Choosing a Survey Tool for Pricing and Packaging Research
This is a living doc that will evolve as community members add fresh perspective.
SaaS Pricing is hard. PricingSaaS is your cheat code.
Monitor competitors, track real-time benchmarks, discover new strategies, and more.
There are several ways to go about pricing and packaging research, depending on your desired output, and the methodologies you want to use to get there.
With that in mind, this doc is a collection of shared experiences from the GBB Community, who have shared their experiences with some of the usual suspects.
Lets start things off with the biggest player in the game — Qualtrics.
Qualtrics
Pros
Widely considered the best multi-use platform, with lots of flexibility.
Anyone can pump panel into their platform since they’re the market leader.
Cons
Annoying sales process — they’ll try to upsell you on platform, panel, and survey building/programming. Can be challenging to get to a clear “cost per complete.”
Pricing structure — TLDR, Qualtrics is expensive. They charge based on users and responses, with packages starting at 5 users and 5,000 responses.
If you’re looking to do conjoint analysis, depending on the complexity, you may want to look elsewhere since Qualtrics has very basic conjoint tools.
Support is all about using the tool, and not particularly helpful. You will get tossed to FAQ often.
Summary: Likely the best option, but typically overpriced. That said, they will heavily discount if you push them. Since they’re widely considered the market leader, and most customers aren’t looking for much complexity, their support function is pretty basic, and lacks strategic guidance.
QuestionPro
Pros
Great UI/UX — the tool adapts with parameters and sets guidance in app
Direct connection to QP's panel
Services team is available 24/7 to assist in setting up questions
Cons
Same pricing structure as Qualtrics, but cheaper per user and per response
Not much experience using their survey tool (mainly managed panel)
Questionable panel (not the best, but not the worst)
Summary: Mixed feedback on their survey tool and panel, but if cost is a constraint, they’re a solid alternative to Qualtrics.
SawTooth
Pros
Arguably the most robust conjoint platform
Easy setup and configuration
Very legit analytics tools
Simulator capabilities are best in class
Can redirect Qualtrics to Sawtooth for conjoint and redirect back to Qualtrics (lots of Sawtooth customers do this).
Support team is practically consulting-lite — very knowledageble about their own tool but also know a ton about choice-based survey methods and can offer ideas in tricky situations.
Solid value for the price
Cons
Requires lots of coding
Clunky for MaxDiff and Van Westendorp
To unlock Gabor Granger, Relative Preference, etc. you need the desktop version which is only available on windows
Conjointly
Pros
Tool can save and create multiple scenarios to compare at once
Solid simulator depth like Sawtooth
Ability to collaborate with your team on surveys and share with clients is on par with Qualtrics
Really solid customer support
Solid value for the money
Cons
UI isn’t on par with Qualtrics
 | A guest post by
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I'd add two things to the above - (1) while Qualtrics' standard support isn't great for complex questions, it is very easy to get ahold of someone (they'll often call you within minutes) and their online documentation is incredibly robust and can answer ~95% of simple questions and (2) In my experience, the QuestionPro programming team makes numerous typos and survey logic errors so the QA process ends up taking far longer to get a survey live compared to just doing it yourself via Qualtrics or another tool.
I recently switched from sawtooth to QuestionPro. Latest web iteration of sawtooth no longer has van westendorp.
QuestionPro sales process was pretty simple, the survey creation is decent, though maxdiff could have a few more options for optimizing rounds based on attribut qty, etc.
Sawtooth does this.
I’ll let you know how it goes, two surveys headed out over the next couple of weeks.