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testcritic

Dovetail vs Maze

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 tier

Free tier available

Free tier

What 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.

Maze has withdrawn public pricing — its pricing page is now a feature-comparison table where every paid tier resolves to a form, so the Starter figures quoted by third-party sites are not verifiable. Panel recruitment is billed separately from the platform subscription.

Free tier

Free plan for individuals with limited projects.

Free plan with a limited number of studies and responses per month.

Open source

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

Codeless
Codeless

Platforms

Web
WebiOSAndroid

Fits teams

Scale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Established

Dovetail · since 2017

Widely used

Maze · since 2018

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.
  • Test a Figma prototype with real users before building anything.
  • Quantitative metrics make results defensible in a product review.
  • Usable free tier for evaluation and small studies.

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.
  • Unmoderated only — you cannot ask a follow-up question.
  • Prototype testing measures a happy path, not the messy reality of a live product.
  • Bring-your-own-participants works well; the built-in panel is smaller than UserTesting's.

Best for

Organisations running enough research that findings get lost.

Product and design teams validating flows early and often.

All of these integrate with: Slack, Notion, Figma.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.