UserTesting vs Insights Pro: Choosing the Perfect Market Research Tool for Your Business

As the AI revolution has catapulted the adoption of new age digital products, businesses face a tough choice between ensuring quality research before launching products and churning out new products at an unprecedented pace. Which in turn, has brought forth multiple challenges for researchers. Some of the most significant ones being-

• Conducting more research with the same amount of resources
• Waiting for vendor approvals before moving ahead with research
• Gaining access to the right audience for research
• Unrealistic deadlines
• Garnering the right amount of qualitative and quantitative insights required for driving key decisions at stakeholder level

However, since AI was the one adding problems to the equation, it also presents some promising solutions. AI-based market research tools offer a way to cope with these challenges and perform research effortlessly, using a fraction of the time and resources required previously. There’s an ocean of these tools out there and two of the most widely used tools are UserTesting and Insights Pro.

To find out which one of these tools is better, we conducted a thorough research comparing these tools on parameters like pricing, utility, accessibility, offerings, and learning curve. But before we dive into the core comparison, here’s a quick run through for both these tools, their offerings, and utility.

About UserTesting and Insights Pro

UserTesting is a video-first market research tool with a contributor network of over a million users, that lets businesses accumulate real user feedback for their products, designs, apps, processes, concepts, or brands. You also have the option to create a custom audience or add a community with community integrations. The drag and drop test builder is a convenient way of creating tests and you can deploy them within hours instead of days using the platform. 

UserTesting’s core offerings include live interviews, usability testing, brand and messaging testing, auto generated analytics and transcriptions.

Insights Pro, on the other hand, is the only market research on the market right now that makes use of emotion AI to enhance the quality of user insights and drive better decisions for businesses. Users can create custom surveys and tests, invite contributors for testing, and access intelligent insights from the central dashboard. One of the standout features of this tool is its ability to analyse both pre-recorded sessions and live interactions.

Insights Pro’s core offerings include creative testing, UI/UX testing, user journey testing, 1-on-1 direct interviews, and live online focus groups.

Insights Pro vs. UserTesting: Which One is Better?

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. Both these tools are good at what they do and it’s just about the kind of utility you’re looking for that tips the scale towards one or the other. Our goal today is to compare these tools on 5 parameters namely pricing, utility, accessibility, offerings, and value, to make that decision easier for you.

Utility

The key utilities of UserTesting are as follows-

1. Garnering User Feedback- Businesses can collect genuine feedback from relevant users and use it to make continuous adjustments to the product. UserTesting has a vast contributor network of over 1,000,000 users which makes it easier to locate relevant contributor groups for your tests.
2. Usability Testing- You can create custom tasks based on the features of your digital products and assign them to contributors for a better understanding of how the product works.
3. Prototype Testing- UserTesting supports testing of prototypes and mockups, offering businesses a way to validate early-stage designs.
4. Rapid AI-based Insights- UserTesting employs machine learning and AI to generate intelligent insights from user feedback. The turnaround time for the feedback is really quick and helps key decision makers in an organisation can use these insights to make better decisions.
5. Competitive Benchmarking- UserTesting offers features for benchmarking against competitors, allowing businesses to compare their products’ usability and user experience metrics with industry standards and competitors’ offerings.

The key utilities offered by Insights Pro are as follows-

1. User Feedback Collection– Insights Pro also allows businesses to collect user feedback, the only difference is that it does not have a native contributor base and you have the flexibility to pick your own contributors. You can even invite your own customers from the CRM as Insights Pro seamlessly integrates with CRM softwares.
2. Cross-Functional Integration- Insights Pro acts as a unified platform for all research-related activities, centralising data collecting, analysis, and reporting through the dedicated dashboard, making it a perfect place for different teams to collaborate with each other.
3. UI/UX Testing- With features like custom surveys and one-on-one interviews, Insights Pro is the perfect place to test new or existing UI/UX elements. With emotion AI, businesses can instantly identify areas that cause negative emotions and change them to make the overall experience pleasant for users.
4. Prototype and Usability Testing- Insights Pro has all the tools and widgets required to test prototypes and verify usability of newly developed digital products.
5. Emotion AI Integration- With Insights Pro, businesses can integrate emotional insights into their decision making and make changes based on what the consumer actually feels and how they react to certain UI/UX elements.

Accessibility

By accessibility we simply mean the amount of time and effort you need to invest to be able to use the desired features or widgets and generate the expected outcome from the respective tool.

UserTesting falls behind in this regard owing to a higher price tag and limited integrations. The UI is also an integral factor when it comes to accessibility and although it is fairly simple to access regular features, it might take a little getting used to before you can comfortably use advanced features with UserTesting.

Insights Pro on the other hand has a smooth and user friendly interface that is intuitive for the most part and they even assign a dedicated team for every user to guide them through any part that they may find overwhelming. Moreover, Insights Pro integrates with CRMs, marketing and design tools, analytics tools, and a suite of other business intelligence tools to offer stage of the art accessibility.

Learning Curve

UserTesting has a steeper learning curve when compared to Insights Pro and a big reason for this is the onboarding process. With Insights Pro, every user is assigned a dedicated team that navigates them through the tool and stays with them beyond the onboarding process, making the adoption quicker and more natural. 

We went through UserTesting’s TrustPilot reviews and found out that one of the biggest issues with UserTesting is their customer support. Users mentioned being ignored by the customer support team and having to resolve issues themselves, which was not a pleasant experience. This makes UserTesting hard to adopt and getting used to.

Offerings

The core offerings of UserTesting include-

• Audience Solutions– Audience recruitment, quality control, contributor onboarding
• Human Insight Management- Data visualisation, intelligent insights, auto-generated transcriptions and analytics
• User experience testing- Live interviews, usability testing, brand and messaging testing

Insights Pro also offers these solutions and then some more on top of that thanks to its emotion AI capabilities. Some of the core offerings include-

• Creative testing using facial coding

• UI/UX testing

• User journey testing

• 1-on-1 direct interviews 

• Live online focus groups

Pricing

Although UserTesting does not mention the price of their plans on the website, we got in touch with one of their clients and found out that it’s close to $30,000/seat/year. 

Insights Pro, on the other hand, offers custom plans based on your needs. Moreover, there are separate tools for qualitative and quantitative research, so you can save a ton of money by only paying for what you’re actually going to use. This is one of the best features of Insights Pro and it is the only tool in the market that currently offers this. You can request pricing here.

Conclusion

The decision between UserTesting and Insights Pro ultimately boils down to your needs and preferences. Both tools offer robust solutions for market research projects, gathering user feedback, and optimising user experiences, but they differ in their approach and feature set.

UserTesting excels in providing rapid insights through its vast contributor network. Its focus on usability testing, prototype testing, and competitive benchmarking makes it a valuable asset for businesses looking to iterate quickly and improve their digital products based on user feedback.

On the other hand, Insights Pro stands out with its innovative use of emotion AI technology, allowing businesses to delve deeper into consumer emotions and reactions. With features like creative testing, UI/UX testing, and user journey testing, the tool offers a platform for gathering genuine insights that drive better decisions at the stakeholder level.