What are the best market research tools in 2025?
By Laura Ojeda Melchor●7 min. read●Jul 25, 2025
TL;DR: The best market research tools depend on your use case. In general, Qualtrics, Forstra, and BrandMentions are ideal for XM; Typeform, SurveyMonkey, and Tremendous are best for surveys and payouts; and Statista, Dovetail, Think with Google, and Nielsen IQ are perfect for insights and trends. Up-and-coming AI tools for market research include Quantilope, Brandwatch, and Perplexity AI.
Market research tools help businesses keep a finger on the pulse of consumer trends. They help you keep an eye on the competition so you can stay ahead. They even help you compensate customers who share their insights with you.
With hundreds of options on the market, how do you choose the right one for your business? It all comes down to your research goals and operational needs.
This article digs into 13 leading market research tools to try in 2025.
Top market research tools by category
| Category | Tools | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Experience management (XM) | Qualtrics, Forsta, BrandMentions | XM across customer, employee, brand, and product experiences Real-time sentiment tracking |
| Surveys | Typeform, SurveyMonkey, Tremendous | Creating custom surveys Targeting respondents Survey incentives |
| Insights and trends | Statista, Dovetail, Think with Google, NielsenIQ | Market data, consumer behavior Qualitative research Retail trend analysis |
| AI-driven tools | Quantilope, Brandwatch, Perplexity AI | Automated research design AI-generated insights Social listening Real-time synthesis |
Market research experience management (XM) tools
The goal of XM is to carefully measure and improve how people interact with an organization across every touchpoint. XM has many subsets, including:
User experience (UX): Focuses on user interactions with your digital products.
Employee experience (EX): Measures employee work-life and satisfaction levels.
Brand experience (BX): Studies customers’ broader perception of your brand.
Customer experience (CX): Explores each customer’s journey with your company.
Product experience (PX): Analyzes the use and value of each product in your stack or catalog.
Most of the market research tools in the XM category offer capabilities that reach into some or all of the other categories above.
1. Qualtrics
Qualtrics is a must-have market research tool for XM in 2025. If you don’t use it already, you’ve probably heard of it before. At its core, Qualtrics is a software platform designed to help you with every facet of experience management (XM).
The company divides its tools into three distinct XM categories:
XM for Customer Experience: These software tools spot issues (like negative reviews) fast, helping your frontline team respond in real time. The goal is to drive improvements across your processes, products, and digital platforms.
XM for People Experience: Software that helps you manage the employee experience within your organization.
XM for Strategy & Research: Of all of Qualtrics’ tools, this one is a must for market researchers. You get three core customer research tools to help you collect and interpret quantitative and qualitative research.
With Qualtrics’ market research tools, you can learn about who your customers are, what they like and dislike, and how to deliver the most valuable products for them.
Qualtrics doesn’t publish its pricing plans online. You can explore different plans and request pricing for this customer research tool on the Qualtrics XM Platform pricing page.
2. Forsta
Forsta is a human experience (HX) and research platform with tools for gathering, analyzing, and acting on customer insights. Forsta helps companies design surveys, collect data, and organize information into tidy snapshots.
The market research tool bills itself as the ultimate human experience platform, and the software lives up to this name. With Forsta, research teams can:
Gather data with survey software, social listening tools, and online focus groups
Analyze data with a centralized data hub, text analytics software, and voice sentiment analysis
Visualize both qualitative and quantitative data with storytelling, effective reporting, and benchmarking.
Act on your insights with workflows, alerts, and a project management organizer
Forsta integrates with familiar tools like Salesforce, Adobe Analytics, Google Translate, and Zendesk.
3. BrandMentions
BrandMentions is a market research tool for social listening, keeping tabs on your brand’s reputation across the web and social media platforms. It constantly scans blogs, news sites, social media platforms, and forums for brand mentions. You can also set it to include mentions of your competitors or relevant industry topics.
This information can help you understand where your brand excels and where it falls short. If people aren't talking about your brand at all, you can use that knowledge to inform your brand marketing strategy.
This BX-focused market research tool includes features like:
Social mentions: Track keywords and hashtags on forums, sites, blogs, newsrooms, review aggregators, and 10+ leading social media sites.
Sentiment analysis: Use AI to get a quick feel for the sentiment behind a mention.
Real-time updates: Get email alerts anytime your brand is mentioned.
Data organization: View data and analytics for your brand, and organize it according to different customer segments.
Reports: Get customizable, white-labeled reports based on BrandMention’s findings.
The basic plan gives you tracking for 15 keywords and 5,000 mentions a month, with daily updates, one month of historical data, and basic sentiment analysis. This plan costs $79 a month, billed yearly.
For 30 keywords, 30,000 mentions, real-time updates, six months of historical data, and advanced sentiment analysis, you’ll pay $249 a month, billed yearly.
Market research survey tools
Survey tools allow you to create custom screener surveys and full surveys, easily send them to participants, and analyze the results.
Surveys can tell you so much about what your customers are thinking and feeling. You can use the insights you collect to make your products and services offer exactly what your audience wants.
Here are the best market research tools for surveying and incentivizing your target audiences.
4. Typeform
Typeform is an online platform that brings a fresh twist to forms and surveys. Since its debut in 2012, it's been turning basic questionnaires into engaging conversations.
With Typeform, you can fully customize the surveys and forms you send to participants. Using brand kits, it’s easy to add custom branding to your forms for an ultra-professional look. You can even add videos and GIFs to make your surveys extra engaging.
Typeform offers a mix of templates — everything from recruitment application forms and branding questionnaires to order forms and satisfaction surveys. A few particularly handy templates include:
Lead generation form template: Ask potential customers questions to gauge their interest in your product or service.
Market research survey template: Learn more about your customers’ demographics, behaviors, and preferences by asking them specific questions.
Product research survey template: Gather direct feedback about what products or services your customers want to see from you.
Competitor research survey template: Find out what your customers love about your competitors so you can do those things even better.
Market segmentation survey template: Explore consumers’ behavioral, geographic, demographic, and psychographic traits for easy customer profiling.
These are just five of Typeform’s helpful market research surveys. The platform has a limited free plan, but paid plans are affordable, too. They start at $25 USD a month, billed yearly.
But if you want to whitelabel your surveys with your own branding, you’ll need to pay for the Plus plan, which starts at $50 a month. You’ll get 1,000 survey responses with this plan.
If you need to allow more than five users on your Typeform plan, want to gather more than 10,000 responses a month, or need HIPAA or GDPR-compliant forms, you can connect with a sales rep to explore Typeform’s enterprise plans.
5. SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey simplifies the process of creating, sending, and analyzing surveys. This user-friendly market research tool allows you to whip up custom surveys in minutes, or use SurveyMonkey's vast library of existing templates and customize them for your needs.
What sets SurveyMonkey apart as one of the top market research tools is its flexibility. You can mix and match different question types like multiple-choice, rating scales, and open-ended responses in a single survey. The platform also offers features like skip logic to keep your surveys streamlined and relevant.
Some standout features SurveyMonkey offers market researchers:
SurveyMonkey audience: Create a custom group of SurveyMonkey-provided respondents based on different audience targeting criteria or characteristics. Send the survey out and analyze the results within your dashboard.
Ad testing: Run your ad ideas past a group of trusted respondents to gain critical insights before you launch campaigns.
Concept testing: Ask potential users what they think about a concept for a new product, service, or feature.
Usage and attitudes: Find out who’s using your product, when they use it, and how you can make it even better.
Price optimization: Use the Van Westendorp price sensitivity methodology to find out how much customers are willing to pay for your products.
SurveyMonkey has come a long way from its humble beginnings as a simple feedback collection tool. The platform has evolved with the market, and it now offers AI-powered insights and enterprise-level tools along with its core survey features.
Each pricing plan comes with distinct features. With a Team Advantage membership, which starts at $30 per user per month, you and your team get a survey dashboard where you can comment and collaborate on surveys throughout the market research process. You also get custom branding, over 50,000 survey responses per month, and advanced analytics.
6. Tremendous
Compensating research participants for their time is a critical piece of the operational puzzle. With Tremendous, you can send incentives to survey and panel participants almost anywhere in the world for free.
Targeting global audiences? Tremendous handles everything from currency conversion rates to language translation automatically so you can focus on recruitment and analysis.
You don’t even need to know where your participants are. Tremendous automatically geolocates recipients based on IP address to ensure they receive locally relevant incentives in the appropriate currency.
Our research incentive platform includes:
Over 2,000 payout options: Send monetary transfers, prepaid Visa cards, and gift cards to recipients in over 200 countries. Give your recipients the gift of choice, and let them decide how they want to use their payout.
Fraud prevention: Tremendous’s fraud prevention tool leverages AI and customizable fraud controls to block scammers from infiltrating your research study.
Integrations: Send incentives through tools you already use like Qualtrics and Typeform, or use Zapier integrations to send through 5,000+ other apps.
Global reach: Send incentives to participants in over 200 countries, and the platform handles language and currency conversion details for you at no added cost.
Market research insight and trend tools
Doing effective market research means staying up-to-date on everything that’s happening in your field. Today, that means knowing what’s changing not just year by year, but minute by minute.
Insight and trend tools can help your research team stay informed about what’s going on in your target markets and industries 24/7. These leading tools can help you understand the latest trends, developments, and insights to inform your business decisions.
7. Statista
Statista is a leading statistics portal that provides comprehensive data on over 80,000 topics from more than 22,500 sources. It's helpful for any teams that need reliable, up-to-date information on a wide range of topics. Statista is especially popular in the research, business, and academic sectors.
Market researchers can use Statista's intuitive platform to access market data, consumer data, company data, and societal trends. With the platform, you can:
Browse statistics: Statista offers stats on everything, from the worldwide adoption rate of cloud technologies to the current biggest growth regions for e-commerce. With a basic account, you can access some stats for free. It’s a great launching point for getting to know your customers on a broad, quantitative level.
Buy existing reports: Need to know how Reddit makes money so you can replicate its success for your own software product, or get a deep-dive on the US wine market so your new vineyard can get ahead? Statista has thousands of detailed reports available for purchase.
Get comprehensive insights: Statista offers a 360-degree view of four different insight types: market, consumer, company, and e-commerce. See brand KPIs, global survey data, and in-depth surveys for different audience groups.
Conduct original research: Outsource your biggest market research tasks with Statista Q. The full-service market research service can run surveys, interviews, and focus groups on your behalf — and slice and dice the data for you.
Field quick questions. Want quick answers to custom questions? Send a research request to AskStatista and get micro-study results within two days.
A plan for browsing over one million statistics starts at $199 a month, billed annually. Some individual reports are free, while others cost between $495 to $995 to download.
AskStatista packages begin at $6,500 and go up to $17,500 and beyond. For enterprise-level services, you’ll want to talk to a Statista sales rep.
8. Dovetail
Dovetail is a user research and analysis software that helps teams store, sort, and analyze qualitative data.
Market researchers can upload various data types into Dovetail such as interview transcripts, survey responses, and user testing observations. Dovetail's powerful text analytics tools can then identify and organize the insights for you. The platform supports collaborative tagging and note-taking, making it easy to work together with your team.
In a world teeming with data, the market research tool is a lifesaver. It intakes a huge amount of information, digests it, and presents it to you in a tidy, easy-to-work-with format.
Dovetail can:
Collect all your customer data and store it in one single, searchable database
Generate AI-driven summaries of different data points and reviews
Read dense, complicated documents like white papers, industry reports, and customer call transcripts, and summarize the data for you
Highlight key themes within the summaries
Integrate with tools like Notion, Slack, and Trello so you can collaborate with your team in real-time
Show data in charts, graphs, and other easily digestible formats
Dovetail has a free plan that comes with one project and channel. For $29 a month billed yearly, you get unlimited projects, channels, and viewers.
9. Think with Google
Think with Google is a digital resource that offers data and insights to help marketers make informed decisions. The free market research tool provides information on everything from consumer trends to industry benchmarks. You can find articles, case studies, and infographics that explore digital marketing.
A few favorite Think with Google resources:
Consumer insights: Articles and videos that highlight the most recent trends as they pertain to consumers. Example articles include: Lean into AI to engage and convert customers across the funnel and Connect with customers throughout their increasingly complex journeys.
Marketing strategies and innovations: Articles and videos that highlight the newest advances in marketing. Example videos include Meeting the AI moment with action and change and How the New York Times delivers better ad experiences.
In-depth reading: Collections of articles, guides, and videos that provide a deep view into a specific topic. Example collections include Marketing on YouTube and Inclusive Marketing.
Tools: Free customer research tools that help you understand your consumers better. Tools include the Insights Finder, Google Trends, and Marketfinder.
Together, these resources from Think with Google help you stay on top of a rapidly evolving marketplace — for free.
10. NielsenIQ
A spinoff from the well-known Nielsen company, NielsenIQ is a powerhouse for understanding consumer behaviors.
As a consumer research tool, it digs deep into what people buy and where they shop, with a special focus on the retail and consumer goods sectors.
Using a blend of retail scanner data, consumer feedback, and e-commerce trends, NielsenIQ captures a wide swath of information. This data is then enriched with advanced analytics, AI, and machine learning to give a clear picture of market trends and buying patterns. It can also tell brands how they stack up against the competition.
NielsenIQ is a must-have for market researchers. It helps you grasp what drives consumer choices and spot emerging market shifts as they’re happening. This means you can create products and marketing strategies that click with your target audience.
NielsenIQ’s market research tools help with:
Assortment and merchandising: Use data-informed store planning tools to place products in the most profitable locations on brick-and-mortar shelves.
Market performance measurement: Gather and analyze real-time data from your e-commerce and physical locations to see how well your store is performing.
Consumer and shopper insights: Learn who your customers are, what they buy, and which factors affect their buying decisions.
Marketing, media, and personalized offers: Use analytics and AI tools to connect customers with the right marketing campaigns, products, and offers.
Small and mid-size businesses can also benefit from NielsenIQ’s Byzzer tool. This market research tool delivers custom reports to help businesses gain ground in their industry.
As an enterprise-level solution, NielsenIQ requires a demo to explore pricing, but your first three Byzzer reports are free.
Market research AI tools
New AI tools are cropping up every day to help drive efficiency. In market research, it’s time to embrace it. Here are a few top AI-powered tools for market research in 2025.
11. Quantilope
Quantilope is an AI tool that offers advanced quantitative market research tools for businesses. Established in 2014, Quantilope isn’t the newest tool around, but its platform continues to stay ahead of the AI and machine learning curve.
Its features support key research methodologies, including:
MaxDiff (Maximum Difference Scaling): Ranks features or messages by asking respondents to choose the most and least important options.
TURF (Total Unduplicated Reach and Frequency): Identifies the best combination of options to reach the largest audience, without duplications.
Conjoint analysis: Supports a choice-based strategy to reveal which product features and price combinations perform best.
Van Westendorp pricing model: Determines most acceptable and profitable price range based on how consumers perceive a product or service.
Gabor-Granger pricing model: Measures consumer willingness to pay by testing their responses to different price points.
Best of all, Quantilope automates just about everything. Its AI assistant Quinn helps you create surveys, craft optimal question phrasing, and generate visual insights. You also get real-time dashboards with interactive, customizable charts, and built-in statistics.
You also get access to 300 million+ panelists from around the world to help you do any type of market research you can dream up.
Quantilope doesn’t publish pricing online, so you’ll have to schedule a demo to explore costs.
12. Brandwatch
Need a smarter way to listen to consumer discussions about your brand across social media platforms? Brandwatch is the customer research tool for you. While Brandwatch isn’t new, its acquisition by Cision in 2021 and investment in AI and machine learning capabilities makes it an ideal pick.
Here’s what you get with Brandwatch:
Advanced consumer intelligence: Monitors 500M+ new public posts daily (from 100M+ sources) and stores 1.7T of historical conversations reaching back to 2010. Offers multi-language sentiment analysis, smart AI alerts, and crisis monitoring across forums like Reddit, social media platforms, and review sites.
AI-powered insight: Uses generative AI and GPT integration for conversation and research summaries, topic detection, alerting, and content recommendations.
Explore tool: Offers advanced filtering, 25 dynamic visualizations, and powerful boolean search that's easy to use.
Social media management tools: Includes modules like Publish, Advertise, Listen, Engage, Benchmark, Audience, Measure, and Influence for end-to-end social operations.
Vizia dashboards: Provides real-time, automated cross-channel reports you can share via email, Chrome extension, and large-screen displays.
If you need a way to monitor brand experience and customer experience, Brandwatch offers three different plan tiers to explore.
13. Perplexity
Founded in 2022, Perplexity is an AI-powered market research assistant. The tool combines large language models (LLMs) with real-time web search to gather and deliver trustworthy insights in seconds.
Here are some of the features that make Perplexity one of the best market research tools in 2025:
Library: Perplexity offers an easy way to organize all your searches with its easy-to-use Library.
Deep Research mode: Summarizes findings across hundreds of sources in minutes so creating briefs, scanning trends, and gathering competitive intel is faster than ever.
Multi-model access: Increases the power of Perplexity with access to ChatGPT, Claude, and other top LLMs in the Pro plan.
Enterprise Pro features: Harness Perplexity's powerful AI on your team's internal data with search, collaboration, and custom workflow tools.
Sonar API & Comet tools. Bring AI research directly into your apps, workflows, and browsers.
Perplexity is one of the most affordable market research tools out there. Basic research is free. For $20 a month, you get extra citations, access to Perplexity Labs, unlimited file uploads, and unlimited access to Perplexity Research. Enterprise-grade tools are $200 a month.
