A startup must know what its customers want. Otherwise, it is setting itself up for failure. That’s why conducting thorough market research is a must for any product or service development process.

Why Do You Need these Market Research Softwares / Tools?

Market research helps show you who are interested in your product or service, where they are, how to reach these potential customers and how much they are willing to pay you.

It is a continuous and on-going process that you use and reuse while you create your proof of concept, prototype, MVP and repeated product or service reiterations. It also helps you create your business strategy and improvise upon your business model and revenue model(s).

That said, here are the best of the best market research tools that are sure to ease the process out for you as well as speed it up, so that you can collect and analyze insights on the go.

Market Research Tools are used for Various Purposes – How Do You Know which to Pick?

Since you are looking for the right software for your business, you should know that there is no one market research software that fits all the research purpose that you may wish for.

In fact, the right software may change depending on whether you are looking to conduct survey, analyze pre-existing data or whether you wish to go in more deep and analyze behavorial data and activity patterns of your consumers or clients.

Keeping all that in mind, we have categorized our list of market research softwares into the following four categories –

Best Tools to Analyze Pre-Existing Data, Understand Trends and Consumer and Competitor Behaviour.
Best Market Research tools to Conduct Surveys
Business Research tool to Collect and Analyze Behavioral and Activity Data
Best Market Research Tool to Conduct Interviews and for Direct Observation on Test-Participants

We did a massive research and combed through 50+ articles and 100+ tools and have arrived at three tools to suggest to you, that will surely fulfill all your requirements.

The 3 Best Market Research Tools for Analyzing Pre-Existing Data

There is a lot of already available data that can help business owners conduct secondary research for their market research needs.

Most entrepreneurs believe a business research or consumer research means you need to start collecting data.

While that is true, it is not what you should begin with. Rather, you should try and find out pre-existing data that are already available so as to first create a hypothesis.

Then, you should try and challenge the hypothesis by collecting primary data with the help of the tools mentioned in the following sections.

#1. Google Trends

Google Trends is a valuable search trends tool that displays how often a specific search phrase is entered into Google in comparison to the site’s total search volume over a specified time period. Google Trends can be used to do comparative keyword research as well as identify surges in keyword search volumes in different points of time.

Google Trends offers keyword-related data such as search volume indexes and geographic data about searches on google.

#2. Answer the Public

Answer The Public is a free tool that helps you conduct market research by determining what questions people are asking on the internet.

When you enter your keyword on the search bar, a list of questions, themes, common search terms, and related subjects appears which shows the Who, What, Where, When and Why behind the keyword, plus ‘how’, ‘can’, ‘are’, ‘which’ and ‘will’.

#3. Exploding Topics

Exploding Topics analyzes millions of searches, social shares and mentions across the internet and uses data science and analytics to discover upcoming trends. This can deliver very important insights for startups and can even help get a competitive edge.

The 3 Best Market Research Tools for Conducting Surveys

Surveys are best for quantitative market research that brings in primary data. It helps collect a lot of customer data fast. But it is not so thorough as a qualitative interview or direct observation.

For any market research, surveying your potential customers or audience is an absolute necessity. It helps you uncover group thought as well as collect insights from a large number of individuals faster.

While shorter MCQs will provide you with quantitative market research, open ended questions will yield you qualitative results.

#1. The Best Free Market Research Tool for Survey is Google Forms

Although it misses out on advanced logic and features like benchmarking, audience targeting, contact management and database options, the Google Forms offers a very easy to use interface that helps businesses to churn out surveys extremely fast and at scale.

Google Forms Features

With no limits on the number of surveys that you can put out and it being completely free and extremely user friendly, anybody can use this tool and any one can fill it up with ease.

It also offers basic logic features and allows websites to embed it with ease and for free, a must-have requirement for websites which wish to survey its own audience without having them leave the website.

It also allows API access and therefore can be integrated with several SaaS tools including that of the Google workspace.

Further since the individuals filling out the survey are required to log in with their Google Accounts when filling the form up, it reduces the chance of spam.

#2. The Best Freemium Survey Software for Market Research is QuestionPro

QuestionPro starts out with an Essentials package that is free. Most users favour this tool for the ease in setting it up and administering it as well as the amazing customer support it offers.

QuestionsPro also has an advanced plan which cost $129 per month, billed annually and a team plan with an undisclosed pricing, available on request.

QuestionPro Free Plan offers features like –

Surveys and questions are unlimited.
300 responses limit for every survey – One of the highest in the industry.
Email and LiveChat help are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
30 question varieties which includes all standard question types.
Survey colours, logo, and navigation can all be customised.
Branding, survey headers, and footers can all be customised.
Export data to CSV, XLS – You can export the results from the survey in either of these formats.
Integration with Google Sheets – Integrate survey data into other platforms effortlessly.
Skip logic branching enables you to build a bespoke path through a survey depending on responses to questions. Reduce completion time and enhance answer rates.
Piping for questions and answers allows you to use text from previous questions depending on response from the survey participants.

QuestionPro Advanced Plan has Additional Features like –

The limit on the number on responses per survey is changed from 300 per survey to 25k per year. Unless you have a very large company conducting market researches all over the place and cross-departments, you need not worry about crossing the limit.
There is also 8 additional question types (38 total).
It also provides much in-depth customization options and allows you to add HTML and CSS to further stylize the form. You can also create a customizable “thank you” page, which can add to the website’s User Experience.
QuestionPro Advanced also allows you to use advanced skip logic based on multiple responses from the participants.
It also provides advanced statistics, dropout analysis and interesting quota management options. While these are more geared towards advanced users, a noteworthy feature is that you can use the QuestionPro mobile app if you have an advanced plan.
The advanced plan also lets you create multi-lingual surveys, a noteworthy feature if your business operates in non-English speaking countries and also lets participants upload files.

#3. The Best Overall Market Research Survey Tool for Startups is SurveyMonkey

With high customizability, ease of use, setup and a huge variety in pricing plans, SurveyMonkey is highly favoured by startups.

Most startups recommend SurveyMonkey as the best market research tool for their needs, is because, it offers an unique balance between user friendliness and power use.

With custom template surveys (over 200) and a feature list comparable to that of QuestionPro but not that powerful, but packed with a much more competitive pricing, SurveyMonkey is best for startups who need to have a team collaborating on the survey and can not let it be a one-man job.

The basic survey design and format looks better on SurveyMonkey, especially if you can not bother yourself to customize your surveys with HTML and CSS. SurveyMonkey also creates better standard and custom reports for your surveys which helps you analyze the responses better.

SurveyMonkey has got better access controls for its surveys. Plus, SurveyMonkey is really good in survey distribution, which is a must-have feature if your website lacks good traffic.

The Best Market Research Tools to Collect Experience Data and Activity Data

It is one thing to look at people do a task or hear from them about how they like their product and it is another thing to have them do the task and use data to analyze their performance or have them use your product or service and have data to tell you how much they liked it and if they did at all.

This data is known as experience data and it is fundamentally important for market research because customers often say things that are completely opposite to how they act.

That is why, you need to use data to uncover deep, raw insights of your product’s performance. Now, it is rather tricky to suggest business software for experience data. That’s because tracking experience varies based on –

Whose experience you are tracking?
What sort of experience do you wish to track?

That said, here are some of our suggestions based on the various use-cases that you may have.

Qualtrics is the Best Tool for Collecting and Analyzing Experience Data for Large Businesses with lots of Touchpoints

Qualtrics handles your customer and employee experience data management in one place. Qualtrics can help you with everything from market segmentation and competitive benchmarking to getting client input on new services and products.

You may receive thorough insights into all parts of market research with this platform. To learn more about your target audience, it employs complex statistical approaches such as Conjoint analysis and market trend analysis. And you get all of this in a fraction of the time it would take to perform the same thing using conventional ways.

It also allows for brand tracking via social listening across multiple online channels and provides you with rather intuitive reports, straight to your phone.

However, it is useful only for large businesses with lots of KPIs to track and lots of employees to manage. Of course, you don’t need to collect employee data unless you have at least 50 employees.

Also, Qualtrics has a ton of use-cases so you may find something that suits your business or startup growth.

Microsoft Clarity and Google Analytics are the Best Market Research Tool for Analyzing Web-based User Activity

The reason I mentioned both these tools at the same time is simple. You can not do without the other, if you have a web-based business. Plus, they are free!

Google Analytics is a tool that lets web users analyze its traffic, while Microsoft Clarity is a heatmap tool that allows you to check what your users focus more on, when visiting your website.

Microsoft Clarity can help you optimize your conversion rates and increase the effectiveness of any campaigns that you may run. Plus, both these tools are completely free!

Of course, you could ditch Microsoft Clarity for a different heatmap tool like CrazyEgg but Microsoft offers all that any other heatmap tool does, for free. And, with no limits!

The 2 Best Market Research Tools for Interviewing and Direct Observation

Direct observation can help bring in primary qualitative data for business research and if structured properly with the help of the right business research software, can yield much benefit to the business concerned.

Once you collect enough quantitative data through the above market research tools, it is time to dig deep and collect qualitative data.

For that, you need to interview potential customers and audiences. For that, a video conferencing tool will suffice. But, if need arises, it should have the ability for participants to pitch in seamlessly, share documents, present as well as live screen-sharing.

For that we have two tool suggestions that will do the trick –

#1. Google Meet is the Best Free Market Research tool for Conducting Interviews with Participants

While Google Meet does not boast of cutting edge technical prowess, it does get the job done if all you need is to interview participants for your consumer research.

It is entirely free and you can get up to 60 minutes of meet time with more than 100 individuals and unlimited time for one-to-one meetings.

Plus, you can integrate Google Meet with the Google ecosphere seamlessly, provided you have the Google Workspace bundle.

#2. Microsoft Teams is the Most Power-Packed Market Research Tool for Conducting Interviews with Participants

MS Teams is better for interviewing participants for your business research as it is a power-packed system with high integrability (with over 600+ third-party applications apart from the Microsoft ecosystem).

Since it is in its essence a team management software, MS Teams offers a much better experience for your team to observe users partaking in tasks or using your website or app so as to learn how user friendly your product / service design is.

With its shared calendars, planners and in-meeting as well as standalone chat options, it offers an unparalleled experience for startups to observe users performing tasks and share feedback with each other live.

While as a standalone it is quite cheap, it works best with the entire Microsoft 365 suite.