research on software companies

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• 22 Mar 2024
• Research & Ideas

Open Source Software: The $9 Trillion Resource Companies Take for Granted

Many companies build their businesses on open source software, code that would cost firms $8.8 trillion to create from scratch if it weren't freely available. Research by Frank Nagle and colleagues puts a value on an economic necessity that will require investment to meet demand.

• 04 Apr 2022

Tech Hubs: How Software Brought Talent and Prosperity to New Cities

Software invention spurred the rapid ascent of six American tech hubs, helping them draw talent from even larger cities. Will the rise of remote work shake the status quo? Research by William Kerr. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 19 Jul 2020
• Working Paper Summaries

Open Source Software and Global Entrepreneurship

Does more activity in open source software development lead to increased entrepreneurial activity and, if so, how much, and in what direction? This study measures how participation on the GitHub open source platform affects the founding of new ventures globally.

• 22 Jun 2020

Iterative Coordination and Innovation

Do Agile methodologies promote innovation? Results of a field experiment with Google show that increasing the frequency and goal orientation of stand-up meetings reinforces integration and value but reduces specialization and novelty in outcomes.

• 21 Apr 2020

7 Successful Battle Strategies to Beat COVID-19

The Agile methodology used to speed complex software development is also helpful for managing decision-making in today's crisis environment, says Euvin Naidoo. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 24 Feb 2020

The Hidden Vulnerabilities of Open Source Software

The increasing use of open source software in most commercial apps has revolutionized software development—but also created hidden vulnerabilities, say Frank Nagle and Jenny Hoffman. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 28 Aug 2019

Who Drives Digital Innovation? Evidence from the US Medical Device Industry

Major industries are undergoing a digital transformation, in which key aspects of new product development are migrating to a software-driven context. In the medical device industry, experience matters, as does the geographic clustering of new product development, which gives advantages to both new entrants and incumbent firms.

• 22 Apr 2019

Government Technology Policy, Social Value, and National Competitiveness

This study examines the impact of a French law requiring government agencies to favor open source software (OSS) over proprietary software in technology procurement processes. Results suggest a cost-effective policy lever that countries can use to both create global social value and increase their own national competitiveness.

• 05 Sep 2018

The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software

Firms that allow their software programmers to "give back" to the open source community on company time gain benefits—even though competitors might benefit too, says Frank Nagle. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 05 Jul 2017

Designing an Agile Software Portfolio Architecture: The Impact of Coupling on Performance

This study deepens our understanding of how firms can better design software portfolio architectures to improve their agility. The authors examined data from over 1,000 different software applications and 3,000 dependencies between them. They found that indirect measures of coupling and dependency have more power in predicting IT agility than direct measures.

• 09 Mar 2017

Exploring the Relationship Between Architecture Coupling and Software Vulnerabilities: A Google Chrome Case

Managing software vulnerabilities is a top issue in today’s society. By studying the Google Chrome codebase, the authors explore software metrics including architecture coupling measures in relation to software vulnerabilities. This paper adds new findings to research on software metrics and vulnerabilities, bringing the field closer to generalizable and conclusive results.

• 20 Jan 2016

Maybe Uber isn't God's Gift to Mankind

Benjamin G. Edelman discusses the potential negative effects of transportation network companies in the so-called sharing economy. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 01 Oct 2015

Efficiencies and Regulatory Shortcuts: How Should We Regulate Companies like Airbnb and Uber?

With the rise of service technology platforms such as Uber, a new regulatory approach is needed providing more flexibility that ensures service providers, users and third parties are adequately protected.

• 09 Apr 2014

Visualizing and Measuring Software Portfolio Architectures: A Flexibility Analysis

Contemporary business environments are constantly evolving, requiring continual changes to the software applications that support a business. Moreover, during recent decades, the sheer number of applications has grown significantly, and they have become increasingly interdependent. Many companies find that managing applications and implementing changes to their application portfolio architecture is increasingly difficult and expensive. Firms need a way to visualize and analyze the modularity of their software portfolio architectures and the degree of coupling between components. In this paper, the authors test a method for visualizing and measuring software portfolio architectures using data of a biopharmaceutical firm's enterprise architecture. The authors also use the measures to predict the costs of architectural change. Findings show, first, that the biopharmaceutical firm's enterprise architecture can be classified as core-periphery. This means that 1) there is one cyclic group (the "Core") of components that is substantially larger than the second largest cyclic group, and 2) this group comprises a substantial portion of the entire architecture. In addition, the classification of applications in the architecture (as being in the Core or the Periphery) is significantly correlated with architectural flexibility. In this case the architecture has a propagation cost of 23 percent, meaning almost one-quarter of the system may be affected when a change is made to a randomly selected component. Overall, results suggest that the hidden structure method can reveal new facts about an enterprise architecture. This method can aid the analysis of change costs at the software application portfolio level. Key concepts include: This method for architectural visualization could provide valuable input when planning architectural change projects (in terms of, for example, risk analysis and resource planning). The method reveals a "hidden" core-periphery structure, uncovering new facts about the architecture that could not be gained from other visualization procedures or standard metrics. Compared to other measures of complexity, coupling, and modularity, this method considers not only the direct dependencies between components but also the indirect dependencies. These indirect dependencies provide important input for management decisions. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.

• 11 Jan 2010

Mixing Open Source and Proprietary Software Strategies

Open source and proprietary software development used to be competing strategies. Now software firms are experimenting with strategies that mix the two models. Researcher Gaston Llanes discusses recent research into these "mixed source" strategies. Key concepts include: Software companies are taking a "best of both worlds" approach by creating products that use a combination of OS and proprietary software code. The researchers wanted to get a clearer sense of when a profit-maximizing firm should adopt a mixed-source business model and what that model might look like under different circumstances. Results indicate recurring patterns and strategies that managers can take into consideration when setting strategy. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.

• 25 Sep 2006

How Software Platforms Revolutionize Business

Cell phones, the Game Boy, and PCs are examples of products based upon software platforms—ecosystems where independent companies can provide products and services tied to the core technology. Playing in a software platform world can make you rich—ask ringtone creators—but it also demands special management skills that emphasize cooperation over competition. Professor Andrei Hagiu discusses his new book, Invisible Engines. Key concepts include: Software platforms have improved productivity and innovation in many industries, disrupted or destroyed others, and created entirely new businesses. Software platforms are powerful engines of change because of the malleability of code and of the fundamental functions they perform, which make it easy for them to march across industry boundaries; and because their multi-sided nature allows them to spawn vibrant ecosystems of complementors. Managing software platforms is about much more than creating technology. It takes skills in navigating cooperation and competition, building creative business models, and anticipating competition across industries. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.

• 30 Apr 2001

Why Evolutionary Software Development Works

What is the best way to develop software? HBS professor Alan MacCormack discusses recent research proving the theory that the best approach is evolutionary. In this article from MIT Sloan Management Review, MacCormack and colleagues Marco Iansiti and Roberto Verganti uncover four practices that lead to successful Internet software development. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.

Top 17 market research companies in the United States (US) 

5. pollfish, 6. ascendant consulting firm, 8. ready to launch research, 9. antedote, 10. b2b international, 13. nielsen, 15.  forrester research services, 16. momentive, 17. veridata insights.

Your company can’t navigate the constantly changing marketplace without understanding business landscapes, consumer needs, or buying habits. Market analysis is key to how you find and capitalize on market trends before your competitors do. You can start by outlining research goals and needs. But let’s be real, making data-driven decisions is a whole lot easier with top market research firms by your side. 

The right market research agencies, platforms and companies do more than just surveys to offer actionable insights so you can make smarter decisions for business growth. They make consumer research easy with strategic zero-party data collection, comprehensive data analysis, and intelligent insights. 

If you’re tired of searching through market research companies in the United States, this article leads you straight to the best ones out there.

Here’s a quick rundown of the top US market research companies:

Looking to dive deep into the minds of your target audience? Sign up for a demo to see how Attest makes it effortless to gain consumer insights from 125 million consumers across the globe. 

Attest is one of the top market research companies in the US. This consumer research platform lets you collect data from 125 million diverse respondents in 59 countries. You can use Attest to do market research for branding , consumer profiling, market analysis, and much more! 

Every Attest customer has access to expert research advice from their in-house Customer Research Team. Whether you’re new to research and need some guidance, or a research pro looking for a second pair of eyes on your market research project, Attest’s Customer Research Team is here for you.

Besides speedy surveys and quick responses, this platform features an intuitive results dashboard that turns data into mesmerizing stories. You can also send surveys on a recurring basis to spot changes in responses or compare data from two groups. Plus, expert advice is only a click away when you aren’t sure about choosing market research tools or reaching market research goals.

Attest has been really instrumental in driving home the reality of the consumer need, and surfacing that it is much harder to get a younger demographic to engage with pensions. Georgie Burks , Head of Brand Marketing, Penfold

Trustpilot relied on the Attest market analysis solution to research consumer attitudes among marketers and engage them in eight key markets. Here’s what they think about the value Attest brings.

We were thinking about how businesses could look within their reviews and understand what was important to their consumers, but we didn’t actually know what the most important things consumers cared about were. So we decided the best way to find out was just to ask consumers themselves. Gillian Harris , Global Marketing Program Manager, Trustpilot

Location: London

Founded: 2015

Pricing: Pricing on request

Best for: 

• Market analysis: unlocks new market opportunities
• Brand tracking: measures brand health and performance
• Creative testing: validates the creative impact of ad campaigns
• Consumer profiling: dives deep into existing and future customers
• New product development: tests product ideas or marketing messages with your target market

Get reliable consumer insights fast with Attest

With Attest you get high-speed insights, so you can make informed decisions when they matter. And you get designated research advice from the experts in the Customer Research Team—they’re with you at every step of your research journey!

Bixa is a market research studio specializing in mobile youth research and custom UX research services. Their qualitative and qualitative research offerings are best for those trying to validate new markets, gather product feedback, or understand the target audience better. 

They make marketing research a breeze by completing the entire cycle of participant recruitment to report delivery in three to four weeks. Besides conducting customer surveys, user testing, and mobile ethnography, Bixa also offers market research consulting for companies looking to jumpstart their product and marketing research.

Location: Alexandria, Virginia

Founded: 2012

Pricing: Available on request

• In-depth interviews
• Product research
• Hyper-profitable targeting
• Customer surveys
• Usability testing
• Website and app review
• Team coaching

Suzy is a leading qualitative market research software with iterative research capabilities. Its end-to-end consumer insights platform offers qualitative insights into complex research questions. The best part is that you can get real-time data from Suzy’s proprietary audience of one million consumers. On the other hand, Attest offers a larger audience in more countries, making it ideal for those with market research campaigns spanning the globe. In addition, Attest provides designated advice from experienced researchers for all customers.

Suzy offers qualitative research solutions such as product development, advertising, shopper and behavioral insights, and tracking and measurement. Industries ranging from finance to media use Suzy to improve business performance through qualitative studies.

Location: New York

Founded: 2017

• Concept testing
• Competitive analysis
• Consumer profiling
• Positioning strategy
• Shopper and category insights
• Tracking research services
• UX design research

Remesh is one of the top market research firms in New York City. They offer artificial intelligence-driven research solutions to companies looking to streamline qualitative and quantitative insight discovery. This marketing research firm makes it easy for companies or governments to speak to thousands of customers or citizens at the same time. Then it analyzes interactions and opinions to offer key insights. 

Market researchers use Remesh to get actionable feedback on product ideas, messaging, and packaging from online focus groups. You can also use their online surveys to improve employee listening and boost corporate reputation. 

Founded: 2013

• Packaging testing
• Civic engagement
• Consumer insights
• Collective intelligence
• Employee engagement
• Shelf placement testing
• Product issue identification
• Employee experience and engagement

Pollfish is a modern survey research platform that uses artificial intelligence to help you create surveys in seconds. This DIY market research company helps you gain real-time insights from over 250 million consumers worldwide. The platform also comes loaded with cutting-edge technology capabilities for dynamic sampling and random device engagement.

Attest is a great alternative to Pollfish for conducting primary market research. Attest’s platform detects bad-quality responses that contain non-relevant, incomplete, and conflicting answers. Additionally, Attest is much easier to use and provides advice from experienced researchers.

Pricing: Starts at $95

• Brand awareness
• Brand perceptions
• Advertising testing
• Logo testing
• Brand diagnostics
• Product concept testing

Ascendant Consulting Firm is one of the best in the marketing research industry. They specialize in competitive intelligence, consumer insights, and market feasibility services. With 95+ years of collective experience in market research analysis, they help you make data-driven business decisions for business expansion, market entry, and assessments. 

The team at Ascendant is also adept at advanced quantitative analytics suitable for financial and strategic marketing analyses. Other key capabilities include full service market research, survey design, and secondary data research. 

Location: Miami

Founded: 2010

• White label research
• Product market research
• Market opportunity evaluation
• Survey reporting and analysis
• Employee experience and satisfaction research
• Consumer attitude, usage, and trends research

Isurus offers bespoke market research services to B2B and technology companies. This market research company leverages multiple statistical analysis tools to help you gain a 360° understanding of markets and decision-makers. Moreover, they also make it effortless for you to evaluate competitors for competitive advantage or validate market opportunities. 

Business software, manufacturing, and financial services companies rely on Isurus to keep a pulse on what customers want and find the right pricing strategies. The team at Isurus can also help you with brand tracking and creative performance testing. They specialize in quantitative, qualitative, international, and secondary research.

Location: Burlington

Founded: 2000

• Persona analysis
• Competitor profiling 
• Pricing strategy research
• Brand perception research
• Market segmentation research
• Customer satisfaction analysis
• Market assessment and planning
• Brand audit, tracking, and management

Ready to Launch Research is a California-based market research agency that serves a wide variety of industries with qualitative, quantitative, and digital research strategies. Whether you want to quantify consumer behavior or get qualitative consumer journey insights, they have the expertise to handle all your needs.

They leverage the following research methods to get you the insights you need.

• Creative testing
• Online discussions
• Home use test (HUT)
• Focus group moderation

Ready to Launch Research serves many dynamic industries ranging from pet to education to consumer electronics. Once you reach out to them with research requirements, they’ll get in touch to know more details and design the research process.  

Location: Los Angeles

Founded: 2014

• Ethnography
• Focus group discussions
• Advertising research
• Online communities research services

Antedote is an innovation consultancy that delivers strategic market research insights by combining data science, in-depth research, and next-generation digital tools. What makes them different is their ability to use different qualitative and quantitative research tools instead of relying on a one-size-fits-all approach. 

The team at Antedote helps you uncover insights in various areas such as user research, cultural research, and scenario planning. You can also partner with them for creating innovation roadmaps or concept development and visualization. Antedote’s plug-and-play approach means you have an agile and collaborative team that makes problem-solving easy with guidelines and blueprints. 

Location: San Francisco

• Brand positioning
• Concept crafting
• Demand space segmentation
• Internal engagement programs
• Price and proposition optimization
• Product and portfolio development
• Workshop design and facilitation

B2B International by Merkle is one the largest market research agencies in London , with several locations in the United States. This market research company serves B2B companies looking to gather business insights and intelligence. They can help you with customer loyalty testing, pricing effectiveness, and market size analysis. 

B2B International also specializes in delivering research services for go-to-market strategy, customer journey mapping, and voice-of-customer surveys. Their experience of working across different industries ranging from chemicals to media to logistics makes them uniquely qualified for B2B market research. 

Location: London (with offices in Boston, Chicago and New York)

Founded: 1998

• Market sizing research
• Customer journey research
• Thought leadership research
• Product and proposition research
• Customer research and segmentation

Ipsos is one of the top market research companies trusted by top brands and companies across the Americas, Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Besides market strategy and innovation services, Ipsos also offers marketing management analytics, brand health tracking, and advisory services. 

With tailored market research solutions for every need, Ipsos helps you optimize brand positioning, discover shopper journeys, and understand consumers. The team can also help you with product testing, package research, and creative idea assessment. Other services include brand health tracking, employee engagement research, and channel performance optimization. 

Location: Paris (with locations in New York)

Founded: 1975

• Mystery shopping
• Brand health research
• User experience study
• Innovation and forecasting
• Social intelligence analysis 
• Creative development and assessment

Dynata is a first-party data platform that helps you gather and analyze business intelligence for efficient decision-making. Their platform streamlines the entire research workflow so you can focus more on insights. Dynata lets you ask questions to their proprietary 67 million consumers and visualize those responses effortlessly. 

The Dynata insights platform lets you build surveys for concept testing, creative testing, and ad-hoc market research. Other research services include market segmentation, brand health monitoring, campaign measurement, and voice of the customer surveys. With real-time dashboards and research reports, Dynata makes it easy for you to gain useful data insights. 

Location: Plano, Texas

Founded: 1940

• Survey authoring
• Digital ethnography
• Online research panel
• Online qualitative research
• Data analytics and reporting
• Brand performance tracking

Nielsen is a global data, analytics, and audience measurement company that offers bespoke research solutions to help you discover audience intelligence across channels and platforms. This market research company divides its services into four core categories:

• Media planning
• Content metadata
• Marketing optimization
• Audience measurement

Audience measurement is all about using quantitative and qualitative research to discover shifting habits of audiences. Media planning, on the other hand, offers a comprehensive understanding of competitive intelligence, audience segmentation, and scenario planning. Marketing optimization research services help you analyze and boost campaign performance. Finally, content metadata improves customer experience with easy audio and video content discovery.

Founded: 1923

• Scenario planning
• Competitive intelligence
• Audience segmentation
• Cross-platform audience measurement
• Marketing campaign performance analysis

Westat is a 100% employee-owned market research company that delivers superior quantitative and qualitative research services in transportation, health, social policy, and education. They specialize in survey research, statistical sciences, and providing technical assistance. 

Westat’s expertise in integrated data collection strategies helps them create focus groups, run web surveys, and create questionnaires for finding the right data. Plus, they use a research-driven communications framework to engage audiences effortlessly. They also use machine learning and artificial intelligence-assisted interviewing systems to solve your research challenges. 

Location: Rockville

Founded: 1963

• Custom research
• Clinical trials
• Survey and analytical needs
• Biomedical science research
• Behavioral health and health policy research

Forrester Research Services is the market research wing of the global research and advisory firm Forrester. Their customer-obsessed approach helps companies turn their strategic research needs into reality. They currently offer market research services to companies in technology, sales, B2B marketing, product, B2C marketing, customer experience, and digital business space. 

Forrester offers research services in the following domains:

• Sales operations optimization
• Marketing strategy formulation
• Competitive market intelligence
• Product lifecycle process research
• Corporate communications strategy
• Integrated campaign strategy planning
• Business change management strategy
• Customer insights collection and analysis
• Customer acquisition and retention research
• Route-to-market configuration and optimization
• Account-based marketing and demand generation research 

Location: Cambridge

Founded: 1983

• Public sector research
• Sales and product management 
• Customer experience analysis
• Digital business transformation
• B2B and B2C marketing research

Momentive is an artificial intelligence-powered market research platform that helps you gather on-demand customer and market feedback for actionable insights. This market research company is known for its agile experience management solution that lets you better understand markets, competitors, or even internal teams.

Their purpose-built market insights solutions offer you actionable insights from consumer panels. You can also decode buyer attitudes, understand consumer segments, and monitor buyer preferences. Mometive’s AI solutions also make it easy for you to conduct customer experience research, track product experience, and transform employee engagement. 

Location: San Mateo

Founded: 1999

• Market sizing
• Idea screening
• Industry tracking
• Shopper insights
• Customer effort score
• Mobile app experience 
• Customer segmentation
• Post-purchase experience
• Product and price optimization
• Custom market research services
• Employee engagement and retention

Veridata Insights is another top-rated market research company with recruitment capabilities to serve 100+ countries. Whether you want to analyze complex data with quantitative methodologies or need qualitative insights, they can help you with it all. 

The team at Veridata Insights strives to deliver stress-free, budget-friendly, and timely research services that keep you ahead of the competition. Apart from their proprietary technology and global reach, they’re known for data quality and panel strength. They can also help you gather business intelligence with data processing and easy-to-understand dashboards. 

Location: Dallas

Founded: 2019

• Consumer research
• Online data collection
• Survey programming
• B2B audience research
• Dashboards and analytics

Break into your US target market with Attest

Choosing the right agency isn’t easy, especially with so many players in the market research industry. Businesses often struggle with finding one that delivers accurate and valuable insights while simplifying their findings. Plus, the biggest challenge is targeting the right audience that matters to your business. 

Attest solves all these problems by letting you handpick the target audience you want to reach. You can use filters and quotas to filter the most appropriate audience from 125 million people in 59 countries. Moreover, the platform empowers you to run surveys that bring in results in days instead of weeks. With hybrid research and a three-layer data quality check, you’ll never have any nonsense answers. And you also get to interact with the data, thanks to the interactive dashboard. 

Ready to transform your business with easy-to-access consumer insights? Sign up for a dem o to see how Attest can be your ally in conducting market research effortlessly.

Make decisions based on reliable consumer insighs

Insights with Attest are triple-checked for data quality, so you know that you’re making smart decisions based on data you can trust.

Nikos Nikolaidis

Senior Customer Research Manager 

Nikos joined Attest in 2019, with a strong background in psychology and market research. As part of Customer Research Team, Nikos focuses on helping brands uncover insights to achieve their objectives and open new opportunities for growth.

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2020 Top 50 U.S. Market Research and Data Analytics Companies

Diane Bowers

A full ranking of the top market research and data analytics companies in the U.S. for 2020

The “2020 Top 50 U.S. Report”—formerly known as “The Gold Report”—is developed by Diane Bowers and produced in partnership with the Insights Association and Michigan State University . The report is also sponsored by the AMA, ESOMAR and the Global Research Business Network . The report includes a ranking of the top 50 companies, a breakdown of trends by Bowers , and an analysis of the market research and analytics industry  by Michael Brereton, Melanie Courtright and Reg Baker.

50. RTi Research

Founded: 1979 2019 U.S. revenue: $12.9 million Percent change from 2018: -3% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: — Percent from outside U.S.: — 2019 worldwide revenue: $12.9 million U.S. employees: 45

In a world awash in data, the challenge is to turn data into something meaningful, something that can be communicated simply and acted upon effectively. RTi Research meets that challenge head-on, turning data into meaning through smart research design, flawless execution and innovative storytelling. Everything the company does is aimed at helping its clients move their ideas and insights through their organizations to influence change. 

RTi has conducted research in just about every category in the U.S. and globally. Informed by 40 years of experience across categories and cultures, RTi knows what works and what doesn’t, when to leverage new technology and methods, and when traditional approaches are best.

49. Hypothesis

Founded: 2000 2019 U.S. revenue: $18.3 million Percent change from 2018: -4.7% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: — Percent from outside U.S.: — 2019 worldwide revenue: $18.3 million U.S. employees: 61

Hypothesis uses insights, strategy and design to help important brands do amazing things. The company specializes in tough questions that take creative, multidimensional approaches, thoughtful strategy and a broad business perspective. Hypothesis’ approach combines inventive consumer-centric qualitative research, advanced analytics, strategic thinking and data visualization. Its award-winning design team translates complex information into compelling, easy-to-understand deliverables to socialize learnings and engage teams. 

In 2018, Hypothesis added important new capabilities with the launch of Momentum, a strategy that turns insight into application with downstream marketing and implementation planning. The Momentum team has worked alongside Hypothesis consultants on strategic engagements with clients focused on brand strategy, product development, and led dozens of workshops with senior and C-level executives to socialize insights and ideate on next steps. 

In 2019, Hypothesis’ focus on growth continued with its expansion to the Midwest and establishment of its Chicago office. From this office, the company will be able to service new and current clients in the Midwest and on the East Coast.

48. Bellomy Research

Founded: 1976 2019 U.S. revenue: $21 million Percent change from 2018: 1.4% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: — Percent from outside U.S.: — 2019 worldwide revenue: $21 million U.S. employees: 116

Bellomy is a privately held, family-owned, full-service market intelligence company. Bellomy focuses on driving successful business outcomes through the design and delivery of solutions that yield deeper customer understanding. The company surrounds its clients’ business challenges with an unparalleled mix of knowledge and experience, marketing science and proprietary research technology. 

Bellomy’s work involves both B2C and B2B environments—with qualitative and quantitative insight solutions spanning market segmentation, customer experience and journeys (including digital user experiences), brand equity, product innovation, shopper insights, marketing optimization, social research platforms and research technology. Bellomy works with clients across a broad range of categories and industries including consumer packaged goods, financial services, automotive, retail, restaurant and hospitality, telecommunications and technology, apparel and textiles, utilities, healthcare, insurance and home improvement.

Bellomy serves as an extension of its clients’ marketing research and customer experience departments by integrating a broad set of capabilities and areas of expertise, including segmentation, customer (and digital experience), shopper insights, social research platforms, brand equity, product innovation and marketing optimization. In addition, Bellomy clients leverage SmartIDEAS, the firm’s enterprise consumer knowledge and insight platform. 

47. Edelman Intelligence

Founded: 1999 2019 U.S. revenue: $21 million Percent change from 2018: 12.9% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $11.5 million Percent from outside U.S.: 35.4% 2019 worldwide revenue: $32.5 million U.S. employees: 131

Edelman Intelligence (EI) is the global research and analytics consultancy of Edelman, the world’s largest global communications firm. Based in New York, with employees in 18 offices internationally, EI houses more than 200 consultants, strategists, researchers, data scientists, data visualization specialists and analysts worldwide. Its specialists are method-agnostic and leverage the best of primary and secondary research, advanced analytics and business science to solve business and communications issues for its clients. EI’s offering spans the full spectrum of client needs, from mapping the current environment and targeting key audiences, to optimizing content and measuring business impact. 

EI partners with early-stage start-ups and Fortune 100 companies alike, providing strategic research, analytics, and insights-based marketing and communications counsel for a broad range of stakeholders and scopes, including government and public affairs, corporate reputation and risk strategy, crisis and issues management, employee experience and talent advisory, executive positioning, strategic communications and public relations, marketing and branding strategy, customer experience and insights, mergers, acquisitions and market entry strategy and more.

Key accomplishments in 2019 included advancement of its Edelman Trust Management (ETM) capabilities, including an evolution of its offering focused specifically on providing guidance for measuring and building trust in brands. Developed building from its 20-plus years studying trust through the Edelman Trust Barometer and the initial iteration of ETM (which explores corporate trust), this proprietary model for brand trust measurement was created in partnership with renowned academics from Harvard Business School and INSEAD, Edelman Brand experts and external marketing thought leaders. In recent months, this model has been engineered to consider fundamental transformations to consumer/brand relationship dynamics that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated.

46. KS&R

Founded: 1983 2019 U.S. revenue: $21.7 million Percent change from 2018: -1.4% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $3.6 million Percent from outside U.S.: 14.2% 2019 worldwide revenue: $25.3 million U.S. employees: 100

KS&R is a privately held strategic consultancy and full-service marketing research company. For nine consecutive years, KS&R has received the highest Gold Index composite score of any provider in the Prevision/Inside Research survey of marketing research buyers. This is a testament to the company’s passion for excellence and client-first business philosophy—wherein KS&R empowers its clients with timely, fact-based insights so they can make smarter decisions and be confident in their actions.

KS&R creates and executes global custom market research solutions for some of the best-known corporations in the world in more than 100 countries and 50 languages. It has extensive and diverse industry experience with particular strength in healthcare (pharma and device), technology, entercom, transportation, professional services, and retail and e-commerce. Team members often include business strategists with client-side experience and deep industry knowledge.

In 2019, KS&R leveraged its expansive network of pharmacy panels to build world-class capabilities for pharma inventory measurement and healthcare insights. Its marketing scientists have driven marked advances in pricing decision support, which have now been validated by positive in-market results. KS&R expanded its portfolio to include insights fusion across multiple channels of content (primary research, social media, web-based information, etc.). And finally, it introduced its KS&R Win-Loss program that provides actionable insights for how organizations can improve their value proposition and sales performance to close more deals.

Founded: 1911 2019 U.S. revenue: $22.7 million Percent change from 2018: 12.9% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: — Percent from outside U.S.: — 2019 worldwide revenue: $22.7 million U.S. employees: 78

NAXION guides strategic business decisions globally in healthcare, information technology, financial services, energy, heavy equipment and other B2B markets, drawing on depth of marketing experience in key verticals and skilled application of sophisticated and inventive methodologies. The firm’s NAscence Group helps life science innovators develop commercialization strategy through clinical trials design and selection of target indications, forecasting, brand planning and other research-based consulting services.

Engagements routinely include market segmentation, opportunity assessment and innovation, demand forecasting and pricing, positioning, brand health, market monitoring and lifecycle management. The firm deploys multiple data streams including primary research (qualitative and quantitative), secondary data, customer databases and other complex datasets to develop an integrative perspective on business problems. The firm also builds custom panels for B2B markets.

Project leaders with sector experience and research proficiency are supported by in-house methodologists and a wide portfolio of advanced analytic tools, including proprietary modeling services and software, all of them highly customized. The firm continues to invest significant resources in intellectual capital to enhance enterprise decision support with cutting-edge methods, including specialized “small data” choice models, new predictive techniques using big data and brand-customized text analytics. Its Farsight suite supports the building of highly dynamic models capable of producing forecasts for complex market scenarios, including paradigm-shift technologies, and gives market monitoring programs a forward-looking perspective that guides timely market interventions. Other services include litigation and regulatory support, often involving expert testimony in cases involving trademark confusion, deceptive advertising and brand equity. NAXION’s strong commitment to operational excellence is reflected in ISO certification and in-house operations capabilities to deliver exceptional levels of quality control. 

Founded: 1991 2019 U.S. revenue: $24.2 million Percent change from 2018: -3.6% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $1.2 million Percent from outside U.S.: 4.7% 2019 worldwide revenue: $25.4 million U.S. employees: 144

Gongos is a consultative agency that places customers at the heart of business strategy. Partnering with insights, analytics, marketing, strategy and customer experience groups, Gongos operationalizes customer centricity by helping companies both understand their customer needs and deliver on them better than anyone else.

From product innovation to portfolio management, customer experience to consumer journeys, pricing strategies to marketing optimization, and trend analysis to predictive modeling, Gongos provides both outside-in and inside-out approaches across organizations to drive greater customer attraction, retention and lifetime value.

Gongos further serves as a translator to help cross-functional teams fuel the competency to gain and apply consumer wisdom, transform decisions into action and navigate organizational change. Coalescing enterprise data with primary research and curating insights for multiple audiences further empowers stakeholders to achieve greater ROI by ensuring information is designed to influence actions and behaviors from executives to the frontline. 

Gongos’ consultative tools stem from change management principles that help organizations navigate the transformation often necessary to create a more outside-in perspective as they reorient around the customer. Gongos’ approaches to engage multiple audiences include communication strategies and tactics grounded in frameworks such as its adoption-to-advocacy model and human-centered design.

43. Maru/Matchbox **

Founded: 2016 2019 U.S. revenue: $28 million Percent change from 2018: 3.7% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $14 million Percent from outside U.S.: 33.3% 2019 worldwide revenue: $42 million U.S. employees: 150

Maru/Matchbox began disrupting the market research industry in 2000. Powered by proprietary technology, its expert teams are deeply invested in key sectors of the economy, including consumer goods and services, financial services, retail, technology, healthcare, public services, and media and entertainment. Maru/Marchbox provides organizations with the tools and insights to connect with the people that matter most, so they can build and maintain a competitive advantage. 

In 2019, Maru/Matchbox released a series of innovative research solutions. 

• Digital Media Measurement is a campaign evaluation approach that enables clients to better understand how content, channels and brands interact to deliver effective communication. 
• Creative Insight measures people’s implicit and explicit responses to advertising, giving clients a complete picture of how their ad is working. It is designed to evaluate any type of ad or brand communication, across all channels, with best-in-class benchmarks.
• Lissted analyzes how members of communities relevant to clients react to content, tweets and even websites. 
• Brand Emotion utilizes visual semiotics to identify and leverage the emotional profile of a brand. 

Maru/Matchbox continues to demonstrate innovation and thought leadership through relentless publication of articles and whitepapers.

42. Chadwick Martin Bailey (CMB)

Founded: 1984 2019 U.S. revenue: $28.7 million Percent change from 2018: 20.6% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: — Percent from outside U.S.: — 2019 worldwide revenue: $28.7 million U.S. employees: 90

CMB is a research and strategy firm, helping the world’s leading brands engage, innovate and grow amid deep disruption. The company leverages the best of advanced analytics, consumer psychology and market strategy to tackle critical business initiatives, including market identification, segmentation, brand health, loyalty and advocacy, and product and service development.

For more than 35 years, CMB has helped the most successful brands and their executives give voice to their market through a relentless business decision focus, creative problem-solving and storytelling, deeply consultative approach and flawless execution. With dedicated financial services, media and entertainment, tech and telecom, retail and healthcare practices, CMB’s expert teams understand the complex and evolving technological, social, cultural and economic forces that drive disruption and create opportunity.

In 2020, CMB continued its growth trajectory, including building expertise in gaming and digital platforms and expanding its qualitative and advanced analytics teams. A thought leader in the application of consumer psychology to real world business issues, CMB conducted self-funded research among tens of thousands of consumers to capture the four core benefits that motivate decision-making—identity, emotion, social and functional—providing an in-depth look at more than 80 global brands. Further self-funded research explored the accelerating journey and path to purchase of today’s gamers.

41. Screen Engine/ASI

Founded: 2010 2019 U.S. revenue: $33 million Percent change from 2018: 10% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $1.9 million Percent from outside U.S.: 5.4% 2019 worldwide revenue: $34.9 million U.S. employees: 132

Screen Engine/ASI is a research-based consumer insights firm that stands for delivering its entertainment and media clients actionable insights and recommendations, not simply data. SE/ASI strives to help clients mitigate risk and maximize the potential for success. Through its Motion Picture and TV Groups, SE/ASI works across all distribution platforms for both domestic and internationally produced content. 

The company is centered on assessing the “abilities” of content as it migrates from the earliest stages of development through multi-channel distribution. The Motion Picture Group is the leader in traditional and digital in theater and online recruited audience screenings. Offerings also include PostTrak, a syndicated domestic and international in-theater exit poll, and ScreenExperts, an early assessment of critical response, creative ad testing, positioning and brand studies, custom work, and location-based and online focus group research. A cross-platform team within this group works with home entertainment, over-the-top and gaming clients. 

The TV group is the leader in location-based ViewTrac dial testing of pilots, programs and ongoing series and conducts online dial testing as well. Other offerings include location-based and online focus groups, promo testing, positioning and brand studies, and a variety of custom studies including custom trackers. SE/ASI syndicates Tracktion trackers including a TV tracker, a theatrical movie tracker, a home entertainment tracker and a premium video-on-demand tracker. All groups work in the company’s media lab equipped for biometric and new technology research. When appropriate, SE/ASI engages in advanced analytics techniques including, but not limited to, segmentation, conjoint, maxdiff and TURF analysis. 

40. MarketVision Research

Founded: 1983 2019 U.S. revenue: $33.2 million Percent change from 2018: 2.5% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: — Percent from outside U.S.: — 2019 worldwide revenue: $33.2 million U.S. employees: 140

MarketVision Research is a full-service marketing research firm, providing clients with actionable insights about their markets, customers, brands and products. Research areas of focus include product and portfolio development, pricing, branding, segmentation and customer experience. The company offers a full suite of quantitative and qualitative research capabilities and works across industry groups. These include:

• Optimization and discrete choice modeling as it applies to product and service development, branding, packaging and pricing.
• Online communities that are managed and developed entirely in-house with a focus on improving participant engagement and with additional support for mobile participation.
• Hybrid research, which uses 20 in-house moderators, along with marketing science professionals and global project managers, to facilitate qualitative and quantitative research seamlessly.

39. The Link Group

Founded: 1994 2019 U.S. revenue: $34.2 million Percent change from 2018: 23.9% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $0.3 million Percent from outside U.S.: 0.9% 2019 worldwide revenue: $34.5 million U.S. employees: 85

The Link Group executes research for Fortune 500 firms in the healthcare, retail, CPG and finance industries across both qualitative and quantitative methodologies and around the globe. TLG attributes its success to its core business philosophy: smarter research and better service. Its commitment to smarter research has allowed the company to take a creative, custom approach to its clients’ business needs that results in actionable and insightful reports. TLG delivers better service by maintaining a consistent research team across projects, allowing the team to anticipate and respond to client needs. This business philosophy has resulted in 99% of revenue coming from repeat clients.

This past year, TLG has continued to hone its research approaches to help elevate traditional research methods. For its messaging and positioning work, TLG developed a framework that triangulates quantitative survey data to determine how well messaging concepts will activate, communicate and engage the customer. In its segmentation studies, TLG blends science and art to create models that align with the client’s brand strategic vision by creating differences that are meaningful and actionable from a marketing perspective. TLG has leveraged its knowledge of behavioral economics to develop a validated, proprietary quantitative methodology—LinkEQ—that allows the company to reveal latent emotional associations.

Founded: 1983 2019 U.S. revenue: $34.3 million Percent change from 2018: -1.2% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $1.2 million Percent from outside U.S.: 3.4% 2019 worldwide revenue: $35.5 million U.S. employees: 233

SSRS is a full-service market and survey research firm led by a core of dedicated professionals with advanced degrees in the social sciences. 

SSRS surveys support numerous media and academic partners looking to report on public attitudes and beliefs about a wide range of salient issues such as elections and public policy. SSRS is the polling partner for CNN, and conducts public opinion polling for ABC News, The Washington Post, Politico and CBS News. 

Beyond national polls, SSRS regularly conducts research at a state level, and among subpopulations such as Latinos and political partisans, and specializes in reaching hard-to-reach and low-incidence populations. SSRS has extensive experience in public policy, public affairs and health policy research. Since the Affordable Care Act was signed into law, SSRS has completed numerous studies surrounding its implementation and assessing Americans’ attitudes and experiences with the law. 

Since 2016, SSRS conducts the monthly Kaiser Family Foundation Health Tracking Poll. SSRS is well-known for its weekly telephone Omnibus poll. The firm also offers the SSRS Opinion Panel, which allows clients to conduct probabilistic surveys quickly at low cost. The SSRS/Luker on Trends Sports Poll is the first and longest-running tracking study focusing on sports in the U.S. 

37. BVA Group **

Founded: 1970 2019 U.S. revenue: $36 million Percent change from 2018: 2.6% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $147 million Percent from outside U.S.: 80.3% 2019 worldwide revenue: $183 million U.S. employees: 120

BVA Group is a fast-growing research and consulting firm, an expert in behavioral science, ranked in the top 20 worldwide agencies. BVA brings data to life and converts deep understanding of customers and citizens into behavior change strategies. BVA operates both for public and private clients with methodologies fueled by data science and behavioral science. 

Its FMCG specialist—PRS IN VIVO—is a global leader in packaging and shopper research. PRS IN VIVO helps consumer marketers to succeed through: 

• In-store and online studies to better understand shopper behavior, in both physical and e-commerce shopping contexts.
• Qualitative studies to develop, screen and refine new product, packaging and merchandising concepts.
• Quantitative studies to pre-test and quantify new packaging, merchandising and display systems (for physical stores and e-commerce).
• Volume forecasting and product testing for both innovations and brand restages.
• “Nudge” initiatives to facilitate behavioral change, create new consumer habits and drive category growth. 

BVA Group is a European leader in customer experience research. More than 100 leading brands use BVA’s behavioral insights to provide seamless shopper journeys and design successful new products and services, including solutions from its multi-awarded Global Nudge-Unit.

36. radius | illumination

Founded: 1960 2019 U.S. revenue: $42 million Percent change from 2018: — 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $1 million Percent from outside U.S.: 2.3% 2019 worldwide revenue: $43 million U.S. employees: 127

Radius│illumination is the product of a merger between Radius Global Market Research and Illumination Research in 2018. Together, it’s one of the largest independent custom insights providers in the world. Its focus is on guiding brands at critical points along their growth journey, tackling issues such as identifying compelling innovations, creating relevant customer segmentations and developing strategies for deeper loyalty and engagement.

Radius | illumination partners with Fortune 500 leaders as well as challenger, disruptor and emerging brands in the U.S., Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Its top sectors include financial services, personal care, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, technology, home improvement and durables, media and entertainment, packaged foods, beverage, retail and transportation.

Its 2020 initiatives to fuel brand growth for its clients include:

• Provide agile and robust solutions such as InnovationSprint to accelerate new product and service development.
• Increase its information design capabilities so clients can easily take action on the results.
• Focus on driving deeper insights by combining its advanced analytics strength with immersive customer understanding in its designs.
• Expand solutions through the integration of new technologies and behavioral approaches.

35. Market Force **

Founded: 2005 2019 U.S. revenue: $50 million Percent change from 2018: 2% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $7 million Percent from outside U.S.: 12.3% 2019 worldwide revenue: $57 million U.S. employees: 375

Market Force Information provides location-level customer experience management solutions to protect clients’ brand reputation, delight their customers and make them more money. 

Market Force operates at scale across the globe. Each month, the company:

• Completes more than 100,000 mystery shops.
• Collects, processes and analyzes millions of employee and customer experience surveys.
• Manages more than 100,000 inbound calls to its contact center.
• Hosts more than 1 million user logins on its KnowledgeForce reporting platform.

Market Force’s multi-location solutions provide a robust framework for measuring and improving operational excellence, customer experience and financial KPIs. Measurement channels include mystery shopping, customer experience surveys, contact center calls, social media and employee engagement surveys via the KnowledgeForce technology platform and Eyes:On mobile app. Market Force employs predictive analytics to determine what matters most and the ROI for investing in improvements. The firm takes a dual-headed approach to market research services (e.g., customer segmentation, attitude trial and usage studies and custom research projects) and strategic advisory services to design and implement effective measurement systems and improve performance.

Founded: 1991 2019 U.S. revenue: $52 million Percent change from 2018: 4% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $6 million Percent from outside U.S.: 10.3% 2019 worldwide revenue: $58 million U.S. employees: 400

As a leading customer experience management firm, SMG helps clients get smarter about their customers and employees to drive changes that boost customer loyalty and improve business performance. SMG combines technology and services to collect, analyze and share feedback and behavioral data, so it’s easier for clients to deliver and activate customer insights across their enterprise.

SMG partners with more than 350 brands around the globe to create better customer and employee experiences, which drive loyalty and performance. SMG uniquely combines technology and insights to help clients listen better, act faster and outperform competitors. SMG is a technology-enabled research firm with a global footprint—evaluating more than 150 million surveys annually, in 50 languages across 125 countries. 

Strategic solutions include omniCXTM, Brand Research and Employee Engagement. SMG’s omniCX solution uses multiple research methodologies in capturing solicited and unsolicited consumer feedback across in-store, online, contact center and social channels. Results are aggregated and reported via smg360TM—a real-time, role-based reporting platform providing access to all customer and related data. 

SMG’s research professionals partner with clients to derive business-changing insights. Within Brand Research, SMG offers traditional brand tracking as well as access to dynamic customer and competitor data through market intelligence tool BrandGeek. Fueled by SurveyMini—SMG’s location-based mobile research app—BrandGeek contains consumer feedback and behavioral data relating to more than 4,500 brands across more than 500,000 locations.

33. Hanover Research

Founded: 2003 2019 U.S. revenue: $52.7 million Percent change from 2018: 14.1% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $2.6 million Percent from outside U.S.: 4.7% 2019 worldwide revenue: $55.3 million U.S. employees: 358

Hanover Research is a brain trust designed to level the information playing field. Hanover is made up of hundreds of researchers who support thousands of organizational decisions every year. One of the industry’s fastest-growing companies, Hanover attributes this market success to its unique positioning as the only firm that provides tailored research through an annual, fixed-fee model. 

Hanover serves more than 1,000 organizations and companies worldwide from established global organizations, to emerging companies to educational institutions. Hanover’s research informs decisions at any level and across any department capitalizing on the exposure to myriad industries and challenges. 

Founded in 2003, Hanover operates on an annual fixed-fee model, and partnership provides its clients with access to a team of high-caliber researchers, survey experts, analysts and statisticians with diverse skills in market research, information services and analytics. There is no limit on the type of challenge that can be asked for on the quantitative and qualitative approaches Hanover uses to deliver solutions—most of which are very difficult to replicate internally.

Hanover’s custom research services include:

• Secondary research: market segmentation and evaluation; labor and demographic trends and forecasts; vendor and product reviews; best practices reports. 
• Survey: survey design, administration and analysis; open-ended response coding. 
• Qualitative primary research: focus group design and administration; in-depth interview design, outreach, administration and analysis. 
• Data analysis: data segmentation and mining; conjoint analysis; linear regression; descriptive and predictive analytics; data forecasting and modeling. 

32. Directions Research

Founded: 1988 2019 U.S. revenue: $54.2 million Percent change from 2018: 17.8% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: — Percent from outside U.S.: — 2019 worldwide revenue: $54.2 million U.S. employees: 181

Independently recognized as one of the leading business decision insight firms in the nation, Directions Research combines a highly experienced staff with a unique mix of innovative and proven approaches to answer pressing business issues. Directions and SEEK routinely combine primary and connected data from multiple sources to create holistic and actionable analytic stories for their clients. Through digital dashboards, infographics, written reports and other unique visualizations, the firm communicates its knowledge in a manner that is right for today’s leaders. 

Directions and SEEK excel in innovation, optimization, customer and brand experience, brand strategy, strategic business intelligence and visualization across a wide range of industries. The firm offers B2C and B2B services globally, surveying audiences using a broad selection of data collection techniques and combining those insights with existing client knowledge. Directions’ and SEEK’s staff have an excellent mix of client- and supplier-side experience. The organization allows senior researchers to work with clients on a day-to-day basis.

SEEK (acquired in 2018) is a qualitative insight and innovation consultancy, operating as an independent but connected division of Directions. SEEK empathically connects brands with the humans they serve, transforming the brand-to-consumer relationship into a human-to-human one. The SEEK approach builds brand advocacy for clients with the human-centric approach to innovation, activating empathy as an innate problem-solving capability.

31. Fors Marsh Group (FMG) *

Founded: 2002 2019 U.S. revenue: $57.5 million Percent change from 2018: 22.1% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: — Percent from outside U.S.: — 2019 worldwide revenue: $57.5 million U.S. employees: 263

FMG applies behavioral and data science to improve organizational processes, business solutions and customer experiences. This work is conducted within seven core U.S. markets: health, defense, technology, finance, homeland security, policy and consumer. 

FMG’s work for its clients wins industry and federal awards. FMG has been named as a top market research company by GreenBook and the American Advertising Federation and has been named to the American Marketing Association’s list of top market research companies in the U.S. for five consecutive years. FMG was also a finalist for the American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council’s Igniting Innovation 2018 award for creating an innovative e-learning program that improved program awareness and usability for the General Services Administration’s Center for Acquisition Professional Excellence. 

For 2019 and beyond, FMG is focused on continuing this momentum and expanding in important areas. In its human capital practice, FMG is furthering its work in the cybersecurity industry to help the Department of Defense attract top cyber talent and to protect the nation’s infrastructure. FMG is also expanding its efforts in public service recruiting through new partnerships with the U.S. Army, U.S. National Guard and AmeriCorps. The company is proud that its partnership with these institutions will help shape the future of the U.S. For its health division, FMG is leveraging its deep experience in health communications to fight the opioid crisis by reducing stigma and removing barriers that victims face in receiving help—potentially one of the biggest challenges facing America today. 

30. National Research Group (NRG) **

Founded: 1978 2019 U.S. revenue: $59 million Percent change from 2018: 1.7% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $4 million Percent from outside U.S.: 6.3% 2019 worldwide revenue: $63 million U.S. employees: 200

National Research Group, acquired by Stagwell Media from Nielsen in 2015, is a leading global insights and strategy firm at the intersection of entertainment and technology. Rooted in four decades of industry expertise, the world’s leading marketers turn to NRG for insights into growth and strategy for any content, anywhere, on any device. Working at the confluence of content, culture and technology, NRG offers bold insights for storytellers everywhere. 

Some agencies specialize in qual, others focus on quant—but NRG connects the two disciplines with hybrid teams expert in both modalities. The company is a one-stop, custom consultancy that tailors its approach to solve clients’ biggest challenges. 

The foundation of NRG’s qualitative work is a team of passionate, subject matter experts who connect deeply with consumers in any environment. NRG uses qual to discover the subconscious drivers that fuel our quantitative truths. Its quantitative work is anchored in sophisticated techniques with a focus on agility, creativity and rigor. NRG is method-agnostic and works collaboratively with its clients to solve complex problems in a simple way.

29. Cello Health * **

Founded: 2004 2019 U.S. revenue: $64.5 million Percent change from 2018: 23.3% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $58.5 million Percent from outside U.S.: 47.6% 2019 worldwide revenue: $123 million U.S. employees: 260

Cello Health consists of four global capabilities that enable the company to offer best-in-class services and an integrated partnership approach to its clients. This unique mix of capabilities, combined with its collaborative approach, results in a unique fusion of expertise, providing powerful advisory and implementation solutions.

• Cello Health Insight is a global marketing research company, providing business intelligence to the healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors. Cello Health Insight specializes in getting to the heart of its clients’ questions, using a large pool of creative and academic resources and providing design of materials and deliverables through a hand-picked project team—selected to best meet the needs of each individual project.
• Cello Health Consulting is the strategic consulting arm of Cello Health, focused on delivering business results by unlocking the potential within organizations, people, assets and brands. Cello Health Consulting works alongside clients to create practical solutions that ensure buy-in and build relationships. 
• Cello Health Communications combines science, strategy and creativity to unlock the potential of brands and assets. Its services underpin differentiated positioning and deliver brand optimization, focusing on multiple areas of development and launch, through commercial maturity.
• Cello Signal is a full-service digital capability bringing impactful messages alive in communications campaigns, content and film.

28. Macromill Group **

Founded: 2000 2019 U.S. revenue: $68.5 million Percent change from 2018: 2.2% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $260 million Percent from outside U.S.: 79.1% 2019 worldwide revenue: $328.5 million U.S. employees: 275

Macromill Group is a rapidly growing global market research and digital marketing solutions provider bringing together the collective power of its specialist companies to provide innovative data and insights that drive clients’ smarter decisions. Macromill’s industry-leading digital research solutions deliver rapid and cost-effective solutions to the challenges businesses face today. 

The group’s leading business units are Macromill and MetrixLab. Macromill stands at the forefront of innovation, delivering unique marketing solutions. It offers exclusive access to the highest-quality online panels with more than 2 million members. Using its self-developed platform AIRs, Macromill provides full-service online research including automated survey creation and completion, data tabulation and analysis. Today, its business portfolio includes services such as offline quantitative research, mobile research, point-of-service database research (QPR), digital marketing (Accessmill), a DIY survey platform (Questant) and more. 

Metrixlab turns data from online surveys, social media, mobile devices and enterprise systems into valuable business information and actionable consumer insights. This helps leading companies drive product innovation, brand engagement and customer value. Owned and group panels provide expansive access to global respondents in mature and emerging markets. Its teams deliver strategic and tactical decision support by pushing the boundaries of data analysis innovation, combining cutting-edge technology with data science and proven marketing research methodologies. Clients across the globe rely on the company’s hyper-efficient data and insights ecosystem to deliver fast and affordable results.

27. C Space **

Founded: 1999 2019 U.S. revenue: $70 million Percent change from 2018: 2.9% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $18 million Percent from outside U.S.: 20.5% 2019 worldwide revenue: $88 million U.S. employees: 354

C Space, part of the Interbrand Group, is a global customer agency that marries art and science to create rapid customer insight and business change. 

C Space works with some of the world’s best-known brands—such as Walmart, Samsung, IKEA and more—to build customers into the ways companies work and deliver on customer-inspired growth. By building real, ongoing relationships with customers—online and in-person—brands can stay relevant, deliver superior experiences, launch successful products and build loyalty. Through its “customer as a service” approach of research, consulting and communications, C Space helps businesses minimize risk and maximize growth.

The company integrates customers into the ways its clients work. By bringing stakeholders together around the customer, C Space’s clients create greater clarity and alignment in the actions that will most effectively drive customer growth.

C Space’s customized programs are tailored based on specific business needs and include private online communities, immersive storytelling, data and analytics, activation events, innovation projects and business consulting. C Space continues to invest in its people, existing capabilities like data and analytics, as well as new initiatives.

26. Engine Insights**

Founded: 2004 2019 U.S. revenue: $71 million Percent change from 2018: 4.4% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $44 million Percent from outside U.S.: 38.3% 2019 worldwide revenue: $115 million U.S. employees: 240

Engine is a new kind of data-driven marketing solutions company. Powered by data, driven by results and guided by people, Engine helps its clients make connections that count—leading to bottom-line growth, an inspired workplace and business transformation. 

Engine Insights (formerly ORC International) connects traditional market research with cutting-edge products to deliver clients a 360-degree view of their customers, employees and markets. Engine’s extended suite of solutions and products are designed to support business growth, from helping clients understand and outperform the competition to operationalizing both survey and behavioral data to identify, attract, engage and retain their audiences.

Engine Insights’ client services and products include custom research and omnibus surveys; customer experience, customer retention and brand engagement studies; and data management and data analytics. 

These services help clients:

• Think beyond products and services to drive business revenue.
• Use insights to inform more relevant messaging and creative.
• Get a complete 360-degree view of their customers.
• Segment audiences for better targeting.
• Develop the perfect product and take it to market.
• Create unique experiences that engage their customers and keep them loyal for a lifetime.
• Build an internal culture that attracts, retains and engages the best talent.

Founded: 1931 2019 U.S. revenue: $71.1 million Percent change from 2018: 9% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $6.9 million Percent from outside U.S.: 8.8% 2019 worldwide revenue: $78 million U.S. employees: 253

Since 1931, Burke has consistently redefined expectations in the marketing research industry. From segmentation to customer engagement programs, product innovation and brand tracking, Burke prides itself on designing and executing objectives-driven quantitative and qualitative research. Working across a variety of industries, Burke helps its clients gain actionable perspective on their most critical business challenges, providing a range of solutions from agile to integrated strategic decision support.

Today, Burke continues to push the boundaries of what marketing research can be, seamlessly uniting research, strategy and education. Backed by Seed Strategy—its strategic consulting subsidiary—Burke has the capabilities to support its clients throughout every phase of the product or service life cycle, with expertise in strategy, innovation, branding and marketing. In addition, Burke provides comprehensive training on research fundamentals and best practices through the Burke Institute—its dedicated education division and the industry’s leader in research and insights training. Wherever its clients find themselves on the path to success, Burke is uniquely equipped to help them move forward with clarity, confidence and purpose.

Continuing its long tradition of research innovation, Burke recently unveiled two new offerings: Geode|AI, an integrated insights system that analyzes multiple data sources to uncover patterns, relationships and critical insights that are often hidden; and Quantiment, a robust machine-learning solution that jointly extracts richer insights from structured and unstructured data.

24. YouGov *

Founded: 2000 2019 U.S. revenue: $76.8 million Percent change from 2018: 11.8% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $107.5 million Percent from outside U.S.: 58.3% 2019 worldwide revenue: $184.3 million U.S. employees: 212

YouGov is a global provider of analysis and data generated by consumer panels in 42 markets. Its core offering of opinion data is derived from the proprietary YouGov Global Panel of more than 9 million people. The YouGov Global Panel provides the company with thousands of data points on consumer attitudes, opinions and behavior. YouGov captures these streams of data in the YouGov Cube, its unique connected data library that holds more than 10 years of historic single-source data. In 2019, YouGov panelists completed more than 25 million surveys.

YouGov’s data-led offering supports and improves a wide spectrum of marketing activities of a customer base, including media owners, brands and media agencies. YouGov works with some of the world’s most recognized brands.

Its syndicated data products include the daily brand perception tracker, YouGov BrandIndex and the media planning and segmentation tool YouGov Profiles. Its market-leading YouGov RealTime service provides a fast and cost-effective solution for reaching nationally representative and specialist samples. YouGov’s Custom Research division offers a wide range of quantitative and qualitative research, tailored by sector specialist teams to meet users’ specific requirements. YouGov data is delivered through Crunch, the most advanced analytics tool for research data, combining fast processing with drag-and-drop simplicity. YouGov has a strong record for data accuracy and innovation. 

23. Phoenix Marketing International

Founded: 1999 2019 U.S. revenue: $77 million Percent change from 2018: -3.8% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $4.5 million Percent from outside U.S.: 5.5% 2019 worldwide revenue: $81.5 million U.S. employees: 343

Global advertising and brand specialist Phoenix Marketing International operates in all major industries, utilizing modern technology, innovative research techniques and customized approaches to help clients elevate their brand, refine their communications and optimize their customer experience. 

With the launch of Phoenix’s AdPi Brand Effect Platform, clients now have access to continuous advertising measurement and performance improvement insights through a single platform, providing the ability to analyze their campaigns at any stage in the advertising life cycle, and the flexibility to draw upon each piece as needed. Through more than 20 years of experience and testing thousands of ads per month, Phoenix developed 19 category-specific ad measurement models that uncover the drivers and creative attributes that explain the “whys” behind an ad’s creative performance, with forward-looking estimates for ad memorability and brand linkage.

Phoenix continues to evolve its CX solution, launching Competitive Customer Experience, a measurement of how consumers perceive their overall experience with a brand, including key touchpoints along the journey. Grounding recent experiences with a client’s brand, competitor brands and non-categorical benchmarking, Phoenix is able to evaluate brand opinion, understand what drives great CX outside of the category, focus on emotional drivers of brand CX, and provide an external view of culture, consistency and brand promises.

22. Concentrix **

Founded: 1983 2019 U.S. revenue: $95 million Percent change from 2018: 11.8% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $130 million Percent from outside U.S.: 57.8% 2019 worldwide revenue: $225 million U.S. employees: 253

Concentrix is a wholly owned subsidiary of SYNNEX Corp., specializing in technology-enabled customer engagement and improving business performance for clients around the world. With more than 225,000 staff in more than 40 countries, Concentrix provides services to clients in 10 industry verticals: automotive, banking and financial services, insurance, healthcare, technology, consumer electronics, media and communications, retail and e-commerce, travel and transportation, energy and the public sector. 

The Concentrix Voice of the Customer solution combines technology with experience management services provided by its in-house team of hundreds of CX professionals. 

Powered by analytic tools and artificial intelligence, its customer feedback platform ConcentrixCX helps companies listen, analyze and act on omnichannel customer feedback at any point in the customer journey, at scale. Features include data capture and integration, real-time reporting and analytics, and coaching and employee engagement tools. Concentrix continues to invest in enhanced platform functionality—for example, multi-source data expansion of its proprietary text analytics engine, including structured and unstructured customer feedback sources such as surveys, social, messaging, complaints and email. New digital data collection capabilities include a conversational feedback bot and embedded micro-journey surveys. 

Concentrix experience management services range from program management to strategic advisory services and are custom tailored to free clients’ internal teams to focus on transformational impact. Its CX experts specialize in quantitative and qualitative techniques, delivering data-driven insights through solutions such as survey design, relational loyalty research, CX journey analytics, digital channel optimization, customer segmentation, customer effort assessment and integrated CX analytics.

21. Escalent

Founded: 1975 2019 U.S. revenue: $97.1 million Percent change from 2018: -3.4% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $5.5 million Percent from outside U.S.: 5.4% 2019 worldwide revenue: $102.6 million U.S. employees: 352

Escalent is a human behavior and analytics firm specializing in industries facing disruption. The company transforms data and insights into an understanding of what drives human behavior, and it helps businesses turn those drivers into actions that build brands, enhance customer experiences and inspire product innovation. 

Escalent specializes in automotive and mobility, consumer and retail, energy, financial services, health, technology and telecommunications. Focusing on select industries allows Escalent to function as a trusted business partner who knows the challenges its clients face and understands how to engage their most valuable audiences. 

Escalent has three centers of excellence: Qualitative Research combines emerging technologies, anthropology and ethnography to tap into human insights that reveal real needs and potential; Marketing & Data Sciences combine survey, behavioral, transactional and third-party data to solve tough research challenges; and Insight Communities provides private, online platforms for brands to engage with groups of stakeholders to quickly and easily draw insights.

20. dunnhumby **

Founded: 2001 2019 U.S. revenue: $100 million Percent change from 2018: -3.8% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $335 million Percent from outside U.S.: 77% 2019 worldwide revenue: $435 million U.S. employees: 230

Dunnhumby is a customer science company that analyzes data and applies insights for almost 1 billion shoppers across the globe to create personalized customer experiences in digital, mobile and retail environments. Its strategic process, proprietary insights and multichannel media capabilities build loyalty with customers to drive competitive advantage and sustained growth for clients. Dunnhumby uses data and science to understand customers, then applies that insight to create personalized experiences that build lasting emotional connections with retailers and brands. It’s a strategy that demonstrates when companies know and treat their customers better than the competition, they earn more than their loyalty—they earn a competitive advantage.

Dunnhumby was established in the U.S. to help retailers and manufacturers put the customer at the heart of their business decisions. Analyzing data from millions of customers across the country, dunnhumby enables clients to use this insight to deliver a better shopping experiences and more relevant marketing to their customers.

By putting best customers at the center of every decision, dunnhumby’s approach delivers measurable value, competitive edge and even more customer data to fuel ongoing optimization, setting clients up for long-term success.

Dunnhumby serves a prestigious list of retailers and manufacturers in grocery, consumer goods, health, beauty, personal care, food service, apparel and advertising, among others. Clients include Tesco, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Macy’s and PepsiCo.

19. Informa Financial Intelligence**

Founded: 2016 2019 U.S. revenue: $107 million Percent change from 2018: 1.9% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $36 million Percent from outside U.S.: 25.2% 2019 worldwide revenue: $143 million U.S. employees: 500

Informa Financial Intelligence is a leading provider of business intelligence, market research and expert analysis to the financial industry. The world’s top global financial institutions and banks look to Informa Financial Intelligence for its authority, precision and forward-focused analysis. 

Informa Financial Intelligence consists of key research, analysis and industry experts, such as Informa Research Services, EPFR Global, Informa Global Markets, iMoneyNet, Informa Investment Solutions, eBenchmarkers and Mapa Research.

Informa Financial Intelligence provides fund and wealth managers, traders, insurers, analysts, and investment and retail bankers with the intelligent advantage to make informed decisions, understand past trends, forecast future performance, drive profitability and increase returns.

Because of their strong background in the financial industry, the research teams of Informa Financial Intelligence are highly qualified to help financial institutions with their market research needs. Informa’s researchers are experts in benchmarking studies, competitive intelligence, new product development and usability testing, customer and member satisfaction and loyalty research, brand and advertising awareness research, and mystery shopping services for sales and service quality evaluation, legal and match pair testing, compliance, discrimination and misleading sales practices testing. Informa is considered a leader in the use of market research to limit the risk associated with allegations of discrimination, UDAAP (unfair, deceptive, or abusive acts or practices), predatory lending and misleading sales practices.

18. NRC Health

Founded: 1991 2019 U.S. revenue: $113 million Percent change from 2018: 10.8% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $3.6 million Percent from outside U.S.: 3.1% 2019 worldwide revenue: $128 million U.S. employees: 448

NRC Health (formerly National Research Corp.) has helped healthcare organizations illuminate and improve the moments that matter to patients, residents, physicians, nurses and staff for more than 38 years. The company offers performance measurement and improvement services to hospitals, healthcare systems, physicians, health plans, senior care organizations, home health agencies and other healthcare organizations. 

NRC Health solutions help organizations stay at the forefront of healthcare by understanding the totality of healthcare consumer and staff experiences. Primary solutions include: 

• Experience solutions capture personal experiences, while delivering insights to power a new benchmark: n=1. Developing a longitudinal profile of customers’ healthcare wants and needs allows for organizational improvement, increased provider and staff engagement, loyal relationships and personal well-being. 
• The Loyalty Index, composed of seven aspects that combine to provide a 360-degree view of healthcare consumer loyalty—a single, trackable metric to identify emerging trends in consumer behavior and benchmark against peers. 
• Market Insights is a large U.S. consumer database that gives partners access to the opinions of 310,000 healthcare consumers in 300 markets, and access to resources to better understand target audiences and gauge consumer response to communications.
• The Transparency solution calculates star ratings from existing patient, resident and family survey data, and publishes those ratings to organizations’ websites. 
• The Governance Institute supports the efforts of healthcare boards across the nation—to lead stronger organizations and build healthier communities. NRC Health partners with organizations to improve governance efficiency and effective decision-making by providing trusted, independent information, tools and resources to board members, executives and physician leaders. 

17. MaritzCX **

Founded: 1973 2019 U.S. revenue: $118 million Percent change from 2018: — 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $44 million Percent from outside U.S.: 27.2% 2019 worldwide revenue: $162 million U.S. employees: 600

MaritzCX is a software and research company that focuses on customer experience management for big business. The company offers a unique combination of award-winning CX software, industry-leading data and research science, deep vertical market expertise and managed program services. MaritzCX provides a full-service professional CX approach designed to continuously improve the customer experience across an enterprise’s customers, employees, prospects and partners. 

MaritzCX’s research insights include its leading CXStandards competitive benchmarking research that delivers quarterly benchmarks for 55 CX categories across 16 industries. Its CXEvolution study of more than 10,000 practitioners’ feedback informed large enterprises of their CX gaps. 

The company’s focus is to leverage the MaritzCX platform, its industry-leading studies and research services to drive more meaningful experiences between its clients and their customers by adding product and research services and continued thought leadership in the CX market. In addition, MaritzCX has received CMS-certification for HCAHPS surveys, becoming the industry’s first CX platform company to offer an inclusive CX-based patient experience platform.

MaritzCX specializes in solutions for key industries, including automotive, financial services, retail, technology, B2B and more. Its global reach includes more than 900 full-time employees and 800-plus part-time or contract employees in 19 offices around the world. MaritzCX provides solutions to more than 500 clients and 1.6 million users who speak 72 languages in 100 countries. MaritzCX is committed to being its clients’ customer experience research partners.

In March 2020, InMoment acquired MaritzCX.

16. DRG (Decision Resources Group) **

Founded: 1990 2019 U.S. revenue: $140 million Percent change from 2018: 2.2% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $53 million Percent from outside U.S.: 27.5% 2019 worldwide revenue: $193 million U.S. employees: 399

DRG, the Health Science & Analytics Division of Piramal Enterprises, is a global information and technology services company that provides proprietary data and solutions to the healthcare industry. DRG has brought together best-in-class companies to provide end-to-end solutions to complex challenges in healthcare. DRG reframes these challenges, enabling its customers to see the opportunities. Pharmaceutical, biotechnology, medical technology and managed care companies rely on this analysis and data to make informed decisions critical to their success.

Framing the current status and future trends in target healthcare markets using data, primary research and secondary research is a core competency of DRG. Product offerings include high‐value analytics, syndicated research, proprietary databases, decision support tools and advisory services.

DRG has a number of key specialties, including syndicated research focused on new therapeutic opportunities; portfolio planning, changing industry dynamics and global treatment patterns; insights and data on physician and consumer healthcare e‐marketing; and proprietary databases and analytics covering more than 90% of the U.S. managed care markets. 

15. Wood Mackenzie **

Founded: 1973 2019 U.S. revenue: $150 million Percent change from 2018: 3.4% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $335 million Percent from outside U.S.: 69.1% 2019 worldwide revenue: $485 million U.S. employees: 337

Wood Mackenzie, a Verisk business, is a leading research and consultancy business for the global energy, chemicals, metals and mining industries. Wood Mackenzie launched in 1923 as a small, relatively unknown, Edinburgh, Scotland-based stockbroker. By the 1970s, it had become one of the top three stockbrokers in the UK, renowned for the quality of its equity research. 

Its success has always been underpinned by the clear and simple principle of providing trusted research and advice that would make a difference to clients. This was true when the first oil report was published by its equity analysts in 1973 and remains just as relevant to it today. So much so that, over the past four decades, Wood Mackenzie has drawn upon its heritage to create a global research and consultancy business that has grown alongside the needs of its clients. 

Having cultivated deep expertise in upstream oil and gas, Wood Mackenzie has carefully broadened its focus to deliver the same level of detailed insight for every interconnected sector of the energy, chemicals, metals and mining industries it now serves around the world. But heritage is more than just history. Its expert analysts and consultants have connected the company to some of the most significant events of our time—creating insight for governments, boards and CEOs who have helped shape the future direction of the world’s natural resources industries and their impact on society. 

14. Material *

Founded: 1973 2019 U.S. revenue: $166.7 million Percent change from 2018: 0.3% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $57.9 million Percent from outside U.S.: 25.8% 2019 worldwide revenue: $224.6 million U.S. employees: 1,038

In 2019, Material (under the name LRW Group) acquired five companies: Killer Visual Strategies, an award-winning visual communication agency based in Seattle; Greenberg Strategy, a Bay Area research and strategy consultancy with a strong presence in the tech community; Karma Agency, a strategic communications firm based in Philadelphia; Salt Branding, a Bay Area consultancy; and T3, an Austin, Texas-based digital marketing agency. This year, Material is taking steps to unify these companies under one brand, integrating their services and building a collaboration that will provide seamless, end-to-end marketing solutions for clients. This year, LRW Group rebranded as Material, formally integrating 10 companies into one modern, unified offering.

Material is a radical collaboration of the top research and analytics firms seamlessly paired with the most creative and strategic marketing agencies, all with the shared mission of igniting growth for the world’s top B2B and B2C brands, from Fortune 500 companies to disruptive start-ups. Material offers a full range of marketing services—from data analytics and insights, to consulting and strategy development, to customer experience programs and creative executions. Material employs a roster of 1,200 strategists, creators, technologists, designers, researchers and storytellers that work side-by-side with clients to solve modern-day problems, build customer loyalty and make an impact on the world around us.

Founded: 1969 2019 U.S. revenue: $173.7 million Percent change from 2018: 0.5% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $52.6 million Percent from outside U.S.: 23.2% 2019 worldwide revenue: $226.3 million U.S. employees: 5,311

ICF is a global consulting services provider with more than 7,000 professionals focused on making big things possible for its commercial and government clients in the U.S., Europe and Asia. 

Clients work with ICF on issues that matter profoundly to their success, whether it’s a product or program that matters to the business or a social issue or policy that matters to the world. ICF offers comprehensive survey research services that empower clients to gain valuable and actionable insights on issues that matter. 

For more than 40 years, ICF has demonstrated design, methodological and statistical knowledge through the implementation of large and complex survey research projects. Its clients consist of U.S. federal, state and local agencies, universities, nonprofits and commercial organizations. 

Its survey research services include: 

• Analyzing, reporting and presenting findings.
• Conducting surveys through a variety of data collection methods. 
• Designing samples, data collection protocols and instruments.
• Protecting all processes and data through quality assurance and system security.

ICF recently completed the installation of a state-of-the-art, fully integrated and security-enhanced data collection system, allowing the company to securely and most efficiently collect survey research data across all modes. ICF continues to be dedicated to solving the world’s most complex challenges and tackle problems with ingenuity on issues that matter profoundly to its clients.

12. J.D. Power **

Founded: 1968 2019 U.S. revenue: $217 million Percent change from 2018: 3.3% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $113 million Percent from outside U.S.: 34.2% 2019 worldwide revenue: $330 million U.S. employees: 744

J.D. Power is a global leader in consumer insights, advisory services and data and analytics. Those capabilities enable J.D. Power to help its clients drive customer satisfaction, growth and profitability. J.D. Power offers market research, forecasting, consulting, training and consumer surveys of product and service quality, customer satisfaction and buyer behavior. The company’s independent industry benchmark studies, innovative data and analytics products, and customized advisory services provide insights and help companies improve quality, engagement and business performance.

Annual syndicated studies are based on survey responses from millions of consumers and business customers worldwide. The firm does not review, judge or test products and services for its syndicated studies. It relies on the opinions and perspectives of consumers who have used the products and services being rated. 

J.D. Power is most often recognized for its work in the automotive industry, where its metrics have become the industry standard for measuring product quality and customer satisfaction. A team of associates worldwide conducts quality and customer satisfaction research across industries including automotive, financial services, insurance, telecommunications, travel, healthcare utilities and consumer electronics. 

11. Forrester Research Services **

Founded: 1983 2019 U.S. revenue: $233.7 million Percent change from 2018: 32.9% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $65 million Percent from outside U.S.: 21.8% 2019 worldwide revenue: $298.7 million U.S. employees: 525

Forrester Research Services is the research component of Forrester, one of the most influential research and advisory firms in the world. Forrester works with business and technology leaders to develop customer-obsessed strategies that drive growth. Its unique insights are grounded in annual surveys of more than 675,000 consumers and business leaders worldwide, rigorous and objective methodologies, and the shared wisdom of its most innovative clients. 

Forrester’s research offerings consist of a library of cross-linked documents that interconnect its playbooks, reports, data, product rankings, best practices, evaluation tools and research archives. Research access is provided through role-based websites that facilitate client access to research and tools that are most relevant to their professional roles, including community tools that allow interaction between and among clients and analysts.

Forrester’s research and decision tools enable clients to better anticipate and capitalize on the disruptive forces affecting their businesses and organizations, providing insights and frameworks to drive growth in a complex and dynamic market. 

Founded: 1934 2019 U.S. revenue: $320 million Percent change from 2018: 3.2% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $1,280 million Percent from outside U.S.: 80% 2019 worldwide revenue: $1,600 million U.S. employees: 860

GfK connects data and science. Innovative research solutions provide answers for key business questions around consumers, markets, brands and media—now and in the future. As a research and analytics partner, GfK promises its clients all over the world “Growth from knowledge.” 

The increasing speed of product innovation, the rise of new channels and emerging customer needs are all part of business today. GfK’s clients are businesses around the globe. To make the best possible business decisions every day, they need more than purely descriptive data—they require actionable recommendations based on advanced analytics and powered by leading-edge technology. GfK is in the unique position to leverage proprietary and third-party data to create indispensable predictive market and consumer insights and recommendations.

GfK’s industry focus provides its market researchers with a thorough understanding of business issues and questions specific to their concerns. Industries covered include automotive, consumer goods, fashion and lifestyle, media and entertainment, retail, technology, and travel and hospitality.

9. comScore * **

Founded: 1999 2019 U.S. revenue: $336.1 million Percent change from 2018: -6.5% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $52.5 million Percent from outside U.S.: 13.5% 2019 worldwide revenue: $388.6 million U.S. employees: 870

ComScore is a global information and analytics company that measures advertising, content and the consumer audiences of each across media platforms. ComScore creates its products using a global data platform that combines information on digital platforms (smartphones, tablets and computers), television and movie screens with demographics and other descriptive information. 

ComScore has developed proprietary data science that enables measurement of person-level and household-level audiences, removing duplicated viewing across devices and over time. This combination of data and methods enables a common standard for buyers and sellers to transact on advertising. This helps companies across the media ecosystem better understand and monetize their audiences and develop marketing plans and products to more efficiently and effectively reach those audiences. ComScore’s ability to unify behavioral and other descriptive data enables it to provide audience ratings, advertising verification and granular consumer segments that describe hundreds of millions of consumers. 

ComScore offers several solutions to help advertisers maximize cross-platform marketing effectiveness—be it measuring brand impact, viewability or ad and audience delivery validation—as well as power cross-platform advertising for better targeting and stronger advertising ROI. ComScore Advanced Audience segments go beyond age and gender to help advertisers better target consumers based on lifestyles, behaviors, demographics and interests. ComScore pioneered this concept in digital, local and national TV. 

8. The NPD Group

Founded: 1966 2019 U.S. revenue: $339.5 million Percent change from 2018: 8.6% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $104.5 million Percent from outside U.S.: 23.5% 2019 worldwide revenue: $444 million U.S. employees: 1,185

NPD’s global information and advisory services help the world’s leading brands achieve data-driven growth. NPD combines data, industry expertise and prescriptive analytics across more than 20 industries to help its clients measure markets, predict trends and improve performance.

NPD syndicated services include retail tracking, distributor tracking and consumer tracking. NPD offers weekly data, store-level enabled data for looking at geographies or custom store groupings and account-level information for participating retailers. Point-of-sale data is collected from more than 600,000 doors worldwide, plus e-commerce and mobile platforms. Consumer information is collected via online surveys and NPD’s Checkout service, which uses receipt harvesting to track and analyze purchasing and behavior. Prescriptive analytics include market forecasting, new product forecasting, pricing and promotion evaluation and segmentation. 

With deep expertise in more than 20 industries, NPD provides thought leadership to the C-suites of many of the world’s leading brands. Senior industry advisors are available for strategy sessions to guide long-range planning or address specific needs, such as preparing for earnings calls. Topics include industry and category performance, the state of retail and winning strategies of best-in-class companies.

7. Westat **

Founded: 1963 2019 U.S. revenue: $590 million Percent change from 2018: 3.5% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $7 million Percent from outside U.S.: 1.2% 2019 worldwide revenue: $597 million U.S. employees: 1,900

Westat is a 100% employee-owned research and professional services company. Westat provides extensive survey design and operations capabilities in support of modern data collection from households, institutions, businesses and individuals. Westat applies multiple modes of data collection and survey management to achieve maximum response rates.

The company’s focus areas and capabilities include: 

• Statistical analysis and methodological research in survey design, experiments and testing, data science and analytics, statistical disclosure control and qualitative research.
• Program, process and outcome evaluation using diverse methodologies from design to implementation to guide each program to success.
• Health research, including behavioral and mental health, clinical studies and clinical trials, public and international health, healthcare delivery, patient safety and health communications campaigns.
• Social policy research and technical assistance for implementing innovative evaluation, quality improvement and service delivery systems.
• Education programs for supporting teachers, conducting evaluations and providing technical assistance.
• Transportation studies of travel behaviors, safety and human factors using advanced technologies such as instrumented vehicles and simulators, field observational studies, and online and mobile device-based surveys.

To support its research projects, Westat designs tailor-made approaches for clients as well as invests in many general and specialized IT technologies and products. Westat also provides licensing, training and support for Blaise, a major data collection software system produced by Statistics Netherlands and used internationally. 

Founded: 1975 2019 U.S. revenue: $682 million Percent change from 2018: 16.2% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $1,685 million Percent from outside U.S.: 71.2% 2019 worldwide revenue: $2,367 million U.S. employees: 2,025

Ipsos, through its subsidiaries, engages in collecting, processing and delivering survey data for brands, companies and institutions primarily in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Americas and Asia Pacific. It explores market potential and market trends, tests products and advertising, helps clients build long-term relationships with customers, studies audiences and their perceptions of various media and measures public opinion trends. Ipsos offers advertising research services, including advertising tracking and brand equity evaluation services that help advertisers in the development, evaluation and improvement of their advertising efforts.

It also provides marketing research services that help clients to identify business opportunities and innovation platforms, develop strategies at point of sale, generate insights and ideas, develop and optimize their mix, and model and forecast sales volumes, as well as offers custom innovative products and solutions to address stakeholder experience and brand-building business goals.

In this unique year, Ipsos has remained strong and reaffirmed its ambition and sense of purpose to deliver reliable information for a true understanding of society, markets and people. Ipsos activates this vision for more than 5,000 customers through its presence in 90 markets both globally and locally. Ipsos covers the whole information production and analysis chain, from the collection of raw data to the activation of the insights. It has a solid tradition of innovation expressed by new methodological developments and continuously renewed product range.

5. Information Resources, Inc. (IRI) **

Founded: 1979 2019 U.S. revenue: $815 million Percent change from 2018: 1.9% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $510 million Percent from outside U.S.: 38.5% 2019 worldwide revenue: $1,325 million U.S. employees: 3,639

IRI is a leading provider of big data, predictive analytics and forward-looking insights that help consumer packaged goods, over-the-counter healthcare organizations, retailers, financial services and media companies grow their businesses. A confluence of major external events—a change in consumer buying habits, big data coming into its own, advanced analytics and personalized consumer activation—is leading to a seismic shift in drivers of success in all industries. With the largest repository of purchase, media, social, causal and loyalty data, all integrated on an on-demand, cloud-based technology platform, IRI is empowering the personalization revolution, helping to guide its more than 5,000 clients around the world in their quest to remain relentlessly relevant, capture market share, connect with consumers, collaborate with key constituents and deliver market-leading growth.

In 2019, IRI announced the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning into its leading suite of analytics solutions, retained 100% of its major CPG clients and welcomed new strategic partnerships with top retailers in the U.S. IRI added several innovators to its leadership team while continuing to invest in its employees by providing ongoing training. 

4. Kantar **

Founded: 1993 2019 U.S. revenue: $950 million Percent change from 2018: 2.7% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $2,900 million Percent from outside U.S.: 75.3% 2019 worldwide revenue: $3,850 million U.S. employees: 3,585

Kantar is one of the world’s largest data, insights and consulting companies, bringing together some of the world’s leading research, data and insights expertise. Kantar’s offer covers the breadth of techniques and technologies, from purchase and media data to predicting long-term trends; from neuroscience to exit polls; from large-scale quantitative studies to qualitative research, incorporating ethnography and semiotics. 

In April 2019, all services and offerings of the various Kantar companies were combined under the Kantar brand name. This operational change enables Kantar to build platforms and offers on a global scale and to remove barriers to collaboration and co-creation within the organization to better meet clients’ needs. 

As part of this branding strategy, Kantar launched several initiatives:

• Kantar Marketplace, a global on-demand research and insights store.
• Kantar’s new Brand Guidance System that intelligently integrates validated survey measures with social, search, sales media and behavioral data to provide actionable insights to optimize brand or campaign performance.
• Integration of big data, artificial intelligence and analytical capabilities from across the company into one resource that unlocks deeper insights to fuel growth.

3. Gartner Research **

Founded: 1972 2019 U.S. revenue: $1,800 million Percent change from 2018: 4.7% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $1,474.5 million Percent from outside U.S.: 45% 2019 worldwide revenue: $3,274.5 million U.S. employees: 4,500

Gartner Research delivers independent, objective advice to leaders across an enterprise through subscription services that include on-demand access to published research content, data and benchmarks, and direct access to a network of approximately 2,300 research experts located around the globe. Gartner Research is the fundamental building block for all Gartner products and services. It combines its proprietary research methodologies with extensive industry and academic relationships to create Gartner products and services that address each role across an enterprise. Gartner’s research agenda is defined by clients’ needs, focusing on the critical issues, opportunities and challenges they face every day. Its proprietary research content, presented in the form of reports, briefings, updates and related tools, is delivered directly to the client’s desktop via its website or product-specific portals.

Within the research segment, Global Technology Sales sells products and services to users and providers of technology, while Global Business Sales sells products and services to all other functional leaders, such as supply chain, marketing, human resources, finance, legal and sales. 

2. IQVIA * **

Founded: 2016 2019 U.S. revenue: $2,220 million Percent change from 2018: 8.6% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $2,166 million Percent from outside U.S.: 49.4% 2019 worldwide revenue: $4,386 million U.S. employees: 6,000

IQVIA is a global provider of information, innovative technology solutions and contract research services focused on helping healthcare clients find better solutions for patients. Formed through the 2016 merger of Quintiles and IMS Health, IQVIA applies human data science—leveraging the analytic rigor and clarity of data science to the ever-expanding scope of human science—to enable companies to reimagine and develop new approaches to clinical development and commercialization, speed innovation and accelerate improvements in healthcare outcomes. 

IQVIA has three operating segments: Technology & Analytics Solutions, Research & Development Solutions and Contract Sales & Medical Solutions. Powered by the IQVIA CORE, IQVIA delivers unique and actionable insights at the intersection of large-scale analytics, transformative technology and extensive domain expertise, as well as execution capabilities to help biotech, medical device and pharmaceutical companies, medical researchers, government agencies, payers and other healthcare stakeholders tap into a deeper understanding of diseases, human behaviors and scientific advances, in an effort to advance their path toward cures.

IQVIA has one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of healthcare information in the world, which includes more than 800 million comprehensive, longitudinal, non-identified patient records spanning sales, prescription and promotional data, medical claims, electronic medical records, genomics and social media. Its scaled and growing information set contains more than 35 petabytes of proprietary data sourced from more than 150,000 data suppliers and covering more than 1 million data feeds globally. Based on this data, IQVIA delivers information and insights on more than 85% of the world’s pharmaceuticals, helping its clients run their organizations more efficiently and make better decisions to improve their clinical, commercial and financial performance. 

1. Nielsen **

Founded: 1923 2019 U.S. revenue: $3,875 million Percent change from 2018: 1.6% 2019 non-U.S. revenue: $2,623 million Percent from outside U.S.: 40.4% 2019 worldwide revenue: $6,498 million U.S. employees: 10,300

Nielsen is a global measurement and data analytics company that provides a complete and trusted view of consumers and markets worldwide. Nielsen is divided into two business units: Nielsen Global Media and Nielsen Global Connect. 

Nielsen Global Media provides media and advertising clients with unbiased and reliable metrics that create the shared understanding of the industry required for markets to function, enabling its clients to grow and succeed across the $600 billion global advertising market. Nielsen Global Media helps clients define exactly who they want to reach and optimize the outcomes they can achieve. The company’s cross-platform measurement strategy brings together the best of TV and digital measurement to ensure a more functional marketplace for the industry.

Nielsen Global Connect provides consumer packaged goods manufacturers and retailers with accurate, actionable information and a complete picture of the complex and changing marketplace that brands need to innovate and grow their businesses. Nielsen Global Connect provides data and builds tools that use predictive models to turn observations in the marketplace into business decisions and winning solutions. The business’ data and insights, combined with its open, cloud-native measurement and analytics platform that democratizes the power of data, continue to provide an essential foundation that makes markets possible in the rapidly evolving world of commerce. With Nielsen Global Connect’s set of guiding truths, businesses have the tools to create new opportunities.

* ‘% change’ calculation reflects adjustment of previously reported 2018 U.S. research revenue due to acquisition or divestiture activity or other business change during 2019.

** Some or all figures are not made available by this company so instead are based on research and estimation by the report author.

Diane Bowers is a consultant to research and data analytics businesses and industry associations in the U.S. and internationally. She previously served as the president of CASRO, board chair of the Global Research Business Network, a board member of the Americas Research Industry Alliance and a board member of The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University. She is also a past president of the Market Research Council and the Research Industry Coalition, and a long-time member of American Association for Public Opinion Research, AMA and ESOMAR.

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Related Expertise: Technology Industry , Product Innovation and Engineering

Solving Software’s R&D Conundrum

October 05, 2022  By  Pranay Ahlawat ,  Clark O’Niell ,  Archith Mohan , and  Ted Wiles

• Adopt a long-term product investment strategy 
• Drive continual software architecture modernization  
• Break organization silos  
• Invest in new techniques for multiplying scale
• Provide incentives for legacy customers to shift to new products and platforms   

Smaller software companies tend to outperform their larger competitors in returns from R&D investments. How can software companies ensure the scaling of R&D even as they grow?

Software companies live by the mantra of “innovate or die.” As a result, research and development programs are among their most indispensable functions. The average software company spends about 20% of revenue on R&D; some spend more than 40%. The effectiveness of R&D teams—chiefly, their ability to innovate—is in many cases a software company’s most significant differentiator.

Unlike most other aspects of business, however, R&D doesn’t scale with size. Indeed, recent BCG research shows that smaller companies tend to outperform their larger competitors in returns from R&D investments and speed to market. This may seem obvious—after all, older companies generally have more mature products in slower-growth markets—but we found that market maturity alone doesn’t explain declining RDIs.

Unlike most other aspects of business, R&D doesn’t scale with size.

In fact, the nuances and outliers in our analysis convinced us that we had to look deeper and answer these questions: What separates the software companies that have successfully scaled their R&D from the many competitors who have not? What are the factors that get in the way of companies as they scale? Finally, what can software companies who want to grow without losing their edge in innovation do to solve the R&D conundrum?

When R&D Lags

BCG recently analyzed nearly 200 mostly public software companies from around the globe to compare the change in one-year revenue growth (excluding acquisitions) against the percentage of revenue allotted to R&D. 1 1 We analyzed 191 software companies—approximately 70% from the United States, about 10% from China, and the rest from 13 other countries. Of the 191 companies analyzed, 187 (~98%) are public. Notes: 1 We analyzed 191 software companies—approximately 70% from the United States, about 10% from China, and the rest from 13 other countries. Of the 191 companies analyzed, 187 (~98%) are public. This ratio is what we call the Research and Development Index (RDI). The companies we examined are young to old, small to large, and with varied growth strategies. Our analysis shows that as a company matures and increases in size, its RDI falls, in large part because its R&D budget expands commensurately while not delivering an equal amount of revenue gains. (See Exhibit 1.)

By contrast, smaller companies, under $250 million, which tend to focus on product development and incremental product improvements, have median RDIs as high as 1.6, boosted by rapidly compounding growth rates. But as software companies surpass $2 billion in revenue, their RDI tends to decline precipitously (median values of 0.6), often the result of fewer new product features and advances.

RDI also tends to be worse in companies whose growth is based on acquiring other companies. Few acquisitions achieve the hoped-for product and operational synergies, often because the two companies have separate technology stacks that are difficult to integrate. Consequently, the more acquisitions that a software company makes—which usually means that they are deferring organic growth—the more its RDI suffers.

Some software companies defy this pattern, but it is hard to place them in precise categories. On the one end of the spectrum of the outliers, there are some larger software outfits with more traditional enterprise sales business models—such as Adobe, Microsoft, and Salesforce—that maintain decent RDIs. On the other end of the spectrum, a few product-led companies, whose growth strategies are driven by attracting customers to a flagship product line, have low RDIs. These outliers only make the R&D conundrum more perplexing.

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Why R&D Efficiency Lags

Broadly, we attribute the inability to scale R&D to increased organizational complexity, a natural but problematic by-product of growth and maturity that companies often fail to create strategies to control. The types of complexity that hinder efforts to scale R&D can be broken down into four categories. (See Exhibit 2.)

Let’s examine each of these categories in greater detail:

Engineering and Technology. Older, larger companies are often wedded to aging products and technologies. Frequently, this happens because their legacy products represent their largest revenue streams, and there is little organizational will to risk losing the sales tied to their core product platforms and architectures. These products have often accumulated technical debt, such as leftover and obsolete code, bugs, and design requirements that are a drag on continuous innovation and modernization.

Companies stuck in this situation face increasing technological irrelevance as new application development frameworks and platforms—such as cloud and serverless computing, next-generation data storage, and AI—shift the economics and speed-to-market of product development. These advances, which many newer competitors have eagerly embraced, have made it easier for new entrants to race past older companies in specific markets with essentially turnkey products and to maintain their lead through rapid improvements. Consequently, R&D outlays at older companies for less relevant products decrease in efficacy and value.

We have witnessed this play out at numerous companies, including a leader in gaming and operations center software that has been beset by engineering and development slowdowns and redundancy due to its large and complex code base, which grew unchecked over many years. In addition, multiple programming languages, among them legacy versions of C/C++, and an inefficient data model have created a shaky foundation for innovation. Recognizing the problem and seeking a return to growth, the company has begun an effort to systematically modernize and re-write its products.

Organization and Operating Models. Many software companies serve as apt exemplars of Conway’s law, which states that a company’s software design function and software architecture reflect the organization’s ability to collaborate and communicate. Said another way, building scalable products requires thoughtfully orchestrated operating models. Many larger, multiproduct companies have overly complicated development structures because they have become bloated, with a raft of siloed teams working on different parts of the same products. Collaboration and coordination across product lines, features and functions are hindered while teams become larger and more stratified. And the development work itself may be redundant and duplicated across teams. In this insular environment, planning, coordination, and product development—and, as a result, R&D efficiency—suffer.

Sometimes operating model complexity comes from inorganic moves—primarily acquisitions—to expand growth. To fully integrate acquired businesses and products companies have to combine multiple operating models with diverse technology stacks and varied planning and software development teams. In many cases, companies give up trying to combine separate offerings into a logical product portfolio and instead allow them to continue their disparate efforts with little or no integration. This creates duplicative development functions and operations and sometimes redundant portfolios and, in turn, customer confusion. As a result, it is virtually impossible to drive the intended synergies and economies of scale.

In addition to its impact on productivity, acquiring companies without a fully thought-out integration plan can lead to downstream problems in workforce retention and further erosion of company performance. One software company we studied took a laissez-faire approach to a significant acquisition by combining teams of engineers into a single pool without a clear roadmap for their roles and their product development priorities. The result: more than half of their best talent left the firm, frustrated by the opaqueness of the company’s integration tactics and expectations.

Relationships with Customers. There are two types of customer dynamics that hold software companies back. First, younger software companies or ones operating in markets with large customer concentration are overly reactive to their so-called highest annual recurring revenue (ARR) customers in designing new product features that these ostensibly valuable customers demand but that few other customers will pay for. This impacts R&D efficiency, which depends on building products that scale to large markets and multiple customers; by contrast, prioritizing bespoke, or customized, features in the near term inevitably hurts product economics in the medium to long term. In other cases—particularly those involving older companies—customers are responsible for stymieing attempts to upgrade products without adding operational complexity. Software companies with legacy on-premises products are particularly susceptible to this problem and face the challenge of supporting multiple versions of their products, greatly increasing R&D and support burdens. At the same time, many companies are loath to force these long-standing customers to modernize by embracing SaaS- or PaaS-cloud-based or turnkey products. Even if they are upgrading and innovating their products, the inability to turn their backs on older customers forces them to adopt two-speed models—developing, selling, and supporting different modalities of the same or similar products. These somewhat dysfunctional relationships with customers place software firms in a quagmire, held hostage by their older—and often largest—customers and hurting their ability to modernize and compete.

Missing market windows by a few quarters can mean the difference between building the next billion-dollar product or losing out to competitors.

Short-Termism . For many incumbent software companies, short-termism is, unfortunately, the way of doing business. It is the manifestation of the Innovator’s Dilemma, formulated by Harvard Business School professor and BCG alumnus Clayton Christensen. The Innovator’s Dilemma holds that boards and executives of established companies fail to value new innovation sufficiently because it often doesn’t bring the immediate returns that can wrung out of existing customers and product architectures. In other words, company leaders reject going to market with new, strategic, or adjacent products because these products’ short-term potential appears too limited to drive higher revenues and their perceived risk too high. In the world of technology, where trends change rapidly and success depends on staying ahead of the curve, missing market windows by a mere few quarters can often mean the difference between building the next billion-dollar product or losing out to competitors. We have seen this play out with cloud-based products, data platforms, and applications software across all categories.

Short-termism is, of course, a myopic attitude that deters effective planning for the future. But it is nonetheless adopted by many CEOs and other executives whose incentives and jobs are linked to next quarter improvements as opposed to longer-term value creation. In the end, this approach leads to misallocated portfolios and stands in the way of companies innovating, maintaining competitive products, or making the right types of investments to scale R&D and sustain long-term growth.

How to Scale R&D

Complexity can be daunting, but we have identified a series of specific steps that software companies can take to avoid its worst aspects. In the process, companies can create pathways for scaling research and development, allowing revenue gains to outpace R&D earmarks. (See Exhibit 3.)

Adopt a long-term product investment strategy while maintaining an effective portfolio in the short term. Difficult though it may be, striking the balance between the short term and the long term is essential for ensuring that R&D and product development are aligned with growth strategies and value creation. Companies need both an effective portfolio that consistently delivers strong quarterly results and to undertake innovation planning for the future.

A long-term product investment plan should ideally include three elements:

First, the plan must have a clearly articulated innovation budget for medium- and long-term product development initiatives. This budget should be flexible enough to shift priorities as new technology or market expediencies arise. And it should be disciplined: no more than 10% of total R&D earmarked for longer-term moonshots.

Second, the plan should include a defined process to incubate and bring new products to market and to do so without bureaucratic roadblocks or technological inertia. Allocating R&D capacity alone is not enough. Companies should adopt a software lifecycle process and framework that prioritizes new products, measures their success, and manages them differently from legacy or cash-cow offerings.

Third, the plan must feature incentives that minimize short-termism. Managers should be rewarded for supporting longer-term projects that ultimately drive greater growth. Bonuses can be based on revenues from innovation portfolios, a number of new products that surpass a certain sales threshold over a period of time, or market expansion, among other possibilities.

However, long-term innovation gains are only possible if product portfolios are well managed in the short term. That means companies must avoid placing too many bets on too many products and must be willing to shelve products that are not successful. They must avoid technologically cumbersome and fragmented portfolios in favor of simple product lines with two or three anchors that can be counted on for consistent revenue streams. With this approach, R&D is focused on designing adjacent applications and improving features and functions in a limited but expanding universe, resulting in targeted growth channels, software development efficiency, and a more efficient use of resources.

Top-flight software companies from Apple to Microsoft have all adopted this reduced portfolio model. Indeed, to paraphrase Steve Jobs commenting on the dangers of product proliferation, the hallmark of a good company is not always saying yes, but rather saying no to 1,000 other good ideas that would only serve to distract.

Track and repay technical debt to drive continual architecture modernization. Software architecture is always evolving. Our analysis found that software companies with the highest RDI offer their products on the most-modern software platforms. In today’s technology landscape that means having a highly modular and cloud-native architecture and designing software using modern automated applications development and deployment methodologies. Moving to such scaled architectures accelerates innovation, improves product acceptance, and makes it easier to update products frequently.

Established companies with older technology stacks should build a modernization roadmap to better compete with newer rivals and enjoy the benefits that hyperplexed architectures offer. Best-in-class software companies earmark roughly a quarter of their product development budgets for platform modernization and automation and repaying technical debt in a continuous and deliberate way, our research found.

Avoid massive re-architectures of aging technology stacks related to products that are past their expiration date.

However, it is important to target modernization efforts on faster growth or strategically important products and markets, an imperative that many companies make the mistake of neglecting. Massive re-architectures of aging technology stacks related to products in markets that are past their expiration date is usually a wasteful exercise, a distraction from more profitable investments that better align with a company’s growth plans.

Break organization silos by investing in shared services and product management. To overcome the organizational complexity and silos that are perhaps the biggest impediments to scaling R&D and product development, these steps can prove valuable:

First, maximize re-use and sharing of R&D efforts. In an ideal structure, a software company should have a shared services or a platform team that builds common data and middleware components, user interfaces, security services, and tooling frameworks for all products. This team’s primary strategic roles are to ensure code re-usability, drive faster time to market for application features, and improve the overall user experience by making the software more integrated and consistent with the company’s portfolio of products. One large SaaS fintech that adopted this shared platform approach found that the more efficient product development model and improved interoperability generated significantly higher returns from cross-selling.

Second, individual product development teams should be small, self-sufficient and, at the same time, collaborative and accountable for results. As much as possible, work should be executed in a modular and self-contained way with each group focused on specific product development or upgrading tasks with clearly defined interactions among development teams. This helps ensure that progress is shared, and new ideas proliferate. Amazon embraced this concept with its “two pizza team” approach, in which units of work are executed and owned by a team of six to eight engineers.

How to scale large product teams effectively? Skilled development and management leadership.

Lastly, companies must invest in world-class product and portfolio management capabilities. Possibly the single most important but often overlooked aspect of increasing returns from R&D, product and portfolio leadership not only bridges product teams with each other but also connects these teams to other functions, such as product marketing, sales, and customer support. Product management leaders help product development teams focus, prioritize tasks and measure performance and results. Indeed, skilled product development and management leadership is the single biggest determinant in helping large product teams scale effectively.

Invest in product scale multipliers. To guard against complexity creep, companies need to be proactive by adopting what we refer to as scale multipliers. These are essentially capabilities solely designed to continuously maintain scale improvements and ferret out potential problems that would hinder them. Scale multipliers come in many forms but in our view early adoption of automation, product analytics and developer productivity engineering (DPE) is a good starting point.

Companies tend to be reactive when implementing automation, adding it to product development late or only when a large-scale inefficiency is discovered. But when automation is embedded in the entire product development process—across functions from quality and testing to release engineering, security, and operations—scaling becomes ubiquitous. This means positive impacts for product quality, performance, customer satisfaction, and retention.

Similarly, product analytics is usually an after-thought at many enterprise software companies. Companies decide on new product features and even new products, and sometimes make poorly thought-out investments in incremental improvements, without fully understanding their customers’ preferences and usage patterns. Investing in data capture technologies and building a dedicated product analytics team helps overcome this, supporting the development of products that best address customer needs and that improve the customer experience while undergirding data-driven product and portfolio management across the organization.

DPE targets complexity seeping into the code base and product development tooling and processes that tends to occur when engineering companies’ portfolios expand, and new features are added on more frequently. DPE confronts these issues by helping to fine-tune development, placing a spotlight on excess costs and inefficiencies and calling for even minor improvements in process and tooling that, at scale, can have a substantial impact on the organization’s performance. Many successful software companies—recently Dropbox and Netflix, among them—have built dedicated DPE teams to better manage product cycle times and improve developer efficiency.

Manage customer change and be prepared to say no. It is imperative for software companies to avoid falling into a customer trap when building new product lines and features, and when upgrading their products to run on modern and more accessible platforms. Software companies have numerous large customers that are either looking for one-off bespoke features or are not prepared to change their technology stacks or to adopt new platforms across their organizations. In both cases, many software companies divert their resources to keep one or a few customers happy and fail to fully understand the opportunity cost and the longer-term impact of doing so on R&D efficiency and competitive advantage.

Not all revenue is good revenue. Paradoxically, it pays to not listen to customers sometimes.

To avoid this trap, software companies must do two things. First, they need a clear process to triage incoming customer requests and they must be prepared to say no. This means avoiding altering product development roadmaps with customized changes requested by individual customers—no matter how valuable those customers are. Instead, from a revenue growth perspective, they need to look beyond immediate customer demands and determine if a customer’s request will help expand the TAM (total addressable market) or help drive better economics for other customers. On the cost side, they need to consider the total expense of building custom features, including the recurring cost to maintain and support these features. Most importantly, they need to understand the total opportunity cost and business risk of diverting resources away from other items on the roadmap. Not all revenue is good revenue, and, hence, paradoxically it pays to not listen to customers sometimes.

Second, when modernizing or releasing new architectures, software companies should clearly identify the revenue at risk for different migration and modernization scenarios and be open to leaving customers behind. This assessment should consider, among other things, potential loss of certain customers and possible shifts in market influence as well as impact on pipeline and new opportunities. Armed with this knowledge, companies should create an incentive model to encourage uptake of the new software models. These can be carrots, such as discounts on the new products or assistance from software company experts to help a top customer migrate, step by step. In other cases, these may be sticks, penalizing customers who refuse to shift to the new product with higher prices for legacy versions. That may sound overly punitive, but companies cannot afford to scale development only half-way; it is too costly to maintain hybrid versions of a product, and the negative impact on RDI demonstrates that it will reduce future growth. Sometimes, leaving some customers behind as a company embraces change is the only option.

Many leading software companies—Adobe, Ariba, and Salesforce, to name a few—have successfully transitioned their entire customer bases into SaaS-based products (or in Salesforce’s case, transitioned partners and customers to a new architecture) following the approach we outlined here. All three took an aggressive stand, frequently communicating to customers that they want their business but only if they are willing to move to the new platforms. In essence, their message was: “We want to solve your problems, provide the features that you want, and improve your experience with our products. But we can only do that with a more modern product emerging from a more efficient R&D initiative.” Importantly, these companies planned carefully for the changeover; for example, Salesforce ran the old and new versions of its software during a three-year migration timeline.

Software companies face a host of challenges even in their most routine development efforts, and competition is more intense now than it has ever been. Spending on R&D has always been seen as a way to overcome some of these obstacles and market leadership was dependent on these expenditures. Yet, while R&D is still critical to success and differentiation, knowing that R&D doesn’t scale with company size will certainly come as a disappointment to many companies.

Fortunately, there are relatively straightforward answers to address the difficulty of scaling R&D: adopt a long-term product investment strategy while maintaining an effective portfolio in the short term; track and repay technical debt to drive continual architecture modernization; break organization silos, by investing in shared services and product management; invest in product scale multipliers; and manage customer change, being prepared to say no. These steps will not only generate again significant returns from R&D but make software companies feel more confident about coming out on the winning side of innovate or die.

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Market research software helps businesses understand market trends and customer behavior. It’s a data collection tool companies use to identify their target audiences, assess competition, gauge demand for their products or services, and take feedback from prospects.

If you’re looking to purchase market research software, this guide is your one-stop solution. It explains software features and benefits as well as the various factors you must consider to make a smart purchase.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

What is market research software?

Common features of market research software, what type of buyer are you, benefits and potential issues, market trends to understand.

Market research software is a data collection tool that lets businesses check if the product or service they’re planning to launch will be received well by customers. It helps manage the various steps of the market research process, from setting the research panel and identifying the target audience to collecting data and reporting on the collected data. The software also allows companies to identify what is or isn’t working well for their existing products and make changes accordingly.

Most market research software tools offer the following features:

You should choose a market research tool that aligns with your industry of operation and intended application. That said, most buyers can be divided into the following broad categories:

Retail businesses: Retail companies conduct market research regularly to keep track of changing customer preferences and market or competitor trends. They should opt for market research software that provides real-time reporting to measure audiences’ responses to products or services and to assess the impact of marketing decisions. Survey builder, multichannel data collection, and benchmarking are some features that would suit the needs of these buyers.

Professional services firms: Professional services firms such as advertising and accounting agencies use market research software to formulate branding or marketing strategies, understand target market trends, and more. These buyers should look for a market research tool that can build customized surveys based on data objectives such as client satisfaction and opportunities for new service offerings. Panel management, multichannel data collection, benchmarking, and statistical analysis are the top features these buyers should choose.

Nonprofit organizations: Nonprofit organizations conduct market research to gather information about their supporters’ or donors’ preferences, motivations, and behavior. These firms should consider investing in a market research solution that offers multichannel distribution, reporting, and statistical analysis to identify patterns in donors’ behavior and payment trends for maximizing fundraising abilities.

Here are some of the key benefits market research software can offer to your business.

High data quality: Market research software collects data based on the parameters and quality standards defined by you. It uses the defined standards to identify which data to keep, discard, or correct. Its survey sample management feature also helps you ensure the collected data is consistent, correct, and of high quality.

Better audience targeting: Using the multichannel distribution feature of market research software, you can reach out to your target audiences across channels, including emails, social media, and web. Thus, you’ll be able to capture responses from various prospects, and the data you collected will provide a well-rounded opinion of customers’ preferences.

Enhanced customer service: Market research software lets you measure how satisfied customers are with your products or services. Comprehensive data reports generated by the software help you identify your customers’ likes, preferences, and wants, so you’re able to serve them better.

Lower risks: The software helps you understand market demand and viability for new products or services before launching them in the market. It also assists in identifying improvement areas for your existing offerings. You can add new features or make improvements to existing features to ensure your product or service fits the needs of the target audience. This reduces the chances of customer rejection or disinterest and lowers market risks for your business.

Here are some recent trends related to market research software that you should be aware of:

Data visualization tools helping companies better understand research results: Businesses are increasingly using data visualization tools to easily identify trends or patterns from research data. Data visualizations such as charts, graphs, and images help simplify complex datasets so that companies can spend their time and resources more efficiently.

Artificial intelligence (AI) improving market research and data analysis: AI-equipped market research tools can filter large volumes of collected data using text analysis to identify relevant trends and customer behavior. They improve data accuracy by reducing the chances of human error or bias. Market research software driven by AI also helps save time on report generation and secondary research.

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Market research software: A buyer’s guide in 2022

See how market research software can help you get faster, better quality insights to every corner of your organization and find which features to look for when choosing the right research tools with our ultimate guide

What is market research software?

Market research software is used by companies, individuals, and research agencies to collect and analyze data in order to help make better decisions. It typically combines survey tools with analytics and reporting capabilities, enabling users to field a study, gather results, and turn data into insights — all on a single platform .

There are a whole host of different market research tools on the market, with varying levels of sophistication. Choosing the right market research software for your business is essential to ensure it’s:

• Powerful enough for your most sophisticated research programs
• Simple enough for users with little experience in market research

See how it works: Request a demo

A (very) brief history of market research software

Before the age of business computing, research was an entirely manual process. In the 1940s and 1950s, survey responses were collected in person or via mail, and results were painstakingly coded, tabulated, and analyzed for insights.

As computer science began to develop, their processing power offered researchers the opportunity to increase the speed of research by automatically analyzing survey responses . In the 1960s and 1970s, huge amounts of processing power — think rooms full of computers — was required and so this kind of analysis was reserved for a select few academic and research institutions.

However, as processing power moved on and we entered the age of the personal computer from the 1980s onwards, research software began to be used more widely as more people had access to the computing power required to crunch the data.

But despite the advances in processing power and analytics, data collection was still very much a manual process. Survey responses were predominantly collected in person, or via telephone, and manually entered into the system.

As such, detailed market research was usually outsourced to specialist agencies that could achieve economies of scale by investing in expensive research software and data collection, and then sell that as a service to multiple clients.

But then came the internet. Online surveys began to grow in popularity from the 1990s onwards, enabling researchers to gather data at scale, at far less cost and far more quickly than before.

Just as processing power has continued to move on, so has data collection. Today’s researchers can gather insights through email, SMS, social media, websites, and many more channels and leverage the immense processing power instantly available in the cloud to analyze billions of data points through widely available research software.

The advanced analytics and survey-building capabilities now available on many SaaS research platforms has made complex research tasks as simple as clicking a button — or in some cases entirely automated. Where once you needed a team of PhD researchers to carry out a market research study, with the platforms available today, everyone in an organization can now launch a study and get real-time insights.

Do I need market research software?

Yes. It’s a pretty straightforward answer, regardless of your role. Where once market research software was the preserve of specialist research teams and agencies, today there’s not a single department in an organization that doesn’t need insights.

Whether it’s understanding your buyers better , optimizing your advertising and communications, or testing new product and service concepts, market research software helps you quantify what matters, make confident decisions, and take the right actions across the business.

Want to see how our research software works? Request a demo

10 key features of market research software to look out for

Not all market research software is equal. Across the various platforms out there, you’ll find a whole host of different features, capabilities, and user experiences which determine whether it’s the right fit for you.

Here’s what you need to look out for when choosing a modern market research tool for your organization:

1. Easy to use survey builder

The first step in any research is to build your survey . Your survey builder should ideally have a simple drag and drop interface with a WYSIWYG editor so anyone in the organization can write and update the questions and options.

The best market research tools will have pre-built question types - you’ll find over 100 on Qualtrics! — so those without research expertise can choose the right questions, and scales for their research. Look for a platform that offers a wide range of question types from your basic multiple choice and likert scale questions to heatmaps, hotspots, and rank order questions . Having a wide variety of question types at your disposal will mean your market research software is agile enough to handle any type of research you may need.

More sophisticated platforms also offer features like advanced routing, customizable survey flows , and embedded data. These help you easily build more complex surveys for advanced research. But even though the research is advanced, the features should still be easy to use for even the most inexperienced user.

With Qualtrics you can be confident that your team will be able to launch best practice studies thanks to our built-in QA tool, Expert Review . It provides real-time feedback to users on their surveys and recommends improvements to help them get better quality data.

See how Qualtrics’ survey builder works

“We have yet to find another survey software that is as fully-featured and easy to use as Qualtrics” - Stewart L. Research Manager

Read more reviews

2. Best-practice survey templates and methodology

We’ve already looked at question types available in many survey builders, but the best research tools go a step further by offering entire studies, pre-built and ready to go at the click of a button.

These templates are designed by research experts and should include all the questions, routing, and any other advanced builds you need to run a best-in-class research project. Each type of study should have its own template, as the methodology is likely to be different, so look for a platform that offers plenty of options when it comes to out-of-the-box templates and studies.

Many of these pre-built studies will also include reporting, so when you field your study the data will automatically populate the reports and dashboards with the insights you need, helping you get to insights faster.

3. Instant access to respondents

A survey is nothing without respondents. Traditionally, organizations have either used their own customer database, or engaged a research agency in order to find respondents for their study.

However, modern market research platforms offer instant access to respondents directly in the platform. Whether you need responses from a general population sample, or need to survey a very specific demographic , you can build your panel of respondents in the same platform as you build your survey.

This makes it quick and easy to find the answers you need and enables you to self-serve rather than having to hand off to a third-party vendor in order to source your responses.

4. Survey distribution

There are plenty of ways to distribute your survey, and increasingly companies are looking to a mix of channels in order to reach a broad demographic. The best research platforms will offer you the flexibility to distribute the same survey in a host of different channels.

Make sure at the very least the software you choose offers distribution via:

• Social media
• Messaging apps (eg WhatsApp , Facebook Messenger, WeChat etc.)

The more channels you have open to you, the more likely you are to be able to reach the right audiences for your different research projects.

5. Contact frequency management

If you’re using your own database as a source of responses, you need to be able to control contact frequency — i.e. you need to be able to put rules in place to ensure you don’t ‘over-survey’ people .

This is particularly important where you’re using the same platform across multiple teams or departments and, without safeguards in place, you run the risk of ‘spamming’ your customers with research requests.

The best research solutions have built-in controls that enable admins to set rules around who can be contacted for research, on which channels, and how often.

6. Real-time insights and reporting

One of the biggest benefits of cloud-based market research software is the speed and agility they offer. As results come in from your studies, you should be able to see them in real-time — no waiting weeks for them to come in.

As well as real-time insights, look for a platform that enables you to easily build out reports with easy-to-read graphs, tables, and filters that you can share with others too. Ideally the two should work together so as more data comes in, your reports update in real-time too — this enables you to build the structure of a report, share it with the right people, and keep them up to date on the insights as data comes in.

Whatever research platform you’re using, ease of use is essential when it comes to reporting.

From adding new visualizations and customizing the look, to adding response weighting and sharing live reports with your stakeholders, make sure it’s simple to build and even simpler to understand.

“Qualtrics makes it really easy to understand your results by viewing charts that make it easy to spot trends and then make decisions.” - Brandon O, Senior Product Design Engineer

See all reviews

7. Powerful analytics

The analytics capabilities can make or break a market research platform, so this is an area it’s worth really focusing on as you choose the right platform for you.

Analytics are what turns your data into insights, and when you’re collecting a lot of data, you need powerful analytics tools to mine for deep insights.

The ‘must have’ analytics for every research platform are:

• Text analysis — essential for identifying trending topics and sentiment from open text responses. Having text analytics in your market research software helps to get better quality data by letting respondents answer in their own words and then using the platform to analyze it and draw out deep insights.
• Statistical analysis — from simple correlations to multivariate regression, there are many different methods you can apply to draw insights from quantitative data. In Qualtrics, Stats iQ automatically chooses the right test, applies it, and presents the results in plain language.
• Key driver analysis — identifies the most important factors behind an outcome (e.g. customer satisfaction, employee engagement , intent to buy etc.) so you can prioritize actions to improve it.
• Predictive analytics — applies various statistical analysis techniques to make a prediction about future behavior, for example likelihood to churn .

Within each of those categories, there are varying levels of sophistication from one market research platform to the next — for example some text analytics tools will need you to do a lot of manual work to create a topic library for open text responses while others use machine learning and AI to automatically update them, reducing the need for manual set-up.

Another key consideration is how easy they are to use. While a platform may be capable of running a complex conjoint analysis, unless you have a team of researchers who know how to do it, the platform needs to make it accessible to everyone.

Our analytics tools have been built to be incredibly simple to use — in many cases they run automatically in the background so all you ever see is the insights and recommendations that appear in your notifications or reports. And if you do need to do anything, it’s never more than a few clicks to run any kind of analysis.

Learn more about our analytics tool, iQ

8. Enterprise controls and management tools

As market research software has become more accessible to everyday users, organizations have struggled to keep up with the proliferation of tools used across the company. With different teams using different software, with different capabilities, methodologies and data protection standards, it raises a shadow IT risk.

Even when consolidating all your research into a single platform, not all platforms afford the same control over access and management of data.

Look for a platform that gives everyone access to the tools they need, but at the same time provides administrators with tools to control user access and permissions. In a world where organizations face increasingly tight controls on how they use and store customer data, it’s vital you have oversight of how it’s being used.

Another key feature to consider is the ability to share data, insights, and best practices across the organization. If you’re looking to roll out a research platform for the entire organization, being able to build your own best-practice methodologies, custom templates, branding etc. into the platform and making it available to all your users is essential to ensure everyone gets the most value out of it.

9. Data security and privacy features

With the amount of data organizations are collecting today, be it from customers, panels, suppliers, employees, or any other stakeholder, you need a market research platform with robust security and data privacy features .

The best market research software should meet the international standard ISO 27001 as well as SOC2 Type 2 certification — make sure you ask your vendor if they have these.

Depending on your industry, there may be other standards you need to consider such as FedRAMP for US federal security standards, HITRUST in healthcare, or GDPR in companies with operations or collecting data in the European Union.

Always check with your IT and infosec teams on what your requirements are, and ask your market research platform vendor to demonstrate their security certifications.

Beyond the ‘official’ certifications, useful security and data privacy features to consider include:

• Sensitive data controls so you can set rules around the collection of personally identifiable information (PII)
• GDPR controls so you can comply with ‘right to erasure’ requests and other parts of the legislation
• User access controls like single sign on or multi-factor authentication

See how Qualtrics protects your data

10. Integrations and automation

Your market research doesn’t exist in a vacuum — you’re using it to drive action and make decisions across the organization. So look for a platform that can integrate into your existing tech stack.

It could be something as simple as an integration with Slack to alert the right people to insights that impact their day-to-day, or into a respondent reward platform to automatically generate rewards when people complete a study.

Many platforms have pre-built integrations which are essentially plug and play, as well as an open API which means, with a small piece of code, they’re able to integrate into anything.

It’s a great way to ensure you’re not only getting the best insights, but you’re using them to drive action across the organization.

Check out the Qualtrics integrations

Get started with the #1 rated market research software

Carol Haney // Head of Research and Data Science

At Qualtrics, Carol Haney is head of research and data science. Her principal research area is online quantitative research, specifically focusing on best practices around sampling, Total Survey Error, and advanced analytics.

Carol currently works with multiple commercial clients, mostly in the financial, health, and tech spaces. Carol has experience running large survey programs that involve customer experience, segmentation, and performance measurement. In 2015, Carol was honored by Qualtrics as the most valuable player.

Prior to Qualtrics, Carol has worked in executive positions at Toluna; Harris Interactive; TNS; SPSS; and the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. Carol currently leads all the formative research for the CDC’s anti-smoking ads for the past five years, a campaign that has in part contributed to the five-year decline in smoking rate in the U.S. amongst adults from 23% to 14%.

Elizabeth Dean // Senior XM Scientist

Elizabeth Dean is a senior experience management (XM) scientist with 20+ years of designing and leading research for commercial, academic, and government customers. Her expertise is in survey and market research design, UX research, brand health, technology adoption and cross-cultural research. She is passionate about designing questionnaires, contact strategies, and experience management tools that reduce respondent burden and simplify the data capture process. Liz has published research in the International Journal of Social Research Methodology, Military Psychology, and Social Science Computer Review, and co-edited the book Social Media, Sociality and Survey research, published in 2013 by Wiley Press.

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19 best market research software tools for 2024

Last updated

25 March 2024

Reviewed by

Whether you're marginally satisfied with your current market research software or are venturing out to find your first software option, keep reading. In this article, we'll share some of the best market research tools available for 2023. Based on user reviews, affordability, and efficiency, these are the top considerations your company should look into for market research software.

Market analysis template

Save time, highlight crucial insights, and drive strategic decision-making

• Different types of market research software

Since there are several types of market research, there are different types of market research software solutions. Before you begin your hunt for the best-fit software, recognize what type of market research you do most.

Determine which metrics are the most valuable to your company. Work out if this key data is best gathered via a consumer survey, questionnaire , interview, or checklist form. From there, you can begin to look for various market research software options offering features and calculations that make the most sense for your needs.

Decide which types of market research matter to you, each requiring its own tools and methods:

Primary market research

Secondary market research

Quantitative research

Qualitative research

Branding research

Competitor research

Customer or client research

Product research

• Uses of market research software

As you evaluate your market research software options, start by reviewing each tool's strengths and core uses. Then, look at each through the lens of these four steps, checking how well they perform at each stage. This will also form your process when it comes to using them.

1. Identify the target audience

Know your target audience first. This might be a data pool of prospects based on your buyer personas . But it might also be an unknown segment of people if you’re conducting market research on a new region or for a new offering.

The ideal market research software will provide insights to help you identify your target audience in any scenario.

2. Create a research questionnaire

Market research software should have the capability of creating research questionnaires . These surveys are instrumental in learning more about a particular audience segment , region, or market dynamic.

3. Share your research questionnaire

Creating your market surveys and research-related questionnaires is one thing. You'll also need to share those questionnaires with participants. A great market research software tool will have additional layers of features to help you send and receive surveys.

4. Collect data and create information

A great market research software tool will also help you collect data and create usable insights from those metrics. You'll need a seamless way to gather market information and disseminate it throughout your organization in an actionable, effective way.

• Benefits of using market research software

When you harness the right market research software, prepare for some significant advantages. Automation alone makes data analytics faster. But your datasets will also be more accurate when you use software to collect and share insights.

As an added benefit for companies, researchers, and organizations, using market research software means easier report generation and the ability to spot trends and patterns in your collected data.

The bottom line: market research software tools will help you keep up with consumer behavior trends and market fluctuations, allowing you to capitalize on emerging shifts and changes.

• 19 market research platforms and tools for accurate analysis

Based on industry reviews, effectiveness, and available features, these market research platforms and tools deserve a look. When accurate data and analysis matter, these are the solutions to have in your toolbox.

Take advantage of free trial periods and start evaluating your research tool and dashboard options.

Keep these top software solutions on your roster of must-try tools, and you'll be able to keep up with whatever's happening in your market.

Software strengths:

Precision accuracy in transcription with an advanced speech engine

Custom fields for structured data

Importable datasets

Sentiment analysis

Project templates

Access control and unlimited viewership capabilities

Flexible and customizable editing

Another market research tool worth exploring is  Qualtrics . This software solution can help you draft surveys, analyze captured data, and run statistical testing.

Qualtrics also provides a representative sample of recipients if you don't already have an audience segmented.

In addition, the platform includes training on demand if your teams need help navigating it.

Easy to create and facilitate survey processes

Top-notch dataset reporting

Ability to boost your survey audience

QuestionPro

If you want survey customization and ultimate flexibility,  QuestionPro  is a great market research tool. It uses survey logic tech to seamlessly adjust the survey in real time based on participant responses.

Choose from a variety of software plans, most of which are ideal for creating, sharing, and analyzing collected metrics.

There's also 24/7 live chat for ongoing support.

Easy to navigate and customize

The free plan is fairly robust

Analysis can be exported or carried out in the app

If you prefer visual data, such as graphs showing statistics and market research-related reports, you'll like  Statista .

Statista continuously uploads data, so you can check back on the same charts and see real-time shifts in trends. It's a good resource for consumer behavior insights and covers a broad range of market topics.

Considered one of the best statistics resources

Easy to use and navigate

Hundreds of reports and dashboards available

If your organization needs a more advanced customer survey tool and market research solution,  Qualaroo  is a great option.

The main difference between Qualaroo and other market research tools is that its surveys can be directly embedded into your website or landing page. You can catch and attract participants in real time, which makes their survey responses more valuable.

There are AI analytics tools built in, too, with plenty of features for customizing your questionnaires.

Easy to create, embed, and send surveys

Super-fast reporting turnaround capabilities

Auto language translation

Another piece of market research software worth considering is  Typeform . Explore pre-made templates in an entirely user-friendly platform. Typeform makes creating and customizing forms and surveys a breeze, especially with all the available templates.

Unlike other survey tools, Typeform only sends one question at a time, making it a participant-friendly format.

Explore Typeform as a research software tool for qualitative and quantitative data .

Brilliant visualization of your data

Mobile-optimized

Compatible with hundreds of other apps

SurveyMonkey

Nearly anyone in research or business has heard of  SurveyMonkey . It's another market research solution worth looking into, especially if you need access to 200+ survey templates for inspiration.

This platform is a breeze to navigate, much like Typeform. SurveyMonkey is more of an enterprise-grade dashboard, however, simplifying the process of creating, sending, and analyzing for all your metrics.

Easy for anyone to use

Custom reports available

Robust free plan

If you're looking for a social media marketing research tool with content marketing research features, check out  BuzzSumo . Its software will scrub and analyze billions of articles and trillions of social media engagements, assembling metrics about relevant topics, influencer targeting, and popular trends.

These types of metrics are helpful in any marketing endeavors and content creation. They’re also key in understanding the driving factors of your target consumers.

Accuracy with social sharing metrics

Ideal for competitive research

Ability to monitor mentions

Google Trends

One of the most popular market research tools, firstly because it's Google and secondly because it's free, is  Google Trends . It's not as comprehensive as some of the other tools, but it can be helpful in your research objectives.

Find topics that are popular online or review line graphs that rank widely used terms and keywords. This tool is less about conducting surveys and more about carrying out your own online research and active listening.

Discovering keywords, including long-tail keywords

Find hot-topic conversations to inspire your marketing

Visually appealing and easy to use

Bonus list of market research software tools

While the above market research tools tend to land at the top of the favorites list, there are other solutions worth considering. These are all great tools and platforms to dive into.

Evaluate the features and choose those that align best with the data you're trying to collect and analyze.

Tableau: Business intelligence suite for connecting virtually any data source

Paperform: Free-text interface and customizable surveys for all your personas

Claritas MyBestSegment: Great for digging into demographics and lifestyle habits

Upwave Instant Insights: Distributes surveys to real people, not including paid participants

Userlytics: Test prototypes, mobile apps, or website user experience and opinions

NielsenIQ: Great for evaluating product launch-related market research and data

Loop11: Test website usability and user experience metrics with your participants

Ubersuggest: Keyword and content research tool, great for competitive advantage insights

BrandMentions: Social media monitoring software and platform

Pew Research Center: Gather data regarding social media usage, political sentiments, and economic conditions

• How to choose the right market research software

The market research software tools listed in this article are just the tip of the iceberg. You'll find all kinds of innovative tools with shiny new capabilities worth exploring.

What may be more helpful is a short to-do list outlining how to go about choosing the right research market platform for your project or company. Keep these objectives in mind as you decide to adopt or upgrade your software solutions.

Know your market research objectives

Be mindful of your budget

Evaluate the ease of use for you and your teams

Look for robust data collection features

Look for analytics capabilities

Choose those that integrate with other apps and software

When evaluating the best tools, create and reference your objectives, so you know you'll make the best-fit decision.

What are examples of research tools used today?

Some of the most common market research tools used today include surveys, interviews, checklists, and questionnaires. While the methods have been around for decades, the software used to facilitate and manage these strategies has improved using technology, algorithms, and automation.

What are the four Ps of market research?

When you hear about the four Ps of market research, researchers typically mean the four categories worth researching in a particular market: price, place, product, and promotion.

Why are the different types of market research important?

Because the consumer market, or your target audience, is constantly changing how it makes decisions, interacts with brands, buys products or services, and makes recommendations to others, market research is your first line of defense in keeping up with those changes. Finding the right market research software tool will determine how effectively you collect, share, and act on those emerging shifts in consumer behavior.

The only way to stay ahead in today's consumer product and service landscape is with superior intel. And the best way to learn the very latest about industry shifts, changes in customer behavior, and user preferences is with market research. Today's market research software tools make it easy and efficient to collect all kinds of metrics and apply those insights to effect organizational or core-offering changes.

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The 24 Best Market Research Tools & Software in 2024

Product Manager at Qualaroo

Dwayne is a seasoned Product Manager 10+ years of experience. His articles offer a fresh perspective on the dynamic and ever-evolving world of customer-centric strategies.

Market research tools have been at the heart of every business’s success. In a world where competition seems to be never-ending, knowing the ins and outs of your target market is more crucial than ever. 

According to a study conducted by PwC , companies that benchmark can achieve 69% faster growth and 45% greater productivity as compared to those that don’t. 

Market research has enabled organizations to uncover not only some of the biggest revelations about the market but also the tiniest details that most people miss. Market research helps organizations read between the lines and make informed decisions, which makes the process ever so important. 

Thankfully, in the 21st century, we do not require an insider to give us data about the market in the name of research. We now have some of the world-class software tools at our fingertips that would enable us to truly improve, evolve and empower our products and services for the people. 

In this blog, we’ve included a list of 12 of the best market research software and tools out there with some of the key details that you should know before making a decision to choose the one for you. 

But first, let’s take a closer look at what market research actually is.

The 24 Best Market Research Tools in 2024

There are plenty of online market research software tools that you can choose from. Here is a list of 12, which the users think very highly of:

Market research tool # 1.  Qualaroo

Qualaroo is the best market research tool and one of the best  online survey software  out there for conducting market research. It provides users with a market research platform that is easy to use and also offers actionable insights.

Qualaroo also helps you  develop user personas  through  advanced targeting , which helps you better  understand your users  and easily track their goals & behavior patterns.    

• Easy to set up and can instantly start taking feedback.
• Professionally designed survey templates to ask just the right questions.
• Catches your visitors in real-time with context for valuable responses. 
• Users can easily determine who and where the survey targets are
• Can help create detailed  customer journey maps . 
• Ask for product/website/app feedback from the audience based on engagement. 
• Supports branching logic to easily go through the redundant users. 
• Integrates with popular tools like Hubspot, Zapier, and Slack. 
• Perfect for measuring customer satisfaction and loyalty using Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys.
• Helps to gather user experience (UX) feedback at every stage of the design process for any product.
• You can test prototype templates through unobtrusive pop-up surveys called Nudges™.
• Makes analyzing customer sentiments and open-ended survey results easier through the sentiment analysis engine
• Needs more filters and export options for the reports.
• Lacks a bulk action button in the survey dashboard.

Pricing:   Starts from $69 per month.

Market research tool # 2.  Google Trends

Google Trends is a free market research tool that presents data in the form of trend lines from all over the internet. When you enter a specific term into Google Trends, it will give you an accurate representation of how trendy that term has been over the course of time and also gives it a score out of 100.

• Shows the frequency of your searched term in Google with respect to the website’s total search volume over a given period of time.
• Refines your search by adding location filters.
• Presents the trend graphically for better visualization of the result.
• Easy to respond to surveys on any device, including mobile, tablets, and computers. 
• Integrates with popular tools such as  Zapier , Automate.io, and Integromat. 
• Data is generated into organized Google Sheets that can be instantly presented without making any alterations. 
• Useful tool to acquire keyword-related and geographic data about the users.
• Instantly uncover any search spikes due to special events for a search.
• Sometimes shows irrelevant results for a searched term.
• Shows only relative numbers, so a comparison analysis is necessary.

Pricing:  Free to use

Market research tool # 3.  SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is another market research software that offers new market research techniques and provides different ways to customers for voicing their opinions. They have combined an enterprise-grade platform with a suite of specialized market research and customer experience solutions to ensure that the power of feedback can be given to organizations of all sizes. 

• Professionally built question bank to ask accurate questions.
• Personalized survey techniques like skip logic, branching logic, etc.
• AI-powered analysis tool to get expert feedback on the survey draft. 
• Test creative concepts by asking the right set of questions from the right audience. 
• Ensures quality of data gathered from over 144 million users worldwide.
• Ability to get help from market research experts and dedicated accounts managers with the flexible engagement model.
• Potential to monitor market dynamics of a specific product category over time.
• Easily design recurring surveys to track sentiments with time.
• Embed survey questions into emails to improve response rates.
• Provides accurate context from the updated benchmark data.
• Analytical dashboard needs improvement to make data presentation better.
• Sometimes glitches a little while designing surveys.

Pricing:  Starts at $25/user/month. 

Market research tool # 4.  Statista

Statista is one of the top market research tools that specializes in data visualization and market research. It picks up data from reputable reports that are present all over the internet and makes them easy to comprehend and digest for researchers and other users. It can find the specific data relating to your industry and create a statistical report on it, which would be much easier to understand. 

• Ability to filter content based on a specific type. 
• Hundreds of metrics to choose from and the ability to customize visualizations.
• Also features forecasts and surveys reports.
• Flexibility to analyze the markets across 150+ countries. 
• Presents global stories and statistics in a vividly visualized manner. 
• Ability to conduct Global Consumer Surveys to understand what drives the consumers. 
• Can integrate with other marketing tools by simply copying the HTML code. 
• Great tool for portraying Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to understand the consumer market outlook.
• Helps research and gather information about the companies like their headquarters, the number of employees, and revenue performance.
• Can be challenging to find relevant data for long-tail search terms.

Pricing:  Starts at $39/month

Market research tool # 5.  Google Keyword Tool

Google Keyword Tool is a highly sophisticated  market research software and analysis tool  that acts as a window into the behavior of customers when searching online. Google Keyword tool provides valuable insights into queries that your target audience is searching on google.

It acts as an accurate product research tool that tells you what the customers are looking for. To use it, you need to create a free Google Adword account.

• Shows you the volume of keyword searches.
• Lets you filter keyword searches based on location and language.
• Lets you filter searches based on the device that people use to search.
• Helps marketers build a content strategy and marketing strategies as well. 
• Offers users insights into the current marketing trends.
• Expand long-tail efforts by discovering other important keywords in the same domain.
• Integrates with other tools using Google API.
• Shows the relationship between different keywords to help you find targeted related keywords.
• Excellent tool to understand the competitiveness of the keywords.
• Shows fewer keyword suggestions than other similar tools.
• Needs more keyword filters in the dashboard.

Pricing:  Free to use.

Market research tool # 6.  Tableau Software

Tableau is a business intelligence suite for data visualization that needs no programming knowledge. Tableau uses analytics, visualization, and business intelligence to present the data in a visually appealing fashion for a better understanding.

It aims to transform the way we see and use data to make decisions. Tableau empowers its users with the help of its highly sophisticated market research tools to make the best out of their data. 

• Lets you visualize data on anything.
• Can easily extract data from PDFs, Excel, text, Python, SAS, and many more.
• Tableau dashboard provides a comprehensive and wholesome view of your data.
• Enables the marketing team to directly access the data from different formats.
• Visualizes the market research data to generate actions and make quick decisions. 
• Natively integrates with other market research tools like Qualtrics and Salesforce. 
• Flexible team collaboration and data sharing options.
• Makes it easy to connect with live data sources to stay up to date. 
• Offers data heat maps to give a general sense of the emerging patterns in the market.
• Can be an expensive tool for some businesses.
• You may need help from the IT department to set up the tool.

Pricing:  Starts at $70/user/month.

Market research tool # 7.  Typeform

Typeform is another market research software and online survey tool that allows you to conduct market research surveys to get a direct response from your targeted audience. It has a built-in photo and video libraries and a wide range of design themes to choose from. Typeform primarily aims to create people-friendly forms by making them appealing, which would gather more responses and better insights.

• Shows the viewers one form field at a time. 
• Easy to use and optimize for mobile devices.
• Let’s you create a wide range of question types. 
• Make the form uniquely yours with a wide range of customization options.
• Integrates with other tools like Google Sheets, Salesforce, Slack, etc.
• The drag and drop feature allows users to create forms within minutes.
• Variety of question types including multiple-choice, rating, opinion scale, free-form text, and many more.
• Creating conversational and casually approached surveys. 
• Gathering demographics of the customers to understand their behavior patterns. 
• Creating positioning strategy through survey results. 
• Survey design options need more flexibility and customization options.
• It would be good if there were more filters in the reporting dashboard.

Pricing:  Starts at $25/month.

Market research tool # 8.  SEMrush

SEMrush is another very effective market research software tool that marketers use to boost their conversion rates. It has over 40 tools under its portfolio that can be used to attract more visitors and increase conversions. 

This tool primarily aims at improving online visibility and discovering marketing insights by offering services like SEO, PPC, SMM, Keyword Research, Competitive Research, PR,  Content Marketing , Marketing Insights, analytical tools for market research , Campaign Management.

• Provides tools like keyword research, on-page SEO, and local SEO.
• Easily monitor and manage organic rankings.
• Provides tools for content marketing, creation, distribution, optimization,
• It’s the best  tool for market analysis . 
• Lets you explore and analyze the demographics of competitors in the market. 
• Determine how to market competitors earn their traffic and also estimate your market share. 
• Integrates with popular Google and social networking applications. 
• The technical audit report gives in-depth suggestions for site optimization.
• One of the best enterprise-level tools.
• Provides a plethora of segmentation options for keyword suggestions to find the right keywords.
• Training docs can be hard to navigate. It can be hard to find what you are looking for.
• Backlink suggestions dashboard can be improved. Sometimes, it misses a lot of backlinks.

Pricing:  Starts at $119.95/month. 

Market research tool # 9.  Ahrefs

Ahref is also the top  tool for business research  or market research that offers a fully-packaged suite of  conversion rate optimization tools  is Ahrefs. It is an extremely diverse software that has tons of functionality and can easily make anyone an SEO expert. It is an extremely powerful tool for backlinks, SEO analysis, and also managing your SEO health over time.

• Ranks keywords with respect to their level of difficulty and traffic potential. 
• Conduct site audits to understand the weak links and boost the conversion rates.
• Conducts keyword research for Google, YouTube, and Amazon.
• Finds content that performs well on a given topic.
• Tons of different metrics to measure the data on.
• Integrates with tools like Tray.io and Rank Ranger using Ahrefs API
• Provides insights into competitors’ organic search and backlinking profiles on different websites.
• Helps to find the most optimized and well-performing content to generate new ideas and analyze competitors’ content.
• Coes with a slight learning curve. Needs inline tooltips in the product menus for quick access.
• PPC features need some optimization.

Starts at $83/month, billed annually 

Pricing:  Starts at $99/user/month.

Market research tool # 10.  Upwave (Formerly Survata)

Upwave, formerly Survata, is one of the best analytics and market research platforms to help you measure the effects of your brand advertising efforts. You can use the inbuilt dashboard to track every campaign across various channels and optimize them to improve ROI. The data from Upwave has been featured in brands like Forbes, USA Today, CBS News, and The New York Times.

• Track and optimize brand advertisement to improve brand awareness.
• Get real-time updates about outperforming aspects of every campaign to run timely optimization.
• Receive email notifications to get refreshed reports directly in your inbox.
• Provides automated tracking of different demographic & behavioral profiles in each campaign.
• You can see how accurately each campaign is reaching the target audience across various channels.
• Create customer dashboards to monitor the performance of your campaigns.
• Leverages AI-based Upwave Customer Forecast feature to predict brand lift and customer acquisition for your campaigns.
• Track market penetration, i.e., the percentage of the target audience you reached for any campaign.
• You can estimate customer acquisition numbers to study the effectiveness of your brand marketing campaigns and make changes.
• Needs more filters to include other behavioral traits in the dashboards.
• Dashboard UI can be overwhelming for new users.

Contact for a quote

Market research tool #11.  AnswerThePublic

Answer the public is the best software for market research according to their home page, ‘There are 3 billion Google searches every day, and 20% of those have never been seen before”.  AnswerThePublic is responsible for listening to autocomplete data from search engines and cranking out every useful phrase or question that people are asking about a given keyword.

• Helps you get a sense of what the people are really asking for. 
• Gives you the context behind every search. 
• Very easy to use and digestible for beginners. 
• Listens to autocomplete data from search engines like Google and cranks out useful phrases and questions. 
• Also acts as a goldmine for consumer insights, and the data can be used to create extremely useful content and product.
• Integrates with other popular applications to generate more insights. 
• An excellent tool for insights, validation, creativity, and creating content strategies.
• Word Cloud feature is fantastic to visualize related keywords and their relationships.
• Helps to uncover the untapped potential of search demands for different queries.
• The database is constantly updated to help you spot new trends, slang, and topics.
• Sometimes, the results become less relevant when you search for more than two keywords simultaneously.
• It’s challenging to find keywords for niche markets.

Market research tool #12:  Social Mention

Social Mention is one of the  best tools for market research  that digs through 100+ social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, and many more, to determine the number of times your brand or keyword has been mentioned. It has the ability to accurately track and measure what people are saying about your brand.

• Displays how much your keyword crops on all social media platforms.
• Distinguishes between positive and negative sentiments.
• Gives a general overview of the customer’s perception of your brand. 
• Users can determine the overall footprint of their brand and make informed decisions.
• Supports simple integration with popular social media applications for more meaningful data.
• You can also determine the number of people talking about your keyword at any given time. 
• You can set up alerts for more minor updates using tags within broader categories.
• Consolidates the data from all over the internet under one dashboard for real-time monitoring.
• Makes it easy to research specific domains where the audience is looking.
• The UI can be updated to improve navigation for new users.

Market research tool # 13. Think With Google

Think With Google is a one-stop information resource to monitor customer behavior, get marketing insights, and view the latest industry trends. It offers several tools to find the right demographic audience for your business, test and optimize your website, and track real-time consumer behavior across any location. So, if you are looking for the best market research resources, this is the one to go for.

• Run a site audit on your domain and get custom tips on improving site speed, UX, and other aspects.
• Lets you search trends and actionable consumer insights for specific locations.
• Track emerging technologies to plan the future of your marketing strategies.
• Benchmark your website against industry standards with a simple test.
• Use Google Trends to discover trending topics, latest stories, and other hot topics.
• Free-to-use online repository to explore new markets, find the right audience, and access global consumer behavioral data.
• No advanced features to find information on sub-categories or niche markets.

Market research tool # 14. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is an excellent content marketing and researching platform to produce high-performing content. You can do keyword research, competitive analysis, brand monitoring, and more to grow your business. The platform also offers a chrome extension to make the job easier.

• Find the target keywords to design your content based on monthly search volume, cost per click, and other parameters.
• Track viral trends in real-time for any domain, topic, and location.
• Track new content around your target keywords to design your SEO strategies.
• Find the most popular influencers worldwide for any topic to sponsor them for your brand.
• Set alerts for desired keywords, blogs, brand mentions, competitors, and influencers.
• Track backlinks to your domain from all over the internet.
• One of the best tools for social listening and keyword research.
• The Chrome extension is an excellent addition to one-tap monitor the performance of your campaigns.
• Doesn’t monitor the content or engagement data for Instagram posts.
• Needs more filters to separate news and general topics.

Starts @ $79/month, billed annually

Market research tool # 15. Make My Persona

If you are new to building a buyer or user persona , then MakeMyPersona is your tool. It’s a simple market research software from HubSpot that creates a buyer persona based on the data you enter into the form. Just fill in the details, and you get a ready-to-use persona template to study different customer segments. And it’s free.

• Uses demographic and psychographic details of your target audience to build a buyer persona.
• It asks for details like age, organization’s size, job title, goals, challenges, etc.
• You can also add new sections manually, if necessary.
• Download and export the buyer persona with a click.
• Quick and easy to use to build customizable persona templates.
• Requires market data from your end. You cannot use it to find information on the target market.

Market research tool # 16. PureSpectrum Insights

PureSpectrum Insights (formerly Upwave Instant insights) is a consumer insights platform to collect market research and brand tracking data. You can create surveys and questionnaires to ask questions to the right audience to gather valuable insights for your marketing strategies. The company also offers PureSpectrum Marketplace to help you buy samples from multiple market research panels with one click.

• Create focused research and brand tracking surveys and distribute them to the target audience.
• Target the right people based on age, gender, shopping behaviors, income, job title, and other inbuilt attributes.
• Get real-time updates about the performance of your market research campaign.
• Use the PureSpectrum marketplace to find the right target audience for your surveys.
• Track the data in real-time using detailed reporting dashboards.
• The panel service helps to get to the required sample size quickly.
• To improve data quality, you can create crosstab reports and set up significance tests in minutes.
• Limited survey options as compared to other tools.

Contact for quote

Market research tool # 17. Loop11

Loop11 is a usability testing and market research tool to build better products. You can perform usability testing, benchmarking, prototype testing , information architecture testing, and more using the same tool. It offers both moderated and unmoderated testing so you can find the right audience to test your product and prototypes. 

As an audience research tool, you can use it to see how your product appeals to your new target market, explore their preferences, and channel the insights into the design.

• Offers a user-friendly test builder to guide you at every step of designing a test. No coding is required.
• Create tasks, such as five-second, first click, tree testing, etc.
• Add surveys to your test to collect in-depth demographic and psychographic data.
• Design surveys using multiple question types like multiple-choice, single-choice, NPS, rating, and System Usability Scale (SUS).
• Run your test on any device like desktop, mobile, or tablet.
• Provides a dedicated participant panel service to find the right participants globally for your tests.
• Offers video, audio, and screen capture to collect first-hand data from users.
• Edit videos to extract useful points like adding time-stamps, assigning tags, and more.
• Track test metrics like task completion rate, lostness, time on task, and NPS scores.
• Use inbuilt behavioral analysis tools like heatmaps and clickstream to map participants’ journeys during the test.
• Offer more flexibility in annotating and sharing the clips than other similar tools.
• An inexpensive tool with a wide range of testing options.
• The participant panel offers niche filters to help you target the right people for your tests.
• You cannot make changes to a test after publishing it.
• It may slow down your website a little.

Starts at $63/month, billed annually

Market research tool # 18. Qualtrics

Qualtrics is one of the most advanced experience management platforms in the market. It comprises different product suites to cover different aspects of your business. You can gauge customer satisfaction, optimize products and services, run market research campaigns, and track brand awareness from the same platform. Plus, AI-based analytics put it among the leading Market research tools to collect data for brand tracking and advertisement optimization.

• Track brand awareness through AI-based dashboards.
• Uncover the aspects that provide positive and negative brand perceptions among your audience.
• Set up automated alerts to track changes in brand signals or awareness.
• Run surveys to collect customer feedback and market research data.
• Offers 27+ deployment channels like website, app, link, email, and QR code.
• Use the drag-&-drop builder, 50+ answer types, branching logic, 100+ templates, theme customization options, rebranding, and other features to design surveys.
• Provides targeting options to target the right people.
• The iQ™ analysis engine leverages AI, machine learning, and NPL to extract data, spot opportunities, and suggest improvements automatically.
• Offers XM services to collect and manage market research data for you.
• Generate custom resorts to align your data with your business KPIs for real-time insights.
• Limited customization options for your surveys.
• It takes time to add the contract data to directories. It could be improved to make the process faster.

Market research tool # 19. SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is among the most trusted and leading market research tools that offer in-depth data on different industries. You can find the top website, best apps, top trending topics, and other data around your industry. The company also offers data intelligence services to help you collect insights into your target market and audience. Plus, you can perform keyword research to find relevant keywords for your marketing strategies.

• Analyze any website and mobile app to view their ranking, total traffic, demographic targeting, competitors, marketing channels, etc.
• Uncover top keyword trends based on organic vs. paid search, channels, traffic sources, and other attributes.
• Perform keywords research to find new keywords.
• Run benchmarks for your website against industry standards.
• Leverage the data repository to track and monitor consumer data signals from over 100 million sites worldwide.
• Explore competitive insights, global market trends, and audience behavior on domain and sub-domain levels.
• Get shopper insights to track consumer behavior across your website, marketplace listings, and app.
• Offers a Chrome extension to get quick performance insights about any open web page.
• Easy to use and navigate. The UI is intuitive and user-friendly.
• Sometimes the data does not accurately represent the actual insights.
• Poses a learning curve for new users. Could benefit from a detailed knowledge base.

Market research tool # 20. Userlytics

Userlytics is one of the best tools for market research and user testing. You can easily conduct remote usability testing to align your products with the target audience. It also lets you collect information about your participants and interact with live conversations to gather in-depth market data without the hassle of arranging personal interviews, making it a perfect online market research tool.

• Choose from a plethora of test types like tree testing, card sorting, usability testing, prototype testing, and more.
• Use the tests to find the right product-market fit, test products, and conduct in-depth market research.
• Offers features like multiple question types, branching logic, rebranding, multi-language support, and others to create targeted tasks.
• Use built-in targeting options to select the right audience for your tests.
• Provides picture-in-picture recording to view how participants perform the tasks.
• Choose your own participants or access Userlytics’ panel services to select your target audience.
• Offers advanced dashboards to track metrics like NPS scores, time on tasks, and success/failure rate.
• The Global participant panel with inbuilt filters makes it easy to find the right audience.
• The feedback editing tool lets you create highlight reels, bookmark, download, tag, share, and rate the transcripts to extract valuable insights.
• The panel credits needed to recruit participants cannot be shared with other users within the same company. So, you have to buy more credits for each separate account.
• It can be expensive for small businesses.

Subscription plans start at $399/month. billed annually

Market research tool # 21. Temper

Temper is among the more straightforward feedback and audience research tools that let you collect user insights and other important data about your products and services. With simple surveys on different web pages, you can measure customer satisfaction, collect demographic and behavioral data on your target audience, gauge customer experience, and do more. 

The tool is perfect for small businesses getting started with market research resources or creating a feedback loop.

• Create and add survey widgets to your website and email.
• You can show the widget as a page pop-up or embed it into the page.
• Provides multiple question types like NPS, emoji, free-text, rating scale, and more.
• Fetches respondents’ meta-data to build your market research resources.
• Add custom tracking variables to pull other user data like email address, user ID, order number, etc.
• Offers inbuilt targeting options to show the widget to the right audience.
• In-built sentiment analysis dashboard to show overall sentiment score for each campaign.
• Beautiful dashboard to view scores with time and track any changes in real-time.
• The dashboard is simple but intuitively designed to display all the data without appearing overwhelming.
• Custom tracking is an excellent way to identify logged-in users and quickly act on their feedback.
• Lacks more question types offered by other similar tools.
• No advanced tools for quick data analysis.

Starts at $12 month

Market research tool # 22. BrandMentions

If you want to know what people are saying about your brand, BrandMentions is the perfect tool. It’s a great market analysis tool to instantly search every corner of the internet and track brand engagements. From social listening to competitor spying, you can do it all and more with this feature-packed platform.

• Track aggregated social mentions across various social channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
• Respond to people’s brand mentions from the dashboard to build an online community.
• Find and connect with the right influencers to fuel your marketing efforts.
• Monitor Hashtag performance across different channels.
• Run sentiment analysis of all the brand mentions and track the overall sentiment tone of people about your brand.
• Perform competitive analysis to analyze how your rivals are performing on the internet.
• Track your competitors’ brand mentions, social shares, and other data to identify their most popular channels.
• Set alerts for trending topics and news to stay on top of optimizing your business strategies.
• The UI is simple to use and navigate.
• Set real-time alerts for negative mentions to take quick action and build brand reputation.
• The initial setup takes time. We recommend consulting tutorials or help guides.
• Needs a bigger integration stack to export/import data to other workspace tools.

Starts at $99/month

Market research tool # 23. GrowthBar SEO

GrowthBar offers an all-in-one SEO toolkit for keyword research and competitive analysis to grow your business. You can find new target keywords, create new content ideas, and track competitors’ websites with a click. The business research tool also offers a Blog Marketplace to help you find the top freelance SEO writers for your blogs.

Features 

• Offers AI-based content assistant to auto-generate optimal titles, headers, introductions, word counts, images, and more for your blog posts.
• Use the inbuilt dashboard to view related keywords, difficulty scores, and suggestions for any keyword.
• Track DA, targeted keywords, Google and Facebook Ads, backlinks, and other data for any competitor website.
• Access the Blog Marketplace to find the right freelance writers to publish quality blogs.
• Offers Chrome extension to get SEO insights about any open webpage without leaving the browser.
• The AI-based content assistant comes in handy to generate optimized content outlines in minutes.
• Cannot do advanced SEO research like other similar tools.
• No option to track broken links.

Starts at $29/month, billed annually

Market research tool # 24. Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is another market research tool to generate new keyword ideas for your campaigns. You just need to enter a domain or keyword. The tool shows keywords suggestions, monthly volume, and other data to help you identify the best opportunities for the target keyword. UberSuggest was acquired by Neil Patel, who has since expanded its feature list significantly.

• Generate long-tail and short-tail keywords ideas for your target keyword.
• Track metrics for each keyword like monthly search volume, PPC competition, average CPC, SEO competition, and more.
• Track top-ranking pages for any target keywords with estimated traffic, social share, and domain scores for each website.
• You can also analyze any domains for traffic, domain score, organic keywords, backlink score, and other useful information.
• Provides an SEO analyzer to run Site Audit and speed tests on your website and show suggestions to optimize it.
• The free version offers all the features to generate new keyword ideas.
• Uses location-based data to enhance data accuracy.
• Offers Word-Cloud keyword display to help you identify relevant keywords around the target term.
• Lacks several technical SEO features.
• Show limited results for niche target markets.
• No custom reporting option.

Free. Paid plans start at $12/month

Must-Have Features in Market Research Tools

You have already come across what market research software tools can do and how they are useful to marketers. But what makes a market research tool great and desirable? Let’s take a look at some of the features that every market research online tool should have

1. Identifying the Target Audience

Each step in the process of market research is crucial, but it stems from identifying your target audience in the initial stages. The inability to identify the right target audience would automatically result in the market research being void and halt the process entirely.  Therefore, a market research tool should, first and foremost, be able to fetch you the right set of audience to ask the questions from.

2. Creating a Research Questionnaire

The step that follows the identification of the target audience is the creation of a research questionnaire that will fetch you the answers that you are looking for. 

A good market research tool should provide users the ability to draft questions that: 

• Make the surveys engaging 
• Keep the surveys short 
• Always ask the right questions

3. Sharing Your Research Questionnaire

Another must-have feature of any market research tool is the ability to share the research questionnaire on multiple platforms through different channels. The flexibility of sharing your research questionnaire on different platforms is directly correlated to gathering accurate and significant data.

Respondents should be given the ability to opt for platforms that are convenient to them, like emails, social media, web links, SMS shares , and many more.

4. Collecting Data and Creating Information

A good market research tool should always be able to collect raw data and process it in such a way that it gives valuable information to the researcher. This is where an analysis tool comes in. 

The analysis conducted by the research tool should give actionable market insights by analyzing the data on a granular level and presenting it with the help of a robust reporting system.

Final Tips for Conducting Market Research

At this point, you are well aware of how important ongoing market research is for the organization’s long-term success. But even if you fully understand the depths of market research, you need to leverage it effectively. 

For that, here are some of the quick tips that would be useful for you while conducting market research:

1. Context Is Everything

Data is everywhere, yet so little of it is of any use. Even with tons of invaluable information at our fingertips, we often are clueless as to how we should use them. Understanding the true meaning and the reasoning behind the information is what makes research complete. 

As a good researcher, you should always be aware of the possibilities and limitations out there and harness the vast potential of information out there to paint a clear picture in the form of market research.

This can be done by always trying to look beyond the data points and asking questions to understand the actual meaning around the data.

Also Read: How To Measure Customer Satisfaction In Context

2. Make It Personal

When it comes to interpreting the data, you should always try and engage with the researchers and the analysts to understand how the data would be applicable to your organization. Market research is not about reading recorded visuals and texts or purchasing a report card and moving on. 

There is a vast amount of information captured on a daily basis that does not make it to a publication and remains unused. Research is often widely applicable, which is why you should personally engage with research personnel or analysts who work behind the scenes to curate the research.

Asking them the right questions about the applicability of research would give you a much better understanding.

Remember, Research Is an Ongoing Process

We live in an ever-changing society, where the consumer’s needs and market trends change at a rapid pace. In order to analyze and interpret those trends and consumers’ needs, you need to study them on a regular basis. Research needs to be an ongoing process with no inevitable end to ensure that you always stay ahead of the curve at any given point in time.

Ask the Right Questions

Before starting with your marketing research, you need to have your objectives in place. These objectives act as a blueprint for your research and would guide you towards successful market research. 

While focusing on the core objective, you would need to derive the right set of questions that would gather the specific data needed to fulfill your research. Here is a quick example of questions that can be applied in your research:

To understand how your visitors came to know about you

• How did you find our website?
• What search term did you use to find our website?
• What was the first thing you found out about us?

Understanding the purpose of your visitors

• What brings you to this website today?
• What product or service are you looking for?

Understanding the exit intent

• What is preventing you from signing up?
• What is preventing you from starting a trial?
• What could we do to make this site more useful?

Related Read – To know more about the survey questions, have a look at What Survey Questions Should I Ask?

Reflect on the Insights

Conducting market research is not the end of the process. The important bit is what comes afterward. Sharing the research data with your team and other organization members is the ideal thing to do when it comes to interpreting it. 

You can also use the analytical tool provided in the market research software that would comprehensively decipher the data and give you a bird’s-eye view. This is how reflecting on the data would give you the ability to make critical decisions.

Ultimately, market research will always be considered as a highly sophisticated way of gaining insights and answers that will eventually reduce business risk and ensure overall success.

Research success can always be determined by comparing your discoveries with the business objectives. Proper deployment of market research tools is one of the biggest enablers of this success.

With that being said, you have been enlightened with some of the best market research tools out there. All you need to do now is evaluate your needs and map them with the tool that can make it happen for your business by helping you develop what your customers need.

About the author

Dwayne charrington.

Dwayne Charrington is a seasoned Product Manager with 10+ years of experience. He brings a wealth of expertise to the world of UX improvement and user research. Dwayne's also an insightful author who writes compelling pieces that assist entrepreneurs and organizations in navigating the intricate landscape of customer experience. He shares in-depth industry insights and practical tips on delivering exceptional customer experience and creating genuinely happy customers through the Qualaroo blog post.

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The 15 Largest Software Companies In The World

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Largest Software Companies Research Summary

The largest software company in the world is Alphabet Inc. , with a revenue of $282 billion.

As of 2022, the global software industry has a market size of $474.61 billion.

Between 2017-2022, the number of software publishing businesses in the U.S. grew by 9.1% per year .

The global business software and services market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 11.9% through 2030.

Today’s software companies have the ability to change the world. We interact with intelligent software so often, we probably don’t even realize it. But some of the basic software you see on a daily basis are Microsoft Word, Avira, Adobe Photoshop, Windows Media Player, and more.

Our lives in business are easier with software applications as we often use software applications like managing databases , accounts, billing, payroll, and more. We use software in healthcare, banking, general communication, and more.

Valued at over $474.61 billion, the software industry is projected to reach a market value of $773 billion by 2025. It’s no surprise at how much software has exploded over the past years, as it plays such a significant role in our everyday lives, both for professional business and personal use. Here are the biggest software companies in the world, ranked by revenue:

Top 15 Largest Software Companies

Let’s look at these top software players a little more deeply. Check out our list of the top 15 largest software companies, based on revenue.

Alphabet Inc.

2022 Annual Revenue : $282 Billion

Alphabet Inc. is the holding company for Google and several Google entities, including Google X, Google Ventures, Google Capital, Calico, and its Life Sciences efforts. In 2015, CEO Larry Page announced the operational restructuring effort for Alphabet Inc. to replace Google Inc. as the official publicly-traded entity.

Alphabet Inc. will replace Google Inc. as the publicly-traded entity and all shares of Google will automatically convert into the same number of shares of Alphabet, with all of the same rights. Google will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet. The two classes of shares will continue to trade on Nasdaq as GOOGL and GOOG.

Alphabet is about businesses prospering through strong leaders and independence.

2022 Annual Revenue : $198.27 Billion

Founded by Bill Gates in 1975, Microsoft Corporation is the leading developer of software systems and applications for the PC. Based out of Redmond, Washington , this software company is the biggest giant in the industry.

They design and produce software, sell licenses, and support their products. Most PCs and laptops will already be wired with Microsoft applications like Windows 10, 9, or XP, as well as Microsoft Office.

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2022 Annual Revenue : $42.4 Billion

Based out of Redwood, California , Oracle is one of the world’s largest providers of database software. They also boast second place for the largest provider of business applications.

Their business revolves around the production and distribution of an integrated line of software products used for data management , computer-aided software design and development, application design and development, and data integration.

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2022 Annual Revenue : $26.49 Billion

Based in San Francisco, California , Salesforce is the largest cloud-based provider of business software focused on customer relationship management (CRM). Salesforce focuses on and has pioneered cloud, web, social, Internet of Things (IoT), and AI technology.

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2022 Annual Revenue : $17.61 Billion

Based in San Jose, California , Adobe, Inc. was founded in 1982. The company is most popular for its software revolving around multimedia production including Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Lightroom, and many more.

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2022 Annual Revenue : $12.72 Billion

Operating out of Mountainview, California, Intuit is number five on our largest software companies list. This organization offers financial reporting and compliance products and services to its clients.

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2022 Annual Revenue : $7 Billion

ServiceNow offers a business cloud computing solution that helps clients identify, build, manage, and automate services for global businesses across industries like financial services, consumer products, IT, healthcare, government, education, and more.

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2022 Annual Revenue : $5.13 Billion

Workday is based in the heart of Silicon Valley in Pleasanton, California . Ranking as number 8 on this list, this organization offers corporate cloud services across the globe.

This includes financial services, human resource management , as well as analytical applications for businesses, educational institutions, and government agencies.

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SS&C Technologies

2022 Annual Revenue : $5.28 Billion

Established in 1986 and operating out of Windsor, Connecticut , SSC Technology, Inc. is one of the leading software companies in the world focusing on financial software solutions.

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2022 Annual Revenue : $5.08 Billion

Based out of Mountain View, California , Synopsys is an electronic design automation company focused on silicon design and verification, silicon intellectual property, and software security and quality.

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2022 Annual Revenue : $4.386 Billion

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Citrix Systems

2022 Annual Revenue : $3.31 Billion

Citrix or CTXS is one of the world’s leading software providers in the world. They offer software that helps manage any application over any connection on any device, allowing for easy management and IT assistance in times of need .

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Norton LifeLock, Inc.

2022 Annual Revenue : $2.87 Billion

Norton LifeLock, Inc. is the global leader in security software programs that can protect your computers from hackers and other viruses that attack computers. Norton’s programs enable clients to secure computers, online privacy, identify, as well as home networks.

2022 Annual Revenue : $1.67 Billion

Last on our list, CDK Global is a developer of integrated information technology (IT) and digital marketing that caters to the automotive retail industry.

Find CDK Global Jobs Near Me

2022 Annual Revenue : $1.41 Billion

Red Hat, Inc. or RHT is the world’s leading provider of business open source applications, more commonly known as Linux cloud products. Their products operate on open-source code so that programmers have the ability to make adaptations and improvements when they use the software for their own use.

Find Red Hat Jobs Near Me

Software and Technology Industry FAQ

How many jobs are available in technology?

There are at least 3.97 million tech jobs available in the U.S. in 2022. This number continues to grow. In 2021, there were about 254,000 new tech jobs were added to that number, and 178,000 added in 2022.

What is the growth rate of the software industry?

The global business software and services market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 11.9% through 2030. As of 2022, the global software industry has a market size of $474.61 billion.

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Caitlin Mazur is a freelance writer at Zippia. Caitlin is passionate about helping Zippia’s readers land the jobs of their dreams by offering content that discusses job-seeking advice based on experience and extensive research. Caitlin holds a degree in English from Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, PA.

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The art of software pricing: Unleashing growth with data-driven insights

One lesson for software companies has become abundantly clear during the last 18 months: pricing needs to be on the C-suite’s agenda. Before then, the industry had been growing so fast for over a decade that executives and investors tended not to view individual product margins as an overriding concern. Now, however, that has all changed.

About the authors

This article is a collaborative effort by Christian Fielitz, Mohit Khanna, Michelle Nguyen , Varshik Nimmagadda, and Paul Roche , representing views from McKinsey’s Technology, Media & Telecommunications Practice.

After years of rapid growth, the industry faces economic uncertainty, increased capital costs as interest rates rise, and a still-competitive talent market with accelerating wage growth. In the last year alone, 84 percent of publicly listed software companies saw their valuations drop, and more than a quarter experienced a decline of more than 50 percent. 1 McKinsey analysis of S&P Global data.

The message from the market is clear: top-line growth alone is not enough. Investors are increasingly pivoting from valuing growth at all costs to focusing instead on efficient growth. In this new era, the software companies that thrive will be those that grow revenue and margin simultaneously.

Given these conditions, the leaders of software companies increasingly push pricing to the top of their agendas, viewing it as a critical lever to grow efficiently and capture value.

About our research

To better understand how software executives and decision makers are thinking about evolving their pricing functions, we surveyed 184 software executives and decision makers across company sizes: small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs), with $50 million to $200 million in annual revenue (29 percent of the total sample); midmarket, with $200 million to $1 billion in annual revenue (27 percent); and enterprise-level companies, with more than $1 billion in annual revenue and in at least five geographies (43 percent).

These executives represent both software pure-play (51 percent) and software-hardware hybrid (49 percent) providers. Their companies’ products are applications (51 percent), application development and deployment (35 percent), and infrastructure software (14 percent). And they are based in regions around the world: North America (79 percent), Asia–Pacific (10 percent), Western Europe (6 percent), Latin America (4 percent), and the Middle East (1 percent).

We further divided respondents into lower-growth (0 to 30 percent) and higher-growth (greater than 30 percent) groups based on their self-reported year-over-year revenue growth rates; 63 percent of SMEs were higher-growth, compared with 48 percent of midmarket and 36 percent of enterprise-level companies. We looked for significant correlation of certain pricing-related decisions and actions with company growth rates, and we assessed whether readiness and maturity of companies’ pricing infrastructure also correlates with growth. Through our analysis, we found that these patterns generally hold across company sizes.

To understand what specific actions software companies can take to get the most out of pricing, we surveyed 184 software companies’ decision makers to learn how executives are thinking about their pricing strategy. 2 The 2022 State of Software Pricing survey was conducted in late 2022 to capture a holistic and up-to-date perspective on major pricing trends. We also looked at how outperforming software companies within this group have differentiated their pricing strategies. This analysis uncovered a set of pricing practices that correlate highly with growth rates (see sidebar, “About our research”).

Five actions to strengthen software companies’ pricing practices

Respondents at most of the software companies in our survey (85 percent) indicate that they plan to drive value through price adjustments over the next two years but lack the infrastructure to capture the long-term benefits of pricing and sustain its impact. Worse, many companies also lack the tools and capabilities needed to build this foundational infrastructure. Respondents at about three-quarters of the software companies we surveyed say they lack a dedicated and centralized division to oversee pricing decisions and guidance, relying instead on ad hoc approaches.

Yet almost all our survey respondents say they plan to alter their pricing in the near term. Roughly half say they expect to increase renewal prices and tighten discounting, while just under 40 percent say they plan to increase list prices and drive higher contractual increases at renewal time. Another 12 percent say they expect to reduce prices to disrupt the market. Only 6 percent say they plan to maintain business as usual.

How can companies achieve these kinds of aspirations? To help answer that question, we examined the various pricing actions taken by our survey pool of companies and identified five core approaches that are used more at higher-performing companies and, based on our own experience, generally help produce stronger profits and growth.

Invest in a centralized pricing function

The case for investing in pricing functions has never been more straightforward. In fact, our research has shown that a long-term pricing advantage can account for 15 to 25 percent of a company’s total profits. Investment in the pricing function can take many forms, including head count, training, and organizational systems to enhance pricing accuracy and agility.

Despite the apparent advantages, software companies are generally underinvesting in pricing functions. Only about 49 percent of software executives say they increased investments in their pricing functions in the past year, and even fewer (12 percent) have established a pricing capability-building team to model and spread optimal pricing approaches across the entire organization, especially to frontline sellers.

Nonetheless, investment in pricing functions is quickly accelerating, and higher-growth companies are dedicating more head count to developing their pricing functions. Higher-growth companies are 1.4 times more likely than companies with lower growth rates to devote more than ten full-time employees to product and strategic pricing.

The higher-growth software companies we surveyed also have at the core of their pricing infrastructure a specialized organization that can provide accountability to and ownership of critical pricing decisions. This kind of pricing “control tower” can serve as a mechanism to enforce deliberate and consistent processes around pricing decisions, manage risk, and provide pricing guidance to frontline sellers.

Invest in pricing infrastructure and capabilities

Hiring alone, of course, is not enough. From our broader work with companies that sell to large enterprises, we know the advantage of training sales employees to make pricing decisions that are beneficial in the long run, instead of the more common practice of making concessions to try to close deals as soon as possible. Such concessions often include signing multiyear contracts with capped annual price increases—sometimes even no annual increases or ad hoc discounts. Our survey found that pricing guidance and enablement for the front line is seriously lacking. More than half (57 percent) of respondents say their companies lack adequate sales training in negotiation to communicate and support price changes, and 42 percent say their company provides no deal-level pricing guidance, a shortcoming that may allow an unnecessary loss of value.

Providing this level of guidance relies on access to insights, which in turn requires investment in pricing analytics capabilities. Reluctance to invest in these aspects of the pricing function can impose a high cost. For example, despite the preponderance of multiyear contracts in the B2B space, our research shows how surprisingly common it is for companies to lose value from existing customers on contracts that lack mechanisms for annual price hikes. Over 85 percent of respondents indicate that their companies had a contract annualized price increase that fell below the United States’ year-on-year inflation rate in 2022. Setting minimum price increase thresholds for renewals can safeguard margins, yet only about a third of respondents say their companies have incorporated such pricing guidance into their renewal infrastructure.

Recently, a global IT services provider achieved an approximately 5 percent increase on earnings before interest and taxes by setting up a pricing negotiation recipe and library of documents and reference materials to help frontline sellers conduct negotiations with key accounts. Sellers had been given a pricing target but were unsure how to broach the conversation with clients outside of the renewal cycle, so the company armed them with content and tools. These include a fact base to illustrate how price adjustments—or the lack thereof—have been out of step with inflation and their clients’ own price adjustments. Other content consists of talking points for responding to potential clients’ objections. In addition, capability training programs were tweaked to align with how adults learn; the new design includes short, optional, and interactive sessions with role playing, rather than compulsory full-day sessions packed with theoretical information. The new format commands better attendance, as sellers spread the word and encourage others to attend.

In another example, a large enterprise software player with a massive installed base was struggling to monetize renewals pricing, especially in the current high-inflation, high-uncertainty environment. To address this issue, the company set up a pricing control tower with resources including deal desk support, analytics, strategic pricing, marketing, legal, IT, and customer success. The price control tower drove an incremental 3 percent price adjustment by ensuring focus on four key elements:

• Value messaging. The company created customer-specific messaging on the value derived from core products and tied it to product investments made by the company. For example, customers who used extensive advanced search capabilities received messages that showcase investments in AI to improve search tools.
• Price reporting on renewals. Dashboards were built to provide real-time information to the C-suite on renewal pricing uplift.
• Contract analysis. The company analyzed contract terms and conditions for all upcoming renewals to understand price clauses (such as price increases not being written into contracts) and came up with a strategy to change customer contract terms (such as offering one-time discounts to customers willing to have an annual price escalator clause added to their contract).
• Pricing system changes. The company identified and prioritized key system changes to eliminate pricing roadblocks. For instance, they identified a cohort of about 1,000 customers that were on automatic-renewal plans in which the renewal rates were lower than target and whose churn risk was low, and as a result, were able to bring prices in line with targets.

Inform pricing guidance with advanced analytics or AI

An option software companies can consider for differentiating their pricing strategies is to employ sophisticated, data-driven approaches that align pricing options more closely to customer preferences. Higher-growth companies lead the pack in pricing analytics capabilities: they are 1.7 times more likely than lower-growth organizations to integrate advanced analytics into their provision of pricing guidance to frontline sellers.

Most companies, though, have taken a more cautious approach to investments in pricing analytics capabilities. Many software companies we surveyed haven’t yet embraced core analytics tools (Exhibit 1). Only about a quarter of respondents say they have tools to provide descriptive analytics (the ability to report pricing performance and results), and almost as many have diagnostic analytics (the ability to diagnose underlying reasons for pricing results and trends). And fully 15 percent of respondents say their companies have no pricing analytics capability whatsoever.

Companies that lack the new advanced analytics tools emerging for pricing use cases are missing out on capabilities to forecast pricing results (predictive), anticipate customers’ unique needs and behaviors (prescriptive), and continuously improve artificial intelligence (AI) models based on purchasing patterns (self-learning).

Software companies also tend to hold back on investing in other analytics tools, such as pricing and KPI dashboards. These could enable companies to establish organization-wide transparency over pricing performance, but only 38 percent of respondents say their companies have pricing dashboards to track these metrics and inform pricing decisions and broader sales strategies. The higher-growth companies in our survey sample are catching up: 44 percent of respondents at these companies say their companies are leveraging sophisticated pricing dashboards. Such tools could help software companies identify sources of lost value at the customer and product levels by tracking real-time price changes, allowing the pricing center to continuously iterate and refine its overall strategy.

In our experience, companies that develop and implement a successful pricing analytics journey focus on the following actions:

• Invest in dynamic deal scoring to empower the front line. Software companies that invest in dynamic deal scoring  have experienced four to ten percentage-point increases in return on sales. Far from the early, rudimentary approaches to control of discounting in software companies, dynamic scoring tools leverage sophisticated machine-learning (ML) algorithms to provide real-time information on the quality of discounts to frontline sellers, are integrated directly into the company’s cost per quote, simplify approval processes, and link frontline compensation to the quality of deals.
• Ensure that reporting systems can isolate pricing impact. As software portfolios get increasingly complex, it can become difficult to isolate the impact of pricing. One large information services software player was able to improve price realization of existing customers by 3 percent in part by creating transparency in price reporting.
• Build an analytics-based price-setting engine. The velocity of new software product and feature introductions has accelerated with, for example, monetizable APIs and add-on or third-party partnerships, but the price setting has not kept pace with them. Sophisticated players have invested in developing semiautomated approaches to rapidly gather and analyze customer and competitor input that can inform pricing for new products and features.

Align pricing metrics more closely with value

The most popular pricing metric at respondents’ companies continues to be seat based (based on number of users), with roughly 40 percent of respondents indicating that their companies use this as their primary pricing metric. Seat-based metrics can certainly be the right choice for a subset of companies, especially upstarts that prioritize sales velocity. Seats are easy for customers to understand and accept, especially given that this pricing metric has long been the most prevalent.

However, for many businesses, using seats as the primary metric comes with serious downside. This approach is not scalable to support future growth in revenue per customer. Also, this kind of metric is not auditable in some cases—for example, with shared licenses or credentials. Oftentimes, seats are not directly linked to value either. Consider an analytical product that has 100 users at an enterprise company, with three power users accounting for 95 percent of the usage. Beyond the initial three licenses, the value to the company would not increase consistently as more users are added.

The higher-growth software companies in our survey recognize these deficits. Fully 97 percent of respondents at these companies say they expect their pricing metric to evolve in the near term. One shift we are seeing is companies exploring usage-based metrics, driven partly by the increasingly popular pursuit of product-led growth and the potentially significant revenue growth that such a model can bring (Exhibit 2).

However, usage-based pricing is not necessarily the right strategic move for every company. Depending on the product, usage may not be the sole determinant of the value the product provides to customers. Oftentimes, a product’s value comes simply from access to that product. Also, shifting to usage-based pricing requires a multi-month, cross-functional transformation. This includes preparing sales and customer success teams and upgrading back-end systems to help customers predict how much capacity they will need and be capable of refunding them when predicted estimates don’t match actual usage.

Given variations among companies, software executives who want to investigate changing their pricing metric may want to resist the urge to follow popular trends. Instead, they should consider what matters to customers. To set the right price metric, begin by examining where value comes from for your customers. Consider the following set of questions as a method to identify the right pricing metric for your specific software product:

• Is the metric under consideration linked to the value customers derive from the product?
• Is the metric scalable?
• Is it auditable?
• Is it predictable?
• Is it acceptable to customers?

Simplify pricing and packaging structures

Customers, according to classic economic theory, tend to prefer choice. However, a proliferation of options, in the form of bundles, add-ons, and customized pricing, also has a downside. Too many options create complexity and confusion for sellers as well as buyers. For sellers, this complexity may lengthen the sales process and hamper companies’ ability to control unnecessary discounting and its negative financial impact.

Over the past three years, the average number of buying personas per software customer has increased from one to four. In addition, the average software company also offers more than seven pricing schemes (for example, perpetual, subscription, pay as you go) and ten-plus separate pricing metrics (such as per seat, usage based, or outcomes based). Many end up with highly complex pricing architecture. For instance, one software player offers more than 15 price metrics—including per host, per gigabyte of data ingested, per million log events, and per thousand tests run—and more than 20 different price points for those metrics. It is no wonder their customers describe their bills as complex, impossible to predict, and often much higher than expected.

Companies with simpler pricing and packaging structures (such as three simple tiers for pricing and good/better/best packaging with fewer than five add-ons) are nearly 30 percent more likely to report having effective pricing and discount controls than companies with extremely complex pricing and packaging, our research shows. Simplicity also translates to greater likelihood of high growth, courtesy of faster sales velocity, less customer confusion, and ease of control and reporting on discounts (Exhibit 3).

However, simplicity comes with trade-offs. Companies targeting customers in commoditized software subsectors often find that simplicity encourages price-comparison shopping and drives lower price realization.

To simplify pricing and packaging, it can help to understand “value-adding complexity.” This means identifying areas where pricing and packaging complexity does not deliver incremental customer value and targeting only those areas for simplification, versus pursuing simplicity at all costs. Additionally, when companies have multiple discrete products that necessitate different individual metrics, it can be beneficial to wrap these disparate metrics into a single “token or credit” that acts as a secondary, all-encompassing price metric to drive simplicity without sacrificing the link to value.

Tie sales reps’ incentives to pricing

Pricing-specific incentives can help software companies align sales efforts with the overall pricing strategy. As the case study in Exhibit 4 illustrates, this approach can encourage sales reps to negotiate the best possible pricing outcomes for the company.

Despite the advantages of pricing-related sales force incentives, 53 percent of respondents to our survey report that their companies have no pricing-related sales force incentives. Once again, higher-growth companies are ahead of the curve: they are 50 percent more likely than their lower-growth peers to adopt pricing-specific sales incentives for their reps.

In practice, this involves introducing upside and downside multipliers or one-time bonuses, depending on the specific business context, that are tied to pricing decisions. For instance, a B2B software company leveraged AI to give its frontline sales force discount guidance on live deals but did not activate multipliers on sales compensation tied to meeting the discount threshold. Unsurprisingly, the guidance had a negligible impact on deal outcomes.

Another B2B software and services company tied its sales compensation to margin targets but not to specific pricing actions. The result was that sellers found ways to achieve margin targets by changing the product mix, rather than pulling on cost levers, to sell more higher-margin products. In contrast, a robust sales incentive strategy minimizes the potential for misaligned incentives, so the salespeople reap the benefits of pricing-related incentives in a sustainable manner.

Pricing capabilities as competitive edge

Acting now to rethink pricing strategies can help software companies propel efficient growth and stay competitive in a pricing market that is rapidly maturing. Even in less turbulent times, software leaders can push for more strategic pricing agendas by setting specific pricing targets for revenue leaders and empowering the sales force with incentives to tailor customer-specific price strategies.

Furthermore, building a dedicated and mature pricing function helps software companies adapt quickly to shifting market trends and customer needs in order to capture the full value of their product and services. The following steps offer a starting point for software companies looking to get ahead.

Step 1: Prioritize pricing now

Companies can immediately elevate pricing to the top of the corporate strategic agenda by assigning a specific owner for pricing. That role should have a direct reporting line to the C-suite. To act on this priority, leaders should incorporate pricing into strategic business reviews and set specific pricing targets for revenue leaders.

Step 2: Stand up a SWAT team over the next month or two

Over the next one to two months, companies can maximize short-term pricing realization by standing up a pricing SWAT team with the following responsibilities:

• Develop a segment-based methodology for renewal pricing—for example, by creating tiers of price increases based on elasticity of each customer cohort, building a value narrative to support price increases, and establishing a price control tower to monitor price realization.
• Set up an infrastructure to enable tracking of renewal pricing.
• Tie sales incentives to specific pricing targets—for example, with sales performance incentive funding formulas (SPIFFs) if a sales compensation redesign is not easily achievable.

Step 3: Align pricing and packaging to value within a year

Over the next six months to a year, companies can embark on a customer-backed, data-driven journey to align pricing and packaging to value. The journey would involve the following multiple steps:

• Explore alternative pricing models that might be better aligned to value and more scalable, such as usage-based pricing.
• Understand list prices in relation to willingness to pay, and adjust price points to match value perception.
• Invest in advanced analytics capabilities to track pricing performance and provide pricing guidance for the front line.
• Simplify and optimize packaging, including the introduction of add-ons that contribute to value creation.
• Systematize corporate-level pricing policies and terms and conditions—for example, by baking in annual adjustments that link the consumer price index to current and future contracts.

By building and capitalizing on new technologies, tools, and capabilities to support sophisticated pricing operations, software companies can implement new pricing models and strategies to promote efficient growth at a time when the price of inaction on this front is soaring.

Christian Fielitz is an associate partner in McKinsey’s Hamburg office; Mohit Khanna is a partner in the Bay Area office, where Paul Roche is a senior partner; Michelle Nguyen is an associate partner in the New York office; and Varshik Nimmagadda is an associate partner in the Washington, DC, office.

The authors wish to thank Karin Lauer, Nikhil Sane, and Rohan Taneja for their contributions to this article.

Explore a career with us

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Top 6 Market Research Software in 2024

In today’s data-driven age, businesses need sharp insights to succeed. Market research tools are essential for decoding audience preferences and market trends. Companies use market research software to conduct market research surveys , collect feedback from users , and get insights to drive growth. With so many market research tools out there, finding the right one can be a challenge.

This guide provides:

• a benchmarking on the top market research software in the market
• lists the benefits of leveraging market research
• examines the essential features of market research tools.

Top 6 market research software benchmarking

* Based on the total number of reviews on software review platforms.

** Average ratings on software review platforms.

*** Based on vendor claims.

Vendor selection criteria

Given the high number of vendors providing market research platforms, we streamlined our benchmarking process using specific, transparent criteria to ensure objective evaluation. Our focus was on metrics that are both public and can be easily validated either through the vendors’ official channels or trusted third-party platforms. Consequently, we centered our attention on companies with:

• at least 20 reviews on software review platforms such as G2 & Capterra
• At least 4 out of 5 star ratings on software review platforms such as G2 & Capterra
• more than 20 employees, as stated on LinkedIn

Disclaimer:

The data is gathered from the websites of vendors or the software review platforms (i.e., ratings). Please keep in mind that some vendors provide a variety of services (e.g., advertising), while some are only focused on market research. That’s why, both their company size and the number of reviews may differ. If you believe we have missed any vendor or any feature, please contact us so that we can consider adding it to our article.

> 7 benefits of conducting market research

Market research is more than just gathering data—it’s the key to understanding your market and making informed decisions. From startups to seasoned businesses, every stage benefits from it. Here are the benefits of market research in different stages of a company:

1- Validation

Before allocating time, money, and effort, entrepreneurs must discern whether their vision matches the market’s needs. Validation involves preliminary data gathering through surveys, focus groups, or prototype testing. This gives insights into questions such as: Do people resonate with the concept? Is there genuine interest, or is the market already oversaturated?

2- Audience profiling

It’s insufficient to say “everyone” will use your product. Businesses must define their target customer segments. Audience profiling is about specifics: age ranges, pain points, purchasing habits, online platforms preferred, and even sentiments . With this insight, you can tailor your product design, features, and marketing strategies to resonate deeply with the target group.

3- Risk mitigation

Risk mitigation is about proactively identifying potential roadblocks in your business path. These could inlcude financial risks, regulatory challenges, potential supply chain disruptions, or evolving consumer behaviors. A proactive approach allows businesses to prepare alternative strategies, ensuring a smoother process.

4- Product refinement

Even with a solid idea, there’s always room for improvement. It is critical to gather specific feedback on your product or service from your identified target audience. This phase might involve beta testing, sample distributions, or trial services. Feedback can reveal crucial adjustments needed, enhancing user experience, functionality, or addressing overlooked pain points.

To learn more, check out our article on customer feedback tools .

5- Pricing strategy

Instead of arbitrarily setting a price, businesses should analyze competitor pricing, understand the audience’s willingness to pay, and factor in production or service delivery costs. Setting the right price can dictate profitability and market penetration speed.

Post-Launch

6- feedback loop.

Markets are ever-changing landscapes with shifting demands. Utilizing a tool for market research to regularly capture reviews, conduct surveys, or facilitate direct engagements enables businesses to adapt their offerings in tune with these shifts. This not only ensures the product or service remains relevant but also paves the way for sustained success in a dynamic marketplace.

7- Growth pathways

Expansions are inevitable for companies wanting to broaden their horizon. These can be geographical, demographical, or even product-based expansions. With a combination of market insights, customer feedback, and business analytics, companies can identify areas ripe for growth. Whether it’s launching in a new city, targeting a new age group, or diversifying the product range, informed decisions pave the path to sustained growth.

Features to look for in a market research software

Audience size.

Leading market research tools go beyond data collection ; they also provide access to survey participants . This built-in feature eliminates the need for third-party recruitment platforms. Instead of just offering the tools to gather insights, these solutions directly supply a curated pool of respondents. The larger the pool, the more likely you can find your target audience. For businesses, this means streamlined research, ensuring both efficiency and relevance in feedback collection.

If you want to know more about survey participant recruitment, check out our comprehensive guide .

Selection criteria for the target audience

Sometimes, you need insights from a specific subset of the population. For instance, if your product is tailored for senior citizens, then feedback from teenagers might not be as valuable. The software should allow users to define and select their target audience based on various criteria like age, location, purchasing habits, etc., ensuring that the research is focused on the relevant demographic.

Data quality control

The software should have mechanisms to filter out unqualified participants, detect inconsistencies in responses, and ensure that you’re getting genuine, high-quality feedback. This might involve features like

• AI-powered fraud detection
• response validation
• attention-check questions
• duplicate response prevention.

If interested, here is  our data-driven list of survey participant recruitment services and survey tools .

Customizable reports

Customizable reports allow businesses to view data in various formats, highlight specific insights, and tailor the presentation based on the audience (be it internal teams, stakeholders, or clients).

Real-time results

Instead of batch-processing at the end, some vendors offer businesses to get a live feed of their market research. This instantaneous data stream can be a boon for marketers, product developers, or strategists, allowing them to catch early indicators, respond to concerns, or capitalize on positive feedback immediately.

Media file addition (i.e., audio, image, video)

Modern market research isn’t limited to just textual feedback. It often involves multimedia elements to capture comprehensive responses. Whether it’s a respondent uploading a video review of a product, attaching images to highlight an issue, or including audio feedback, the ability to handle and integrate various media types in the research process enriches the data collected.

Further Reading

• Top 4 Qualtrics Competitors
• Top 5 Pollfish Alternatives
• B2B Marketing Survey: An In-Depth Guide

For those interested, here is our data driven list of market research tools .

Transparency statement: AIMultiple serves numerous emerging tech companies, including resonio by Clickworker .

Reach us if you need help in your vendor selection process:

Cem has been the principal analyst at AIMultiple since 2017. AIMultiple informs hundreds of thousands of businesses (as per similarWeb) including 60% of Fortune 500 every month. Cem's work has been cited by leading global publications including Business Insider , Forbes, Washington Post , global firms like Deloitte , HPE, NGOs like World Economic Forum and supranational organizations like European Commission . You can see more reputable companies and media that referenced AIMultiple. Throughout his career, Cem served as a tech consultant, tech buyer and tech entrepreneur. He advised businesses on their enterprise software, automation, cloud, AI / ML and other technology related decisions at McKinsey & Company and Altman Solon for more than a decade. He also published a McKinsey report on digitalization. He led technology strategy and procurement of a telco while reporting to the CEO. He has also led commercial growth of deep tech company Hypatos that reached a 7 digit annual recurring revenue and a 9 digit valuation from 0 within 2 years. Cem's work in Hypatos was covered by leading technology publications like TechCrunch and Business Insider . Cem regularly speaks at international technology conferences. He graduated from Bogazici University as a computer engineer and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.

To stay up-to-date on B2B tech & accelerate your enterprise:

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Top 5 pollfish alternatives & competitors in 2024, top 10 insurance crm software in 2024, top 3 trustradius competitors in 2024 based on user reviews.

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Related research

Retail Market Research: Benefits, Trends & 5 Real-Life Examples

Top 4 SurveyMonkey Alternatives in 2024

How to Research a Company: The Ultimate Guide

Good company research can take many forms. Depending on your research goals, you might want to look at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of a market, or drill down into key industry leaders and emerging players to unpack their successes.

If you want to beat the competition, you need to know their business as well (if not better) than your own. The more intel you have, the quicker you’ll be able to spot and leverage opportunities, respond to market changes, and grow.

Read on to discover how to research a company online, tear down its strategies, and take over its market share.

What is company research?

Company research gathers and analyzes information about a business and its customers. This means understanding its performance data and target audience so you can optimize your own strategy.

In today’s fiercely competitive markets, doing good company research is a game-changer. In fact, a 2022 report on competitive intelligence found that 98% of businesses believe researching their competitors is vital for success.

If you have the right tools to collect accurate competitive intelligence , you’ll be able to anticipate your competitors’ moves and emerging threats to stay ahead and succeed.

How to do company research in 8 steps

Researching a company is a bit like doing detective work. The deeper you go, the more questions you ask, and the more curious you are, the better the outcome will be.

Here are eight steps to steer you through the process of doing company research.

1. Track top competitors

You want to know exactly what your rivals are doing, where they’re going, and how the competitive landscape is changing. With this data, you can carefully plan your next move and take action when and where it’s needed most. Competitive tracking tools like Similarweb give you the ability to track what your rivals are up to. You can measure each competitor’s digital footprint, and identify any changes or growth over time.

Did someone experience a sudden uptick in website visits? Would you like to know why and how? Perhaps they launched a new feature or ad campaign, or maybe its social channel is driving growth.

With Similarweb Research Intelligence, you get alerts about changes so you can be sure you’ll never miss a beat.

Analyzing the top performers in your industry will give you new ideas and provide targets for what is achievable for you.

Similarweb’s Analyze Industry Leaders tool will tell you who is winning in your industry based on their website performance. A Market Quadrant Analysis graph, or competitive matrix , provides a visual snapshot of the websites in your industry and how they compare based on different metrics. The industry leaders may inspire you to try new things, while the weaker competitors in your industry can provide you with swift opportunities to chip into their market share.

Pro tip: Similarweb’s Similar Sites tool helps you uncover up to 40 domains that are similar to yours. Finding these domains can be infinitely useful when conducting a competitive content analysis . You can audit these domains to learn more about their content strategy and upgrade your own.

2. Benchmark

Now that you have a good view of the market, you need to drill down into your competitors’ performance. You want to understand their metrics and KPIs so you can benchmark them against your own.

A company research and analysis tool can help you understand your competitors’ digital reach and performance. You can look at multiple websites or domains owned by a single company to analyze their aggregated data or look at a specific market. This will give you a good idea of the business’ size and market share .

You’ll also want to look at their engagement metrics and any changes over time. If you see their metrics improving, they are probably investing in a digital strategy . You should look into this to see what has been working for them. We’ll show you how in the next section.

Pro Tip: Don’t forget to look at mobile app intelligence too. There are five key metrics you’ll want to track when benchmarking an app:

• Demographics

3. Compare traffic and engagement

These days, it’s no longer enough to consider website traffic and engagement metrics on their own. The complete digital perspective of any company includes mobile app intelligence, alongside traditional desktop and mobile web metrics. You need to see the full picture before you make any judgments or decisions.

Using Similarweb digital intelligence, I wanted to view the key players in the travel industry – specifically travel booking sites, like booking.com, Expedia, and Airbnb. First, I want my company research to focus on mobile web and desktop traffic alone.

Using Similarweb Digital Research Intelligence, I can see the overall benchmarks for traffic and engagement. This shows metrics like monthly visits, unique visitors, pages per visit, bounce rate, and visit duration. 

The top websites include booking.com , Airbnb , Expedia , Agoda , and Hotels.com . So, in essence, these are my industry leaders .

However, knowing how important apps are these days to consumers, I want to consider app intelligence in my company research too. When I add this data into the mix, things look a little different.

On both Android and iOS: Expedia, Airbnb, VRBO, booking.com, and Hopper are my top five.

Now, my view of industry leaders has changed . We’ve got three key players who are leading desktop, mobile web, and app platforms; and four others, who respectively dominate different channels.

Here, you can see a range of engagement metrics that apply to mobile apps on Android. Including active users, number of sessions, and session times; which shows engagement, upturns, downturns, and opportunities at a glance.

So, when you view traffic and engagement metrics, make sure you explore desktop, mobile web, and app intelligence to get an accurate picture of what’s really going on.

4. View audience interests

Understanding cross-browsing behavior tells you what other sites your users are interested in. Maybe they are looking at other products and solutions like yours!

This audience interests tool allows you to evaluate the browsing behavior of your target audience, helping you understand user intent and their purchasing process. You might even discover new markets or a specific niche audience , and come up with new audience acquisition strategies.

5. Pinpoint audience overlap

Who else holds your potential customer’s attention? With Similarweb’s Audience Overlap feature, you can analyze metrics and insights on the overlap of visitors across up to five websites for a selected time period and geographical region. You’ll be able to determine the size of your total addressable audience , evaluate what part of the audience is shared, and pinpoint your unreached audience potential.

This is also a good way to gauge audience loyalty . You’ll see the proportion of monthly active users who look at multiple sites in the same category or just one site.

6. Analyze specific pages

While a company may be your competitor, you may not be competing on every front. You might only want to look at a particular segment of a business when doing your company research. This ensures that your insights are specific and useful, and leave out less relevant information.

Similarweb’s Segment Analysis tool lets you slice the URL of a website to analyze just the parts that are relevant to you. You can deconstruct their website to look at a specific category, topic, brand, or whatever else interests you. This can help you benchmark a specific line of business or individual products.

This analysis is extremely powerful for marketing and sales managers, data analysts, and BI specialists who want to optimize their strategies for specific business segments. For example, if you are a clothing retailer looking to launch a line of kids’ clothes, you can use this tool to analyze your competitors’ kids’ clothing lines.

7. Reveal successful conversion strategies

What makes customers convert? The only way to know for sure is to analyze conversion data across your industry. You need to understand the conversion funnel, which keywords and marketing channels drive traffic, and which trends your potential customers are interested in.

You can get a unique view of your industry’s conversion data with Similarweb’s Conversion Analysis tool . Check out each company’s conversion efficiency and how they scale over time. You can identify efficient marketing channels , go-to-market strategies, and their ROI for marketing spending. You can also benchmark your metrics across the industry average.

Understanding conversion strategies also reveals opportunities for your own growth. You can examine category performance at top retailers such as Amazon, Walmart, and Target, and identify what consumers are searching for at the different retailers and what converts. When you understand the customer journey, you can better position yourself to guide them toward purchasing from you.

8. Research mobile app performance

When you research a business, you need to look at all customer touchpoints. Today, that means analyzing apps alongside web and mobile web traffic. You want to know how well your competitors’ apps rank so you can focus on your own app strategy. With rapid consumer adoption of mobile-first spending ( 46% of people now complete a full purchase via mobile ), app intelligence is a key consideration for any type of company research. In almost every industry, the digital landscape changes when you add app intelligence metrics.

If you’re looking at apps competitively, you want to consider:

• Monthly/ Daily Active Users
• No. of sessions/session time
• Sessions per user
• Overall rank
• Category rank
• User retention
• App demographics

Similarweb App Intelligence Premium now provides a few ways to help you view app rankings , downloads, engagement, and usage metrics across both Android and iOS. From benchmarking an app to unpacking the successes of those with apps in your market; good company research should include app analysis. By unifying digital insights, you see a truer picture of a company’s successes online.

How to research a company like an expert

Follow these eight steps and you’ll quickly be able to research any company in any niche like a pro. Uncover key insights that tell you more about a market, target audience, or competitors to shape your own strategy for success.

Ready to get growing? Grab a free trial of Similarweb today.

See Similarweb In Action

Don't miss out! Have the latest data at your fingertips.

Why do company research?

Your business doesn’t exist in a vacuum. You’re competing with other companies and operating in an industry that has its own norms and expectations. If you want to succeed, you need to research other companies in your industry to ensure your strategy is aligned, but also positioned to give you a competitive advantage . You won’t be able to do this without researching other companies.

What to look for when researching a company?

You want to review all their company metrics, including traffic and engagement metrics, and look at their strategy, focus, processes, and content. You should search for any interesting ideas and identify where the company excels. All the data you collect will be valuable for you to compete.

What can company research tell you?

Good company research shows you how a market, company, and its target audience’s interests change over time. It can help you develop your own strategy for growth, and shows trends and emerging threats to watch out for.

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10 of the Best Research Management Software in 2024

Engineering Team

February 13, 2024

Juggling research projects and struggling to keep track of things? Don’t worry. With a spiffy new research management tool at the ready, you could be much more productive.

But what if you don’t have time to sift through dozens of tools and apps for research management to find the perfect fit? That’s where we come in!

We’ve narrowed it down to the top 10 research management software tools to use in 2024, so you can pick from the best of the best. 

It’s time to level up! 🙌 

What Should You Look for in Research Management Software?

3. ganttpro, 4. klipfolio, 5. whatagraph, 8. scispace (formerly typeset.io), 10. databox.

Whether you’re an individual researcher or leading a research team, research management software tools make everything better. Here are some of the features we prioritized when picking the 10 tools on our list:

• Intuitive UI: Most tools will have a learning curve, but a configurable user interface makes it easier to get comfortable
• Compatibility: The best tools offer downloadable software, mobile apps, and web-based apps so your team members can work in Android, iOS, Mac, Windows, Linux, and their favorite web browsers
• Integrations: If you and your team use things like project management software, look for research management tools that’ll integrate with all of them
• Automations: Business process automation takes care of everyday tasks and lets you focus on the good stuff
• Templates: Look for something that’ll streamline your workflow with pre-made templates for things like resource management , project management, process mapping , and research planning

The 10 Best Research Management Software to Use in 2024

OK, let’s stop wasting time and get to the good stuff. Here are our picks for the 10 best research management software tools in 2024.

ClickUp is a cloud-based powerhouse with tons of research and project management software features for your research projects. It’s our top pick for a few reasons.

For one, we’ve spent countless hours refining it to be one of the most helpful tools around. It’s highly rated and at the top of several other lists, including G2’s Best Project Management Software Products & Tools in 2024 .

ClickUp has real-time collaboration features, free Gantt charts , AI writing tools, project documentation tools , and so much more. It does almost anything you ask with customizable ClickUp Dashboards and dozens of handy templates, too.

For example, the ClickUp Research Project Plan Template breaks down complex tasks, organizes your resources, and communicates your progress using data visualization tools . And ClickUp Docs serve as a simple wiki software that lets you create beautiful Docs and wikis that are easy to connect to your workflows.

Did we mention that a lot of this stuff is available on the Free Forever plan? 🤩

ClickUp best features:

• Integration with 1,000+ other tools, including Google Docs, Google Scholar, Google Drive, Google Workspace, Microsoft Excel, Trello, Slack, Evernote, Dropbox, Chrome, GitHub, and Asana
• Customizable dashboards, notifications, spreadsheets, templates, time tracking, automations, and more
• ClickUp AI writing assistant summarizes metrics, compose emails, generate action items, draft metadata, and create social media posts in seconds
• Mobile app, web-based app, and desktop software works on all operating systems
• Task management features organize and automate your research process, whether you’re doing academic research for your thesis or managing your company’s research data
• Multiple views and tools allow you to organize large datasets with complex visualizations to manage references, research, and more

ClickUp limitations:

• Some new users report a learning curve (solved with simple, free tutorials)
• ClickUp AI isn’t available on the Free Forever plan (give it a spin with a free trial first)

ClickUp pricing:

• Free Forever
• Unlimited: $7/month per user paid annually
• Business: $12/month per user paid annually
• Enterprise: Contact for pricing

ClickUp ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.7/5 (8,000+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.7/5 (3,000+ reviews)

Tableau is a data visualization tool powered by Salesforce. It’s designed to connect data from different sources on a single analytics platform. The reference management software makes it easier to organize complex research data using a drag-and-drop interface and interactive dashboards.

Tableau makes your life easier with access to a range of data analysis and sharing options. And it’s designed for everyone from students and teachers to data scientists and business owners. 

Tableau best features:

• Tableau Cloud provides a cloud-based analytics platform that drives better business outcomes and provides integrated data management
• Tableau Prep is a modern tool that makes it faster and easier to merge, edit, and organize your research data for efficient analysis
• Integration with a wide variety of products to make collaboration, data storytelling, and decision-making easier
• Training modules for onboarding your team minimize the learning curve with Tableau’s many research management tools

Tableau limitations:

• Users report that large files sometimes require long loading times and may result in crashing
• Some reviews mention bugs in new versions of Tableau software

Tableau pricing:

• Tableau Viewer: $15/month per user paid annually
• Tableau Explorer: $42/month per user paid annually
• Tableau Creator: $70/month per user paid annually

Tableau ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.3/5 (1,000+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.5/5 (2,000+ reviews)

GanttPRO is a resource management system that uses Gantt charts for efficient project management. It’s also a research and reference management software that’s perfect for managing teams and organizing your workflow.

Import Excel spreadsheets and graphs or use pre-made templates to get your projects going pronto. Of all the research management tools in this list, GanttPRO helps you organize everything you need for thesis research, business data analysis, wiki pages, bibliographies, and more. 🛠️ 

GanttPRO best features:

• Multiple views allow you to create Kanban and scrum boards in addition to Gantt charts for better research and workspace visualization
• Integrations with Slack, OneDrive, Google Drive, and MS Teams collect all your work in one place
• Time logs let you track how much time you spend on each research task
• Collaboration tools make it easy for research teams to work together and communicate in real-time

GanttPRO limitations:

• Some views have limited customization options
• Reviews mention difficulty moving and converting tasks

GanttPRO pricing:

• Basic: $9.99/month per user
• Pro: $15.99/month per user
• Business: $24.99/month per user

GanttPRO ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.8/5 (400+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.8/5 (400+ reviews)

Klipfolio is a business dashboard tool that monitors your research data in real-time. It’s a metrics-focused platform that helps everyone make better decisions with access to the data they need when they need it. ✨

Individual users and data teams can use this powerful analytics tool to catalog data in a user-friendly platform that provides self-serve access to research information. Draft effective reports for team projects, organize citations for research papers and create useful dashboards for end-users. 

Klipfolio best features:

• Integrations with 100+ other tools and apps, from Ahrefs to Zapier, with dozens of options in between
• Compatibility with Android and iOS mobile devices and most popular web browsers
• Klip Annotations allows you to create, update, and delete annotations quickly and easily
• User-friendly interface helps reduce the learning curve for new users

Klipfolio limitations:

• Some reviews mention a lack of alerts and notifications
• Some users report issues with needing to restart the application after adding elements to their dashboard

Klipfolio pricing:

• Go: $125/month
• Pro: $300/month
• Business: $800/month

Klipfolio ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.5/5 (200+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.7/5 (100+ reviews)

Whatagraph is a reporting tool that helps manage and visualize research data with customizable templates for efficient marketing projects. Move data, share reports with stakeholders, and build stunning reports. 🦋

Whatagraph replaces multiple tools and collects your team’s work in an easy-to-use data platform with a user-friendly dashboard. This tool is designed with in-house data research and marketing teams in mind. 

Whatagraph best features:

• Integrations with 40+ tools and apps, including YouTube, Google BigQuery, LinkedIn, and BigCommerce
• Automates research data transfer to save your team members hours of work and streamline your workflow
• Generates quality reports in less time using data analytics software
• Analyze and manage web page performance data to give your marketing team the information they need to get results

Whatagraph limitations:

• Some reviews mention slow responses from customer service
• Some users report bugs that slow down their research process
• No real project management software features

Whatagraph pricing:

• Professional: $223/month paid annually
• Premium: $335/month paid annually
• Custom: Contact for pricing

Whatagraph ratings and reviews:

• Capterra: 4.4/5 (80+ reviews)

Looker (aka Google Looker Studio) is a browser-based data analytics platform that uses a unique modeling language to leverage, analyze, and visualize research data. Use it for governed and self-service business intelligence (BI), and to build the best apps for your organization’s metrics. 

Collaborate in real time and capitalize on the fastest analytic databases available. Looker’s lightweight architecture allows developers to create flexible data and researcher apps quickly. 👀

Looker best features:

• Intuitive user interface minimizes the learning curve for new users
• Integrations with multiple tools, including BigQuery Standard SQL and BigQuery Legacy SQL databases
• Customizable charts, tables, and reports allow you to share data insights with your team, classroom, or the world
• Report settings give database users and viewers the option to bookmark existing settings for future use

Looker limitations:

• Users report issues with the varied Google Cloud Pricing structure and the lack of a set monthly fee
• Some reviews report problems with the dynamic tables not displaying full text for headers
• Data focus means few project management software capabilities

Looker pricing:

• Google Cloud Pricing : Contact to request a quote

Looker ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.4/5 (1,000+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.5/5 (200+ reviews)

Bit.ai is a document collaboration platform designed for quick and easy note-taking, document creation, and research management. It builds dynamic knowledge bases, projects, and technical docs with various sharing and formatting options too. 

Users have access to advanced design options, robust search features, powerful document tracking, and real-time collaboration tools. And teams can work together using this tool from around the globe across multiple platforms and devices. 

Bit.ai best features:

• Collaboration tools allow you and your team to work together to create documents, wikis, notes, and web pages
• Integrations with dozens of other tools and platforms, including YouTube, Google Sheets, GitHub, Loom, and Typeform
• Intuitive collaboration and workflow design makes document creation simple for new users
• Automations allow you to complete research projects faster by taking care of small tasks

Bit.ai limitations:

• Some users mention issues with document creation
• Some reviews report trouble with the user interface and a need for a more user-friendly experience

Bit.ai pricing: 

• Pro: $12/month per user
• Business: $20/month per user

Bit.ai ratings and reviews: 

• G2: 4/5 (10+ reviews)
• Capterra: 5/5 (5+ reviews)

SciSpace, also known as Typeset.io, is a powerful researcher app designed to save you time using the power of AI. Discover and review a network of relevant papers and get simple answers from each one without spending hours deep-diving the content. 

Minimize time spent on menial tasks and let SciSpace do the research for you while you find your answers. And you’ll have access to millions of papers and PDFs to get the info you need. It’s also easy to use in tandem with applications like Zotero and Mendeley. 

SciSpace best features:

• Access to metadata of 200 million+ papers and 50 million+ Open Access full-text PDFs
• Workspace enables publishers, institutions, and researchers to collaborate and work efficiently on research projects
• Automations minimize time wasted with repetitive tasks so you discover information quickly
• Built-in plagiarism checker allows you to check your documents and identify issues that may be preventing you from getting published

SciSpace limitations:

• Some reviews mention issues with LaTeX templates
• Free plan does not include any major features
• Lack of reviews on major platforms

SciSpace pricing:

• Basic: Free
• Premium: $9.99/month
• Teams and Labs: $5.49/month per user

SciSpace ratings and reviews:

• Capterra: N/A

Businesses use EndNote to build bibliographies and access research articles. This specialized reference and research management software lets you manage and format citations. It also protects your workflow with efficient data restoration functions. 📁

Find, share, and use research within your EndNote libraries and work on your research from anywhere, on any device. The integrated document creation tools will make your writing more efficient. 

Endnote best features:

• License requires a one-time fee instead of monthly payments
• Integrations with popular tools like Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and Open Office Writer
• Compatibility with desktop, iPad, and most popular web browsers
• Useful organization and research management tools let researchers drafting and citing their theses or writing in-depth research papers get their work done faster

Endnote limitations:

• Some reviews mention limited integration with word processing software outside of Microsoft and Google products
• You may need to correct occasional citation formatting errors manually
• Document system lacks task and project management software capabilities

Endnote pricing:

• Full License: $274.95 one-time fee
• Student License: $149.95 one-time fee

Endnote ratings and reviews:

• G2: 4.1/5 (100+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.3/5 (30+ reviews)

Databox is a business analytics tool that connects your data and tracks it from any device. Monitor your research data in real-time using a single dashboard to build and share reports, discover insights, and monitor trends. 📈

Get daily, weekly, and monthly performance updates viewable through email and Slack and automated alerts for changes in important metrics. Everything is done without the need for coding or spreadsheets.

Databox best features:

• Integrations with 100+ popular tools, including HubSpot Marketing, Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, and Google Ads
• Setup is easy to manage for non-technical users and data research teams
• Data reporting makes it easy to progress toward your goals and share research data with clients
• Custom metrics and conversion rates are calculated quickly and easily

Databox limitations:

• Reviews indicate that individual users may find the business-oriented prices too high
• Users mention a lack of customization and visual tools
• Free version does not include access to most features and metrics

Databox pricing:

• Starter: $59/month
• Professional: $169/month
• Growth: $399/month
• Premium: $999/month

Databox ratings and reviews:

Unleash the power of your research.

With such a wide variety of research management software options listed above, you’re sure to find an option that does what you need at a price that fits your budget. So get ready to streamline your workflow, collaborate more effectively, and fall back in love with research. 😍

If you want a tool that does it all at a price everyone can afford, try ClickUp . It’s free! You’ll have access to everything you need for research management, plus many other project management tools that’ll make your work and life more efficient.

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Business planning startup Pigment raises $145M in rare French tech mega-round

Paris-based startup Pigment has raised a $145 million funding round just five years after its inception. The enterprise software company offers a business planning platform for large companies to visualize their past financial performance and forecast upcoming quarters.

This funding round comes as a bit of a surprise as large rounds have been few and far between in France. According to a recent study from EY , funding rounds in the French tech ecosystem were down 38% in 2023 compared to 2022.

But if you remove buzzy AI startups like Mistral AI and capital-intensive infrastructure plays that are not really tech startups, like EV charging networks (Driveco) and EV battery factories (Verkor), funding rounds are drastically down. Pure software startups have had a rough couple of years.

Pigment appears as an exception with its Series D. Existing investor Iconiq Growth is doubling down by leading this new funding round. Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, IVP, Meritech, Greenoaks and Felix Capital are also participating — many of them were existing investors too.

And there’s a reason why Pigment managed to raise so much at a significantly higher valuation less than a year after its previous funding round . In 2023, the startup managed to triple its revenue and double its customer base with well-known clients like Unilever, Datadog, Kayak and Merck. Half of Pigment’s clients are based in the U.S.

“Our current investors told us ‘if you’re going to raise money in 18 months to scale with others, we might as well offer you great terms right now for an internal round.’ And everything happened very quickly … In one week, it was a done deal,” co-founder and co-CEO Eléonore Crespo told me.

Before Pigment, Crespo worked for VC firm Index Ventures and Google. She co-founded Pigment with Romain Niccoli, who was the co-founder and CTO of adtech startup Criteo — an early success of the French tech ecosystem.

“IVP — one of our backers — benchmarks the growth rate of all SaaS companies. And since we’ve been selling our product, we’ve been in the top 5% of SaaS companies with the best growth rate ever, in terms of revenue growth,” Crespo said.

Image Credits: Pigment

Pigment is a flexible business planning tool that is used by chief financial officers and finance teams to create reports and budgets. It’s a modern SaaS platform, meaning that you can integrate it with all your company’s data (ERP, HRIS, data lakes, etc.) and use it as a collaboration tool.

In addition to finance teams, sales teams can use Pigment to create quotas and see how everyone is performing against quarterly quotas. HR teams can see how they should scale the workforce up and down based on strategic changes and financial objectives.

“We’ve done a lot of work to address other teams, not just finance teams. We’ve developed a lot of modules that enable us to serve HR teams, supply chain teams and sales teams,” Crespo said.

In fact, as more teams start using Pigment, it becomes an important tool for cross-team collaboration. And it’s supposed to work better than legacy tools from Oracle and SAP.

Like many software companies, Pigment has also added AI features. As Pigment acts as the central repository for all the important metrics of a company, customers can ask questions to Pigment AI in natural language to get a quick answer. Examples include “Can you give me a breakdown of revenue per country?” or “Why was our actual revenue lower than our forecast last quarter for this product?”

But more importantly, the company has optimized its core product so that it works well even with large datasets and complicated calculations. The best enterprise software products are must-have products, which means that companies usually don’t need to spend a lot of resources on improving the product — clients need this tool to operate. Pigment is still the challenger in this industry, so it believes it needs to provide a better product to compete with other business planning products.

What about Equifax and TrustedID?

Pricing compared, identity theft: what you need to know, more security and internet recommendations, best identity theft protection and monitoring services for 2024.

If you suspect your identity may have been stolen, these identity theft protection services can help you.

David Gewirtz

CNET staff -- not advertisers, partners or business interests -- determine how we review the products and services we cover. If you buy through our links, we may get paid.

• LifeLock See at LifeLock
• IdentityForce $100 at IdentityForce
• Identity Guard $80 at IdentityGuard
• Complete ID $108 at Complete ID
• ID Watchdog $150 at ID Watchdog
• Identity Fraud $100 at Identity Fraud
• PrivacyGuard $120 at PrivacyGuard
• McAfee Identity Theft Protection Standard $40 at McAfee Identity Theft Protection

Identity theft is a serious matter. Someone stealing your identity can open you up to a host of issues that may destroy your life if you aren’t careful. And according to the  Identity Theft Research Center , these cybercrimes are on the rise, with data compromises increasing by 68% in 2021 alone. This is why you need to protect yourself with one of the best identity theft protection services available. 

Falling victim to one of these crooks could result in your credit being directly attacked. They might even commit other crimes and cause additional problems with your stolen identity. Your Social Security number, bank account and more are at risk, which is why you need to be proactive in protecting yourself.

The best way to safeguard your personal information is to make use of the best identity theft protection services to suit your needs. These services typically offer ID protection, credit monitoring and more to keep your sensitive data away from prying eyes. Our top picks for the best identity theft protection and monitoring services can help safeguard your identity and proactively monitor suspicious activity and assist with recovery if you become a victim of a data breach.  

ID theft protection is only going to become more essential. In 2019 alone, there were  more than 13 million US identity fraud cases , with victims losing nearly $17 billion, along with untold damage to credit reports. The  2017 Equifax breach  was the icing on a nasty cake -- one that got  even worse  in the following years. One of the biggest 2020 data breaches was the  Marriott hack , which affected over 5 million customers. That followed an earlier breach of Marriott’s Starwood reservation system, in which the personal information of more than 380 million guests was compromised, including  more than 5 million passport numbers .

In this directory, we’ll look at some of the best options for helping you manage and protect your identity at various price levels. We’ll also explain the difference between an identity theft protection company and a credit monitoring service. Before we get started, keep in mind that you don’t have to spend $10 to $30 a month for the best identity theft protection service. The US government offers  IdentityTheft.gov , an identity restoration service that can help a victim report and recover from identity theft.

Read more :   How to Prevent Identity Theft

We’ll jump straight to the top choices for the best identity theft protection service options for ID monitoring, credit monitoring and more. Keep reading to review additional important information and facts about ID theft and ID protection. This list is updated frequently.

LifeLock  has come a long way since the days when it was subject to multiple Federal Trade Commission investigations ( settled in 2015 ) and various lawsuits from customers and credit reporting agencies. That might give one pause before declaring it the best identity theft protection even if it does have great features. However, In 2017, it became a  subsidiary of Symantec , purchased for $2.3 billion.

You may recall the ads where LifeLock’s founder posted his Social Security number everywhere, as a statement in his confidence about LifeLock’s protection services. While he did  experience numerous instances of identity theft  based on those Social Security number postings, LifeLock’s theft protection services helped him recover.

The company offers a wide range of identity monitoring and protection options, including stolen wallet protection, ID verification monitoring, home title monitoring and checking and savings account application alerts.

LifeLock’s  ID theft protection services range from around $9 a month to $20 a month the first year. Terms apply. Reimbursement of $25,000 to $1 million is available, depending on the monitoring plan. The lower-price protection services monitor credit only from one credit bureau. The $20-a-month identity theft protection plan monitors all three major credit bureaus. You can pull credit reports once a year, but the service will provide you with a credit score monthly, based on Experian data.

SSN and credit alerts, dark web monitoring, alerts on suspicious activity like crimes committed under your name and credit card activity and fraud alert services are all marks in LifeLock’s favor, despite its past stumbles.

LifeLock Terms of Service

IdentityForce

IdentityForce  offers two tiers of service: UltraSecure and UltraSecure Plus Credit, the latter of which includes credit reports and scores. We liked how the credit score monitoring not only watches all three reporting agencies but provides a visual tracker that lets you examine your credit rating over time.

IdentityForce  identity theft protection monitoring includes quite a lot beyond credit information. It checks for public information record changes, address changes, court and arrest records and payday loan applications, and checks for identity information on a variety of illicit identity-sharing websites to act as a guard dog from identity thieves. The company also monitors sex offender registries to see if your name is associated with such things. We also like that it tracks SSNs for new usages or associations with new names.

Its mobile app has been updated with a feature called Mobile Attack Control. This monitors your smartphone for spyware and insecure Wi-Fi locations, as well as “spoof” networks (networks that act as if they’re legitimate connections but they’re not). Additionally, the phone app will present alerts if there are security issues monitored by IdentityForce that need immediate attention.

The company did not disclose frequency of service monitoring (beyond credit reporting agencies). That said, we liked how the company has an interesting credit score simulator which can help you understand how different balances, payments and balance transfers might have an impact on your credit score. IdentityForce offers a 14-day free trial version, so you can see if it offers the best identity theft protection for your needs.

Right now, the UltraSecure program is $150 per year (or $15 for a monthly plan), and the UltraSecure Plus Credit for individuals is $200 per year (or $20 per month).

IdentityForce Terms of Service

Identity Guard

The big pitch for  Identity Guard  is that it’s powered by IBM’s Watson. Earlier versions of Watson have done everything from  winning at Jeopardy  to helping doctors diagnose cancer. The version of Watson powering Identity Guard is, as you’d expect, focused on identity theft.

Identity Guard’s  use of Watson involves building a corpus of knowledge and continuing to feed it information from many different sources, including social networks. There’s no doubt the Watson-enabled service can help advise you on identity management. Its service monitors the customer’s personal information for ID theft, including your credit files, DOB and SSN.

Identity Guard offers a  clear summary  of its insurance terms, which is very helpful for determining whether it’s the best identity theft protection for you. The company offers a basic plan at around $6 a month, but it doesn’t provide credit monitoring. If you want monthly credit report updates, that jumps to $13 a month and includes credit monitoring from three credit bureaus and a monthly credit score. Its most comprehensive plan is the Identity Guard Ultra plan, which costs $20 a month and includes annual credit reports.

Identity Guard Terms of Service

Complete ID

Complete ID  is a service provided by Experian, one of the big three credit reporting agencies, and is exclusively available to Costco members. Costco Executive members pay $9 a month plus an optional $3 a month for child protection, and Gold Star Costco members pay $14 a month and an optional $4 a month for child protection.

Complete ID provides an annual credit report from the three agencies. It also offers monthly credit scores and provides a nice graph over time so you can see how your score has improved. These perks may help make it the best identity theft protection if you’re seeking multiple services in one.

The identity monitoring service offers monitoring for unauthorized use of your Social Security number and other noncredit identity monitoring to help prevent you from being the victim of stolen identity. A valuable feature is its neighborhood watch, updated monthly, which provides details on sexual predators and crimes in your area.

As with all of the services we’re spotlighting,  Complete ID  offers $1 million in limited identity theft insurance. And unlike some of the competitors listed here, it has a  clear summary of benefits . Base price (for Costco Executive members): $108 a year.

Complete ID Terms of Service

ID Watchdog

ID Watchdog  describes its service as “True Identity Protection.” The company’s big differentiator is helping you recover after you’ve been the victim of an identity theft experience. It offers a  guarantee  of “100% identity theft resolution,” but the fine print introduces some notable limits.

First, the company will only help you if it detects a new incident of fraud while you’re an active customer. It doesn’t guarantee you’ll get back any money you lost, but it will provide access to its team of Certified Identity Theft Risk Management Specialists.

Like all the other commercial identity monitoring services we’ve profiled in this directory,  ID Watchdog  offers a $1 million identity theft insurance policy. But that policy’s exact terms, limits and benefits aren’t spelled out until you complete the signup process.

The base program doesn’t provide a credit report or credit score information, but if you sign up for the premium $220-per-year service, you can get a copy of your credit report and your credit score. The catch? You get that report once a year. You can already do that yourself, for free, by going to  annualcreditreport.com . Still, if you don’t need to check your credit often, this might make sense as the best identity theft protection for you.

While the company says that it provides monitoring services, it does not specify, anywhere in its terms and conditions, how often it performs checks for each type of service it monitors.

ID Watchdog Terms of Service

Identity Fraud

One of  Identity Fraud’s  standout features is price. It has the second-lowest entry-level price of any of the services we explored. The company also offers a business cybercrime protection service called  BizLock . Those two facts alone make it the best identity theft protection for some.

Identity Fraud’s personal service is $100 a year, with a bump to $160 a year for credit reporting and monitoring. Like all our other identity theft prevention contenders,  Identity Fraud  offers $1 million in fraud insurance (except for those in New York state, where the limit is $25,000 in coverage), with a $0 deductible. And we like that Identity Fraud’s  insurance benefits are clear and easy to find .

The company does provide a credit score, but it’s limited to data from TransUnion, one of the three credit-reporting agencies. The company will send you a monthly “no news is good news” email if your identity has had a quiet month. It also offers lost wallet services, along with identity resolution and prevention assistance.

Identity Fraud Terms of Service

PrivacyGuard

PrivacyGuard  offers a 14-day trial program, but instead of it being free, you have to pay a buck. So while you can still see if you like the program, the company loses all the friction-reducing benefits of trial-to-live conversions by requiring users to jump through that dollar hoop at the beginning of the relationship. Go figure.

Beyond the slightly shoot-themselves-in-the-foot trial program, PrivacyGuard provides many of the usual credit and identity protection services offered by its competitors. It offers daily credit monitoring, a key value in protecting a person’s identity against identity thieves, and a frequency level sorely lacking among many of the company’s competitors.

PrivacyGuard ‘s base $10-per-month program does record scans. A $20-a-month program does credit scans. A $25-per-month program does both. Like most other vendors, Privacy Guard offers a $1 million policy. Prior to signing up, the company provides some information about the policy’s benefits and limitations, but not enough for it to be useful for making a purchasing decision.

PrivacyGuard updates credit scores monthly and monitors public records and Social Security numbers. It also offers a yearly public records report, which provides all of the public records information that it’s found in one clear document.

PrivacyGuard offers a trial version.

PrivacyGuard Terms of Service

McAfee Identity Theft Protection Standard

McAfee’s identity theft protection service  is the least expensive we’ve seen for a year of coverage. You can get a full year of basic coverage for $50 as introductory pricing for new customers, and it includes antivirus protection. This is substantially less expensive than the other players we’ve discussed here.

It offers a slick “cyber monitoring” service that constantly scans for credit activity and alerts you if something unusual happens. The company does monitor your Experian credit file but doesn’t connect to either TransUnion or Equifax.

Like most other vendors, it offers to reimburse up to $1 million for identity recovery (unless you’re in New York state), and its recovery service will also return up to $10,000 in stolen funds. As an added benefit, if you lose your wallet, the company will do its best to reissue “a variety of contents from IDs and credit cards to concert tickets.”

McAfee is probably best known as an antivirus company founded by its  very  eccentric eponymous founder, John McAfee. In 2011, Intel bought the company and renamed it Intel Security Group but by 2017, McAfee (now known as McAfee LLC) was back out on its own, having been spun out to TPG Capital (although Intel still owns a minority stake).

We’re telling you all this because the company’s DNA is very clearly antivirus. A presales call to the company asking about its identity theft program first resulted in complete confusion about how many devices we wanted antivirus installed on, and then, once transferred to the “identity theft department,” culminated in our editor attempting to explain to the rep what credit reporting agencies did and why you’d care about them.

That doesn’t mean the product itself is bad. Fortunately, just about all of this service is automated and there’s never been any question about McAfee’s software chops. If its automated systems see odd behavior for one of your tracked accounts, those alerts may be your first and best protection when you need to secure your credit.

The company actually offers four tiers of identity protection service. Its Premium plan is the aforementioned $40 for the first year.

McAfee Terms of Service

Ah,  Equifax . If you already have an ID monitoring service, it may well be because of this company, which is the poster child for bad security. One of the big three credit reporting agencies, Equifax had no less than  five major   data breaches  in 2017, affecting nearly every American who has a credit history. In the months that followed, we learned that things  may have somehow even been worse  than originally known.

And the company’s ham-fisted response to each data breach made matters worse: At one point, the company was  directing users to a fake help site” target=”_blank . And the site it set up to provide free credit account monitoring after the data breach was originally  also vulnerable to hackers .

Heads rolled,  executives left , and the  company’s reputation is in tatters . And yet, thanks to a tepid response from the federal government, it’s unclear if anything has really changed. Equifax remains one of three major companies -- Experian and TransUnion being the other two -- that pass judgment on whether we’re all credit-worthy. 

For better or worse, many people took advantage of Equifax’s offer of a free year’s membership to TrustedID, its commercial identity theft service. But that offer -- originally available to anyone with a Social Security number -- has ended. (It required that you register by Jan. 31, 2018.)

The service provides a copy of your  Equifax  credit report, a lock on your Equifax data by third parties (with some exceptions), credit monitoring from all three credit bureaus, monitoring of your SSN on what Equifax calls “suspicious” websites and a very limited $1 million identity theft insurance policy.

We understand if you took advantage of the offer while it was free. That said, we just can’t recommend doing business with a company that has demonstrated such contempt for security protocols -- let alone customers. Any of the alternative protection services listed above would be a better option. 

The base prices of each service are presented below, from lowest to highest. Note that the more expensive ones almost always offer additional perks, such as more frequent credit reports from credit bureaus. 

ID monitoring yearly pricing

These are some key things to keep in mind about the best identity theft protection and ID monitoring services.

Early detection is key . If you’re signing up for one of these protection services, it’s less about preventing the initial breach and saving you from being a victim of identity theft -- that’s somewhat out of your hands, unfortunately. Instead, the best identity theft protection is about getting a heads-up as soon as possible on suspicious activity to prevent you from needing to do a credit freeze or more to stop an identity thief. Whether your credit card has charges on it you never incurred, or you suddenly discover that loan collectors are trying to collect amounts you never borrowed, thanks to thieves halfway across the country -- or thieves halfway around the world -- who opened a credit card or applied for a loan in your name, seeing the suspicious activity early on is the name of the game. The scary fact is that these breaches can cost you a lot of money and identity theft monitoring can alert you to a problem before it becomes too big to handle.

Knowing how your personal information is being used is a big step to keeping yourself safe . There are identity theft protection companies that can help you monitor your personal information, get notified if your accounts and personal information are being misused by thieves and if you should get a credit freeze, and even get you reimbursement after the fact.

None of these protection services will monitor your actual banking activity . I have  long recommended a way to protect yourself from becoming a victim of most banking fraud , which is to examine all your accounts once a week. It’s a bit of a pain, but just in my family, we’ve found numerous fraudulent activities and charges over the years. By doing this practice regularly, we’ve saved thousands of dollars.  Consumer Reports recommends  you do all your own monitoring, too. 

That said, if you’re not the type of person who is willing or able to take the time to do the constant due diligence necessary to protect your identity, some of these protection services can help. 

Read the fine print . Finally, because each of these protection services offers vastly different terms and conditions, we’ve included an easy link to each company’s terms of service. Be sure to take the time to read all of their fine print before you sign up for another monthly or yearly fee.

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