A UX (User Experience) Research Repository is a place to store research data, notes, and insights. These can be accessed when needed, ideally by everyone in the organization.
A good repository would let teams across the organization find what they’re looking for on their own. This makes research insights more accessible to the right people at the right time.
If you have no prior experience with repositories, check out our definitive guide.
If you are already a Dovetail user - thanks for stopping by!
We sure hope you’ll stick around.
Before we jump into the alternatives, here’s a quick crash course on Dovetail.
Dovetail is a popular UX research repository. It is a web-based platform that lets you organize research data, make notes, and collaborate with team members.
Dovetail is built on the academic approach of qualitative data analysis.
Some bonus features Dovetail offers are:
Dovetail brings your whole research process to one place. This is really convenient for you or your research team to store and discover insights over time.
The participant management elements of Dovetail are also very handy. You’re able to track who you’ve spoken to over time.
If you prefer an academic approach to building and applying taxonomies, Dovetail has a robust multi-layer taxonomy system.
Dovetail also has a strong community of users who you can turn to with questions or concerns on how to use the product. This can be handy when you hit a roadblock or don’t know the best way to set the product up!
To get to the point: Dovetail is a complex product that will slow down your research process.
Everything from confusing navigation to building a tagging taxonomy before you analyze any data makes Dovetail extremely complicated to use.
It’s also likely to slow down your research process, because you will need to rewatch every user interview (likely multiple times) in order to tag all the data you need.
There is also no room for notes in Dovetail. The only kind of annotation you can do is tagging - which means any notes taken by you or your teammates during the calls end up elsewhere. If you prefer to work with notes rather than tags, you’re also out of luck.
Also horror of horrors, Dovetail now deletes your workspace permanently if you’ve had a free trial version, and choose to not upgrade.
Dovetail is free to use for 14 days. After this, the starting price is $30 per month or $300 per year. Here are some of the limitations of each paid plan you may want to keep in mind:
Starter | $30 / month: While Dovetail’s Starter plan can be handy for you to test out the product unless you do very limited research interviews per month, you will quickly run into the transcription and storage limits as a restriction:
Team | $375 / month: Team plans offer a more generous transcription limit and the ability to keep certain project folders private. However, if you’re storing large numbers of audio and video recordings, the storage limit is something to keep your eye on:
Business | $1,200 / month: Business plans are built for unlimited needs on transcription, storage and more. It’s also built to keep high-strung legal teams happy: you can have different user groups with different permissions, security reviews, and Single Sign-on.
Enterprise | Custom pricing: The Enterprise is handy if you have a ginormous team, HIPAA / auto data deletion requirements, or the need for custom legal contracting/support.
Condens is a close competitor to Dovetail built with nearly the same workflow as them. Consider Condens as ‘Dovetail lite’—although it has the same workflow, it doesn’t have as many features as Dovetail (more on this below).
You can upload calls, and have them transcribed automatically on Condens. You can also tag sections on the transcripts of every call, and review tagged data in a filterable view or an affinity map like “canvas”.
Condens has a slightly more intuitive user interface than Dovetail.
It also offers the following:
Condens and Dovetail are both visually appealing UX Research repository tools. Condens is practically a lite version of Dovetail — both have the same basic workflow, with Dovetail being a more fleshed-out tool.
If you want a slightly easier product to use without some of the bells and whistles of Dovetail (e.g., user-friendly interface), Condens is a good bet.
Condens also makes it easier to share insights with your team (pretty important, we’d say). Instead of requiring users to log in to view insights, you can share them as public links.
Condens wins out when it comes to transcription quality. We tested the same clip (from Forrest Gump 😌) on both applications and Dovetail’s transcripts came up with more errors.
Condens has four pricing plans: Individual, Team, Business, and Enterprise.
Condens offers a great plan for Individual researchers at $15/month. It’s half of Dovetail’s pricing for the Dovetail Starter plan, which allows up to 3 contributors.
However, Dovetail offers unlimited free viewer accounts, while Condens does not.
Condens include unlimited projects, unlimited sharing of findings, and unlimited file storage in all plans. Dovetail limits the number of projects, transcript hours, and storage space depending on the plan.
Condens is significantly cheaper than Dovetail for teams too, offering unlimited storage, projects and access to all analysis features for up to 3 researchers at $190/month. Dovetail offers 10 hours of transcription, and 50 GB storage for teams up to 3 researchers for $375.
Condens Team plan will also provide a stakeholder repository.
However, it does not offer granular permission management, single sign-on (SSO), or data security assessments Dovetail Team plan offers these features as well as EU and USA data hosting options.
The Condens Business plan costs $450/month, compared to the Dovetail Business plan costing $1200/month.
Condens allows up to 5 researchers, unlimited transcription hours, unlimited projects, unlimited sharing of findings, unlimited file storage, and all analysis features. Dovetail’s Business has more limitations, but allows up to 10 contributors.
Unlike the Team plan, Condens Business and Enterprise offers granular permission management, single sign-on (SSO), and data security assessments.
Costing $1200/month, the Condens Enterprise plan allows up to 10 researchers. It offers the same analysis and repository features as the Business plan.
Dovetail meanwhile offers a custom Enterprise solution with quote-based pricing for larger teams.
Unlike Dovetail, Condens does not provide features for data management, like workspace fields, custom vocabulary, charts, and API.
Read More: Tips on repositories from researchers at Google & Razorpay
Automate all the tedious, manual parts of a researcher's job. This is us!
Looppanel is a startup building an AI-powered Research Assistant for UX Researchers.
Instead of relying on tagging taxonomies, the product has been built based on how researchers actually do research—using a discussion guide, notes, and categorical tags.
Calls that are already scheduled on your Google Calendar will automatically show up in the calendar view.
During the call, notes can be taken on the web app or on the Looppanel extension.
Any part of the transcript can be easily turned into a highlight, tagged, and turned into a clip that can be shared with anyone.
As your project takes shape, you can find all your highlights and insights, arranged either by questions or by tags.
Dovetail has a way higher learning curve than Looppanel, while Looppanel does not have the fleshed-out features Dovetail does.
We can compare the two on the basis of pricing and features.
Looppanel wins out when it comes to transcription. We tested the same clip from Forrest Gump 😌and not to brag, but even the sentiment analysis was top-notch.
Looppanel doesn’t offer people-management capabilities that Dovetail does and isn’t built for a very academic approach to research.
Looppanel does not offer a free version, unlike Dovetail. But you get 15 days for free to test it out!
We offer a Pro and a Premium version of the product.
To test Looppanel, you can also conduct fifteen calls on the app for free.
Looppanel will cost about $30/month and offer 10 transcription hours for teams of up to 3 researchers.
Dovetail offers the same, but without the features of live note-taking and Auto-record on Zoom, GMeet or Teams.
Looppanel’s pro plan should easily work for a medium-sized team.
It will cost up to $350 per month ($3500 yearly) for 25 transcription hours monthly.
This is slightly cheaper than Dovetail’s closest corresponding plan (which costs $375).
The Looppanel Business plan offers 120 transcription hours/month, SSO, and priority support for $1000 per month.
Dovetail offers 100 transcription hours monthly for its Business plan, costing a higher price of $1200/month instead.
Both Looppanel and Dovetail offer custom Enterprise pricing plans for larger organizations.
The most grown-up tool on our list, EnjoyHQ has had enough time to grow and flesh out. It has also gotten some exciting additional features after being acquired by UserZoom (which has now been bought by UserTesting.com). The price hikes however, yikes.
For a small team, EnjoyHQ can still be powerful in the beginning.
EnjoyHQ is very easy to use and beginner-friendly as a repository tool.
EnjoyHQ provides a stakeholder repository feature, which allows researchers to create and share interactive reports and dashboards with stakeholders, partners, and clients. Dovetail does not offer this feature, but it allows researchers to share insights via Slack, Atlassian, Notion, or Zapier.
It also integrates with UserTesting. You can easily import data and insights from UserTesting directly into EnjoyHQ and analyze them alongside other sources of feedback. Dovetail doesn’t offer this, but supports other tools like Typeform, SurveyMonkey, and Intercom.
EnjoyHQ’s transcription quality is good, but not as accurate as Dovetail’s.
The starting plan on EnjoyHQ is free with features like unlimited transcription and uploads, video editing features, unlimited research projects and (nearly) any integration your heart desires.
The Grow plan is for teams upto 10 people, while Scale is for packs of 25 seats. Pricing is customized based on team size and requirements, so you’ll have to contact Enjoy’s sales team for more information.
Aurelius prides itself on being a UXR tool created by researchers for researchers.
Much like Dovetail, Aurelius is also suited for after you’ve had your user interview.
While tools like Looppanel and Condens are meant for faster research, Aurelius is more academic in nature.
The transcript generated by Aurelius was more accurate than the one by Dovetail. They could do a better job at the way the transcript looks. Each line of the transcript need not be separate, for example.
Aurelius also requires users to upload separately recorded videos under the “documents” section.
Overall, Aurelius does not add much during the interview process and does not offer basic discussion guides either. Dovetail does a little better in comparison. Aurelius should be considered a post-call tool.
Aurelius offers professional, premium, and enterprise plans, billed yearly.
To test it out, you can also get a 30-day free trial.
Aurelius will cost about $49 a month and offer unlimited stakeholders, storage, projects, and transcription. Dovetail will cost $30 a month in comparison but offer just 10 hours of transcription.
Aurelius Premium works best for smaller in-house teams. The cost would be $199 a month
Dovetail would cost $375 a month, with significantly fewer features, user seats, and transcription hours.
Aurelius Premium could work for larger teams as well! In case your team is large enough to require advanced features such as priority support, penetration testing reports, personalized training, etc. — you might want to look into their Enterprise plan with custom pricing. Dovetail would cost $1200 for 10 users. At this stage, Dovetail’s price against Aurelius is not justified by the relative ease of using it.
The most cleverly named tool by far. Splendid.
Great Question aims to be a one-stop solution for all things research.
They already have solutions for use cases ranging from ReOps to Marketing and design.
We have only approached the tool from the lens of a researcher, since you’re who we write for.
You can start a study based on one of the templates they’ve already provided or start from scratch.
In the planning step, you can decide to offer incentives and add screeners, consent forms, etc.
Over the next steps, you connect your calendar, decide on the incentives, and add screener questions.
Finally, you can create your assets and finish setting up the study.
The assets include landing pages, invites to screener and participation questions, and a discussion guide.
Great Question and Dovetail are both pretty fleshed-out products with decent learning curves.
Great Question might get overwhelming for researchers along the way.
The tool does try to do A LOT at once, which can be off-putting.
We can compare the two on the basis of pricing and features.
As of writing this article, Great Question is still working on the transcript for our Forrest Gump clip 🤔.
Great Question is by far the most comprehensive tool to set up your interview.
Neither Great Question nor Dovetail offers automatic recording for your interviews. Uploading screen recordings of your interviews can be inconvenient.
Overall, Dovetail has better analysis features and works as a great post-interview tool. Great Question works as a significantly better pre-interview tool.
Great Question offers a decent free version, and four priced plans. The pricing is per seat, unlike Dovetail’s plans.
Great Question’s free plan is good for solo researchers, allowing 5 interview hours monthly, with 3GB storage and unlimited viewers.
It also offers the option of unlimited studies, which is great for freelancers with multiple clients.
Teams of up to 4 researchers can go for Great Question’s Pro Plan. Each seat costs $15 monthly, with 10 transcription hours and 50 GB storage.
Additionally, you also get the option of rolling and round-robin interview scheduling, with highlight reels to share with stakeholders, and incentives for customers.
Dovetail’s Team plan for teams up to 5 researchers meanwhile costs $375 monthly, with 25 transcription hours. Despite the higher price, you don’t get any of the interview scheduling or planning features that Great Question offers.
The Team plan is a great option allowing for unlimited seat options, with each seat costing $35 monthly. It offers 30 interview hours monthly, unlimited viewers, focus groups and study/email templates.
The Scale plan also allows unlimited seats at $85/month, offering custom consent and NDA forms, branding, Qualtrics integration, and concierge repository migration with 65 interview hours monthly.
Larger teams can also explore the Custom plan with custom transcription hour requirements and more options.
For a team of 10 users, Dovetail would cost $900 and offer unlimited transcription.
Looppanel automatically records your calls, transcribes them, and centralizes all your research data in one place
