11 Best Product Research Tools in 2025: Preferred by Product Teams

Great products start with great research. 

But here’s the catch: The right tools can make or break your efforts. 

A solid product research tool doesn’t just gather data; it helps you understand user needs in-depth, spot gaps in user experiences, and validate ideas before committing resources.

With countless tools available, selecting the right one ensures you focus on what truly matters—delivering a product your users will love.

In this blog, we’ll guide you through the essentials of product research and explore the top tools to elevate your research process.

What are product research tools?

Product research tools help businesses, entrepreneurs, and product managers gather and analyze data about market opportunities, customer needs, competitor offerings, and product viability. These tools provide insights that inform product development decisions, validate ideas, and identify profitable niches before significant resources are invested.

The primary capabilities include:

• Market trend analysis and demand forecasting
• Competitor product tracking and pricing monitoring
• Customer review and sentiment analysis
• Keyword research and search volume data
• Sales estimates and profitability calculators

Top 7 Product research tools – Quick glimpse

• VWO
• Hotjar
• Maze
• UserTesting
• Productboard
• Qualtrics
• Zendesk

Top product research tools – Comparison

Tool Name	Key Features	Free Trial	Starting Price
VWO	• Heatmaps, session recordings, funnels, and on-page surveys • A/B, multivariate, and split URL testing • AI-generated survey questions and summarized insights • Experience Score to quantify user engagement	30-day all-inclusive free trial	• VWO Insights: $139/month (billed annually) • VWO Testing: $275/month (billed annually)
Hotjar	• Heatmaps • Session recordings • Surveys (NPS, CSAT) • Real-time feedback widget	15-day free trial	Pricing available upon request
Maze	• Usability testing • Surveys and feedback collection • Diary studies • Five-second tests	30-day free trial	$99/month
UserTesting	• Real-time usability testing • Video feedback • Targeted participant selection and live interviews • Sentiment analysis	No free trial	Pricing available on request
Zendesk	• Ticketing system • Multi-channel feedback collection • Help desk automation • Analytics and reporting	15-day free trial	$55/agent/month
Qualtrics	• Advanced survey builder • Supports in concept testing • Robust reporting and visualization tools • Concept and UX testing • Pricing research	30-day free trial	Pricing available on request
Productboard	• AI Centralized feedback management • Interactive and customizable roadmap planning • Data-driven feature prioritization frameworks	15-day free trial	$19/user/month

Best 7 Product research tools for product teams – A detailed review

1. VWO 

VWO is an all-in-one conversion rate optimization platform that helps businesses optimize their websites and apps, driving better user experiences through data-driven decisions. It facilitates product research by enabling businesses to analyze user behavior, test hypotheses, and optimize their digital experiences. 

Product teams can discover insights, validate product ideas, and refine features to align with user needs and expectations, ensuring informed decision-making throughout the product lifecycle.

Capabilities

1. VWO Insights

VWO Insights equips you with powerful tools to understand user behavior and optimize your product. The features are as follows:

• Heatmaps: Watch how visitors interact with your website, highlighting clicks, scrolls, and engagement patterns. They identify underperforming elements—like low-click buttons or hidden content—and track dynamic actions, such as pop-up closures. With segment-level insights, product teams can pinpoint areas for feature improvement and inform research decisions.

• Session recordings: Session recordings provide a detailed view of user interactions, uncovering issues like rage and dead clicks. With custom filters and flexible sampling, you can track sessions by funnel drop-offs or peak events. These insights drive user experience improvements and inform product refinement.

• Funnels: Track user journeys from landing page to conversion to pinpoint drop-off points. Funnel analysis highlights critical areas for product research, aiding in optimization. Use advanced segmentation and observations to refine reports and enhance conversion rates.

• On-page surveys: Collect visitor feedback with goal-based AI-generated questions and ensure hassle-free analysis with AI-summarized survey reports. Segment responses for deeper insights into specific visitor groups. Surveys provide direct feedback on pain points, feature requests, and satisfaction. Use these insights to align product development with customer needs.

2. VWO Testing

With VWO Testing, you can experiment with various product features, layouts, and design elements to optimize your web and app performance. VWO’s testing capabilities include:

• Web testing: Test design elements and content through A/B, multivariate, and Split URL testing to determine if adjustments drive conversion improvements. Select your test audience using parameters like visitor type, OS, behavioral data, and third-party sources, or apply logical operators such as AND/OR for more precise audience segmentation.

• Mobile app testing: Optimize mobile experiences across iOS and Android with A/B testing on app versions, focusing on performance, usability, and responsiveness. No coding required, with easy setup and plug-and-play SDKs for high performance. Target specific audiences and allocate traffic accurately to refine features like onboarding, search, and in-app purchases.

• Server-side testing: This capability helps run complex tests on the back end, from pricing strategies to subscription flows, without disrupting the user experience. Gradually roll out features using feature flags to control deployment to specific audiences, enabling targeted testing and optimized performance.

By combining VWO Insights and VWO Testing, businesses not only gain valuable insights into user behavior but also test and implement product changes based on those insights. Start your free trial today and improve your product’s performance!

Watch this webinar to explore how in-app experiments can boost user engagement and accelerate product growth.

Pricing and free trial:

Pricing	Free trial
• VWO Insights starts at $139/month (billed annually)  • VWO Testing starts at $275/month (billed annually)	VWO offers a 30-day, all-inclusive free trial

Testimonial:

VWO is a highly user-friendly and economical tool. It offers an intuitive user interface. It makes it easy to run experiments, gather customer insights, check for leakages in the sales funnels, look at customer journeys using recordings, and conduct usability tests. The ease of segmenting the audience while creating ‘control’ and ‘variation’ is also something that makes VWO stand out.

Loef Kleinmeijer
Team Lead Conversion & CRO Consultant at ISM eCompany 

2. Hotjar 

Hotjar is a powerful qualitative user behavior and feedback tool designed to help businesses understand how users interact with a website. By providing insights through heatmaps, session recordings, and surveys, it enables teams to gain a deeper understanding of user actions and make informed, user-centric decisions throughout the product development lifecycle

Features

1. Heatmaps: Hotjar provides heatmaps that help identify which elements drive engagement and where users tend to bounce, offering valuable insights for product optimization.
2. Session recordings: You can observe individual user journeys in detail. You can track clicks, time spent on pages, and identify any usability issues that might cause frustration or abandonment.
3. Surveys: Hotjar enables you to collect user feedback through in-product surveys. Whether you ask open-ended questions or use structured rating polls (like NPS or CSAT), you can gain direct insights into how users perceive your product and identify areas for improvement based on their feedback.
4. Feedback widget: The feedback widget offers real-time feedback from users, allowing you to gather insights about their thoughts and feelings while interacting with your product. This context-specific feedback helps inform product decisions and enhances the user experience by identifying opportunities.

Pricing and free trial:

Pricing	Free trial
Observe: Heatmaps and recordings  Ask: Surveys and feedback    Engage: User interviews  (Pricing is available upon request)	Hotjar offers a 15-day free trial

3. Maze 

Maze is a usability testing platform that simplifies research by seamlessly recruiting participants and analyzing user insights to drive business decisions. Product teams can continuously validate ideas, test prototypes, and gather real-time feedback, ensuring that product decisions are always grounded in user insights.

Features 

1. Usability testing: Maze allows you to run usability tests on your product or prototype, helping you evaluate its usability and identify areas of improvement. You can record participants’ actions and interactions to understand how they navigate through your product.
2. Surveys and feedback: You can gather direct feedback from your target users through surveys, helping you understand their preferences and pain points, which can guide the development of your product.
3. Diary studies: Maze enables the collection of longitudinal data through diary studies, where users report their experiences with your product over time. This helps gather ‘in-the-moment’ insights in a real-life context.
4. Five-second tests: Maze offers five-second tests to quickly assess how well users can understand your product or feature in a short amount of time, helping you validate designs and features early on.

Pricing and free trial:

Pricing	Free trial
• Free Plan: Limited features for small teams or individual users  • Starter Plan: $99/month  • Organization Plan: Custom pricing, tailored for larger organizations	30-day free trial

A customer experience as per G2 reviews: 

Maze helps us to accurately validate ideas and ensure feedback is collected on time. We get insights that can be actionable from Maze, ensuring that the tasks we conduct are successful. We get an intuitive design from the app, optimizing the user paths for easy management. The testing process is automated and consistent.

Marledvuka L.
Field Operations Manager

4. User Testing 

UserTesting is a user experience (UX) research and usability testing tool. It helps organizations gather qualitative and quantitative insights into how users interact with their websites, mobile apps, prototypes, or digital products. It helps teams make better decisions throughout the product lifecycle.

Features 

• Usability testing: This feature allows teams to observe users in real-time as they navigate through websites, mobile apps, or prototypes, helping identify design flaws and usability issues. 
• Video feedback: It facilitates video recordings of user interactions, allowing teams to observe user behavior and gather qualitative insights directly from the source.
• Targeted participant selection: This feature ensures feedback comes from relevant audiences, filtered by demographics, behavior, or preferences, enabling validation of product-market fit. For deeper insights, the live conversations feature provides one-on-one interviews where follow-up questions can help in discovering nuanced feedback.
• Sentiment analysis: It evaluates emotional responses, highlighting areas of most clicks or frustration to guide priority improvements. 

Pricing and free trial:

Pricing	Free trial
• UserTesting offers three plans: Essentials, Advanced, and Ultimate • For detailed pricing and the best fit, contact UserTesting	UserTesting does not offer a free trial

5. Zendesk 

Zendesk is a customer service and customer relationship management (CRM) tool designed to help businesses manage and improve their interactions with customers. Zendesk can help in product research by leveraging its customer interaction and feedback tools to gain insights into user behavior, preferences, and pain points. 

Features:

• Ticketing system: The ticketing system organizes customer inquiries by logging, tracking, and prioritizing support requests. This feature helps product researchers identify common issues and feedback trends from customers, allowing for targeted improvements in product offerings.
• Multi-channel support: Gather feedback from multiple touchpoints such as email, chat, phone, and social media, simplifying the data collection process.
• Help desk automation: Automation features streamline repetitive tasks, freeing up support agents to focus on more complex inquiries. For product research, this means faster resolution times and enhanced data collection on customer interactions, which can be analyzed for insights into product performance
• Analytics and reporting: Zendesk provides powerful analytics tools that allow businesses to track key metrics related to customer support performance. These analytics can reveal patterns in customer feedback and help identify areas for product improvement or new feature development.

Pricing and free trial:

Pricing	Free trial
For Service: • Team – $55/agent/month • Growth – $89/agent/month • Professional – $115/agent/month • Enterprise – Contact sales For Sales: • Team – $19/agent/month • Growth – $55/agent/month • Professional – $115/agent/month	15-day free trial

A customer experience as per G2 reviews: 

Zendesk has truly simplified our customer support journey. The clean and straightforward interface made it a breeze to navigate through customer tickets. The automation features saved us heaps of time by handling routine tasks, allowing our team to focus on more complex customer issues. Plus, the collaborative tools made teamwork smoother than ever, ensuring everyone is on the same page.

Amir S.
Software Engineer

6. Qualtrics 

Qualtrics is an experience management platform that specializes in market research and user experience insights. It serves as a comprehensive tool for conducting product research by providing a suite of features designed to facilitate effective data collection, analysis, and reporting.

Features 

1. Survey builder: It offers a powerful survey builder with customizable templates and advanced question types, allowing businesses to create detailed questionnaires tailored to their research goals. This feature is ideal for collecting quantitative data on customer preferences, usability concerns, and market trends, providing insights to refine product design and functionality.

2. Advanced data collection methods: It supports various data collection techniques, including A/B testing, conjoint analysis, and competitive benchmarking. These methods help businesses understand customer preferences and optimize product features based on real-time feedback. 

3. Comprehensive reporting tools: Qualtrics provides robust reporting capabilities that visualize survey results, making it easy to interpret data at a glance. Users can compare different product names or features based on key attributes such as appeal and relevance.

4. Product development support: It aids in concept testing and user experience (UX) research by allowing companies to gather feedback on new product ideas before launch. This helps in validating concepts and refining product features based on user input.

5. Pricing research capabilities: It includes features for conducting pricing studies, such as Van Westendorp and Gabor-Granger analyses, which help determine optimal pricing strategies based on consumer willingness to pay.

Pricing and free trial:

Pricing	Free trial
Three plans under Strategy and Research:   • Research Plan  • UX Plan    • Brand Plan  (Pricing available on request)	30-day free trial

7. Productboard 

Productboard is a product management platform designed to help teams build products that meet customer needs. It acts as a centralized hub for gathering, organizing, and prioritizing customer feedback, product ideas, and feature requests.

Features

1. Centralized feedback management: Productboard enables you to collect and organize product insights and customer feedback from various channels, ensuring a streamlined approach to understanding user needs. Its AI-powered tools turn this feedback into actionable insights for informed decision-making.

2. Roadmap planning: You can create visually appealing and interactive roadmaps that effectively communicate your product strategy. The built-in filters allow you to tailor roadmap views for different stakeholders, ensuring clarity and alignment.

3. Feature prioritization: Productboard offers data-driven prioritization frameworks to help you focus on building features that deliver the most value to customers and align with business objectives.

Pricing and free trial:

Pricing	Free trial
• Starter: Free (single roadmap)  • Essential: $19/user/month  • Pro: $59/user/month  • Enterprise: Custom pricing	15-day free trial

A customer experience as per G2 reviews: 

Out of all the Productboard features, the one that I enjoy most is the Productboard product roadmap. It helps map out our product strategy and feature roadmap to make better decisions regarding users’ feedback and company goals. When used with Jira, it was quite easy to incorporate and helped to keep the development team on track with the vision for the product. Presumably, the possibility of using features such as customer information and prioritization has made our work more focused, as there is nothing superfluous among the available tools.

Owen R.
Senior Content Writer

Other top product research tools

In addition to these popular tools, several other tools help product teams gather valuable insights, understand user behavior, and optimize their offerings. The tools are as follows:

1. Rapidr
2. SurveyMonkey
3. Dovetail 
4. Lookback

Important factors to consider when selecting a product research tool

Choosing the right product research tool plays a key role in building data-driven strategies and achieving success. It is crucial for aligning with your goals, ensuring effective decision-making, and supporting long-term growth. Here are the most critical factors to consider:

1. Features and capabilities

Choose a tool that covers essential user behavior analytics like heatmaps, session recordings, usability testing, and feedback collection through surveys or sentiment analysis. 

If the tool includes testing capabilities, that’s an added benefit, allowing you to validate hypotheses and optimize your product effectively. Ensure the tool aligns with your business needs and product category for better results.

2. Ease of use

For startups, ease of use is crucial because teams have limited time and resources. A complex tool that requires extensive training or onboarding can delay productivity and divert attention from more strategic activities.

 Intuitive, easy-to-learn tools help startups get started quickly and stay focused on achieving core business goals.

3. Integration options

For a tool to be truly effective, it should integrate smoothly with your existing systems, such as analytics software, CRMs, or project management platforms. These integrations can prevent data silos and enable the free flow of data across platforms, supporting various marketing and customer engagement activities.

4. Cost and ROI

Choose a tool that fits your budget while delivering a strong ROI by enhancing research efficiency and quality. It should offer scalable features to grow with your business, supporting more complex use cases like integrating behavioral analytics with server-side campaigns such as feature tests and rollouts. 

This enables deeper insights into visitor behavior across experiment variations for smarter decisions.

5. Customer support and resources

Reliable customer support and resources are essential for getting the most out of your product research tool. Look for tools that offer responsive support through various channels, including chat, email, or phone. A high customer satisfaction (CSAT) score is a good indicator of excellent service.

Additionally, having access to training materials, guides, tutorials, and community forums can be incredibly valuable. 

Conclusion

Product research is the foundation of successful product development. By leveraging the right tools, teams can discover valuable insights, align products with user needs, and create experiences that truly resonate with their audience. 

Whether you’re analyzing user behavior, gathering feedback, validating ideas, or testing them, VWO provides a comprehensive solution for every stage of your product lifecycle. Start your free trial today and experience the full range of capabilities.

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