Dovetail vs Userlytics

Free tier available

From $30 per session (volume/annual rates; platform access from $699/month)

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.

Two shapes. Buy sessions project-by-project with no subscription (5-session minimum), or take a self-recruitment subscription — Premium $699/month for 5 seats and 50 participants, Advanced from $999/month for 10 seats and unlimited self-recruited participants. Panel sessions go as low as $30 on the Enterprise plan. The per-session option suits intermittent research; the subscriptions only pay off with steady volume.

Free plan for individuals with limited projects.

Free trial with a small number of sessions.

Established

Dovetail · since 2017

Established

Userlytics · since 2009

• 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.

• Pay-as-you-go avoids an annual commitment for occasional studies.
• Both moderated and unmoderated in one platform.
• Genuinely international panel including many non-English markets.

• 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.

• Interface is less polished than the market leaders.
• Analysis tooling is basic compared to UserTesting.
• Panel quality varies by market.

Organisations running enough research that findings get lost.

Teams that research a few times a quarter and cannot justify an annual platform contract.