Condens and Dovetail are both tools for qualitative data analysis and building a research repository. If you are looking for an easy-to-use Dovetail alternative or are simply comparing the two tools we put together some information to help you choose the best fit for your organization.
The top 6 reasons why researchers choose Condens vs. Dovetail
1. Build findings on the go
As you analyze data in Condens you have the sidebar available on every page. Here, you can note early findings and connect evidence across sessions without having to switch screens. Simply connect the dots in a visual way and build your report on the go with drag & drop.
„With the split screen you can tag raw data and immediately connect it to findings. It makes things super quick.”
Merche Gómez Sánchez
UX Designer at ShortCut Studio
„With the split screen you can tag raw data and immediately connect it to findings. It makes things super quick.”
Merche Gómez Sánchez
UX Designer at ShortCut Studio
2. A comprehensive whiteboard
The Whiteboard in Condens goes beyond affinity mapping. Lines, emojis, images, files, and templates enable journey maps, empathy maps, SWOT analyses, and more of you favorite research exercises. In addition, Whiteboards in Condens support across-project analysis and can be used as a research result to be shared with stakeholders immediately.
3. Easy to learn - easy to use
To facilitate onboarding and daily use, Condens is designed with the minimal levels of hierarchy needed using terms and concepts people are familiar with. For example, projects follow a consistent structure:
Sessions for raw data
Highlights and Charts to make sense of evidence
Artifacts for the results
Another example: To connect data across studies you simply turn a project tag into a global tag - no big deal.
„The best thing is that Condens is usable with minimal onboarding of new users. I don’t have to spend a lot of time teaching people how to use it.”
Kayla Svoboda
UX Researcher at Freeletics
„The best thing is that Condens is usable with minimal onboarding of new users. I don’t have to spend a lot of time teaching people how to use it.”
Kayla Svoboda
UX Researcher at Freeletics
4. A Stakeholder-friendly experience
Maximize the impact of research by letting stakeholders discover research in a self-serve way. Condens’ Stakeholder Repository is a space specifically designed to let colleagues search for topics and browse research results - like a magazine curated by researchers. Since it contains findings and no raw data it helps to democratize access to research while keeping sensitive information private.
„After careful search, we picked Condens to help us democratize access to research and allow designers to look at ongoing research work as it was enveloping.”
Alya Naumova
UX Research Lead at Drop
„After careful search, we picked Condens to help us democratize access to research and allow designers to look at ongoing research work as it was enveloping.”
Alya Naumova
UX Research Lead at Drop
5. Easily analyze across projects
Condens makes it easy to connect evidence from multiple studies to see overarching themes. The sidebar is your friend as you can pin any Artifact and then pull highlights from other projects into it. This way you can also quickly analyze the data from your global tag structure, for example, to identify the main feature request or usability issues.
6. Outstanding customer support with all plans
Whether you’re a team of one or working at a large enterprise, you’ll get personal, high-quality support and training via email or video call, and access to a help center that is meticulously kept up-to-date. In fact, our Condens users are pretty vocal about their appreciation of our helpful and direct support!
The Condens team is highly responsive to bugs and feedback.
Tamara Oess
UX Researcher at Yokoy
We feel like the Condens team is always there to listen to our feedback and their support is just great and fast.
Adéla Svoboda
Senior UX Researcher at Kentico Software
Questions are answered quickly and thoroughly, we even had some ad-hoc feature changes implemented: never experienced that before!
Laurens van Lieshout
Senior Product Owner
The whole team at Condens are SO helpful! It's honestly been the best customer service I think I have ever received. They're helpful, responsive and knowledgeable.
Katie Fischer
Senior UX Strategist at The User Story
The last thing I'll mention is the excellent customer support. My questions are answered within hours and often lead to software changes. It's great to be in touch with the makers of the tool — one of the benefits of a product supported by a small team.
Brett Leber
Senior Manager UX Research at Angi
Switching from Dovetail?
You can keep all your research data as you move from Dovetail to Condens.
Let us show you how.
Honestly, we're no fans of comparing tools based on a mere feature basis. At the same time, we
understand that certain functionality & price packages may be critical to you. To provide a
clear overview, we've put together a table detailing what each tool offers and its cost.
Last updated: March, 2024
condens
Dovetail
Usage
File storage
Unlimited
Unlimited
Transcription
12h | 50h | Unlimited | Unlimited
30h | - | 100h | Unlimited
Supported Languages
85+
25+
Analysis
Splitscreen mode
✓
-
AI-assisted tagging
✓
-
Automated tagging
-
✓
Flexible tag management
✓
✓
Affinity mapping
✓
✓
Ceate media Highlights
✓
✓
Smart Highlights recommendations for Tags
✓
-
AI-generated Bookmarks
✓
✓
Thematic AI clustering
-
✓
Sentiment analysis
-
✓
Collaborative stakeholder workshops
Business+
-
Research Repository
Store all your data in one place
✓
✓
Search & filter
✓
✓
Global taxonomy
Team+
Business+
Research repository interface
✓
-
Share your findings
✓
✓
Repository analytics
✓
✓
Participant pool
Team+
All plans
Automatic summaries
✓
✓
PDFs tagging
-
✓
Templates
Team+
Business+
Custom theme
-
Business+
Support
Personal support for all plans
Email and video call
Email
Onboarding support
All plans
Enterprise
Data migration
Team+
-
Taxonomy support
Team+
Enterprise
Slack community
-
✓
Security
SSO
Business+
Business+
Two-factor authentication
✓
-
Data security assessment
Business+
Enterprise
Granular access controls
Business+
Business+
HIPAA compliance
Business+
Addon for Enterprise
Pricing
Individual / Professional
$165
/year
$348
/year
Monthly subscription
$15
/month
$39
/month
Payment in Euro
165€
/year
-
Included Researchers
1
1
Additional Researchers
$165
/year
$348
/year
Team
$2,090
/year
Not available
Monthly subscription
$190
/month
-
Payment in Euro
1.870€
/year
-
Included Researchers
3
-
Additional Researchers
$330
/year
-
Business
$5,400
/year
$21,600
/year
Monthly subscription
-
-
Payment in Euro
4.800€
/year
-
Included Researchers
5
10
Additional Researchers
$600
/year
$720
/year
Enterprise
$14,400
/year
On request
Monthly subscription
-
-
Payment in Euro
12.000€
/year
-
Included Researchers
10
10
Additional Researchers
$840
/year
On request
Privacy standards that make your legal team happy
We know user research means working with sensitive data and Condens offers a watertight
concept for GDPR compliance. This includes:
EU and US-based data hosting lets you choose where your data is stored to meet
regional data residency requirements.
Condens’ legal entity is based in the EU, and the entire team operates under
stringent EU privacy laws.
A DPA (Data Processing Agreement) is already incorporated into our terms for every
customer.
Condens is designed to help you stay compliant with
HIPAA,
GDPR,
CCPA, and
APA.
Now, when someone comes to us with a question the answers are at our fingertips.
Ayesha Umme-Jihad
Senior Design Researcher at Bank of Montreal
The simplicity and clear UI make it very easy to get started and I was positively surprised by the level/ speed of support. They guided us also to come up with a taxonomy that makes sense for us – free of charge! A big plus for us is also the flexible user management and the fact that the repository is accessible across the organization without payment.
Michaël Dufranne
Senior UX Researcher, UX Team Lead at Elia Group
We feel like the Condens team is always there to listen to our feedback and their support is just great and fast.
Adéla Svoboda
Senior UX Researcher at Kentico Software
Our research repository keeps a searchable archive of all our research sessions and findings. It speeds up the qualitative analysis process and simplifies the sharing of insights, ultimately leading to higher-quality findings.
Tamara Oess
UX Researcher at Yokoy
We now have a much better opportunity to involve our stakeholders in the research studies and to share the results. This creates trust and transparency and motivates our stakeholders to invest in research
Liesa Breitmoser
Team Lead UX Research @ Zeiss
We've developed a hashtag among our UX team at Moz, #BeLikeCondens, because dang if their commitment to swift, useful improvements isn't impressive. It's something to strive for. (Highly recommend as a user research platform!)
Tonya Rinks
UX Designer at Moz
I am LOVING condens! I used to be a huge fan of Dovetail, but started looking around to see what other people have been using and you won me over with the notes feature and the accurate AI generated bookmarks.
Bina Bulman
Founding Product Designer at Passage Health
We've found Condens to be a real game-changer for us. It helped us streamline the entire workflow from note-taking to clustering insights and creating recommendations. The most significant benefit has been its ability to make these insights and recommendations easily accessible to teams from all departments. It helped us build a more collaborative and efficient UX research environment across the company.
Natalia Patiño
UX Leader & Consultant, Former Head of UX at Freeletics
