Top 10 market research tools in 2024

Market research tools help businesses keep a finger on the pulse of consumer trends. They help you keep an eye on the competition so you can stay ahead. They even help you compensate customers who share their insights with you.

In this article, we'll take a look at the top 10 market research tools to try in 2024.

1. Qualtrics

When it comes to essential market research tools, Qualtrics is a must-have. If you don’t use it already, you’ve probably heard of it before. This tool does so many different things it’s hard to narrow its benefits down to a single value prop. 

At its core, Qualtrics is a software platform designed to help you with every facet of experience management (XM). The goal of XM is to carefully measure and improve the way people interact with an organization across every touchpoint. 

Each solution on the Qualtrics platform exists to help you do just that. Qualtrics divides its tools into three distinct categories: 

• XM for Customer Frontlines: These software tools spot issues (like negative reviews) fast, helping your frontline team respond in real time. The goal is to drive improvements across your processes, products, and digital platforms. Tools include:

• Frontline Digital: Manages your customers’ experience across your digital channels.

• Frontline Care: Uses AI and analytics to make customer service quick and effective.

• Frontline Locations: Manages your customers’ experience across your physical locations (ie, your brick-and-mortars). 

• XM for People Teams: Software that helps you manage the employee experience within your organization. Tools include: 

• People Engage: Regularly gathers and analyzes employee feedback to help you improve the company culture.

• People Lifecycle: Optimizes the employee journey from hiring interview to exit interview.

• People Analytics: Use AI to practice ethical employee listening so you can improve the employee experience.

• XM for Strategy & Research: Of all of Qualtrics’ tools, this one is a must for market researchers. You get three core tools to help you collect and interpret quantitative and qualitative research:  

• Strategic Research: Build research panels or use third-party respondents to design, run, and analyze your own market research surveys.

• Strategic UX: Test product concepts and track user behavior on existing products to identify and fix trouble areas.

• Strategic Brand: Track key performance indicators (KPIs) and brand perception across the web.

With Qualtrics’ market research solutions, you can learn a lot about who your customers are, what they love (and hate), and how to deliver the most valuable products possible.  

Qualtrics doesn’t publish its pricing plans online. You can explore different plans and request pricing on the Qualtrics XM Platform pricing page. 

2. Typeform

Typeform is an online platform that brings a fresh twist to forms and surveys. Since its debut in 2012, it's been turning once-dull questionnaires into engaging conversations.

With Typeform, you can fully customize the surveys and forms you send to participants. With Typeform’s brand kits, you can add your organization’s branding to your forms for an ultra-professional look.

You can even add videos and GIFs to make surveys extra engaging.

Typeform offers a mix of templates. You’ll find everything from recruitment application forms and branding questionnaires to order forms and satisfaction surveys. 

Since we’re exploring the best market research tools, we want to highlight these especially useful Typeform templates:

• Lead Generation Form Template: Ask potential customers questions to gauge their interest in your product or service.

• Market Research Survey Template: Learn more about your customers’ demographics, behaviors, and preferences by asking them specific questions. 

• Product Research Survey Template: Gather direct feedback about what products or services your customers want to see from you. 

• Competitor Research Survey Template: Find out what your customers love about your competitors so you can do those things even better.  

• Market Segmentation Survey Template: Gain an understanding of customers’ behavioral, geographic, demographic, and psychographic traits for easy consumer profiling. 

These are just five of Typeform’s helpful market research surveys. The platform has a limited free plan, but paid plans are affordable, too. They start at $25 USD a month, billed yearly.

But if you want to white-label your surveys with your own branding, you’ll need to pay for the Plus plan, which starts at $50 a month. You’ll get 1,000 survey responses with this plan. 

If you need to allow more than five users on your Typeform plan, want to gather more than 10,000 responses a month, or need HIPAA or GDPR-compliant forms, you can connect with a sales rep to explore Typeform’s enterprise plans. 

Learn more on Typeform’s pricing page.

3. SurveyMonkey 

SurveyMonkey simplifies the process of creating, sending, and analyzing surveys. The platform is incredibly user-friendly, allowing you to whip up custom surveys within minutes. Or, you can use SurveyMonkey's vast library of existing templates and tweak those to fit your needs.

What sets SurveyMonkey apart is its flexibility. You can mix and match different types of questions—like multiple choice, rating scales, and open-ended responses – into a single survey.

Plus, you can use features like skip logic to keep your surveys streamlined and relevant. (Skip logic is a survey tool that changes the questions a person sees based on their earlier answers.)

Here are some standout features SurveyMonkey offers market researchers: 

• SurveyMonkey Audience: Create a custom group of SurveyMonkey-provided respondents based on different audience targeting criteria or characteristics. Send the survey out and analyze the results—all from within your SurveyMonkey dashboard. 

• Ad Testing: Run your ad ideas past a group of trusted respondents to gain critical insights before you launch campaigns.

• Concept Testing: Ask potential users what they think about a concept you have for a new product, service, or feature.

• Usage and Attitudes: Find out who’s using your product, when they use it, and how you can make it even better.

• Price Optimization: Use the Van Westendorp price sensitivity methodology to find out how much customers are willing to pay for your products. 

SurveyMonkey has come a long way from its humble beginnings as a simple feedback collection tool. The brand has evolved  with the market, and it now offers AI-powered insights and enterprise-level tools along with its core survey features. 

Each pricing plan comes with distinct features. 

For instance, with a Team Advantage membership—which begins at $25 per user per month— you and your team get a survey dashboard where you can comment and collaborate on surveys throughout the market research process. You also get custom branding, over 50,000 survey responses a month, and advanced analytics. 

See the full suite of plans on SurveyMonkey’s pricing page. 

4. Statista

Statista is a leading statistics portal that provides comprehensive data on over 80,000 topics from more than 22,500 sources. It's helpful for anyone a who needs reliable, up-to-date information on just about anything. Statista is especially popular in the research, business, and academic sectors.

Market researchers can use Statista's intuitive platform to access. market data, consumer data, company data, and societal trends. 

There are several different ways to use Statista as a market research tool: 

• Browse statistics. Statista offers stats on everything, from the worldwide adoption rate of cloud technologies to the current biggest growth regions for e-commerce. With a basic account, you can access some stats for free. It’s a great launching point for getting to know your customers on a broad, quantitative level. 

• Buy existing reports. Need to know how Reddit makes money so you can replicate its success for your own software product? Or a deep-dive on the U.S. wine market so your new vineyard can get ahead? Statista has thousands of detailed reports available for purchase.

• Get comprehensive insights. Statista offers a 360-degree view of four different insight types: market, consumer, company, and e-commerce insights. See brand KPIs, global survey data, and in-depth surveys for a ton of different audience groups. 

• Use Statista Q to conduct original research. If you need to outsource your biggest market research tasks, Statista Q can help. The full-service market research team can run surveys, interviews, and focus groups on your behalf—and slice and dice the data for you. 

• Ask quick questions via askStatista. Want quick answers to custom questions? Send a research request to askStatista and get results from your micro-study within two days. 

A plan for browsing over one million statistics starts at $199 a month, billed annually. Some individual reports are free, like The Era of Taylor Swift. Others cost $495 or $995 to read and download. 

askStatista packages begin at $6,500 USD and go up to $17,500 and beyond. 

For enterprise-level services, you’ll want to talk to a Statista sales rep. 

Start your search for the best tools and prices on the Statista Corporate Solution pricing page.

5. Dovetail

Dovetail is a user research and analysis software that helps teams store, sort, and analyze qualitative data. Market researchers can upload various data types into Dovetail—think interview transcripts, survey responses, and user testing observations. Dovetail's powerful text analytics tools can then identify and organize the insights for you.

The platform supports collaborative tagging and note-taking, making it easy to work together with your team.

In a world that's teeming with data, the market research tool is a lifesaver for companies. It basically chomps up huge amounts of information, digests it, and presents it to you in a tidy, easy-to-work-with format.

Dovetail can:

• Collect all your customer data and store it in one single, searchable database

• Generate AI-driven summaries of different data points and reviews

• Read dense, complicated documents like white papers, industry reports, customer call transcripts and summarize the data for you

• Highlight key themes within the summaries

• Integrate with tools like Notion, Slack, and Trello so you can collaborate with your team in real-time

• Show you data in charts, graphs, and other easily-digestible formats

Dovetail has a free plan that comes with one project and channel for you to use. For $29 a month billed yearly, you can get unlimited projects, channels, and viewers. See the full pricing breakdown on Dovetail’s pricing page.

6. Think With Google 

Think with Google is a digital resource that offers data and insights that help marketers make informed decisions. The free resource provides information on everything from consumer trends to industry benchmarks. You can find articles, case studies, and infographics that explore various aspects of digital marketing. 

Here are some of our favorite Think with Google resources:

• Consumer Insights: Articles and videos that highlight the most recent trends as they pertain to consumers. Example articles include: “Lean into AI to engage and convert customers across the funnel” and “Connect with customers throughout their increasingly complex journeys.”

• Marketing Strategies & Innovations: Articles and videos that highlight the newest advances in marketing. Example videos include: “Meeting the AI moment with action and change” and “How the New York Times delivers better ad experiences.”

• In-Depth Reading: Collections of articles, guides, and videos that provide a deep view into a specific topic. Example collections include Marketing on YouTube and Inclusive Marketing.

• Tools: Free tools that help you understand your consumers better. Tools include the Insights Finder, Google Trends, and Marketfinder.   

Together, these resources from Think with Google help you stay on top of a rapidly evolving marketplace—for free. 

7. Forsta 

Forsta is a human experience (HX) and research platform with tools for gathering, analyzing, and acting on customer insights. Forsta helps companies design surveys, collect data, and organize information into tidy snapshots.

The market research tool bills itself as the ultimate human experience platform, and the software lives up to this name. With Forsta, companies can: 

• Gather data with survey software, social listening tools, and online focus groups. 

• Analyze data with a centralized data hub, text analytics software, and voice sentiment analysis.

• Visualize both qualitative and quantitative data with storytelling, effective reporting, and benchmarking. 

• Act on your insights with workflows, alerts, and a project management organizer.

Forsta integrates with familiar tools like Salesforce, Adobe Analytics, Google Translate, and Zendesk. 

For pricing, reach out to the Forsta sales team. 

8. BrandMentions 

BrandMentions is a tool that keeps tabs on your brand’s reputation across the web and social media. It constantly scans blogs, news sites, social media platforms, and forums for any mention of your brand. You can also set it to include mentions of your competitors or relevant industry topics. 

You can use this information to see where your brand is excelling—and where it falls short. If people aren't talking about your brand at all, you can use that knowledge to pump up or change your marketing strategy.

Whether you need to keep tabs on competitors or manage your reputation, BrandMentions can help. 

Here’s a snapshot of the features you get with this market research tool: 

• Social Mentions: Track keywords and hashtags on forums, sites, blogs, newsrooms, review aggregators, and 10+ social media sites—including all the big names.

• Sentiment Analysis: Use AI to get a quick feel for the sentiment behind a mention.

• Real-time Updates: Get email alerts anytime your brand is mentioned. 

• Data Organization: View data and analytics for your brand, and organize it according to different customer segments. 

• Reports: Get customizable, white-labeled reports based on BrandMention’s findings.

The basic plan gives you tracking for 15 keywords and 5,000 mentions a month, with daily updates, one month of historical data, and basic sentiment analysis. This plan costs $79 a month, billed yearly. 

For 30 keywords, 30,000 mentions, real-time updates, six months of historical data, and advanced sentiment analysis, you’ll pay $249 a month, billed yearly. 

Explore the ins and outs of the plans on BrandMention’s pricing page. 

9. NielsenIQ

A spinoff from the well-known Nielsen company, NielsenIQ is a powerhouse for understanding consumer behaviors. It digs deep into what people buy and where they shop, focusing on the retail and consumer goods sectors.

Using a blend of retail scanner data, consumer feedback, and e-commerce trends, NielsenIQ captures a wide swath of information. This data is then sharpened with advanced analytics, AI, and machine learning to give a clear picture of market trends and buying patterns. It can also tell brands how they stack up against the competition.

NielsenIQ is a must-have for market researchers. It helps you grasp what drives consumer choices and spot emerging market shifts. This means you can create products and marketing strategies that click with your target audience. 

NielsenIQ’s tools help with: 

• Assortment and merchandising: Use data-informed store planning tools to place products in the most profitable locations on your brick-and-mortar shelves. 

• Market performance measurement: Gather and analyze real-time data from your e-commerce and physical locations to see how well your store is performing.

• Consumer and shopper insights: Get a deep look at who your customers are, what they buy, and which factors affect their buying decisions. 

• Marketing, media, and personalized offers: Use analytics, AI, and machine learning to connect customers with the right marketing campaigns, products, and offers. 

Small and mid-size businesses can benefit from NielsenIQ’s Byzzer tool. This market research tool delivers custom reports to help businesses gain ground in their industry. 

As an enterprise-level solution, NielsenIQ doesn’t list prices. We do know that your first three reports on Byzzer are free, though. 

Reach out to a sales associate to learn more about NielsenIQ’s pricing plans. 

10. Tremendous

One of the most important aspects of market research is the people you talk to.

Compensating research participants for their time is a necessary piece of market research. With Tremendous, you can send incentives to research participants almost anywhere in the world for free. 

Tremendous handles everything from conversion rate to translation automatically. You don’t even need to know where your participants are. Tremendous automatically geolocates recipients based on IP address to ensure they recieve locally-relevant incentives in the appropriate currency

Our features include: 

• Over 2,000 payout options: Send monetary transfers, prepaid Visa cards, and gift cards to recipients in over 200 countries. Give your recipients the gift of choice, and let them decide how they want to use their payout. 

• Fraud prevention: Tremendous’s fraud prevention tool leverages AI and customizable fraud controls to block scammers from infiltrating your research study.  

• Integrations: Send incentives through tools you already use, like Qualtrics and Typeform. Or, use our Zapier integration to send them through 5,000+ other apps.

• Global reach: We can pay recipients in over 200 countries, and we’ll handle all the language and currency exchange details for you—for free. 

Want to send research incentives fast, for free? Sign up now and send your first incentive in minutes, or chat with our team today.