Alida CXM vs. Pollfish

From my experience, I believe that Vision Critical offers the best software to manage an insights community. They are great to work with, and my opinion has only improved over time. However, that doesn't mean it is the best survey software overall. If someone simply needs to program and distribute surveys, this may or may not be the right solution. There are some other really great survey tools on the market that are competitively priced and offer very intuitive interfaces (like Qualtrics). If you are going to recruit people to answer surveys or provide feedback on an ongoing basis (re-contacting and engaging with the same people repeatedly), though, Vision Critical would be my #1 recommendation.

Despite its minor shortcomings, PollFish is still very good for startups that need to gauge their product idea's potential acceptance and customer demand, and also very useful for fine-tuning their branding, messaging, product features, and even pricing. This is so much better than traditional polling and surveying, which were more expensive and much slower in the past.

Incentivized

• The team is helpful in creating complicated survey logic
• The team is accommodating in creating interfaces that suit our desired look
• The team keeps in regular contact in order to effectively manage our requests and goals

• Obtain people's opinions on a specific topic, both quantitatively and qualitatively, as it has option for open answers.
• Being able to segment my audience not only by country and state, but also by city and even socioeconomic level (something that is particularly difficult outside of the United States).
• Be able to insert videos in order to make quick creativity tests.
• Obtain quick results. Most of the times in only one day, even with specific segmentations.

Incentivized

• The functionality when creating a new questionnaire is rather clunky, particularly when there are a few conditional factors in the logical flow; being able to see those factors and how they apply with some sort of other logical layout would really help when creating a longer survey.
• There are quite a few steps that aren't intuitive when launching a survey, for instance all the various dates (launch date, reserve date, survey date, etc etc etc). If there were a description field if you hovered above labeled areas of sections that explained what this field was for that would really help
• It doesn't help either that the entire site is grey; it's a cold environment to be in for a long time, and the simple design makes it seem more clunky than it probably really is.

• The survey editor UI can be quite annoying. The way it scrolls back up to the top of the page whenever I click on a question to edit it makes it so that the page is constantly moving.
• Oftentimes I get an "oops an error occurred" message but it never actually explains what is going wrong.
• Customer support can sometimes take a long time to respond making it challenging when faced with a platform question or capability I am not familiar with.

Incentivized

Vision Critical often requires you to dump the data to a statistical program. I hate that step. You waste time, and improve the chance of data being lost, or changed.

I think there is a ton of room to improve, in things as simple as aesthetics and other areas of logical flow when it comes to creating and then launching a survey, as well as providing descriptors for what each field is referencing. For instance, there are like 5 date fields to be filled out, but no button near them that says "this date will determine _________" and I am not about to go back into the training module, which was confusing enough to FIND, let alone work through to find just ONE answer.

For what it is and what it offers, I think it is very user friendly, intuitive and reactive. As long as you don't treat it as a powerful full service research tool and look at it more as the scrappy DIY option, it will actually exceed expectations.

Incentivized

Absolutely fantastic support team. Willing to help you online through vast collection of how-to guides and resources, online via chatbox, or over the phone. Even though we were in different time zones, they were always available. Very helpful and knowledgeable

Vision Critical is more appealing visually but no where near as complex or robust. Vision Critical is also much more expensive though.

Pollfish is the most cost effective and the quickest survey platform. However there are questions when it comes to the actual reliability of the results that are retrieved from Pollfish surveys. However, its speed makes it tough to use other platforms, even at a potential sacrifice of the quality of data.

Incentivized

• Our use of Vision Critical's software has allowed us to dramatically increase the amount of research that we do, at a much lower cost. Since there is no incremental cost for each survey we field, we can ask many questions we wouldn't have been able to otherwise.
• Our use of an insights community has also sped up the research process, allowing us to write, program, field and report on a survey within only a few days.
• Because of the two advantages listed above, we have been able to listen closer to our customers' opinions.

• Drives a lot of traffic to our website when consumer insights pieces are put out
• Had one customer request a meeting based on seeing our consumer data leading to a $100,000+ close on an opportunity
• Drives our strategy for certain areas of our product development

Incentivized