5 top Qualtrics alternatives to turn feedback into action

Qualtrics tells you how users feel. But if all you’ve got are survey scores and complaints, you’re only seeing part of the picture. You don’t know what users clicked, where they got stuck, or what those moments are doing to your revenue.

That’s why more teams are exploring tools that go beyond feedback. In this guide, we look at 5 popular Qualtrics alternatives that offer different ways to collect and use feedback. 

Plus, we show you exactly how Contentsquare helps you turn opinions into outcomes, whether you use it on its own or right alongside Qualtrics.

Key takeaways

• Qualtrics is a powerful experience management platform, but it lacks behavioral context. It tells you how users feel, but not what they did before, during, or after leaving feedback

• Qualtrics doesn’t tie sentiment to friction or revenue, which makes it hard to see how feedback trends connect to business performance or which issues you should fix first

• Contentsquare fills the gap by linking feedback to real user journeys, surfacing friction automatically, and showing exactly how each issue impacts conversion and revenue

• If you’re using Qualtrics for advanced research or contact center analytics, integrating it with Contentsquare helps you see the full picture so you can move quickly from feedback to results without guesswork

Limitations of Qualtrics: why you’re looking for an alternative

Qualtrics is built for research. But most teams need more than surveys to move fast and fix what’s broken. These are the main blockers Qualtrics adds to your workflow:

1. Feedback without behavioral context

Qualtrics tells you how users feel, but not what they did. Without behavioral tools like heatmaps or session replays there’s no way to see what led to negative feedback—or how many others ran into the same issue. That makes it understand what led to issues or prioritize fixes. 

For example, a user might leave a low rating after visiting your checkout. Unless you can trace that feedback to a session replay or journey step, you’ll never know what they actually struggled with, whether that’s a payment error, a broken promo code, or a confusing shipping form. 

2. Slow time to value

Qualtrics is powerful, but complex. Designing the right feedback flows, setting up integrations, and acting on insights takes time and often requires a dedicated research team. For fast-moving product or UX teams, this delay can mean missed opportunities to resolve issues before they impact conversion, retention, or customer satisfaction.

3. No direct revenue impact

Qualtrics can surface sentiment trends, but it doesn’t show what those trends are costing you. There’s no built-in way to quantify the impact of a drop in satisfaction in terms of revenue loss or missed conversion opportunity. 

As a result, you run the risk of spending time on the loudest (or most common) feedback, rather than the issues that hurt growth the most.

💡 Pro tip: Qualtrics users can overcome all these limitations with Contentsquare’s Qualtrics integration. Use it to watch the sessions behind feedback, segment users by satisfaction score, and connect survey responses to behavior and revenue impact.

“The Contentsquare-Qualtrics connection helps us to understand the customer experience, identify issues and take action. And being able to segment on survey respondents in Contentsquare gives us the full customer journey.”

Niels Digneffe

Digital Analytics Consultant at Vaimo

5 top Qualtrics competitors (and what they do better)

Here’s a quick breakdown of how Qualtrics compares to 5 popular feedback and experience tools. 

Use the table below to see which platforms do what best and which ones actually help you turn insight into action. Keep reading for more about each one.  

1. Contentsquare

What it is An all-in-one experience intelligence platform that connects user behavior and customer feedback to business outcomes.

Who it’s best for All digital teams that want to reduce drop-offs, fix what’s hurting conversions, and prioritize improvements based on real customer and revenue impact.

What it does

• Unifies behavior analytics, product insights, voice of customer (VoC), and friction analysis to help teams spot issues, prioritize fixes, and improve conversions

• Links feedback to behavior with full context across sessions and devices

• Quantifies how much friction, drop-offs, or actions are costing your business

• Uses AI to surface issues, find trends, and recommend what to fix first

• Designed for cross-functional teams across web and app—no tagging, no silos, no bottlenecks

Use Contentsquare to survey your users—and let our AI surface key trends in feedback for you

Why we’re better than Qualtrics Yes, we’re Contentsquare (hello! 👋), so we’re obviously a little biased. But only because we’ve seen the incredible impact Contentsquare has for the many teams who use it. 

Where Qualtrics tells you how users feel, we also show you what they did, what went wrong, and what to fix first based on revenue, not guesswork.

And you don’t have to take our word for it: according to Forrester, brands using Contentsquare see a 602% ROI and recover over $3.2 million in revenue by fixing the friction they couldn’t see before.

2. Medallia

What it is Medallia is a voice of customer platform built to collect and analyze feedback across digital, physical, and contact center touchpoints. It also offers digital experience tools through its acquisition of Decibel (formerly Decibel Insight).

Who it’s best for Enterprises running complex VoC programs across multiple channels including customer feedback, contact centers, and employee experience.

Strengths

• Captures feedback across web, mobile, email, in-store, and call centers

• Uses AI to analyze sentiment, intent, and themes in feedback

• Offers session replay, heatmaps, and journey visualization

• Includes tools for contact center optimization and employee experience

• Supports large-scale CX programs with workflow automation and reporting

Why it’s not enough Medallia has some added digital experience features, but it still puts feedback first. You won’t get element-level behavior insights, instant revenue attribution, or frustration scoring. 

If you choose Medallia over Qualtrics, you’ll still need a platform like Contentsquare to connect feedback to business impact (and, yes, we have a Medallia integration for that).

3. Hotjar

What it is Hotjar, part of the Contentsquare group (hello, again! 👋), is a behavior analytics and feedback tool designed to help teams quickly see what’s hurting user experience.

Who it’s best for UX, product, and marketing teams at small to mid-sized companies who want an affordable, self-serve way to pair session replays and heatmaps with in-the-moment user feedback.

What it does

• Heatmaps that show where users click, scroll, and move on key pages

• Session replays to observe real user journeys and spot friction

• Built-in feedback widgets, surveys, and NPS tools

• Easy to set up and intuitive to use

• AI features to help create, summarize, and analyze feedback faster

Why it’s not enough (on its own) Hotjar gives you the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ behind user actions, but it’s not built for advanced teams who need journey analysis, revenue impact, or deep segmentation.

The good news? Hotjar is now part of the Contentsquare group. That means you can start simple with Hotjar and upgrade into the broader Contentsquare platform to unlock enterprise-level capabilities without losing continuity or retraining your team.

4. Pendo

What it is Pendo is a product experience platform that helps software teams understand user behavior, capture feedback, and improve adoption with in-app guides and analytics.

Who it’s best for Product and growth teams at SaaS companies that want to drive feature adoption and guide users inside their apps.

What it does

• In-app guides and tooltips to onboard users or highlight new features

• Basic usage analytics and session replay to see how users interact with specific flows

• Feedback collection tools like polls and NPS

• Works across web and mobile, with some AI features to surface trends

Why it’s not enough Pendo doesn’t offer journey mapping, business impact analysis, or full VoC coverage. It’s built for SaaS product teams, so teams outside of product (or anyone working beyond in-app flows) will quickly hit limits.

5. Sprig

What it is Sprig is a modern research platform focused on helping UX and product teams run targeted surveys and uncover insights quickly.

Who it’s best for User research and product teams at software companies who need fast feedback during design, development, or post-launch phases.

Strengths

• Launches in-product and long-form surveys without engineering support

• Uses AI to analyze open-text feedback and highlight patterns or outliers

• Offers limited behavioral data through session replays and event-based targeting

• Integrates with common UX and prototyping tools for insight sharing

Why it’s not enough Sprig is built for collecting targeted product feedback, but it stops short of full experience analytics. It doesn’t provide journey mapping, business impact metrics, or cross-session behavior analysis and it's not built for marketing, ecommerce, or support teams.

Why Contentsquare is the right Qualtrics alternative for growing teams

Qualtrics is built to find out how users feel. But feedback alone doesn't explain what happened or what to do next. 

Contentsquare outperforms Qualtrics as a standalone platform and complement because we connect those feelings to what users actually did and what it means for your business.

Let’s look at why brands like Crunchbase, Samsung, and Clarins rely on us to go beyond surveys and deliver tangible business impact.

1. Built-in VoC that connects to outcomes

Contentsquare collects feedback and ties it to what users did and what it’s costing you.

You can launch surveys across your site or app, capture open-text responses, and let Sense (our platform’s AI) group them by theme, sentiment, and urgency. Then use Impact Quantification to instantly see how those insights affect conversions, revenue, or subscriptions.

It takes just 1-click from any part of the Contentsquare platform to quantify impact 

Say someone leaves a low NPS after a checkout issue. You can replay their session, measure how often the problem occurs, and quantify how much it’s hurting your bottom line. 

Whether it’s a broken promo code, a high-exit page, or an error on mobile, Contentsquare shows you which feedback ties to actual revenue loss—so you can fix what matters first.

💡 Pro tip: you’ll get the same benefits if you integrate Contentsquare with Qualtrics or any other feedback tool.

2. Behavior and feedback in one place

Contentsquare brings feedback and user behavior together so every team can see what users said, what they did, and what went wrong, all in one place.

With Surveys, you can capture in-the-moment feedback and link it directly to session replays, Journey Analysis, and conversion data—no tagging or jumping between tools.

Automatically tag sentiment and view related replays and trends

Want to know how users with low CSAT behave on mobile? Filter by segment and watch their actual journeys. Starting with a drop-off? Pull in comments to understand what frustrated users. You can even troubleshoot support tickets by jumping straight from feedback to the session that caused it.

3. AI that actually tells you what to fix

Chat with Sense is your AI assistant inside Contentsquare. Ask it natural language queries about your behavioral data and it will respond in seconds. 

When it comes to collecting feedback, Chat with Sense can generate surveys for you and automatically summarize and categorize responses.

Chat with Sense suggests goals for your surveys, creates them for you, and analyzes responses 

You can also go further by asking questions like “Why is NPS down this week?”. Chat with Sense will analyze your NPS segments, find patterns like rage clicks or content drop-offs, and generate charts and next steps so you can quickly work on a fix. 

Ask your data anything using Contentsquare’s Chat with Sense 

4. Designed for fast-moving, cross-functional teams

Whether you're in UX, product, marketing, ecommerce, or support, Contentsquare gives you fast, visual answers—no tagging, no dashboard setup, no waiting on a data team.

Everything is captured automatically and available retroactively. You can explore journeys, open session replays, launch surveys, or compare page performance in just a few clicks.

It’s all visual, easy to share, and built for collaboration. And with unlimited seats on every plan, there’s no need to gate access or route requests through a single team. Everyone sees the same data and works from the same source of truth so you can move faster, together.

Final take: feedback is only useful if you can act on it

Qualtrics is a powerful experience management platform, but it only tells part of the story. You get sentiment, scores, and surveys, but not the behavior behind them or the business impact they have. 

Some Qualtrics alternatives might fill in some of the gaps, but stitching them together takes time, resources, and usually ends in incomplete insights.

Contentsquare is the only all-in-one experience intelligence platform that shows what users say, what they do, and what it means for your business, without tagging or guesswork.

And remember: it’s not an either-or. If you need Qualtrics for things like employee experience, brand tracking, or contact center feedback, you can integrate it with Contentsquare to add real behavioral context and turn every insight into action.

FAQs about Qualtrics alternatives

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