Dovetail vs Lyssna
Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.
Entry price
Free tier available
Free tierFrom $166 per month (Growth, billed annually)
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Dovetail now publishes only the free tier and an Enterprise 'contact sales' option — the paid middle tiers carry no list price, so budget from a quote. Historically priced per contributor, with viewers cheaper or free.
Growth buys 5 in-depth studies a month, 5 seats and unlimited self-recruited responses. Panel responses are purchased separately per participant, typically a low single-digit dollar amount for general audiences.
Free tier
Free plan for individuals with limited projects.
Free plan: unlimited quick studies, 3 seats and 15 self-recruited responses.
Open source
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Established
Dovetail · since 2017
Established
Lyssna · since 2011
Strengths
- Turns scattered research into a searchable organisational asset.
- Automatic transcription and AI-assisted theme detection save real analysis hours.
- Good at making findings visible to people who did not attend the sessions.
- Extremely fast — a first-click test can be designed, run and answered inside an hour.
- Cheap enough to use for routine design decisions rather than special projects.
- Simple test types that non-researchers can run correctly.
Limitations
- It stores and analyses research; it does not recruit or run sessions.
- Value depends entirely on discipline — an untagged repository is a folder.
- Costs scale with the number of contributors.
- Narrow: it answers specific comparative questions, not exploratory ones.
- No moderated sessions.
- Panel is general-population; niche B2B audiences are hard to reach.
Best for
Organisations running enough research that findings get lost.
Design teams that want quick evidence for everyday interface decisions.
All of these integrate with: Slack, Figma.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.