19 Best User Research Tools In 2023

UserTesting is a customer insights platform for gathering user feedback from digital and in-person experiences. UserTesting has an online community of testers you can tap into according to demographic categories you set yourself (age, gender, location, etc.). The software automatically generates highlight reels to help uncover patterns from numerous testing sessions. 

UserTesting is the best UX research tool with a customer journey mapping feature to understand how customers use your website, product, or mobile app. You can use UserTesting to identify points of frustration that could increase churn rate. UserTesting lets you scrutinize user behavior to uncover existing customer needs you can address in product updates.

UserTesting integrates with other tools like Google Analytics, Survey Monkey, Adobe XD, and Google Calendar.  

UserTesting provides pricing upon request. 

Survicate is an online survey tool for measuring NPS, CSAT, CES, and other customer service aspects. It has customizable surveys that allow you to change the colors, fonts, and layouts and brand your survey to make it unique. You can use Survicate to automate surveys using customer behaviors like exit intents, length of website visits, and website scrolling speed. 

Survicate has a free forever plan with limited features for up to 25 responses per month, while the pricing for the paid plans starts at $65/month/up to 250 survey responses.

Hotjar helps you understand how users experience your website. It has live playbacks of user movement to monitor clicks, scrolls, and mouse cursor pathways. It can even determine where “rage clicks” happen, usually marked by multiple high-pressure clicks in one area. Hotjar has a survey tool for creating targeted surveys for users and members of online communities to understand your users better, and receive ideas and suggestions. Hotjar can also create a user suggestions box to get direct customer feedback about your website, mobile app, or product. 

Hotjar is the best user research tool for heat maps. Hotjar's heatmaps let you see where users click, move, and scroll while using your website to identify the most used features. It lets you compare user behavior before and after releasing changes to assess their impact. You can also use Hotjar to identify seldom-used features to improve or replace them with better options.  

Hotjar integrates with tools like Google Optimize, Segment, Optimizely, and Omniconvert. You can connect Hotjar to a paid Zapier account to access more premium apps. 

Hotjar has a free forever plan with limited features, while the pricing for paid plans starts at $31/month/up to 30,000 sessions. Hotjar offers a free 15-day trial of their paid plans. 

Userlytics is a usability testing platform with a global participant panel for testing your product or app. Userlytics has a custom screener for targeting a specific demographic or customer community during testing. It has UX reports for visualizing user test results, including actionable insights for improving customer experience. 

Userlytics is the best user research tool with a dedicated QA team to make sure that you have the quality results you need. With the help of Userlytics' QA team, you can save time because you don't have to scrub test results. This can also help weed out unqualified respondents that might compromise the integrity of test results. 

Userlytics pricing starts at $499/month and offers a free demo upon request. 

Lucky Orange is a user research tool with heat maps to track customer engagement with your website. You can record customer sessions to know how customers use your website—where they are slicking, hovering, and getting stuck. It has live chat to touch base with customers based on page behavior or traffic segmentation. 

Lucky Orange is the best user research tool for fleshing out comprehensive visitor profiles. Visitor profiles keep track of customer interactions across their history with your product as well as basic data like chat logs, key events, pages viewed, when they were last online, and what (if anything) they bought. 

Lucky Orange has a free version with limited features, while the pricing for paid plans starts at $18/month/account. They offer a 7-day free trial of their paid plans. 

BetaTesting is a user research software for customer engagement data and user feedback on iOS and Android apps. You can use BetaTesting to conduct group tests by scheduling multiple users simultaneously. This UX research software has an in-app bug submission feature so participants can report errors and help you improve your tests.

BetaTesting offers access to a worldwide tester network to get feedback from real users in their native environments. They have a network of more than 350,000 testers and allow for targeting of a specific demographic like age, gender, location, education, or tech experience. BetaTesting's screening survey tool lets you refine your targeting by only admitting testers who passed pre-set qualifications. 

BetaTesting pricing starts at $650/month for up to 4 tests per year.

Maze is a product research platform for testing new product concepts or testing the ease-of-use for existing ones. You can use the platform to test product prototypes for usability and identify areas where you need to improve. Maze lets you use a custom domain URL to share tests and results quickly with users and product design team members.

Maze is the best user research software with a 5 Second Test feature for gauging first impressions of advertising materials. You can use this feature to see how your test audience reacts to your advertisement and make changes based on your observations. You can use this test to learn how your audience views your company to see if your advertising materials align with your branding.

Maze integrates with tools like InVision, Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD. 

Maze has a free forever plan with limited features for one user, while the pricing for paid plans starts at $75/month/up to 3 users. 

Empathetic is user research software for getting insights from customers. It acts as the central repository of research data where product teams can store video files and audio transcriptions of user interviews. This customer intelligence platform lets you send micro surveys that participants can quickly finish to increase response rates. 

Empathetic is the best UX research tool with a participant management feature for finding and recruiting research participants. This platform can add tags to research participant profiles to segment participants in groups. 

You can send notifications to targeted participants to increase survey participation rate. 

Empathetic provides pricing details and a free demo upon request. 

LogRocket is a frontend monitoring and product analytics software. This product analytics platform has a session replay feature for reproducing issues encountered during user sessions. You can use it to monitor frontend performance issues like page load times, browser crashes, or component rendering to see how they affect user engagement and conversion rates. 

LogRocket has a free forever plan for up to 1,000 sessions. Pricing for the paid versions starts at $99/month/for up to 10,000 sessions. LogRocket offers a 14-day free trial. 

EthOS is a UX research tool for gathering pictures, videos, and audio data from your customers as they use your products in real time. It has notifications (email and push) to alert respondents to new surveys or testing opportunities. EthOS supports unlimited video length so it’s great for products that take more than a few minutes at a time to explore.

EthOS has a great live chat interview feature for real-time user conversations. EthOS lets you ask follow-up questions based on user activity in a direct messaging window. This user research software lets you conduct individual chat sessions or focused group discussions that can include multiple participants. 

EthOS provides pricing details and a demo upon request.