Top Tools: Insight Community Platforms

By Insight Platforms

• article

• Insight Communities
• Online Communities
• Short Term Communities
• Long Term Communities
• Survey Software
• Qual-Quant Hybrid
• Online Qualitative
• Agile Quantitative Research
• Agile Qualitative Research
• Lean Insight
• Survey Research
• Mobile Qualitative
• Customer Panels
• Custom Panels

Insight communities can be a great way of understanding your customers. They can vary in size and duration – some with dozens of members, others with thousands, spanning weeks or years. Some will be more qualitative in nature, others more quantitative, and others will be somewhere in between.

Communities are popular because they can be more cost effective than running stand-alone projects, and more agile too. Additionally, insight can be iterative, and the community can help to build deeper relationships between the brand and the members. As the needs and scope for communities can vary widely, so can the community platforms themselves, too.

We’ve put together a list of the top 20 platforms that are available for insight communities. Each have different focuses, features, and service levels. We’ve broken them down by qual/quant hybrid platforms; qual platforms and quant platforms – so you can find the platform that fits with your needs.

If you’d like to know more about insight communities, read our guide: What is an Insight Community? to get started.

This is not an exhaustive list – find more solutions by searching the Insight Platforms Directory. There’s also no hierarchy implied.

Top Insight Community Platforms:

Crowdtech

Crowdtech is an insight community platform for both short-term pop-up communities and long-term panels. The platform mixes qualitative and quantitative research with a range of features, including crowdsourcing and co-creation tools, forums, videos, and polls. The survey engine supports both simple and complex designs, routing, live dashboards and reporting, full design customisation, and more than 20 question types.

The platform has an integrated panel management system for seamless respondent communication and management. Crowdtech also have a team to support your research to help ensure you get the most out of your community.

Bulbshare

Bulbshare is a customer collaboration technology platform that provides a range of services and products designed to enhance customer insights using AI technology. Researchers can gather real-time feedback from their community and use Bulbshare’s AI analysis to group, mine, and analyze the data within seconds. This allows for at-scale responses and quick turnaround time, making it easier for researchers to access customer insights and trends.

Bulbshare also offers various use cases for researchers, such as exploratory qualitative research, empathy diaries, competitor analysis, brand identity, and positioning analysis, customer connects, product placement feedback, creative concept testing, and product reviews.

Qualzy

Qualzy is a web-based platform offering a range of features and tools to create and manage short-term and long-term communities, diary studies, video projects, and more. With Qualzy, researchers can engage participants through various activities such as social posts, video uploads, surveys, and heatmaps. The platform is optimized for all devices and can be accessed in multiple languages. It also provides advanced tools like transcription, translation, video editing, and AI analytics, allowing researchers to uncover profound insights. 

Researchers can create different types of qualitative research projects, from short-term projects lasting a few days or weeks to long-term communities with thousands of participants that span years. After completing a project, researchers can take as long as they need to analyze the data and create reports, without incurring any additional costs.

Suzy

Suzy is an end-to-end consumer insights platform that integrates AI-powered quantitative and qualitative research, along with high-quality audiences, into a connected research cloud. Suzy offers various solutions for different areas of research, including insights, innovation, creative, and shopper.

Researchers can conduct robust and iterative research efficiently and at scale with Suzy’s AI-powered suite of products. The platform also provides an integrated 1st party consumer network of over 1 million diverse and engaged consumers. Suzy prioritizes enterprise-level quality and security, ensuring industry-leading privacy, fraud prevention, and data quality controls. Suzy’s simplified subscription-based pricing eliminates the need for multiple tools and cost-per-response calculations. 

CMNTY by MarketResponse

CMNTY is a software platform for insight communities. The platform includes research tools such as polls, forum discussions, chat sessions, idea contests, surveys, or personal diaries. It allows you to segment members based on feedback or behavioural data, as well as enabling co-creation.

The platform has a fully customisable look & feel, offers a lightweight mobile version for fast loading on slow connections, and supports push notifications and location tagging of content.

CMNTY also offers a suite of analysis tools, such as for poll & questionnaire data, sentiment analysis for open ends, and mood boards and heatmaps for visual research. Collected data can be exported to commonly used analysis solutions such as SPSS, MS Excel or any other tool.

My-Take

My-Take is an insight technology company that delivers customer/consumer insight through insight communities. The platform has a suite of activity types available, such as surveys, polls, discussions, diaries, collages, co-creation sessions, video chats, and mobile missions. Images and videos can easily be shared, and the activities adapt to the user’s device.

The platform also has several solutions for community management, such as a content management system, member management, communications management, and reward fulfilment. The tool integrates a real-time reporting engine for analysing data and authoring reports. The reporting engine, which is permission-based, allows you to view results through “Live Report,” download raw data files, export reports, charts, and member videos, run crosstabs, and present information in lists, tables, word clouds, and more.

Rival Community 2.0

The Rival Technologies platform offers insight communities that utilise conversational studies. The platform takes a mobile-first approach. It allows you to collect quantitative and qualitative data, including selfie videos, photos and closed and open ended answers. The platform uses direct and meaningful questions asked in plain language to build understanding, powered by conversational AI. Studies run in a web browser or can be embedded in messaging apps.

Mobile agile communities of customers, fans and employees can be set up in days. They can both short and long-term. The tool also integrates with Alida insight communities.

incling

incling are a digital research agency who specialise in building online communities of all shapes and sizes. Communities can be set up in little time, support over 20 languages, and are optimised for mobile.

Features include discussion rooms, screen sharing, diary studies, concept evaluation and polls. The tool also allows members to share videos and pictures to bring answers to life. For analysis, there are built-in tools within a dashboard. Customers are able to star and highlight comments, add tags, and share notes, as well as filter and sort data before exporting. Researchers can choose a DIY option, or can opt for support from set-up and recruitment, to translation, moderation and participant management.

Recollective

Recollective is an insight community platform for qualitative research. Studies can be short pop-up communities from a few days to months or years. The platform was designed to be intuitive to use and flexible to different needs. They aim to deliver better quality data quicker, with in-depth responses and in-the-moment research tools with same-day set-up and instant reporting and transcription.

Applications include concept testing, behavioural studies, customer feedback, advisory & consultation, co-creation and ideation, employee satisfaction and ethnographic projects. They offer different service options to suit your budget and time needs, such as self-service or project management.

Forsta Digital Diaries & Communities

Forsta Digital Diaries & Communities offers researchers a dynamic qualitative research solution tailored for capturing in-the-moment insights through smartphone diaries, journey mapping, and ongoing communities. The platform enables researchers to tap into diverse methodologies to enhance their understanding of consumer behavior and preferences

The tool allows researchers to build a community of customers and engage with them on a dedicated platform that facilitates ongoing interactions and generates a continuous stream of in-the-moment insights. 

Sago QualBoard

Sago QualBoard is a solution for lean and flexible communities. Lean communities are a good option for researchers who have a limited budget and time or are unsure how often they’ll use a community. The platform lets researchers grow communities over time, and there are no large up-front fees.

The platform offers a range of research features, such as quick polls, individual diaries, group discussions, and real-time video chats. Additionally, there are a variety of analysis tools available featuring AI automation to make it easier to uncover insights. The platform has flexible service options available. Researchers can opt for self-serve or access project management and/or research teams depending on needs.

Fuel Cycle

Fuel Cycle is a market research platform with a wide range of methodologies. The platform offers a large range of automated solutions to save time. It also enables you to run in-depth qual research alongside rapid quant studies. It can be used for a range of research needs, such as product development, ad testing, customer experience, user experience, and more.

The platform allows researchers to access integrated solutions through the FCX marketplace, which connects the leading insights tools with Fuel Cycle’s CoRe platform.

Alida

Alida (formerly known as Vision Critical) is an insight community software platform for managing long-term, large-scale custom panels. The platform is mobile-first and cloud-based. It offers a variety of native features including surveys (with over 25 different question types), forum discussions, social community features and participant communication tools. Additionally, extended features are available through integrations with SurveyGizmo for sophisticated surveys and Remesh for AI driven qualitative discussions and analytics.

Alida Analytics provides customers access to real-time, role-based, mobile dashboards that are completely customisable. This gives researchers the most up-to-date information about their community and the ability to monitor KPIs in real time. Alida communities can be used for a range of research needs, such as voice of the consumer, voice of the employee, customer journey, CSAT, marketing & advertising, UX & product design.

FlexMR

FlexMR is a research agency that offers insight communities alongside other qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Their platform, InsightHub, has 11 integrated qual and quant tools available, including focus groups, surveys, quick polls, diaries, forums and more. The tool offers fully customisable branding and support over 60 languages.

The platform has extensive analysis options alongside a services team on hand to help. Every platform licence includes secure hosting, data security compliance checks, 12 hours of support services, bespoke brandingm and a custom URL for free.

Platform One

Platform One is a research services and technology company that specialises in insight communities. The tool offers features like surveys, forum discussions, social community features and participant communication tools. The platform can be used to ideate, co-create, and concept test with your customers. It provides feedback that helps to inform your marketing, product innovation, and communication.

The tool offers a dashboard for analysis which can combine multiple data sources, and be set to static or live findings. With role-based access, the dashboard can be tailored to the project and the viewer to ensure the right people are getting the right information.

human8

human8 are an insight consultancy offering a range of services and solutions designed to understand the daily lives of consumers, their motivations, and how these factors are evolving. The community platform features over 40 activities, spanning qualitative and quantitative approaches, and is mobile-first, giving flexibility to members.

Toluna

Toluna provides survey panels, research services and technology, with insight communities part of its wider Toluna Start software. The platform has a range of engagement activities, such as digital journals, photo and video sharing, media integration, focus forums, and more. Researchers can create engaging discussion topics alongside surveys for quantitative insight.

Survey data can be appended to members for better insights and context into their decisions and feedback. Multiple features can be accessed to improve your analytics, including heatmaps and scripting enhancements. Advanced analytics and visualisation are also available in the same user interface.

STRAT7 Researchbods

ResearchBods offers insight communities as part of a larger offering, fitting in with the Strat7 ResearchBods group. The platform has a range of qualitative and quantitative activities available, such as surveys, polls, discussion rooms, diary tasks, and video interviews. The community can be customised to your brand, has the option of a mobile app for member access, and is available in over 14 languages.

Using APIs, the community data can be plugged into any CRM or third party platforms to ensure information is transferred in real-time. Reporting tools are available for analysis and visualisation. These include live cross tabs (with sig testing and weighting), automated PowerPoint charting, and interactive dashboards. The community management platform provides the key metrics of your community’s health and allows you to learn about your members past and future behaviours driven through AI and machine learning.

Q One Tech

Q One Tech is a market research software development company that allows researchers to build a customer panel using their platform. The platform can be used for panel management, surveying and UX research/data collection. It was built to execute both simple quick-turn-around studies through to complex, multi-wave projects.

icanmakeitbetter

icanmakeitbetter is an idea development and insight community platform. The platform offers integrated surveys, live chat, focus groups, discussion forums, digital journals, ideation, and panel management.

Communities can be launched using drag & drop tools without custom coding; groups can be open or private, with various sizes. Quant tools include survey templates and question libraries. Members can access the community via a mobile web app with options for rich media uploads, digital diaries, and mobile ethnography.

Basic quantitative and qualitative reporting is available using charts and wordclouds. Data can be exported to third party tools such as SPSS for deeper analysis.

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