Nowadays, there are so many tools on the market, it can be hard to know what is best to use for your needs.

Below is a guide on user feedback tools. The pros, and the cons. When to use them, and when to look for something else.

Manual User Interviews

The ultimate way to collect user feedback.

In-person user interviews are the best way of uncovering what your users actually think about your product.

Until recently, it has been hard to get that same level of fidelity at scale across 100s or even 1000s of users.

Pros: Lots of rich feedback, can ask follow-ups, can do product walkthroughs.

Cons: Hard to scale, time-consuming.

Traditional Forms

Tools like Google Forms (free), Typeform, and Airtable allow you to create custom forms to collect quantitative and qualitative data from your users.

These tools are perfect when you want to collect large volume quantitative data (e.g. 'how likely are you are to recommend X?', 'where did you find out about?' [with a list of options]). However, they often fall short with qualitative data (e.g. 'what did you think of our latest release?', 'why did you download our app?') because they are static and don't allow for realtime follow-up conversations with the user.

Pros: Easy to scale, can be relatively cheap.

Cons: Static, often hard to get quality responses, requires proper survey construction.

Chat Apps

Tools like Slack, Telegram, and Discord are a great way to build a real user community where you can collect feedback on an ongoing basis.

The challenge with scaling this channel becomes moderation and building a healthy community. This is easy with a select handful of early adopters, but much harder with 1000s of general users.

Pros: Great way to build community, allows for back-and-forth conversations over time.

Cons: Hard to scale, requires constant moderation, quality can deteriorate over time.

Feedback Forum Tools

Tools like Canny.io and Circle.so allow businesses to create community forums, where users can submit feedback to a feedback submission board. Often with features such as upvoting, downvoting, and commenting.

These tools can be seen as 'having a bespoke subreddit for my business, that I fully control'.

These tools can be good ways to collect feedback from early adopters or power users, for similar reasons to chat applications where you foster a community. But then can fall short when you want to collect user feedback across your entire userbase.

Pros: Often results in better quality submissions than basic survey tools, can help foster a community, can validate across many users.

Cons: Often biased towards power users, can be affected by confirmation bias (of existing submissions), requires constant moderation, hard to ask follow-ups and dive deeper with users.

Feedchat

Feedchat is the AI-powered user feedback tool that is designed to help businesses of all sizes collect better user feedback.

How Feedchat works:

1. Set up your Feedchat in ~60 seconds

2. Share your link with users (e.g. in emails, embedded in your app)

3. Users can share their thoughts

4. Feedchat AI asks follow-up questions in realtime, ensuring deeper insights and collecting better quality responses

5. You can view insights and summaries in your Feedchat dashboard

Businesses in a variety of industries, from B2C & B2B Software to retail businesses, use Feedchat to collect better user feedback. This feedback can be used to help refine roadmaps, reduce customer churn, prioritize bugs, and unlock more growth opportunities for businesses.

Feedchat offers flexible monthly plans, with a 7-day free trial to explore Feedchat risk-free, with plans starting from $99 per month.

Pros: Easy to set up and to start collecting better feedback, all feedback is automatically summarized, the dashboard includes helpful export & tagging features, the tool is tailored to your business.

Cons: Costs more than basic tools (though we think it's worth it!)

Our Verdict

The ultimate user feedback will always be direct one-on-one user interviews. But this is hard to scale.

Once you need more feedback from your wider userbase, traditional tools break down. They encourage basic, rushed, or incomplete submissions.

Feedchat changes this. It is designed to collect the best user feedback possible, helping unlock real insights you can use.

You can set up Feedchat for your business in less than 60 seconds. Try risk-free with our 7-day free trial. You can get started at dash.feedchat.io

Teams that take user feedback seriously and invest in the best feedback tools are often able to avoid costly mistakes.