A UX research study is often facilitated by relevant data and insights obtained from research participants that fit the demography and requirements needed for the success of the research study. One of the tools that helps you run an effective research study is Discuss. Discuss is a popular research participant tool built to scale qualitative research by streamlining the process of finding, managing, and engaging participants for research studies. It facilitates the recruitment of user panelists who can provide valuable and actionable insights into your product features, performance, and workflows. Discuss, however, does not have a robust participant management feature that would help you manage and invite your research participants whenever you need to carry out a test or research study.
In this article, we will provide you with an exhaustive list of Discuss alternatives that would help you recruit better research participants and manage them for future studies effectively.
For each Discuss competitor, we included:
- A short description
- A list of features
- Pros & Cons list
- User reviews
- Pricing
Here’s a comprehensive comparison table of each tool’s reviews from Capterra:
Rating | Ease of Use | Quality of Support | Pricing | |
UXtweak | 4.7 | 5.0 | ✓ Free plan Plus plan starts at $80 per month | |
UserZoom | 4.5 | 4.7 | ✗ No free plan Information is available on request, starting at $70,000/year | |
PanelFox | 5.0 | 5.0 | ✗ No free plan Paid plan starts at $83 per month | |
User Interviews | 4.1 | 4.8 | ✗ No free plan Paid plan starts at $175/month | |
Ethnio | 4.5 | 5.0 | ✗ No free plan Paid plan starts at $79 per month | |
Alchemer | 4.5 | 4.3 | ✓ Free plan Paid plan starts at $55 per month | |
GetFeedback | 4.7 | 4.5 | ✓ Free plan Paid plan starts at $50 per month | |
Survicate | 4.3 | 4.5 | ✓ Free plan Paid plan starts at $117 per month | |
Qualaroo | 4.7 | 4.7 | ✗ No free plan Paid plan starts at $80/month | |
QuestionPro | 4.6 | 4.8 | ✓ Free plan Paid plan starts at $99 per month | |
Lookback | 3.5 | 2.1 | ✗ No free plan Paid plan starts at $17/month | |
SurveySparrow | 4.4 | 4.3 | ✓ Free plan Paid plan starts at $99 per month | |
Startquestion | 4.8 | 4.9 | ✓ Free plan Paid plan starts at $49 per month |
Top 13 Discuss Alternatives & Competitors in 2024
Below is our list of our top 13 Discuss alternatives and competitors that would help you recruit better research participants and manage them for future studies effectively.
1. UXtweak
UXtweak is the first Discuss alternative and is an all-in-one user research platform that provides many usability testing tools and other great features.
UXtweak as a great alternative has a robust participant recruitment feature that simplifies the participant recruitment process, offering you multiple ways of recruiting, from the Onsite Recruiting Widget and 155M+ User Panel with 2000+ filtering attributes to creating your Own Database – a CRM-like tester management system for your database of testers. This participant management feature helps you easily invite users to participate in your studies and test your product at any time.
Key features
- Moderated Testing
- Own Database – Panel management – a CRM-like tester management system for your database of testers.
- 155M+ User Panel – Gives you access to 155M+ panelists from more than 130 countries.
- Onsite Recruiting Widget – allows you to turn your website visitors into testers completely free of charge!
- Mobile Testing
- Website Testing
- User Surveys
- Prototype Testing
- Card Sorting
- Tree Testing
- Preference Test
- Five Second Test
- First Click Test
- Session Recording & Heatmaps
Test the capabilities of UXtweak by participating as a respondent in competitive usability testing demos👇
User reviews & rating
The ratings below are based solely on the tool’s reviews from Capterra:
Overall – 4.8/5
Ease of Use – 4.7/5
Quality of Support – 5.0/5
Pros
- UXtweak offers research and user recruitment tools, so there is no need for extra tools (subscriptions)
- Ability to recruit from 155M+ User Panel on top of your Own Database.
- Onsite Recruiting widget – allows you to turn real website visitors into testers.
- Intuitive UI and easy set-up.
- Has a free plan
Cons
- Only supports 14 languages
Pricing & Plans
UXtweak has a free plan available with unlimited time for small projects. You can also choose a Pro plan for only $80 per month billed annually.
Explore the potential of UXtweak today by testing Mobile App Preferences and Preference testing! 🚀
2. UserZoom
UserZoom is the second Discuss alternative and is an innovative UX research platform fueled by UX insights. UserZoom allows you to make confident, data-driven product decisions by leveraging a suite of advanced, mixed-method UX research capabilities, and a global participant network of research participants that help you to design experiences your users love through a deep understanding of their wants, needs, behaviors, and machine learning-powered distribution.
Key features
- Moderated & Unmoderated usability studies
- Prototype testing
- Mobile app testing
- Card Sorting & Tree Testing
- Mixed method research
User reviews & rating
The ratings below are solely based on the tool’s reviews from Capterra:
Overall Score – 4.4/5
Ease of Use – 4.5/5
Quality of Support – 4.7/5
Pros
- Ability to highlight specifics of an interview and then click a button to generate a video highlight when using the video recording feature
- Ability to mock up enhanced prototypes to evaluate design concepts
- Has measurement tools to supplement user feedback with empirical usage data
- Has a good participant recruiting feature and exports the data into an easy-to-analyze format.
- Has 120M+ user panel
Cons
- Inability to refine conceptual models to design constraints
- Limitations with conducting international research studies
- Can be hard to use – The UI of the platform is quite complicated and is not the best choice for a complete beginner.
Pricing & Plans
User Zoom’s pricing is available on request.
3. PanelFox
PanelFox is the third Discuss alternative and is an all-in-one research recruitment and management software that makes it easy to run user research recruiting and panel management. PanelFox automates personalized mass recruitment emails and enables 1-on-1 communication with research participants. They have robust screening, quotas, scheduling, and incentive automation that helps to streamline the qualitative research process.
Key features
- User recruitment
- Panel management
- Email & SMS
- Surveys
- Scheduling
- Incentives
User reviews & rating
The ratings below are based solely on the tool’s reviews from Capterra:
Overall – 5.0/5
Ease of Use – 5.0/5
Quality of Support – 5.0/5
Pros
- Ability to manage multiple projects from one central hub
- It is a simple and largely intuitive tool
- Allows you to better manage your research participants in one place
- Easy to integrate with third-party apps like Calendly
Cons
- Inability to interact with team members, assign tasks, and track progress
- Inability to customize workflows for different projects for each team member
Pricing & Plans
Panelfox makes it easy to run user research recruiting and panel management with its paid plan that starts at $83.25 per month.
4. User Interviews
User Interviews is another Discuss alternative that offers a pool of 4.1 million participants to recruit research participants from and reach your project goals. User Interviews help you to recruit for moderated or unmoderated, remote or in-person studies for product performance tests, design features, and feedback to help you make informed decisions. User Interviews also have a recruitment database the Research Hub product which they can use to manage and invite research participants for future research studies.
Key features
- Unmoderated and moderated Research
- Data security and user privacy
- Live data feed
- Reporting
- Integrations
- Analytics
User reviews & rating
The ratings below are solely based on the tool’s reviews from Capterra:
Overall– 4.4/5
Ease of Use – 4.1/5
Quality of Support – 4.8/5
Pros
- They have an excellent, vetted, varied, and reliable panel of participants
- Ability to keep track of user participation
- Extremely intuitive and does not require training or comprehensive practice to be able to leverage effectively
Cons
- Limited filtering option in finding participants that fit a target if identity profile is similar
- Does not have built-in conference/chat messaging.
Pricing & Plans
User Interviews allow you to recruit research participants with their free plan. They have a paid plan that starts at $175/month. You can also use their pay-as-you-go option for $45/session.
5. Ethnio
Ethnio is a Discuss alternative that enables you to recruit research participants, manage participants, and keep track of all your participant activity with your database for research studies. Ethnio is also efficient for continuous discovery across research ops from tracking and screening to recruiting, scheduling, and payment processing for UX research participants.
Key features
- Pool: Centralized participant database
- Incentives
- Screeners
- Intercepts: Targeted elegant intercepts on the web, iOS, or Android
- Scheduling
User reviews & rating
The ratings below are based solely on the tool’s reviews from G2:
Overall – 5.0/5
Ease of Use – 4.5/5
Quality of Support – 5.0/5
Pros
- Ability to recruit, screen, house, and pay participants easily
- Improves participant show-up rate through its reminder text message feature
- Efficient for qualitative and quantitative data collection
- Ability to provide detailed reports
Cons
- Has a bit of a learning curve
- Limitations in setting up advanced quotas for each user segment
Pricing & Plans
Ethnio allows you to recruit users and participants for research studies on a 14-day free trial in which you upgrade to a paid plan that starts at $79 per month.
6. Alchemer
As a Discuss alternative, Alchemer is a UX research platform that offers a unique approach to collecting and acting on user feedback that allows teams to hear from their customers in the moments that matter most. Alchemer integrates with existing systems and keeps feedback in the hands of product teams enabling them to implement actionable and improve the user experience of their website or mobile application by leveraging Alchemer’s research recruitment and management functionality.
Key features
- Survey/Poll Management
- Customizable Forms
- Dashboard and analytics
- Multi-Channel Data Collection
- Advanced Logic and Branching
- Flexible Reporting
User reviews & rating
The ratings below are based solely on the tool’s reviews from Capterra:
Overall – 4.5/5
Ease of Use – 4.5/5
Quality of Support – 4.3/5
Pros
- Ability to conduct conference and webinar evaluations as well as consent forms for research studies
- Has advanced reporting features that help in segmentation when analyzing data
- Alchemer makes it easy to activate its “response encryption” function which is very helpful for protecting sensitive data in your surveys and forms.
- Has a uniquely wide range of interview question types available
Cons
- Limitations with multi-language surveys
- Data merge can be slow when importing from third-party software
Pricing & Plans
Alchemer Survey helps you uncover new user insights with its free plan. They have a paid plan that starts at $55 per month.
7. GetFeedback
GetFeedback as Discuss alternative is a UX research platform that enables product teams to automatically collect customer feedback at critical touchpoints in the customer journey. GetFeedback helps you create targeted survey questions that connect with your customers and unlock new insights to quickly iterate on your digital experiences and improve customer interactions.
Key features
- Survey Builder
- Data Import/Export
- Reporting/Analytics
- Listening
- Understanding
- Acting
- Integration
User reviews & rating
The ratings below are based solely on the tool’s reviews from Capterra:
Overall – 4.7/5
Ease of Use – 4.7/5
Quality of Support – 4.6/5
Pros
- Easy to design stunning, simple feedback surveys
- It provides excellent reporting features for efficient feedback collection
- Has advanced analytics that reveal user feedback data in real-time and allows for segmentation.
- Ability to integrate into new and existing software to enable survey participants to provide accurate responses.
Cons
- Inability to fully customize survey questions
- It does not permit real-time video responses or screen recordings of the user participant’s interview or survey.
Pricing & Plans
GetFeedback helps you collect customer feedback at critical touchpoints in the customer journey with their free plan. They have a paid plan that starts at $50 per month for advanced feedback features.
8. Survicate
Survicate is another great Discuss alternative that enables you to collect customer feedback at scale in minutes. It is a UX research tool that helps you create targeted surveys, get insights from customers at all stages of the user journey, automate feedback collection and track metrics, and analyze and act on feedback to improve user satisfaction, reduce churn, and design better digital products.
Key features
- Email Surveys
- Website Feedback Surveys
- In-Product Surveys
- Mobile In-App Surveys
User reviews & rating
The ratings below are based solely on the tool’s reviews from Capterra:
Overall – 4.8/5
Ease of Use – 4.8/5
Quality of Support – 4.9/5
Pros
- Ability to determine client behavior, trends, and other relevant factors
- Ability to manage quick surveys and gather customer feedback regarding any website, services, and products
- Ability to integrate with other software with ease
- Very easy to ensure a non-biased question and has great data capture options
Cons
- The backend can be slow at times
- No export features for survey results are available on the free plan
Pricing & Plans
Survicate helps you to collect customer feedback at scale with its free plan. They have a paid plan at $99 per month.
9. Qualaroo
Qualaroo is another great Discuss alternative is a UX research and customer recruiting software for mapping customers’ journeys across various touchpoints to discover their motivations and fears. Qualaroo allows you to create surveys that target participants at precisely the right time with focused surveys to understand their pain points & issues to improve user experience, engagement, and satisfaction with your digital product.
Key features
- Survey Templates
- AI Sentiment Analysis
- Nudge for Prototypes
- Confirmation Page Surveys
- Exit Intent Surveys
- Question Branching
- A/B Testing
- Integrations
User reviews & rating
The ratings below are based solely on the tool’s reviews from Capterra:
Overall – 4.7/5
Ease of Use– 4.6/5
Quality of Support – 4.7/5
Pros
- Ability to collect consumer insight by targeting specific client and participant groups
- Has advanced reporting, targeting, and a Sentiment analysis feature that helps to collect accurate feedback.
- The Nudge feature makes it easy to survey customers while they are performing an action to get precise feedback.
- Supports surveys on iOS and Android devices as well as websites.
- Very easy to set up and work with.
Cons
- Limitations in analyzing dashboard reports due to poor visuals
Pricing & Plans
Qualaroo allows you to map customers’ journeys across various touchpoints with its 15-day free trial. You can also choose a paid plan only for $80 per month for advanced feedback features.
10. QuestionPro
QuestionPro as a Discuss alternative provides a wide range of features to measure and manage customer experience, employee engagement, and the pulse of the audience. QuestionPro enables you to run fast and flexible qualitative research by efficiently recruiting participants to collect the qualitative insights that matter and help you make smarter product decisions.
Key features
- Survey Creation
- Survey Templates
- Mobile-Friendly Surveys
- Participant Recruitment
- Panel Management
- Distribution Channels
- Advanced Logic and Skip Patterns
- Real-time Reporting
- Data Visualization
User reviews & rating
The ratings below are based solely on the tool’s reviews from Capterra:
Overall – 4.8/5
Ease of Use – 4.6/5
Quality of Support – 4.8/5
Pros
- Has an efficient analytics functionality
- Ability to tailor surveys and application forms for data collection
- Branching which is a feature on QuestionPro allows you to create one survey and customize it for multiple survey-takers based on question logic.
- It has a free plan
Cons
- Data visualization within QuestionPro is limited
- The process of data clean-up is cumbersome
Pricing & Plans
QuestionPro enables you to conduct fast and flexible qualitative research with its free plan. They have a paid plan that starts at $99 per month.
11. Lookback
Lookback as a Discuss alternative is a usability testing and user interview software that enables product teams to conduct qualitative research. The platform captures the screen, face, and voice of research participants as they interact with digital experiences. With key features like remote observation, session highlighting, and integrations with other recruitment platforms, Lookback aims to make qualitative research accessible and collaborative.
Key features
- Remote Research
- Live Interviews
- Recorded Sessions
- Screen Sharing
- Participant Scheduling
- Note-Taking and Annotations
- Collaborative Analysis
- Recruitment Tools
- Feedback Collection
User reviews & rating
The ratings below are based solely on the tool’s reviews from Capterra:
Overall – 3.4/5
Ease of Use – 3.5/5
Quality of Support – 2.1/5
Pros
- The platform enables live video interviews, allowing researchers to interact with participants in real-time
- Ability to gather immediate feedback and observe user interactions
- Ability to review and analyze user interviews and usability tests at a later time
- The platform often includes features for scheduling research sessions, making it easier to coordinate and manage participant availability
Cons
- Technical errors when conducting interview sessions
- The set-up for research participants can be a bit complicated when signing up for the first time.
Pricing & Plans
Lookback offers you all your qualitative research needs in one place with a paid plan that starts at $17 per month.
12. SurveySparrow
SurveySparrow is another Discuss alternative that enables you to turn every customer feedback into a growth opportunity for your digital product through active engagement, smart insights from targeted surveys, and timely actions. Their audience management feature allows you to manage and share your surveys across Web, Mobile, Social, and E-mail to easily collect feedback from your targeted audience.
Key features
- Executive Dashboard
- Customer Journey Map
- Craft Beautiful Surveys
- Share Surveys
- Gain Rich Insights
- Recurring Surveys
- White Label Surveys
- Embedded Surveys
- Conversational Forms
- Mobile-first Surveys
- Case Management
- Audience Management
- Smart Surveys
- Video Surveys
User reviews & rating
The ratings below are based solely on the tool’s reviews from Capterra:
Overall – 4.4/5
Ease of Use – 4.4/5
Quality of Support – 4.3/5
Pros
- Ability to create interactive and conversational surveys for targeted participants
- Has robust management features that make feedback collection easy
- Ability to integrate openly across other software
- The logic condition functionality assigns a suitable option to each question asked
Cons
- The drag-and-drop question box is quite buggy and not correctly snap into alignment
- Inability to send reminders easily or segment audiences
- Inability to handle bulk loads such as deleting or copying an audience list
Pricing & Plans
Surveysparrow enables you allows you to manage and share your surveys with participants on its free plan. They have a paid plan at $99 per month.
13. Startquestion
Startquestion is the last Discuss alternative and is a UX research software that conducts qualitative research by gathering insights about a particular user group through distributing targeted surveys or questionnaires, scheduling data collection, and collecting survey responses from research participants. With its robust panel management feature, Startquestons efficiently gathers feedback from customers and employees, allowing for swift analysis and sharing of insights within product teams and organizations at large.
Key features
- Survey Builder
- Customizable Templates
- Data Import/Export
- Reporting/Analytics
- Email Marketing
- Question Branching
- Question Library
- URL Customization
- Data Analysis Tools
- Mobile Survey
- Multi-Channel Distribution
- Supports Audio/Images/Video
User reviews & rating
The ratings below are based solely on the tool’s reviews from Capterra:
Overall – 4.9/5
Ease of Use – 4.8/5
Quality of Support – 4.9/5
Pros
- Transparency and ease of creating surveys that are shareable with teammates
- Has robust reporting capabilities that are helpful in analyzing and distilling user insights
- Ability to accept large volumes of survey responses.
- Ability to track panelists’ activities, monitor their participation status, and manage their profiles.
- Has a very simple administration panel, usability (UX) for both the respondent and the administrator
Cons
- Inability to have recurring payments
- Surveys on the list are not arranged alphabetically due to a lack of filters.
- Limitations in working with raw data files from Excel
Pricing & Plans
Start questions make it easy for you to recruit and engage participants with its free plan. They have a paid plan that starts at $49 per month.
What is Discuss
Discuss is a robust research recruitment participant tool designed to scale qualitative research and streamline the process of finding and engaging participants for research studies. Discuss simplifies the participant recruitment process by offering a platform where UX researchers define specific demographics and characteristics, ensuring that they recruit participants who align with the requirements of their research study. This tool helps UX researchers interact with potential participants, share study details, and gather the necessary information needed to turn their experiences into valuable insights for product improvement. Discuss is popular among researchers who run qualitative studies but does not meet the demand of research participant management which helps manage and invite participants for future research studies.
Discuss Reviews and Rating
The ratings below are solely based on the tool’s reviews from Capterra:
Overall – 4.7/5
Ease of Use – 4.8/5
Quality of Support – 4.5/5
Why do people use Discuss
- Discuss has a scheduling and reminder feature that schedules research sessions and sends reminders to participants, ensuring a smooth and organized research process.
- They have robust features that help you to moderate research interviews and a chat plus feature that records the interview on the go.
- Ability to highlight specifics of an interview transcript and then click a button to generate a video highlight.
- Discuss has an efficient translation feature that helps international participants easily shift through English and their local language.
Why do people consider other alternatives
- Discuss does not have participant management features that would allow you to easily manage your participants and invite them into any of your future research studies and to test new features.
- For international users, the platform bandwidth can be demanding. It may be difficult sometimes to sustain interviews with participants as most of the users experience lag.
- Most users complained that when using Discuss’s focus groups feature, it is difficult to have more than four research participants which may be needed for a particular data sample size.
List of Free Discuss Alternatives
Here’s a list of our free forever Discuss alternatives that you can use to start recruiting participants for your next research study:
- UXtweak
- Alchemer
- GetFeedback
- Survicate
- QuestionPro
- SurveySparrow
- Startquestion
Which Discuss alternative is right for you?
Navigating through alternative tools that would better suit your needs often becomes a pivotal task as you look for a more seamless and effective user research solution. Whether you are prioritizing a larger pool of research participants or seeking advanced participant management features, your goal should be to discover alternative tools that will align precisely with the unique needs and requirements of your research study in order to help you streamline the process of gathering invaluable insights and this article provides you with a good list to start with.
UXtweak is our recommended alternative as it is an all-in-one user research platform that can help you with recruiting survey participants with a personal user panel of 155M+ testers from 130 countries, over 2000+ profiling attributes, and an Own Database – participant management functionality to help you personalize and manage participants.
Try UXtweak to conduct your first or next research studies by registering for free without any hassle! We offer tons of free and paid recruiting options for all kinds of needs together with a comprehensive set of research tools.
