Alida CXM vs. Sawtooth Lighthouse Studio

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.

Anyone wanting to design and analyze advanced studies, particularly those that incorporate discrete choice modeling (such as MaxDiff and / or Conjoint) should be using Sawtooth Lighthouse Studio. The capabilities and flexibility offered by this platform for these choices is far beyond any other platform I am aware of. It is less appropriate where you need the survey tool to 'play well with others.' Two examples: 1) pulling in live data streams so they can be cleaned and visualized. 2) Integrating into any service where an API call is appropriate such as adding / removing people from a mailing list, incentive management tool, or qualitative community tool.

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

• Powerful programming capabilities
• Advanced analysis
• Fantastic customer and technical support
• Good documentation

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.

• They could focus on integrating API type functionality
• I would love if the data came out labeled
• I am not a fan of the 'limited' time a study can stay up. This causes issues with longitudinal studies.

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.

It is incredibly powerful, very rhobust and has fantastic support. The only reasons I'm not giving it a higher rating are 1) There is a very steep learning curve when it comes to designing more complex studies. 2) It is difficult to get Sawtooth Lighthouse Studio to 'talk' to other systems as the Perl upon which it is built is not really designed to work with API calls, etc.

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

I cannot explain how great the support team is. They are prompt and very thorough in their responses.

Incentivized

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

While QuestioPro has the capability to build surveys and even do some advanced analysis, it is less powerful (and less intuitive) than Sawtooth Lighthouse Studio. It cannot handle studies with the complexity we are used to designing. The CMNTY Platform was initially sold to us as a combined Quant / Qual platform, but we found very quickly that the quant side of it is extremely limited.

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.

• Our business is survey data so we rely heavily on sawtooth
• The advanced design and analytics are incredibly useful
• Negative - I wish it would work natively with API calls

Incentivized