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 that can elevate your research process.
Top 7 Product Research Tools – Quick Glimpse
VWO
Hotjar
Maze
UserTesting
Productboard
Qualtrics
Zendesk
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.
Pro Tip!
Quickly access user insights with the Experience Score in the Insights dashboard, quantifying user behavior on a 0-100 scale. Track user engagement and struggles to make data-driven decisions about product layouts, placements, and features to align with user expectations.
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!
Pricing
VWO Insights starts at $139/month, billed annually
VWO Testing starts at $275/month, billed annually
Free trial
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
Heatmaps: Hotjar provides heatmaps that help identify which elements drive engagement and where users tend to bounce, offering valuable insights for product optimization.
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.
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.
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
Hotjar offers three plans:
Observe (heatmaps & recordings), Ask (surveys & feedback), and Engage (user interviews), each with four tiers (Basic, Plus, Business, and Scale).
Pricing available upon request.
Free trial
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
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.
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.
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.
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
Free Plan: Limited features for small teams or individual users
Starter Plan: $99/month
Organization Plan: Custom pricing, tailored for larger organizations
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
UserTesting offers three comprehensive plans tailored to different needs:
1. Essentials
2. Advanced
3. Ultimate.
For detailed pricing and to determine which plan best suits your needs, contact UserTesting directly.
Free trial
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
Zendesk offers two pricing plans:
1. Zendesk for Service
Suite Team: $55/agent/month (billed annually)
Suite Growth: $89/agent/month (billed annually)
Suite Professional: $115/agent/month (billed annually)
Suite Enterprise: You can contact sales for pricing
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
Qualtrics offers three specialized plans under its Strategy and Research category:
1. Research Plan
2. UX Plan
3. Brand Plan
For detailed pricing information and to determine which plan best suits your needs, contact Qualtrics directly.
Free trial
The strategy and research category offers a 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
Productboard offers a flexible pricing structure tailored to different team sizes and needs:
Starter plan: Build a single roadmap at no cost
Essential plan: $19 per user/month
Pro Plan: $59 per user/month
Enterprise Plan: Custom pricing
Top Product Research Tools – Comparison
Here’s a concise table summarizing the top 5 tools:
Tool
Free Trial
Starting Price
VWO
30-day all-inclusive
$139/month (VWO Insights)
Hotjar
15-day free trial
Pricing available upon request
Maze
Offers a free plan
$99/month (Starter Plan)
UserTesting
No free trial
Pricing available upon request
Zendesk
15-day free trial
$19/month (Zendesk Sell)
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:
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
Ensure that the tool provides the core functionalities your business needs. Look for tools that offer behavior analytics, such as heatmaps, session recordings, usability testing, feedback collection through surveys and sentiment analysis, and other relevant features that enable you to make informed decisions.
If the tool includes testing capabilities, that’s an added benefit, allowing you to validate hypotheses and optimize your product effectively. The tool should be adaptable to your specific business requirements and product category, ensuring you can extract actionable insights that drive better outcomes.
2. Ease of use
For startups, ease of use is crucial because they often have limited resources, both in terms of time and staff. In the early stages, teams need to be agile and focus on core tasks that drive growth. A complex tool that requires extensive training or onboarding can delay productivity and divert attention from more strategic activities. By using intuitive, easy-to-learn tools, startups can get up to speed quickly and ensure that their team is focused on achieving key business goals, rather than struggling with software.
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
The price of the product research tool should align with your budget, but more importantly, it should provide a strong ROI by improving the efficiency and quality of your product research.
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 helps you gather deeper insights into visitor behavior across different experiment variations for better business decisions and outcomes.
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.
FAQs
Q1. What does a product researcher do?
A product researcher is responsible for gathering and analyzing data related to user behavior, market trends, and customer feedback. They use this data to provide actionable insights that inform product development, ensuring that the product addresses user needs effectively and stands out in the market.
Q2. What are the objectives of product research?
The primary objectives of product research are to understand the market, identify customer needs, and evaluate the potential of a product. It helps in validating product concepts and features, reducing risks, and improving decision-making throughout the product lifecycle.
Q3. Why should you use product research tools?
Using product research tools is essential because they provide data-driven insights that ensure the product meets user needs, enhances usability, and performs well in the market. These tools also streamline the research process, making it faster and more efficient.
Q4. What are product research tools?
Product research tools are platforms and software that help collect, analyze, and interpret data. They include survey platforms, user testing tools, analytics software, and prototyping tools, all of which gather insights from users and market trends to inform product development decisions.
Q5. How do product managers conduct research?
Product managers typically use methods such as user interviews, surveys, usability testing, competitive analysis, and data analytics to conduct research. They may also use prototypes and minimum viable products (MVPs) to gather early-stage feedback and validate assumptions.
Q6. How to select the best product research tool for your needs?
Selecting the right product research tool involves considering factors like ease of use, how well it integrates with other systems, its features (e.g., user research or analytics), pricing, and customer support. It’s important to choose a tool that aligns with your team’s objectives and resources.
Q7. What are the benefits of using product research tools?
The benefits include improved accuracy and reliability of research data, faster product development cycles, and better alignment with customer needs. These tools help teams make informed decisions, reducing uncertainty and ensuring that the product meets the market demand.
Q8. Which tools can you use for product research?
There are various tools available, such as VWO, Hotjar, and Maze. These tools provide insights, helping teams gather the data needed to create successful products that resonate with their target audience.
Aastha Trehan
Hey there! I'm Aastha Trehan, a content marketer at VWO. I write, manage, and execute content. I love creating high-quality, engaging content that resonates with readers. When I'm not working, you can find me playing badminton or basketball, binge-watching movies, or getting lost in a good book. I'm also an adventure enthusiast and love trekking.
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