Car manufacturing pioneer Henry Ford famously said: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Ford knew the value of understanding the customer, but he also knew that feedback doesn’t always equate to insight. Of course, people didn’t want faster horses. They wanted to go faster, period. The rest is history.
It’s the same with customer feedback for your own product. You need feedback.
But the best customer feedback software goes further. It provides you with meaningful, actionable insights. So you can deliver products that delight customers and create value.
So you can make an informed choice on which software best suits your operations, team, and goals, we’ve gathered six of the leading tools and broken them down. They include customer survey tools, advanced AI-driven analytics, and engaging interactive features.
Following our breakdown of the best tools, we explained the difference between feedback and insight, how to gather feedback at scale, and how the best customer feedback tools make this easier at each stage, from initial design to post-launch iteration.
Let’s get to it.
6 of the best customer feedback platforms
We’ve compared and contrasted some of the best customer feedback tools out there to help you find the one that’s right for your company and product, including their key features, pricing, and user reviews.
We’ve also noted whether they’re a simple customer survey and feedback collection tool, or have extra features like AI to help generate insights from within the platform itself.
1. Sprig
Sprig specializes in gathering customer feedback to enable useful, actionable insights Sprig is a user experience and feedback platform that gives you insights into your customers and digital products in real-time.
The platform includes replays and heatmap captures, as well as surveys and feedback tools. Its AI-driven software helps you gather essential user-behavior data, improve the customer journey, remove friction points, and build a strong production adoption strategy.
Key features
- Replays: Record clips of your users’ behavior and identify any friction points.
- Heatmaps: View visual representations of users’ in-product interactions.
- Automated studies: Use events and user attributes as triggers for targeted studies.
- Surveys. Send AI-generated surveys to gather qualitative data.
- Feedback. Capture continuous feedback at scale for key metrics like NPS and CSAT.
- AI analysis. Gain a deeper understanding into user behavior with smart AI.
- AI Recommendations. Generate actionable suggestions to hit your goals, improve user retention, drive revenue, and make data-driven decisions based on user feedback.
- AI Explorer. Analyze user behavior and sentiment, boost conversions, and holistically optimize your product across devices.
Best for
Product teams of all sizes looking to capture real-time data and user insights at scale without adding to their workload.
What they say
“Sprig generated over 100 actionable insights for us across five product areas in its first six months. It provides in-product survey insights we can act on immediately. Sprig is the natural solution because it’s so quick and easy.” — Jewel Seperson, Head of User Research at Square
Pricing details
Sprig offers three pricing tiers:
- Free. Includes 50 replay clips, 100 heatmap captures, and 25 survey responses.
- Starter. Includes 400 replay clips, 1,000 heatmap captures, and 200 survey responses.
- Enterprise. Custom replay clips, heatmap captures, responses, extra security and compliance, all integrations, custom branding, and dedicated support.
2. HubSpot
Hubspot offers customizable surveys designed for customer feedbackHubspot’s customer feedback software, which is part of its Service Hub module, mainly focuses on offering customizable surveys that enable you to efficiently collect customer responses and share them with your team to draw meaningful insights and boost customer relationships.
Key features
- Customizable survey templates: A range of question types and customizable styles to adapt to your customer feedback requirements.
- Pre-built feedback KPIs: Ready-to-use metric measures to help score and share feedback, such as net promoter score (NPS), customer effort score (CES), and customer satisfaction (CSAT).
- Feedback dashboard. See all of your customer feedback in one place and take immediate action on insights and conclusions.
- Automatic surveys. Automate the sending of surveys to collect customer feedback on autopilot and watch feedback return in real-time.
- Knowledge base, help desk, and live chat. Access to help and instruction guides to get the best from the software.
- Automatic connection to HubSpot’s Smart CRM. Keep data on each customer and provide a more personalized, individualized service.
Best for
Larger companies that can benefit from the rest of the HubSpot suite, with a focus on surveys as their main feedback mechanism.
What they say
“Amazing, super helpful platform that includes a one-stop for customer service solutions.”
— G2
Pricing details
The customer feedback software is part of the Service Hub, which has three pricing tiers.
- Starter: From £18 per month per seat.
- Service Hub Professional: From £85 per month per seat.
- Service Hub Enterprise: From £125 per month per seat.
You can also pay from £18 per seat per month for the Starter Customer Platform, which includes HubSpot’s Starter marketing, sales, content, and operations features, as well as its service features.
HubSpot also charges an extra on-time fee for Professional Onboarding for its Professional and Enterprise packages (£1,310 and £3,050 respectively).
3. Qualtrics
Qualtrics’ products include customer satisfaction software to gather useful metricsQualtrics specializes in helping enterprise-level companies to collect digital omnichannel data in a bid to reduce friction, build better relationships, and optimize digital experiences. It also includes software to improve employee engagement and retention, and is best for larger companies that need a more complex, multi-channel solution for customers and staff.
Key features
- New customer alerts. Recommends effective actions based on previous customer behavior.
- AI responses and assistant. Tailors replies to customer feedback and enables you to generate relevant goals, KPIs, and respondent data targets.
- Option to set goals and KPIs for your team too. Improve your team’s engagement and behavior to help them translate that into improved customer relationships and outcomes.
- Extra strategy and research module. Design products that people will respond well to, and boost growth.
Best for
Enterprise digital businesses that need a more complex, omnichannel solution, want to improve both customer experience and employee experience, and boost design and marketing strategy.
What they say
“I like this software for its data visualization and project management capabilities. It also allows users to track project progress.”
— G2
Pricing details
Qualtrics prices its plans based on whether you choose the Customer Experience, Employee Experience, or Strategy & Research suite. It also differs depending on whether you need digital experience feedback only, contact center tools, or tools for real-world sites such as retail or hospitality.
For each option, pricing is on request via the Qualtrics website.
4. Crowdsignal
Crowdsignal makes it easy to customize effective customer feedback surveysCrowdsignal aims to make surveying and polling your customers super simple. It offers drag-and-drop templates that you can customize and tailor easily. The polls and surveys are easily shareable, and you can export and analyze your results in just a few steps.
Key features
- Customizable templates. Create effective and fun surveys, polls, and rating requests branded to your style in a few steps.
- Shareable polls and surveys, and responses. Share your polls easily on social media, or on your website, or via email.
- Easy to analyze results. Export results and polls to widely-used apps like Excel and Google Sheets, and draw data-based conclusions.
- Tailor polls further for finer results. Use poll restrictions, limit double voting, and data filters to ensure you ask the right questions to the right people.
- Multi-language support. Work internationally with the ability to send polls and surveys in multiple languages.
- Customer support team. ‘Happiness Engineers’ support and help available 24/7.
Best for
Smaller companies looking for a super-simple way to collect feedback and responses across digital platforms.
What they say
“Not only is it easy to create surveys, but the ability to filter data using custom formulas is extremely useful.”
— G2
Pricing details
Crowdsignal offers four types of plans, including a fairly extensive free option.
- Free. $0 per month. Includes unlimited surveys, and up to 2,500 responses. Limited exports and embeds.
- Premium. From $25 per month. Everything in Free, plus unlimited responses. Exports, embeds, 24/7 support.
- Business. From $59 per month. Everything in Premium, plus your own branding, extra customization, advanced API access, and priority 24/7 support.
- Team. From $29 per user per month, for up to three people. Everything in Business, plus collaboration tools, shared themes, and an assets library.
5. Typeform
Typeform specializes in building surveys and forms that can adapt to customer responsesTypeform is known for simple forms that are easy and engaging for customers to fill out, and promises that its engaging and interactive polls will help companies find out 3.5 times more information about their respondents in comparison to a standard survey.
Key features
- Branded forms. Customizable surveys that match your colors and branding.
- Wide library of proven templates. Choose from more than 3,000 templates of survey and form types.
- Multimedia content. Populate forms with a variety of question types and media including video, star ratings, multiple choice, and text boxes.
- AI analysis. Ask the AI assistant to summarize and understand your customers’ responses for smarter insights.
- Shareable surveys. Embed forms into social, emails, and landing pages.
- Multi-language. Available at the higher levels of the Growth plan.
- Integration with 300+ tools including Salesforce. Available at the higher levels of growth plan.
Best for
Businesses of all sizes looking for a recognizable, simple way to collect online survey responses.
What they say
“Typeform is the most customizable survey platform…The survey logic is also very helpful - it saves time by not showing every question to every user. It's also easy to send survey results…without every stakeholder creating an account.”
— G2
Pricing details
Typeform has two types of plans, depending on your business goals. These types then offer multiple tiers of pricing depending on your needs. Advanced features such as AI and integrations are only available on the Growth plans.
Core plans
- Basic. From £21 per month. Includes one user, 100 responses, and unlimited forms and questions.
- Plus. From £41 per month. Everything in Basic. Three users, and 1,000 responses. Own branding.
- Business. From £66 per month. Everything in Plus. Five users. Includes 10,000 responses, priority support, and more analytics such as drop-off rates and conversion tracking.
- Enterprise. Custom users and responses. Includes data compliance extras, custom branding and domains. Available on request.
Growth plans
- Essentials. From £133 per month. Includes three seats, 1,000 responses, multimedia, AI and smart insights, and 300+ integrations.
- Pro. From £233 per month. Everything in Essentials plus five seats. Includes 10,000 responses, multi-language, and extra integrations.
- Custom. Custom number of seats, 20,000 responses. Includes extra compliance features, and a dedicated support manager. Available on request.
6. SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey’s offers a wide range of question types, along with AI capabilitiesPerhaps one of the best-known online survey platforms, SurveyMonkey has added features such as AI help, more templates to choose from, and tools designed for deeper insights. Specializes in forms and market research, and building happier teams, as well as effective and simple customer surveys.
Key features
- Pre-built, customizable templates. Tailor effective forms and surveys to your needs in minutes.
- AI assistant. Helps to build better surveys, improve replies, and predict response levels.
- Tools designed for customer feedback scores. Recognizable metrics including NPS, CSAT, and retention.
- Analytics. Metrics designed for research to help you make data-driven decisions and gain insights.
- Feedback panel. Possibility to connect with SurveyMonkey’s panel of more than 355 million worldwide, from $1 per response.
- Simple pricing tiers. Easy-to-understand pricing with simple features.
Best for
Businesses of all sizes looking for a simple, efficient way to collect feedback.
What they say
“Very easy to use, versatile, collects information with a lot of cool options.”
— G2
Pricing details
SurveyMonkey offers three tiers of pricing, depending on your needs.
- Basic. Free. Includes unlimited surveys or forms, 10 questions, up to 25 responses per survey.
- Individual Advantage. £33 per month. Includes unlimited surveys, forms, and questions. Up to 15,000 responses per year.
- Team Advantage. £20 per user per month. Includes unlimited surveys, forms, and questions. Up to 50,000 responses per year.
Customer feedback tools: What is the difference between feedback and insight?
The best customer feedback tools understand the difference between gathering feedback and generating insight. Feedback and insight are often used interchangeably, but here’s the difference:
- Feedback can give you insight
- But not all insight comes from feedback.
Think of it like this:
- Feedback is an opinion. It’s an input, from customer to designer, about a product that’s sitting in front of them.
- Insight, on the other hand, is your understanding as the designer.
Insight is the deep, intuitive knowledge about a customer and their problem that ultimately helps you solve it. Feedback can be one source of insight, but insights also come from observation, conversation, analysis, and other forms of user research.
And insight is what makes good designers great.
Henry Ford’s quote at the top of this article points to the difference between feedback and insight. Feedback is that people want faster horses. Insight goes a level deeper.
Ford’s insight, not the customer’s feedback, helped him realize what his customers didn’t think to articulate: I just want to get from point A to point B faster. If he had limited himself to direct feedback—even though he would still be “listening to the customer”—he might not have thought to build the car.
When it comes to designing products, insight, not just feedback, is the holy grail.
Can customer feedback software offer insight?
Traditional customer feedback software is great at delivering—yep, you guessed it—feedback.
These tools often focus on metrics like the Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES). They tell you how customers feel about an already-released product version.
This is feedback, and it has definite value. You know you’re heading in the right direction when customers say they love your product and find it easy to use. And when they don’t, you know it’s time to make some changes. Sometimes, qualitative feedback sparks specific and actionable design insight, too.
So, some insight can come from feedback. But data shows that feedback alone isn’t enough to sustain a truly customer-centric design process.
According to recent research, customer feedback is consistently “most valuable for identifying and fixing quick-hit operational issues and least valuable for identifying innovative product and service ideas”.
Only 29% of companies claimed to be “Good” or “Very good” at designing solutions to problems based on customer feedback.
In the design room, knowing what customers think of your product is only one small piece of the puzzle.
The central challenge of design is to flesh out the customer’s underlying needs, behavior, desires, and experiences—even when they aren’t aware of those inner workings themselves.
Christina Stahlkopf, the associate director of research and analytics at C Space, made a great analogy on this topic. She mentions NPS by name, but the idea extends to all of these broad feedback metrics used by customer feedback software.
“NPS offers mostly broad strokes, akin to a compass pointing companies in the right direction,” she says. “But sometimes, you need a more detailed topographical map to navigate a rough or uncertain landscape. Sometimes, what the compass indicates is the best direction to follow actually isn’t once you take into account the on-the-ground terrain.”
Customer-centric product teams owe it to themselves (and their users) to invest in user research that considers more than just customer feedback.
How can I survey customers to get more insight?
Here are a few user research methodologies that can help you get more insight from your customers, rather than collecting simple feedback alone.
These methods allow you to look directly at a problem, rather than relying on a customer’s interpretation of it.
“People have been conditioned to provide a laundry list of features without coupling those to real needs,” explains Brant Cooper, the author of The Lean Entrepreneur. In other words, the customer doesn’t always have the expertise or perspective it takes to see the whole picture (remember Henry Ford’s customers and faster horses?).
As product designers, it’s our responsibility to take that work out of our customers’ hands. Research methods like the ones listed above help us to:
- Spot issues the customer couldn’t
- Imagine creative solutions
- Build helpful products that improve our users’ lives.
Customer feedback can tell us if we’ve succeeded, but most customer feedback tools can’t reliably tell us how to design great products.
Gaining insight through user research: Make it easier with Sprig
Customer feedback software is so effective because it’s quick and largely automated.
It offers feedback without the disadvantages of more traditional user research, which can be slow and laborious: Tracking down customers can feel like herding cats, surveys often go unanswered, and analyzing all of that rich qualitative data manually is too time-consuming.
That exact problem was the inspiration behind Continuous Research, which uses in-product surveys to gain targeted insights beyond basic product feedback. And, unlike traditional user research, it collects, analyzes, and reports those qualitative user insights for you.
With Sprig, you get valuable insights faster, freeing up your team to focus on what matters most—acting on feedback to create a product that truly resonates with your users.
Because your customers don’t want fast horses.