What’s essential in your tool stack?
Building an impactful UX research practice requires you to adopt the right set of user research tools. UX research tools do a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to user research. From recruiting participants and planning the interviews to getting feedback, and sharing your findings, having a great tool stack is important for running a great research practice.
Selecting the right UX research toolkit depends on various factors, such as where you are in the research process, the methods you’re using, the size of your organization, and the type of product you’re researching. As research scales, managing participant recruitment, scheduling, and engagement has become increasingly complex. Researchers, program managers, and others involved in ResearchOps face the challenge of organizing participant panels, which can be time-consuming and difficult to manage effectively.
To help you navigate the myriad options, we’ve curated a list of the top panel management software solutions that stand out in the industry. Read on for insights into essential tools that will help move the needle in your organization.
Starting with the foundation of organized, scalable research
Managing participant relationships and research data is where a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool steps in. A CRM is your centralized database for customer information and interactions across the org.
A user research CRM specifically, supports efficient recruitment and scheduling and also ensures compliance, data security, and consent management—key factors when dealing with user data. By centralizing all participant interactions, feedback, and insights, it enables researchers and team members to access vital information, keeping everyone aligned and improving research outcomes over time.
Tools for recruiting research participants
Because panels are the go-to solution for teams conducting ongoing studies, there are various types of panels—quantitative, qualitative, panel providers, aggregators, and agencies. However, managing these different participant databases can quickly become overwhelming for UX researchers and ResearchOps professionals.
To address this, UX research professionals seek the best panel management software to:
Streamline the time-consuming and complex challenges of participant recruitment
Manage their own participants—people who use their products
Source external participants—via Intercepts, email campaigns, etc.
Automatically schedule participants, team members, and stakeholders
Invite participants to different types of interviews (self-moderated, moderated)
Why do ResOps and product teams use panel management software?
Agencies are expensive, and providers are full of bots and fakers. Many research teams find themselves wanting more control over their audience for research.
They want a platform that empowers them to:
Recruit the right participants through screening, demographics, and other filters.
Manage consent, privacy, and legal compliance
Centralize participant management and governance of access control for employees and stakeholders
Scheduling with Syncs team member's calendars for study bookings
Pay incentives globally with details that matter to research ops teams and researchers:
Localization
Full branding—white label service
Accessibility
Currencies and countries.
The importance of an end to end solution
This is where panel management solutions and user research CRM tools become essential. In 2024, these tools will play a key role in automating ResearchOps workflows by handling recruitment, scheduling, and participant communication, allowing research teams to focus on insights instead of logistics. A centralized database enables collaboration and informed decision-making across teams. This integrated approach not only saves time but also ensures that insights are derived from well-managed and engaged participant panels, ultimately leading to more informed decision-making within organizations.
In the following section, we’ll explore various CRM and panel management solutions available in 2024, highlighting their features and how they can impact your UX research practice.
Ethnio — Best Enterprise Grade ResearchOps Platform
When it comes to enterprise-level research operations, Ethnio stands out as the gold standard for UXR panel management. Trusted by leading organizations such as Intuit, Meta, Airbnb, Cisco, and Dropbox, Ethnio is the first and only research CRM built specifically by UXRs.
Most panel management software is secretly trying to sell you their panel. It's as simple as that. Ethnio is the only platform that offers 100% organic ownership of your end-to-end participant management without bloat, upsells, and external panel offerings.
We love that Ethnio lets us maintain our brand identity by customizing every visual and copy element of the emails and redemption pages. As a design-focused company, this is critical to us.
Lowell ReadeSenior UX Research Program Manager, Duolingo
Instead of relying on questionable external lists or external panels buying lists, Ethnio enables organizations to:
Import lists from internal cohorts
Integrate with their product and two-way sync
Intercept via the web or in-app
Having one place where my team can setup complex targeting for intercepts and funnel prospective customers through our panel management rules is absolutely game changing.
Sarah BowlinSenior UX Researcher
Intercepts enable researchers to embed recruitment popup forms anywhere in your product ecosystem, including Web, iOS, and Android. Typically, teams use dedicated intercept tools that are difficult to integrate with panel management's privacy, workflow, and legal requirements—these additional tools also increase costs. Ethnio Intercepts are integrated with the platform and are fully white-label.
Researchers can use filters and triggers to intercept only the participants that meet study requirements or use specific features.
Pool is Ethnio's CRM purpose-built for ResearchOps' unique needs. Researchers can upload user databases or sync with other CRMs via Ethnio's API. Any participants recruited via Intercepts will also appear in Pool, and Ethnio provides automatic data enrichment for user interactions and research.
Other key Pool features include:
Mask PII details
Rules and governance
Tagging and segmentation
Subject performance and engagement tracking
Advanced drag-and-drop email builder
Pool offers advanced automation you won't find in other UX research tools, most notably:
Dynamic Tagging: automatically enriches participant data based on Intercept and Screener interactions and testing.
Tag Exclusivity: create rules to automatically override persona tags based on how they respond to future Screeners.
Researchers can customize Ethnio's Screeners to screen, segment, and recruit participants using 16 question types and advanced qualifying logic. You can also conduct light surveys to get instant feedback from users regarding a specific screen, feature, or product.
Ethnio's native Scheduling feature allows organizations to connect every team member and stakeholder's calendar to automate study scheduling at a time that suits everyone—including Round Robin logic, multi-session scheduling, group session scheduling, and more.
Researchers can also set hard and soft quotas with customizable logic to find the most valuable participants for every study. Notable features include:
Create multiple hard and soft quotas
Customize condition logic for each quota
Use color coding and shortcuts to visualize quotas
Invite team members and stakeholders to review and approve or decline participants
Most panel management software providers use third-party vendors for participant incentives (payouts), often resulting in unexpected fees and expenses. These third parties also impact participant privacy and create additional risk for enterprise research teams.
Ethnio's built-in payout feature, Incentives, allows companies to pay participants in any currency worldwide. Researchers can also offer electronic gift cards, or participants can choose one of 40+ charities to donate their incentive.
Researchers can monitor payouts, set tax limits, and manage access, from a single centralized dashboard without switching to third-party tools. They can also automate weekly or monthly reporting emails to relevant stakeholders on research spending.
Pricing
Ethnio works on a per-seat price model with four plans, including an Enterprise package. The Starter plan starts at $79 per seat per month. Book a call to learn about Ethnio’s Enterprise package giving you complete access to the entire product suite.
What clients say about Ethnio
“We use Ethnio when we need to talk to people that a recruitment agency just wouldn't be able to find. We often want people who are in the early stages of researching or using our product, and are in the right mindset. Other recruitment methods just don't cut it for these situations.” Lynsey T. UX Research Lead, Shopify
Salesforce - CRM + AI + Data + Trust on one platform
Salesforce CRM is a cutting-edge cloud-based software solution designed to centralize and optimize customer relationship management. With Salesforce, businesses gain access to a vast array of tools and functionalities, allowing them to manage customer interactions, sales processes, marketing automation, and customer service from a single, unified platform. Over 150,000 businesses trusting Salesforce to safeguard their data, you can rely on its commitment to security and compliance—building your business on a foundation of trust.
Here’s the catch. Although Salesforce offers centralized data management, it may lack specialized features needed for UX research, such as real-time participant tracking, quota management, and streamlined recruitment strategies. As a result, teams will end up using multiple tools to address gaps, leading to fragmentation in their research workflows.
For organizations already using Salesforce, there’s potential to leverage its functionalities for participant management, enhancing communication across customer success and support teams. However, for those considering Salesforce without a current subscription, the steep costs may deter initial investment in participant tracking solutions.
Pricing
Salesforce offers a free trial, allowing users to explore the platform's capabilities. When you’re ready to make a purchase, you can explore Salesforce products by industry or category to find solutions tailored to your business needs.
User Interviews — Detailed Large Panel
One of User Interviews' strongest selling points is the company's 1.5+ million public participants. That’s probably close to the dominant company in this space: Usertesting.com
Researchers can filter the User Interviews database to target users based on demographics, location, and other criteria.
While recruiting is fast with User Interviews, the quality of participants and relevance to your product/market is a contentious topic in the ResOps industry. It's common for public participants to fake their credentials or create multiple accounts. Additionally, User Interviews owns this data.
Another User Interviews benefit is the platform's Free Forever plan on Research Hub, giving early-stage startups and solopreneurs an entry-level research CRM with basic automation and up to 100 contacts—keep in mind you must still pay if you recruit participants from the public panel.
User Interviews Research Hub is supposed to be an answer to Ethnio's enterprise-level toolkit, but the platform lacks comparable features.
Pricing
User Interviews offers two product types:
Recruit: source participants from User Interviews' public panel
Research Hub: a CRM to manage and recruit your own participants
Recruit offers a pay-as-you-go plan for $49 per session for “a flexible number of sessions”. For high-volume user testing, this model can get very expensive.
Research Hub plans start at $250 monthly for up to 5,000 CRM contacts.
What clients say about User Interviews
"Fast, cheap, effective. User Interviews is everything I need and nothing I don't. I love it and recommend it to everyone!" – Michelle Avelis - Sr. Design Researcher at REI
dscout acquired a research CRM in 2023
You probably know dscout as an awesome diary study platform with their own “scouts” that help you collect in-context insights from the people who use your products. Essential for the diary study world and user interviews.
Their acquisition of Panelfox in 2023 added the ability for you to manage your own panel as well as some participant management and data synchronization. Panelfox was designed to replace tracking everything in a spreadsheet. It had scheduling, emailing, screening, and tracking incentives all in one place. It also offered an area to track notes about recruiting participants and a survey function.
Another component of the platform is dscout Live, which lets you run remote user interviews and collect feedback from participants. You can also run diary studies with dscout Diary to see people’s everyday product experience as it happens either on video or in photos.
As a jack of all trades, the G2 crowd mentions the learning curve is fairly steep.
Pricing
Panelfox and dscout do not list pricing on the website, you can start a free trial, schedule a demo which takes an hour, or you can contact them for further information.
Qualtrics — Best Survey and CX Platform
Qualtrics is undoubtedly a powerful platform with sophisticated features. Its powerful CRM provides organizations with a single source of truth for customer databases and powerful quantitative research tools.
It is a top-tier survey distribution platform, however has no means to recruit participants for studies or provide features like scheduling, incentives, screening, or panel management. All ResOps teams have with Qualtrics is a CRM, serving customer experience and marketing teams rather than UX researchers.
To get features comparable with Ethnio, researchers must use external tools or traditional manual workflows. It's also important to note that Qualtrics is one of the most expensive CRMs, and researchers must pay extra for studies using the platform's public panels.
Pricing
Qualtrics doesn't display pricing, but users report it's in the "premium pricing range." Clients must book a demo to design a bespoke package.
What clients say about Qualtrics
"Many IT projects fail because they don't think about the user experience. We're using Qualtrics to gather feedback from stakeholders and take action to close experience gaps." Charlie Davies, Strategic Growth Manager at Costain (UK)
Great Question — Great Entry Level ResearchOps Tool
Great Question is a fantastic low-cost alternative to Ethnio with lots of features like a repository that appeal to non-researchers. Their platform offers standard participant recruiting features but without the same degree of control. They don’t have the same level of panel automation, custom scheduling, or intercept functionality as Ethnio.
Great Question uses a third party tool called Nylas to power their scheduling integrations. This introduces a whole other third party that gets access to your data between Outlook, your organization, Nylas, and Great Question. Nylas has some pretty rough reviews and reliability problems that most likely translate to Great Question.
What Nylas customers say: “Immature solution with frustrating and disappointing experiences."
Great Question allows you to import your research database via CSV or integration like Salesforce, Snowflake, Google Workspace, and others using Zapier into the platform's Candidates feature (CRM). You can filter and segment participants in Candidates, set up screeners, and send email invites for studies.
Research teams can also set up landing pages to onboard participants with screening questions which they can share with their email list, social media, etc.
Great Question's Repository feature allows researchers to upload recordings and other artifacts. They can also import user interview recordings directly from Zoom. Researchers can tag artifacts and link them to participants in Candidates.
The Repository's Highlight Reel allows researchers to create a collection of clips from recent interviews with transcripts, making it easy for UX teams and stakeholders to review feedback on specific features and topics.
Great Question's library of 40+ research templates for interviews, surveys, and tests is a fantastic value-add for inexperienced researchers. Each template outlines the study's strengths and weaknesses and the insights you can gather.
Pricing
Great Question's Starter plan is $10 per month for a single researcher and 20 panelists/participants. To get the platform's full features, you must sign up for an Enterprise Plan, which only offers 10,000 panelists. This pricing model makes sense for small teams and startups, but large-volume enterprise teams will get better value and more features using Ethnio.
What clients say about Great Question
"With Great Question, unmoderated usability studies, we get high-quality customer feedback, so we can make decisions a lot faster." — Emily Drumm, UX Researcher
Automate your UX research for less logistics, more insights
You’ve made it here so we’re going to assume your pretty serious about supercharging your research workflow. Each of the tools on this list has its unique strengths, and the one you pick will ultimately depend on the type of research you need to carry out.
Whether you're focusing on participant recruitment, scheduling sessions, or managing data compliance, there's one fundamental component you can't overlook: a robust panel management software. Without participants, there is no research.
If your needs include complete ownership of your participant recruitment and management, ensuring you connect with the right users who genuinely understand your products—all without the logistical headaches— give Ethnio a try.