If your research isn’t systematically organized, you will end up scrambling for insights every time someone needs them. You might even end up repeating research projects. Thrilling.
A UX Research Repository is a one-stop solution for UX researchers to keep the data, notes and insights of past and present projects organized in one location. These can be accessed by your teams to democratize research in your organization.
Before we jump into the UX Research repository tools, here are the four criteria you should use to assess them.
Psst! here's an in-depth guide to building a research repository!
A repository is usually most helpful if you can also use it to analyze your data. Before choosing a UX research repository platform, you should check whether the tool of your choice offers:
UX research insights matter only if the people in your organization can make decisions based on them. The more such people, the stronger your research! Any repository you choose should enable you to bring stakeholders into research studies and let them view user clips or insight reports without restrictions.
If a PM wants to view a research report, they shouldn’t have to jump through 3 admin hoops to access it. They won’t bother and your repository will be a bust. It may still be helpful for you to find insights in, but your ability to evangelize and democratize research will be severely limited.
Make sure the price is justified for the value your team will get out of the UX research repository. Although it might make sense for Facebook to invest in a repository made of gold, a 2 person research team may want to stick to more budget-friendly options.
Another thing to consider is the integration of tools with your UX repository. These integrations are possible “natively” (the company has a direct integration with another software) or via integration tools like Zapier which you have to pay for separately.
Integrations can be a powerful way for you to bring efficiency to your workflow. For example, if your UX repository tool automatically jumps in to record your Zoom-based user interviews (*cough*, we know of one), it’ll make it that much easier for you to ensure that all your research interviews are stored in the same place.
💡 Looking for UX research repository examples? We asked top researchers at Google and Razorpay for their advice on repositories - check it out here!
Looppanel is a UX Research repository that automatically records your user interviews, provides highly accurate transcripts, enables collaborative note-taking during your calls, and makes analysis oh-so-easy.
Looppanel has robust analysis features that help you skip the step of copy-pasting data into Miro, without making life 10x more complicated with complex tagging taxonomies.
Looppanel’s analysis feature automatically aggregates all your notes across calls to a single view. You can see all your notes by the questions they answered or by the tag you assigned to them.
Looppanel is built to help you bring stakeholders into the research process with ease. All the sharing features in Looppanel are free, starting from bringing in stakeholders to take notes live during user interviews, to watching clips (which you can embed directly into Jira for your engineers to watch) or reviewing insight reports.
We built Looppanel for teams with tight budgets, tighter deadlines, and big goals 🤩.
You get 15 days for free to test us out (more if we become good friends tbh). If you choose to move to a paid plan, there are four options with different transcription limits:
1. Solo plan for solo researchers who want to analyze 10x faster. The Solo plan starts at $30 per user per month, and has:
2. Teams plan for research teams who want to collaborate & build a repository. Teams plan starts at $300 per month, and has everything in Solo, plus:
3. Business plan for larger organizations with custom legal requirements. The Business plan starts at $1,000/month, and comes with everything in Teams, plus:
4. Enterprise plan for enterprises who need extra support & security. The Enterprise plan comes with everything in Business, plus:
Talk to us here about building a custom Enterprise plan.
Looppanel plugs and plays with Zoom, GMeet and Teams so your user interviews can be automatically recorded for you. You and your team can also take time-stamped notes live during interviews so it’s easy to find that ah-mazing quote after the call ends.
We also let you embed video snippets and reports across tools where your team lives—Jira, Confluence, Notion. If an engineer needs to see a video of users struggling with a bug, simply embed the video link in Jira and let them watch it there itself.
EnjoyHQ is one of the oldest repository tools on the market. EnjoyHQ was bought by UserZoom two years ago (which has now been bought by UserTesting.com—I know, hard to keep up). With the acquisition came some added integrations, and painful price hikes.
For a small team EnjoyHQ can still be powerful in the beginning.
EnjoyHQ’s collaborative property helps teams centralize, organise and share report insights across their organisation.
Enjoy comes with two types of licences—Admin and Collaborator.
Admin users can access all of Enjoy’s functionality. Collaborators have access to limited functionality.
Collaborators are not allowed to:
Both admin and collaborator licences are paid—these are the licences you’d allocate amongst your research team or stakeholders who conduct a lot of research.
The good news: you can share documents or summaries of research publicly with your broader organization for free.
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.
Grow and Scale: Grow plan is for teams upto 10 people, while Scale is for packs of 25 seats. Contact Enjoy’s sales team for more information on pricing.
One of Enjoy’s greatest strengths is their strong suite of native integrations. Instead of paying for a third-party tool (such as Zapier), you cut costs by integrating other tools with EnjoyHQ directly.
If your team wants to centralize data across the company from tools like Jira, Google PlayStore, Salesforce, Slack, and more, Enjoy may be the right fit for you.
Check the comprehensive list of integrations offered by EnjoyHQ here.
Dovetail stores feedback, insights and organises all your user research in one place. It has unlimited storage capacity (for Business and Entreprise plans) to record interviews and store files, notes, photos and reports of all types.
You can upload call recordings into Dovetail and get transcripts in 28 languages, tag transcripts with themes, and review data across calls in a tabular or white-board view.
You can collaborate with multiple users and provide access to research insights your broader team.
Dovetail also lets you onboard unlimited viewers. These viewers can read and comment on your projects but do not have editing permissions. This is a powerful feature to evangelize research across the organization, allowing anyone to come in and search for the insights they need.
You can also tag users in Dovetail, helping you draw their attention to the data point or insight that’s most relevant to them. Another handy way to draw your team’s attention to relevant research insights.
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.
Dovetail’s integrations allow you to import and export data easily. Integrations with Google Drive and SharePoint let you easily import call recordings or notes, while integrations with Slack, Jira, Notion and Confluence allow you to share findings with your team where they live.
Integrations beyond the basics with tools like Google Sheets, Calendly, or TypeForm are only possible via Zapier. Zapier is a separate tool that can create integrations between your platforms. That does mean that you would have to pay for Zapier as well (this can be pricey).
Check out more details on the integrations here.
Condens is a research repository that keeps notes, recordings, images and files in one place.
It automatically transcribes the audio and video clips you upload (transcription available in many languages). It also lets you tag your notes and files as a way to organise your data. You can add multiple tags. Condens will also use AI to suggest some tags automatically!
To magnify the impact of your research, it is crucial to be able to share your research findings with the people in your team. With Condens you can share research reports with stakeholders across your team. You can embed video clips, images and audio in your reports and share them with a simple link so your stakeholders can view your findings without the added friction of having to log in.
To check whether the platform serves your needs you can try any plan for free for up to 15 days. After that, you need to pay an amount of $15 per month or $165 per year (if you are an individual researcher).
Individual | $15 / month: You can add 1 researcher for $15 a month, but the cost goes up if you add more researchers. With this, it limits the ability to automatically transcribe research interviews for a maximum of 12 hours every month, though this plan fits those who wish to conduct a restricted number of research interviews. It also lets you collaborate with the your research team for research notes and findings in real-time. A few other limitations are listed below
Team | $190 / month: Team plan scale into hundreds or thousands of dollars per year depending on your needs. With $190 per month you can add just 3 researchers and increasing the number of researchers scales up the cost. In addition, it restricts you to conducting research interviews for up to 50 hours per month. You can store as many audio and video recordings as you'd want without running out of space. Other limitations include
Business | $450 / month: Pricing for the Business plan begins at $450 per month, and it allows you to add a minimum of 5 study research members. Like other plans, you can add more researchers as needed, although this might get expensive. However, this comes with additional benefits such as the ability to transcribe unlimited interviews, work on a large number of projects and store files of any size and format.
Enterprise | $1,200/month: Enterprise is for large organizations requiring a dedicated customer management, stakeholder collaboration or automated data deletion feature. It also includes:
Check out the detailed price here!
Below is a list of integrations offered by Condens to help you centralize your data:
If Condens doesn’t already integrate with a tool you use, you can set up an integration via Zapier. See all Zapier integrations here (once again, comes with a separate added cost).
Aurelius lets you collect, organize, and analyze qualitative research data.
An interesting feature of Aurelius is all three tiered subscriptions include unlimited data storage space, unlimited users and unlimited projects.
Aurelius offers unlimited users on all plans; meaning you can invite any number of users from your team with no extra charge and work on an unlimited number of projects. However, you can restrict who can view your project by opting Read Only option feature and allow access to specific projects to specific users. This advanced permission feature is only available for the Enterprise plan.
Aurelius offers subscriptions for individual and agency researchers for $49 per month, in-house UX and product teams for $199 per month and enterprises need to contact them to customize the price.
To assist you in making a more informed decision, we have mentioned some of the limits of each plan below.
Professional | $49 / month: Jira and Zapier integrations are not offered in the Professional plan, but it does include transcription in over 180 languages, tagging options, and an analysis board where you can view tags, drag and drop notes, and create themes.
Premium | $199 / month: Although Jira integration is not accessible under Premium but it enable Zapier integration free of cost. Other limitations to consider before selecting Premium include no IP whitelisting, no customised onboarding, and no single sign-on.
Enterprise: The enterprise package is designed for large organisations that require custom onboarding, IP whitelisting for added security, and advanced permissions to limit who may see and access your individual projects.
Read more on Aurelius subscription here.
Aurelius doesn’t offer any native integration. They integrate with Zoom, Jira and other tech stack tools via Zapier. If you don’t have a Zapier account, you can sign up for free and connect Zapier to Aurelius. Their Zapier integration is available only to Premium and Enterprise plans.
Notion is an all-inclusive workspace from note-making to project management. You can list your tasks, create a product roadmap and even design repositories.
Although Notion isn’t a UX research repository tool per se, it can be repurposed for this use case. If your team already lives in Notion, this may be a good bet.
Of course, since it isn’t a research repository tool, it also comes with some limitations—no transcription capabilities, make-shift tagging, and no real in-built analysis space.
Notion also has excellent collaborative features, allowing an unlimited number of people to work together in real-time, comment on products or ongoing projects and provide feedback. You can share your workspace with your team and modify teamspace setting to control who can edit or view.
Also, you can share a page with your client even if they don’t use Notion, you just need to share the URL (enable Share from the Share menu) and they can view the page but won’t be able to make edit and comment on it.
If your team already works in Notion, it’s handy to be able to tag them on specific insights or feedback you want them to review.
Individuals can use Notion for free and get access to amazing features like collaborative workspace, basic page analytics, and integration with tools like Github, Slack and more.
The free version is a good fit to store and organize your research data at the initial stage of using it as a repository (also ideal for students, educators and personal use). You can plan, create, organize and share your work with multiple teams along with creating dedicated areas for team space where people can join and work together.
The free version limits the number of users you want to invite. It lets you invite up to 10 clients, upload files up to 5 MB, have no control over team space permission and Single Sign-On among others.
In addition to the free version, Notion features a three-tiered subscription model. Here are a few limitations for each paid plan that you should consider when making decisions.
Notion integrates with SaaS tools including GitHub, GitLab, Zoom and more. All Notion’s integrations are built through Notion’s API and these are free to use. But their partners may charge a service fee for using their integrations.
Notion has partnerships with services like Typoform, Zapier and Automate.io. You can use these to connect with their integrations to your workspace via OAuth.
If you are still unable to decide which UX research repository to choose, Looppanel is the best bet. Sign up for free now.
Looppanel automatically records your calls, transcribes them, and centralizes all your research data in one place
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