has not disclosed its pricing plan. It offers a custom pricing plan based on its client’s needs. For details on price, you need to contact their sales team (expect a 5 or 6 figure quote!).

UserTesting vs Lookback

• Recruiting participants: Finding participants for research studies is a complex and time consuming process. Lookback doesn't have a pool of testers like UserTesting does, so you'd have to find users on your own or through a panel. 

• Price: The UserTesting price plan comes with higher rates. It would be difficult for a small-scale business to avail its services at $20K per year (on the lower end). But if you are part of a very large team with a generous budget, then UserTesting may be the best fit for you.

• Testing Method: Lookback allows you to conduct both moderated and unmoderated research, while UserTesting offers even more testing methods like Card Sorting, Tree testing, and Clickstream Testing, in addition to moderated and unmoderated tests.

• Recruiting participants: A in-built panel with UserTesting.com does come with its advantages. It consolidates two parts of the workflow (recruiting and running tests), instead of using separate products for each as with Lookback.

Userlytics

Userlytics is an all-in-one platform for UX researchers to conduct multiple types of tests. You can conduct moderated and unmoderated studies as well as quantitative surveys in more than 20 languages. In addition, it offers cutting-edge features like sentiment analysis and automatic AI analysis of calls.

Pros

• It has an exceptionally good, global participant panel. The specialised service for hard-to-find participants is also incredibly quick and effective!
• The customer support panel is quick to respond and great at providing help with all kinds of issues.

Cons

• Some parts of the admin portal’s UI can be clunky and not user-friendly.
• Users have found the reporting and analytical tools to be limited and not intuitive. Userlytics needs improvement in creating better reports from within the application, uncovering insights more readily, and offering a more seamless experience with annotations, transcripts, and highlight reels. 
• You can't run unmoderated user tests with video on Apple devices. 

Pricing

Userlytics offers three subscription plans; Enterprise, DIY and Custom. If that sounds too complex, we’ve broken it down for you.

• Enterprise: The price starts at $3,450 per year, which can be expensive for small teams. Based on your budget, Userlytics will offer you a discount on the condition that your yearly budget is over $5,021. 
  ‍
  Based on your budget, you can avail moderate and unmoderated participants/sessions. For instance, if your yearly budget is $3,450, you will get a maximum of 50 unmoderated participants with no moderated participants. If your yearly budget is $5,021, you will be given a maximum 56 unmoderated participants and maximum 6 moderated participants. 
  ‍
  Most importantly, at all prices, you get 30 minutes for unmoderated sessions and 60 minutes for moderated sessions. This also includes:
  1. Unlimited admin and user accounts and seats
  2. Unlimited storage of UX insights
  3. Single sign-on
  4. Review of participants’ test results by expert Userlytics and more.

• DIY: Userlytics DIY plan comes with two options – Premium at $499 and Advanced at $999. You only get 2 seats for your team to access. In both options, you can bring any number of unmoderated participants. In addition, both options allow you to conduct each study for 60 minutes but other features vary in DIY options:
  
  1. The premium plan includes AI-based transcription (up to 20 per month). The advanced option gives you 100 per month.
  2. The premium plan doesn’t provide unmoderated participants from the Userlytics panel, but the advanced option does at $19 per participant.
  3. With the Premium DIY option you can’t bring in your participants from an external source to run moderated tests. With the Advanced DIY option you can bring 50 moderated participants for free (for additional sessions at $10 per participant).
  

• Custom: This plan gives you flexibility in choosing any features you want. Check details here. 

I know, their pricing is complicated—here’s the link to find out which pricing plan is available for you.

Userlytics vs Lookback 

• Integration: The Userlytics platform offers more integrations than Lookback (which only connects with User Interviews). It is entirely compatible with Adobe XD, Axure, Figma, Framer, InVision, and Sketch prototypes.

• Testing Method: Lookback is best for qualitative research while Userlytics lets you use different testing methods based on your needs like customer research surveys, VR tests, 5-second tests and more!

• Recruiting participants: Userlytics comes with a participant panel, Lookback does not. How you source participants may help you decide which product is a better fit for you.

Userbrain

Userbrain is an unmoderated testing platform that helps you gain feedback on your product from a pool of test participants. If you’re only looking for unmoderated testing at a reasonable cost, UserBrain may be a good fit for you.

Pros

• Tests are quite simple to set up, and results are typically available the same day.
• Their customer service is fast, friendly and always helps immediately.
• It's inexpensive when you need user input at a low cost. Userbrain is excellent at refunding the credit too, allowing UX researchers to rerun the test quickly.
• You can recruit participants from their panels or bring your own!

Cons

• Demographics selection could be a little more granular to help you recruit the right participants.
• Many users have struggled with the quality of participants on UserBrain. Often the testers don’t provide high quality feedback or follow the test instructions as required.
• The inability to create and export clips is a big drawback of the software. One needs extra work to manually edit the video in another piece of software.
• Only supports unmoderated testing, so if you plan to do moderated interviews, you may end up needing another tool as well.

Pricing

Userbrain is an affordable remote user testing tool that has the following three subscription plans. 

• Starter | $99 per month: With the Starter plan you get 3 testers recruited by the Userbrain, 10 rollover testers every month and up to 10 sessions per month if you bring your own testers. The starter plan can be handy for small to medium size teams to run tests on a small scale, to fix the usability issue of your product or services. Its limitations include the small number of testers you get access to and the lack of dedicated account management support to help you run your test successfully. 

• Pro | $299 per month: The Pro plan is the perfect fit if you have large teams and are willing to spend. Subscribing to Pro gives you 10 testers and 30 rollover testers, which are enough to get the best result to improve your product if you’re not running your studies consistently.
  
  
• Agency | $799 per month: This plan is for those who are running an agency that needs dedicated support to get the most out of their testing. You can test with 30 testers each month and run up to 90 sessions with your own testers. Other features include:
  - Having up to 20 admins and 50 collaborators
  - Unlimited video storage capacity
  - Up to 90 rollover testers
  - Dedicated account manager

Apart from the three main subscription plans, Userbrain has a Pay As You Go plan which you can use to test them out. For Pay As You Go, you need to pay $39 per tester, but you can’t transcribe your calls and get reports or insights in a flash.

Userbrain vs Lookback 

• Recruiting participants: A major difference between the two is Userbrain’s recruitment of users. Userbrain will recruit the best participants for you to test products quickly. Compared with recruiting from UserInterviews, it may also work out to be more cost effective, although they do have trouble with getting high quality participants.
•  Price: Userbrain has a more flexible pricing plan as you don’t have to commit to a yearly or monthly plan. You can subscribe to any pricing option whichever serves your need and can cancel anytime you want.
• Integration: Userbrain is compatible with prototypes built using Adobe XD, Axure, Figma, Framer, Invision and Sketch, while Lookback connects well with UserInterviews.com.
• Testing Method: Lookback lets you conduct moderated and unmoderated studies, while UserBrain only supports unmoderated tests. 

Using Zoom or Google Meet with Excel or Miro

Zoom, Google Meet, Excel and Miro are tools that you can use to run research studies without a huge price tag. They work very well, especially if you connect these with our budget-friendly and very reliable Looppanel! By integrating, you get high-quality transcripts with automatic sentiment analysis and and auto generated AI-powered notes, making your job 10x easier.

Pros

• Easy-to-use and don’t require a special plugin or software 
• They’re widely used and most familiar tools for users
• The rest of your team already lives there

Cons

• Your data will end up across 3-4 tools, making it painful to work with over time.
• This workflow can end up being very inefficient as you copy data from google docs to Miro boards, and do everything manually.

Pricing

Here are the detailed pricing tag of each with some features or restrictions listed below:

Zoom

Zoom is a video conferencing platform used for various purposes right from academics to conducting business meetings. Zoom’s basic plan is free but it has limited features, which might not be useful for moderated testing;  40 minutes of free calls is not a reliable option. However, you can upgrade to higher plans as per your needs.

• Pro | $161.28 / per user / month:  You get everything included in the basic plan like team chat, and access to whiteboard including:

• Up to 100 attendee invites per meeting
• Up to 30 hours of meeting
• Cloud storage of up to 50 GB
• Free premium app for 1 year

• Business | $219.92 / per user / month: The Business plan has more robust features which include:

• 300 attendee invites per meeting
• Access to unlimited whiteboards
• Cloud storage of up to 5 GB
• Free premium app for a year

• Enterprise | Contact sales team: With the Enterprise plan dedicated to large organizations, you can avail features like:

• Unlimited whiteboards
• Unlimited cloud storage capacity
• 1000 attendee invites per meeting

Google Meet

Anyone with a Google account can easily use Google Meet for free. You can use the platform for interviews or invite up to 100 participants for 60 minutes. That being said, you can also use the less expensive business edition, with pricing here.

While GMeet offers a great in-browser experience (aka users don’t have to download anything), the quality of video calls is a bit lower than Zoom.

Excel or Google Sheets

When it comes to storing data, Excel is handy for turning your research data into insights for free. It lets you create visually compelling graphs and charts to predict possible trends in your analysis reports.

It’s also:

1. Familiar to you and your team
2. Flexible—you can add columns, remove them, and move data anywhere with ease
3. You probably already have Excel or Google Sheets available for free within your organization

Miro

Miro is an excellent tool to conduct workshops. It quickly captures ideas and brings people together to brainstorm new ideas to design better products. You can use Miro’s free version to see what works for you. 

For the visually-minded, this is a great place to synthesise your research findings, although you may have to manually copy-paste your data into Miro (this can be annoying).

• Free: Signing up with the free version provides you with:

• 3 editable boards
• A wide range of ready made-templates
• Integrations like Slack, Trello, Gmail, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, Box, Adobe Creative Cloud, Sketch, Unsplash and MS Teams.
• Collaboration with team members

• Starter | $8 / per member/ month: With just $8 it lets you access a wide range of excellent features such as an unlimited number of editable boards, customizable and ready-made templates by Miro, integrations included in the free version along with Jira and Confluence and more. However, there are certain limitations which you should not overlook while purchasing this plan.

• No single sign-on
• No activities facilitation mode (choose what participants can see and which tools can they use, etc.)
• Can’t invite external collaborators to access private boards

• Business | $16  / per member/ month: The Business edition is for teams that need additional features and security. Here are some of the restrictions which you should consider.

• Flexible licensing plan to manage license use.
• Can’t access admin insights to See analytics for users, boards, projects, and templates.
• Advanced user management
• No premium support (24/7 during critical times)

• Enterprise: Suitable for organizations with very large teams that require advanced security and support. 

Lookback Vs. Zoom or Google Meet

Zoom and Google Meet by far are the most user-friendly and popular video conferencing tools to conduct remote research. Moreover, Zoom offers high quality video and audio streams whereas on Lookback you may face poor connectivity during live sessions.

Best of all, your team probably already has one of these options in-house!

‍Bonus: If you want to keep running calls on reliable platforms like Google Meet or Zoom, but want the benefits of a full-fledged research platform (live note-taking, transcription, analysis features), Looppanel is for you.