UserTesting is a popular UX research tool used by user researchers to gather valuable insights into user experiences.
Each tool comes with its own set of pros and cons. So, it's important to consider alternatives.
In this article, we'll introduce you to some of the top UserTesting alternatives available in 2023, helping you make an informed choice for your user research needs.
Let’s get going!
UserTesting is a user research platform that allows businesses to get feedback on their products and services from real users. It offers a variety of testing methods, including unmoderated and moderated tests, as well as surveys and polls.
UserTesting is popular for it’s ease of use. It is also speedy at providing results!
While UserTesting is a powerful user research platform, it’s drawbacks may make it unsuitable for certain users. Here are some of its limitations, along with why you might want to look for UserTesting alternatives:
We’ve put together a few alternatives just so that you can see what’s out there, especially if UserTesting isn’t working out for you anymore.
Looppanel is an excellent alternative to UserTesting, offering seamless integration with popular video conferencing platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams. It provides high-quality transcripts and AI-generated notes, making your research process more efficient.
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?
Overall, Looppanel makes discovering & sharing insights 5x faster.
Don’t believe us? Ask our customers
Looppanel was built for teams with smaller budgets tackling large-scale challenges.
You can use our free trial subscription plan to test it out. All our plans come with a free 15-day trial, so you can try the product before you commit to a paid subscription.
Looppanel offers four pricing plans, once your free trial is over: Starter, Teams, Business, and Enterprise.
Try Looppanel free for 15 days
Looppanel and UserTesting are both popular UX research platforms, but they have some key differences.
Userlytics is an all-in-one platform for UX researchers, supporting various types of tests, including moderated and unmoderated studies. It offers features like sentiment analysis and automatic AI analysis of calls as well as quantitative surveys in more than 20 languages.
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 will get 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 and 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:
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:
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.
Integration: Userlytics offers more integrations than UserTesting, including Adobe XD, Axure, Figma, Framer, InVision, and Sketch prototypes. UserTesting primarily integrates with User Interviews.
Testing Method: UserTesting primarily focuses on unmoderated and moderated testing while, based on your needs, Userlytics lets you use different testing methods like
Recruiting participants: Once again, Userlytics comes with a participant panel, which UserTesting does not. How you source participants may help you decide which product is a better fit for you.
Pricing: Userlytics and UserTesting both offer a variety of pricing plans, so it is important to compare the plans carefully to determine which one is right for your needs.
Userbrain is an unmoderated testing platform that allows you to get feedback on your product from a pool of test participants at an affordable cost. It is a good option for businesses and individuals who are looking for a quick and easy way to get unmoderated feedback on their products, without breaking the bank.
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:
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.
Lookback as a user research tool 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.
While we're on the subject, here's a guide on recruiting users for usability testing and interviews.
Lookback offers four pricing plans:
Freelance Plan: The Freelance plan is ideal for solo researchers and freelancers who need to conduct a limited number of user research sessions each year. This plan includes 10, 20, or 40 sessions per year, depending on your needs.
Team Plan: The Team plan is ideal for small teams who need to collaborate on user research projects. This plan includes 100 or 150 sessions per year, depending on your needs, as well as unlimited collaborators. Some of the features of the Team plan are:
Insights Hub Plan: The Insights Hub plan is ideal for medium to large teams who need more sessions and features. This plan includes 300 or 500 sessions per year, depending on your needs, as well as security self-assess and priority support. The features of this plan include:
Enterprise Plan: The Enterprise plan is ideal for large organizations who need unlimited sessions and observers, as well as a dedicated CSM.
All Lookback plans include:
To compare plans and features, visit the Lookback pricing page.
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 pros. This consolidates two parts of the workflow (recruiting and running tests), instead of using separate products for each with Lookback.
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 Zoom or Google Meet with our budget-friendly and very reliable Looppanel. By integrating, you get high-quality transcripts with automatic sentiment analysis and auto-generated AI-powered notes, making your job 10x easier.
Here are the detailed pricing tag of each with some features or restrictions listed below:
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 which means 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:
Business | $219.92 / per user / month: The Business plan has more robust features which include
Enterprise | Contact sales team: With the Enterprise plan, which is dedicated to large organisations, you can avail features like
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.
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:
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 a pain).
Free: Signing up with the free version provides you with
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
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
Enterprise: Suitable for organizations with very large teams that require advanced security and support.
Zoom and Google Meet by far are the most user-friendly and popular video conferencing tools for conducting remote research. Moreover, Zoom offers high-quality video and audio streams whereas on UserTesting 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, AI-generated notes, analysis features), Looppanel is for you.
Looppanel automatically records your calls, transcribes them, and centralizes all your research data in one place
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