Dovetail Reviews and Ratings

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Dovetail as our primary repository for our research artifacts, which include recorded video and written documents. Dovetail addresses our need to access a large library of research insights across several products in my organization. Dovetail also addresses the need for researchers to have a central place of storage for unstructured data such as video files from interviews, and easy transcription of these files.

Likelihood to Recommend

DT is the best repository service I have used for a team that supports a diverse array of products with research. It is great when you have multiple categories of products but also of research types. For use cases of research teams with very simple needs (i.e. 1 product supported, <20 reports a year) they could probably just use existing free tools in their org, such as sharepoint.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Dovetail to both analyze and parse through our user testing results and also as a research repository. We have to handwrite our notes and so we transcribe the items, then tag them by topic (we create for our team), group them by type (usually starting with the AI then manually updating and refining), then create insights. The insights AI feature is an ok start but doesn't work as well on our data set because of the handwritten notes. We use that as reference but then make our own. The AI ones are usually too general. We do things like Task completion rate and likert scales outside of Dovetail (in Excel) and create the final report in word. There is not enough functionality in Dovetail for either of those use cases and when working with a teammate it tends to freeze.

Likelihood to Recommend

See 1st question answer for my use case, I went into depth there for the specific use cases we have.

For less appropriate (touched on this earlier) the final report is not great in dovetail. The formatting options are not great and does not look professional because of the lack of customization and layouts. For my customer we wouldn't be able to present that data as it's constructed. So we have to copy and paste all the quotes and insights to a word doc. That's ok but then it means if we want to use Dovetail as a repository of data we have to then re-import a pdf of the report into the project page.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As a UX Research Program Manager supporting a small team in a large tech company, I’ve found Dovetail to be an indispensable tool for housing our research repository. It has transformed the way we organize, store, and share insights. One standout feature is the ability for stakeholders to ask questions and interact with research documents using AI. They no longer need to comb through lengthy studies to get the insights they need. Dovetail has increased the visibility of UX research across our org. Product managers, designers, and other stakeholders can now quickly self-serve insights, which reduces bottlenecks for researchers and speeds up decision-making. It has become our single source of truth for customer insights.

Likelihood to Recommend

There's always a little room for improvement, but Dovetail does most things right! It is a researcher's playground for running studies, analyzing, and producing social reports and outputs. Dovetail is an ideal platform for our research repository/library. The tagging and categorization are done with ease, and options are only limited to how big you can think. Dovetail is currently not a tool for running surveys or moderating interviews, but it stands alone and strongly as supporting all of the tasks that may precede and follow.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Dovetail more than ever now to share valuable user research insights and organize our user research along with market research in one central place. I love the transcripts and often find them more accurate than other tools I've used. The ability to highlight, tag, quickly create demo reels, and share each of them so easily has greatly improved my team's workflow. I love being able to add comments on videos and tag teammates and stakeholders who would be interested in the insight, especially for relevant projects. We operate in a fast-paced environment, so tools like this are essential not only to speed up our workflow but also to maintain order. Without them, we would lose track of important data, making it less convenient for the team to access and we'd be much less efficient and doing research analysis reports.

Likelihood to Recommend

Dovetail works well if you have research to organize and want a single place you can hold it all, while making it super easy for team members, especially across marketing, to access. This has made our lives so much easier, and we no longer have to hunt and dig through so many files. If you also want structure across the board, especially with multiple research teams, Dovetail excels at that. At the moment, it would be less appropriate if you want it to actually conduct the research, as it holds it, but doesn't offer capabilities to run the research, which would be nice and make them unstoppable in my opinion.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it for 2 main reasons: - First, gathering our rights in the same place, with a big company, we always struggle to have it stored in one place. With numerous teams conducting qualitative and quantitative research, we utilize it extensively as researchers to analyze our interviews or surveys. The AI features really help, specifically the Chatbot to discuss with our data. We primarily use it within the design team, but hope to expand its use among our stakeholders.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you want to quickly transcribe your interview and analyse it really fast, it is the right tool. If you want to add a quantitative data report, I think it is less relevant at the moment, except if you have the authority to connect a quantitative source to Dovetail directly and use channels, but quantitative analysis within reports is not good enough. The consequence is that the AI cannot efficiently mix qualitative and quantitative data to create insights.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

At PayFit, we use Dovetail as our centralized research repository to scale our user research practice across a growing design and product organization. Our goal is to ensure that user insights are easily accessible, reusable, and actionable by designers, product managers, and other stakeholders—regardless of whether they were directly involved in the research. Previously, research lived in scattered docs or wasn’t documented at all. Dovetail gives us a single source of truth that teams can trust.

Likelihood to Recommend

Dovetail has helped democratize research at PayFit. Non-researchers now feel more confident diving into user insights, and we're seeing stronger alignment around user needs across the product organization. It’s not just a tool—it’s become a shared space for empathy and learning.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Dovetail has been adopted organically across teams as the go-to space for capturing, organising, and sharing customer feedback. What started with Research team members rolling it out, has grown into our wider R&D org, enableding us to effectively democratise the ability to deliver to high-quality research.

Business Problems It Solves

Teams can access insights easily resulting in higher impact on product and customer.

Customer feedback used to live in disconnected places — documents, Slack threads, private notes. Dovetail allows us to bring those insights together in one structured, searchable place.

Missed patterns and duplication with organic, decentralised research happening, it was easy to lose track of what others had learned. Dovetail helps surface what’s already known and lets us build on existing insight instead of starting from scratch.

Increasingly, it’s becoming a shared memory of customer insights, helping us make better, faster decisions grounded in real experiences.

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited: Sharing Insight With Leadership: Product wants to justify investment in a new workflow automation feature. Dovetail helps: Highlight reels from user calls, tagged evidence, and a quick insight summary can be dropped straight into a slide deck. The “show, don’t tell” effect of hearing customers firsthand is much more persuasive.

Less suited: Quantitative Feedback at Scale: The marketing team runs a survey with 5,000 responses.

Limitation: Dovetail isn’t ideal for analysing or charting large-scale quant data — you’d want a tool like Qualtrics, Google Sheets, or Excel first, and then only pull in rich open-text responses into Dovetail if they need thematic analysis.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have used Dovetail in our organization primarily for analysis, synthesis and sharing of qualitative research and as a research repository to make insights accessible to individuals across the organization. This addresses the business problem of enhancing our workflows related to generating company intelligence and providing access to all employees of the business.

Likelihood to Recommend

Dovetail is an effective tool for processing low volume / high content data like interviews, as it has a usable and effective flow for interview tagging and can support different approaches to synthesis and insight development. As well, the insights look great and are inviting to viewers. However, Dovetail's AI doesn't work as well as its competitors and its ability to process high volume / low content information (like customer feedback) is limited.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Dovetail as our single source of truth for all product discovery and research artefacts

Likelihood to Recommend

It is the best research repository tool I’ve come across so far but unfortunately that does not make it good.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Dovetail has helped our team not only scale research, but share key insights across orgs. Design has been the leader in driving research and now has a mechanism to not only share insights, but influence by showing reels so stakeholders can hear feedback straight from the mouth of the customer.

Likelihood to Recommend

Dovetail has really helped me personally with leadership reviews. We can waste time by spinning wheels debating and arguing about hypothesis. Now I have a few clips from customers ready to play to combat potential derailers and I'm able to keep us on track. Dovetail's shortcoming is that it has a couple barriers to entry which has sometimes made it difficult to get x-org adoption and usage.