Top 16 product discovery tools to build your tech stack in 2024

To stay agile and maintain a laser-sharp focus on delivering value to your users, your team needs a reliable compass to navigate through the noise. Enter product discovery: a structured process that helps validate assumptions, understand your users, and prioritize features.

Sound good? Even better is that with product discovery tools as your sidekick, you can boost team productivity, embrace innovation, and really get to the heart of your user’s needs. But which tools should you be considering?

In this chapter, we’ve compiled a list of our most recommended product discovery tools—so you can pick and choose your favorites and start building the ideal discovery tech stack for your team.

Product discovery isn’t a one-time thing. From the moment you start conceptualizing ideas, to long after launch, continuous product discovery ensures your product remains relevant, user-centric, and solves user problems for as long as it's on the market.

You don’t need a different product discovery tool for every stage of your product’s lifecycle, but you might want to mix and match the types below, depending on your research goals. Here are the five most common types of product discovery tools:

A huge part of the product discovery process is hearing from real users through user research, and digesting those insights to inform product decisions. UX research and usability testing tools make it easier for you to collect and analyze user feedback through interviews, surveys, and usability testing. Using a continuous product discovery tool, like Maze, for user research allows you to gather valuable audience insights, which you can turn into powerful, high-performing, user-centered solutions.

User research is better when you have a mix of quantitative and qualitative data. When testing concepts or running continuous product discovery, you want hard stats to illustrate which ideas resonate, what features work, and where any potential issues arise. With analytics tools, you can see how real users interact with your products and gather data to back up any qualitative research. You can also track key performance indicators (KPIs) like page views, conversions, and user flows to optimize the user experience.

Imagine your development team has created two homepage variations for your website: the first one showcases a large, eye-catching promotional banner with featured products, while the other focuses on a clean layout with easy-to-browse product categories. How do you learn which appeals most to your users?

Experimentation tools help you test different product ideas and new feature designs, and measure their impact on user behavior and satisfaction—through methods like A/B testing, multivariate testing, and feature toggling. Tools that test and validate product hypotheses like this enable you to compare different variations of a product, and ensure you’re always making decisions based on real user opinions.

At a glance, Voice of Customer (VoC) and user research tools can sound similar. The only difference is that VoC tools collect and analyze direct customer feedback, while user research tools offer various qualitative and quantitative research methods to gain valuable insights from customers and other research participants. VoC tools gather direct feedback from customers through sentiment analysis, customer satisfaction surveys, and social media monitoring, allowing product teams to get a direct channel into their most key audience.

Project management tools are a necessity for any product team. Tools like Notion and Jira help you automate workflows, organize tasks, and collaborate. When you track tasks, deadlines, and dependencies, you ensure team members are aligned and informed throughout the product development process.

Meanwhile, training tools like Udemy and Skillshare can help onboard new team members or teach existing members your product discovery principles and key UX research methods. Combined, project management and training tools shorten teams’ learning curves, accelerate the product discovery process, and increase effectiveness.

We’ve selected a mix of different types of product discovery tools along with their top use case, pros, and cons, to help you understand each one and build your toolkit. Here’s our top nine:

Maze is a continuous product discovery platform used by 60,000+ brands globally. It’s ideal for testing concepts and evaluating usability at all stages of the product development process, including after launch, supporting your team to develop a continuous habit of learning from using and building based on their feedback.

Maze supports various user research methods and applications, including usability testing, live website testing, and prototype testing. Since it's code-free, anyone on your team can quickly create and share a test, regardless of research or technical expertise. Use the drag-and-drop functionality and premade testing templates to start generating insights in hours, not days.

Maze is currently an unmoderated solution but you can use it alongside any video conferencing tool, like Zoom or GoogleMeet, to moderate your sessions. Plus, with Clips you can gain deeper insight into testers’ pain points, feelings, and thought processes, without needing the additional resources for a facilitator to be present.

Maze offers three pricing options for organizations and product teams of all sizes.

Hotjar is a heatmap analytics tool that connects to your website and records user behavior. It tracks interactions like mouse movements, clicks, and scrolls, and also offers form analysis to measure completion rates for input fields and surveys. Plus, Hotjar’s heatmaps show you what users are looking at and how long they stay engaged with a particular element or page.

Hotjar’s pricing is a little complicated as it’s categorized by the features you use, number of daily sessions required, and team size. It’s worth having a play around with their pricing scale to truly understand where your team’s needs would fall under the pricing.

Contentsquare is a digital experience platform that collects user behavior data through AI-driven insights. This analytics tool helps you identify areas for improvement, uncover user frustration points, and optimize content, design elements, and overall user experience. By delving into behavioral analytics, you can make impactful changes to UX before user frustrations get the better of your product.

Contentsquare doesn’t publicly list its pricing plans, but you can speak to their sales team through the website.

Google Optimize is an experimentation and website optimization tool that allows you to test different web page variations and measure the impact of changes on user behavior. With Google Optimize, you can create A/B tests, multivariate tests, and redirect tests.

The plans aren’t listed publicly, but you can request a custom quote. Here’s a quick overview of what each plan includes:

Figma is a design and prototyping tool to explore and create different UIs. Since it’s a browser-based platform, your team can create, edit, and share designs without installing software—making it an ideal choice for remote teams or those with distributed workflows.

You can use Figma to create and experiment with user interfaces, wireframes, product roadmaps, and mockups for websites and mobile apps. Plus, FigJam, a brainstorming and whiteboard tool by Figma, gives your team a playground for concept ideation, whether that’s IA grouping or ideating your minimum viable product (MVP).

While Figma offers a mobile app for viewing designs, prototypes, and editing files in FigJam, there’s no native app for designing on mobile devices. This can be a limitation for designers who prefer working on tablets or other mobile devices.

Figma offers three pricing plans:

Productboard helps your product teams decide which features to build by collecting customer feedback, prioritizing it, and mapping it to the product roadmap. A VoC tool, it’s ideally designed for product managers who need to quickly gather customer insights while managing the data they collect in one place. However, it’s made its way into the virtual toolbox of many product teams, thanks to its prioritization framework and strategic value.

Productboard’s pricing plans cater to small teams and enterprise customers:

Typeform is a versatile survey and form-building tool designed for flexibility and usability. It has a wide range of uses, from lead generation and event registration to customer satisfaction surveys.

One standout feature is Typeform’s logic jumps, which direct respondents to the next relevant question based on their previous answer—this not only improves the user experience, but allows product teams to automatically segment audiences and tailor survey questions, all while the survey is live.

Typeform has a free plan that allows you to create three forms and 10 questions per form, but if you want more features, check out these paid plans:

Jira is a versatile project management and issue-tracking tool developed by Atlassian. It was primarily designed for software development teams, which makes it ideal for agile and scrum teams. It offers pre-built Kanban boards for organizing and tracking tasks, and a popular bug-tracking functionality.

Jira’s pricing plans differ based on the number of team members you choose—here’s an overview for up to 10 members:

Udemy is an online learning platform with a vast library of 200,000+ videos across design, development, business, and marketing. The platform offers self-paced and on-demand learning accessible from any device with an internet connection. Udemy caters to an international audience and offers courses in 14+ languages.

For teams looking to upskill on product discovery, Udemy offers these highly-rated courses:

Udemy offers a free forever plan with limited courses, or a pay-as-you-go method for individuals who want to access specific courses. Business plans come at different prices:

You’ve seen our top nine, but if you’re looking to expand your search further, there’s some other great discovery tools out there. Here’s a few honorable mentions to consider adding to your tech stack:

When assembling your ideal product discovery toolbox, choose products that are easy to use, provide actionable insights, and have a reliable support center in case you need assistance. You don’t need every tool on our list, you may only need one or two, but you’ll find some great combinations and collaborations.

For example, Typeform can help you build surveys or polls quickly, and you can pair it with Hotjar for in-depth user behavior analysis. Or you can combine Figma for creating high-fidelity prototypes with Maze for usability testing to assess your designs.

If you want to invest in one tool that gives you the most versatility for your tech stack, with minimal learning curves, try Maze. Your team can put continuous product discovery into action, from prototype testing and concept validation, to usability testing and assessing your live website. Plus, access 50+ pre-built research templates, integrations with popular design tools like Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD, and export easily-digestible reports.