Top 13 customer insight tools to help you understand your customers

It’s no secret that products informed by customer insights produce better customer experiences—and by extension, more satisfied customers.

But tackling customer insight collection manually is a grind. You’re facing a long to-do list of coordinating research sessions, collecting and analyzing data, ideating a plan of action, and creating reports for stakeholders.

Customer insight tools make the process easier and more efficient, freeing up resource to focus on the important part: actually implementing the insights.

In this final chapter, we cover the top 13 customer insight tools to streamline research, data collection, analysis and reporting. First, let’s take a look at some of the types of customer insights tools.

Not all customer insights tools do the same things. While some are exceptional at capturing and reporting customer behavior, others focus on researching your target audience or collecting data from multiple web sources to give you insight into brand perception.

Here’s the types of customer insights tools on the market, and what they can do for your customer insights strategy:

The 13 tools listed below fall into one (or various) of these categories. Keep reading for a breakdown of each tool, plus how to choose the right customer insights tool for your team.

Maze is a leading research platform that empowers all businesses to uncover game-changing user insights. With Maze, you have access to a comprehensive suite of user research methods to design and deploy studies, and analyze the data you gather for product development, customer support, and more.

Maze has a Free plan for individuals looking to kickstart user testing, with a Starter plan at $99 per month, and customizable pricing for larger organizations.

Amplitude is a product analytics platform designed to help teams understand user behavior and optimize product experiences. Their analytics features provide in-depth insight into how users interact with digital products while measuring crucial customer experience benchmarks and metrics such as engagement and retention. Amplitude also provides multiple data visualization options such as conversion funnel visuals, cohort charts, and retention graphs.

Amplitude has multiple pricing options, including a free option, a Plus plan at $49 per month, and Growth and Enterprise plans with custom pricing.

Mixpanel is a powerful product analytics and consumer intelligence platform that helps businesses understand user behavior and refine their product-market fit. It’s focused on providing insights into user journeys so teams can improve upon product differentiation and facilitate growth with data-backed strategies.

Mixpanel offers a free plan containing its essential features, a Growth plan starting at $24 per month, and an Enterprise plan with custom pricing.

The latest version of Google’s tried and true analytics platform equips its users with advanced tools to understand customer behavior across websites and mobile apps. Google Analytics offers a combination of advanced tracking capabilities and machine learning features, making it beneficial for teams looking to understand customer behavior along multiple touchpoints.

Google Analytics has a free plan with analytics features suitable for most businesses. They also offer a Google 360 plan with custom pricing tailored to your business's specific needs.

Typeform lets you collect customer data with interactive forms and a user-friendly survey-builder. With this survey tool teams can build conversational, one-question-at-a-time forms designed to enhance engagement and elicit high-quality responses from customers. It focuses on delivering an exceptional user experience with customer experience survey formats that reduce fatigue and increase completion rates.

Typeform offers multiple plans: starting at $25 per month for its Basic plan, $50 per month for its Plus plan, $83 for its Business plan, and custom pricing for its Enterprise plan.

Qualtrics is a platform that helps large teams collect and analyze customer experience data. It specializes in providing advanced survey capabilities for customer research and data analysis features for getting in-depth insights. The platform supports various question types, logic branching, and customizable templates to create detailed and effective customer surveys.

Qualtrics doesn’t publicly list prices, but offers custom pricing tailored to your business’s specific needs and preferences.

Sprout Social offers a wide range of tools for social media management and social listening. The platform focuses on helping teams enhance their online presence, engage with audiences, and analyze social media performance for actionable data and customer insights. With Sprout Social’s suite of tools, companies can optimize their social media strategy while constantly receiving insights into how customers perceive their brand.

Sprout Social offers a Standard plan for $199 per month/seat, a Professional plan for $299 per month/seat, Advanced plan for $399 per month/seat, and an Enterprise plan with custom pricing.

Hootsuite is a social media management tool that specializes in helping businesses manage their social media presence, conduct social listening, and engage with their audience across multiple networks. While it's mainly known for its ability to streamline post-scheduling, it also provides a range of features that allow businesses to monitor and analyze conversations about their brand and industry for actionable insights.

Hootsuite offers a Professional plan starting at $99 per month, a Team plan at $249 per month, and an Enterprise plan with custom pricing.

Totango is a customer success platform designed to help businesses reduce churn, improve retention, and drive customer engagement with data-driven insights. It offers a suite of tools for managing customer relationships, tracking customer health, analyzing data, and creating successful customer experience strategies.

Totango doesn’t list pricing on its website, but offers customized pricing depending on team needs and preferences.

Hotjar is a user experience and behavior analytics tool that helps monitor how customers interact with your digital product. Best known as a heatmapping tool, Hotjar enables companies to identify users’ friction points and optimize the customer experience with the help of heatmaps, session recordings, feedback polls, and surveys.

Hotjar offers a Basic plan for free, a Plus plan for $35 per month, a Business plan for $88 per month, and a Scale plan for $171 per month.

Brandwatch is a social listening tool with a library of 1.6 trillion historical conversations to help track trends online. Each day, it stores another 500 new conversations from over 100 million websites so users can have an accurate view of active and upcoming trends connected to their industry. It also tracks key social listening metrics like brand awareness, social sentiment, and social share of voice.

Brandwatch doesn’t make its prices public, but offers custom pricing depending on team needs and preferences.

Kissmetrics is an advanced analytics platform designed to help teams better understand user behavior with insights, optimize marketing campaigns, and ultimately increase customer engagement and retention. Unlike most analytics tools out there, Kissmetrics focuses on tracking individual interactions over time, giving you a deep understanding of the customer journey.

Kissmetrics offers a $299 per month pricing plan for small teams, a $499 per month pricing plan for mid-sized teams, and a custom pricing plan for large teams.

Talkwalker is a consumer intelligence acceleration platform offering various tools to understand your target customers and audience. It features AI-powered solutions to help teams monitor customer conversations, including reviews and feedback. Talkwalker also offers multiple insight analysis options to help teams better understand user sentiment and overall brand perception.

Talkwalker offers custom products and pricing depending on the individual team's needs.

The right customer insights tool will save you both time and effort when it comes to connecting with target customers, conducting user research, and analyzing user research data for actionable insights.

Picking the wrong tool can lead to lost resources, ineffective processes, and multiple mistakes when collecting and analyzing insights.

Here are a few factors to look out for when choosing a customer insights tool:

Kirsty Finlayson, Director of Marketing at Chameleon, shares her approach to choosing customer insights tools:

“I look for tools that are easy to get started with, something that has a free trial or a starter option to try it out, with potential to grow with us. We’re a lean, nimble team so don’t want to get stuck with a tool we hate. It should be accessible for lots of different teams and be scalable. Finally, I need it to integrate with our stack so that the data and insights don’t live in isolation.”

Keep these aspects in mind, try before you buy, and you’ll increase your chances of finding the ideal tool from the get-go.

As you move forward with your customer insights tool in hand, and we finish up this guide, keep one thing in mind: customer insights are indispensable to customer-centric businesses. If an organization says they ‘prioritize customers’, but don’t collect customer insights, they’re not truly customer-centric.

Recruiting participants, conducting customer research, analyzing data, and actioning insights is no small task. It requires a solid understanding of your goals, robust research methodologies, and collaborations across teams. (A game-changing tool doesn’t hurt, either). But if you put user insights at the center of your product decisions, then business success will follow.

Now a bit about us: Maze is a leading user research platform that gives you everything you need to start collecting data and gaining insights from your customers right now. With a suite of comprehensive moderated and unmoderated research methods, you can design user research studies, collect data, analyze for insights, and report to stakeholders through a single platform.