What is a research repository?
If your research isn’t systematically organized, you will end up scrambling for insights every time someone needs them. You might even end up repeating research projects. Thrilling.
A UX Research Repository is a one-stop solution for UX researchers to keep the data, notes and insights of past and present projects organized in one location. These can be accessed by your teams to democratize research in your organization.
There are two broad ways to create a repository: DIY it (aka use Notion, Airtable or Confluence for as long as possible), or get a dedicated user research repostiory tool.
Here's a step-to-step guide on How to organize UX Research
How to decide on a UX Research Repository tool
Before we jump into the UX Research repository tools, here are the four criteria you should use to assess them.
Psst! here's an in-depth guide to building a research repository!
Analysis:
A repository is usually most helpful if you can also use it to analyze your data. Before choosing a UX research repository platform, you should check whether the tool of your choice offers:
- significant storage space
- video or audio transcription features
- an intuitive interface
- high-quality analysis capabilities to help you connect the dots and create insights.
Collaboration
UX research insights matter only if the people in your organization can make decisions based on them. The more such people, the stronger your research! Any repository you choose should enable you to bring stakeholders into research studies and let them view user clips or insight reports without restrictions.
If a PM wants to view a research report, they shouldn’t have to jump through 3 admin hoops to access it. They won’t bother and your repository will be a bust. It may still be helpful for you to find insights in, but your ability to evangelize and democratize research will be severely limited.
Cost
Make sure the price is justified for the value your team will get out of the UX research repository. Although it might make sense for Facebook to invest in a repository made of gold, a 2 person research team may want to stick to more budget-friendly options.
Integration
Another thing to consider is the integration of tools with your UX repository. These integrations are possible “natively” (the company has a direct integration with another software) or via integration tools like Zapier which you have to pay for separately.
Integrations can be a powerful way for you to bring efficiency to your workflow. For example, if your UX repository tool automatically jumps in to record your Zoom-based user interviews (*cough*, we know of one), it’ll make it that much easier for you to ensure that all your research interviews are stored in the same place.
6 Great UX Research Repository Tools (free and paid)
💡 Looking for UX research repository examples? We asked top researchers at Google and Razorpay for their advice on repositories - check it out here!
Looppanel
Looppanel is a UX Research repository that automatically records your user interviews, provides highly accurate transcripts, enables collaborative note-taking during your calls, and makes analysis oh-so-easy.
Analysis
Looppanel has robust analysis features that help you skip the step of copy-pasting data into Miro, without making life 10x more complicated with complex tagging taxonomies.
Looppanel’s analysis feature automatically aggregates all your notes across calls to a single view. You can see all your notes by the questions they answered or by the tag you assigned to them.
Collaboration
Looppanel is built to help you bring stakeholders into the research process with ease. All the sharing features in Looppanel are free, starting from bringing in stakeholders to take notes live during user interviews, to watching clips (which you can embed directly into Jira for your engineers to watch) or reviewing insight reports.
Cost
We built Looppanel for teams with tight budgets, tighter deadlines, and big goals 🤩.
You get 15 days for free to test us out (more if we become good friends tbh). If you choose to move to a paid plan, there are four options with different transcription limits:
1. Solo plan for solo researchers who want to analyze 10x faster. The Solo plan starts at $30 per user per month, and has:
- Up to 5 transcription hours per month
- Lots of fun features like View-only access for collaborators, AI-powered notes, Auto-record on Zoom, GMeet or Teams, Live note-taking, Tagging, 1-click video clips, Analysis features, Shareable insights summary
2. Teams plan for research teams who want to collaborate & build a repository. Teams plan starts at $300 per month, and has everything in Solo, plus:
- 30 transcription hours monthly, and unlimited editor & viewer collaborators
- AI-powered search (beta)
- Repository features
- Centralized admin & billing and dedicated workspace!
3. Business plan for larger organizations with custom legal requirements. The Business plan starts at $1,000/month, and comes with everything in Teams, plus:
- 120 transcription hours monthly
- Additional Features such as SSO, Invoicing, Custom contracts, Priority support
4. Enterprise plan for enterprises who need extra support & security. The Enterprise plan comes with everything in Business, plus:
- Dedicated account manager
- Service level agreements
- Custom access control
- Data migration from other tools
Talk to us here about building a custom Enterprise plan.
Integration
Looppanel plugs and plays with Zoom, GMeet and Teams so your user interviews can be automatically recorded for you. You and your team can also take time-stamped notes live during interviews so it’s easy to find that ah-mazing quote after the call ends.
We also let you embed video snippets and reports across tools where your team lives—Jira, Confluence, Notion. If an engineer needs to see a video of users struggling with a bug, simply embed the video link in Jira and let them watch it there itself.
EnjoyHQ
EnjoyHQ is one of the oldest repository tools on the market. EnjoyHQ was bought by UserZoom two years ago (which has now been bought by UserTesting.com—I know, hard to keep up). With the acquisition came some added integrations, and painful price hikes.
For a small team EnjoyHQ can still be powerful in the beginning.
- It’s unlimited storage capacity helps to upload files of all sizes and formats with no additional charges.
- Unlimited transcription allows you to run studies big and small with the help of the product.
- Enjoy’s powerful filter options are also loved—you can discover any data or insights you need in seconds.
Collaboration
EnjoyHQ’s collaborative property helps teams centralize, organise and share report insights across their organisation.
Enjoy comes with two types of licences—Admin and Collaborator.
Admin users can access all of Enjoy’s functionality. Collaborators have access to limited functionality.
Collaborators are not allowed to:
- Create, update, or remove tags/themes/properties
- Delete projects or reports
- Manage billing settings
- Invite or remove other users.
Both admin and collaborator licences are paid—these are the licences you’d allocate amongst your research team or stakeholders who conduct a lot of research.
The good news: you can share documents or summaries of research publicly with your broader organization for free.
Cost
The starting plan on EnjoyHQ is free with features like unlimited transcription and uploads, video editing features, unlimited research projects and (nearly) any integration your heart desires.
Grow and Scale: Grow plan is for teams upto 10 people, while Scale is for packs of 25 seats. Contact Enjoy’s sales team for more information on pricing.
Integration
One of Enjoy’s greatest strengths is their strong suite of native integrations. Instead of paying for a third-party tool (such as Zapier), you cut costs by integrating other tools with EnjoyHQ directly.
If your team wants to centralize data across the company from tools like Jira, Google PlayStore, Salesforce, Slack, and more, Enjoy may be the right fit for you.
Check the comprehensive list of integrations offered by EnjoyHQ here.
Dovetail
Dovetail stores feedback, insights and organises all your user research in one place. It has unlimited storage capacity (for Business and Entreprise plans) to record interviews and store files, notes, photos and reports of all types.
You can upload call recordings into Dovetail and get transcripts in 28 languages, tag transcripts with themes, and review data across calls in a tabular or white-board view.
Collaboration
You can collaborate with multiple users and provide access to research insights your broader team.
Dovetail also lets you onboard unlimited viewers. These viewers can read and comment on your projects but do not have editing permissions. This is a powerful feature to evangelize research across the organization, allowing anyone to come in and search for the insights they need.
You can also tag users in Dovetail, helping you draw their attention to the data point or insight that’s most relevant to them. Another handy way to draw your team’s attention to relevant research insights.
Cost
Dovetail is free to use for 14 days. After this, the starting price is $30 per month or $300 per year. Here are some of the limitations of each paid plan you may want to keep in mind:
Starter | $30/ month: While Dovetail’s Starter plan can be handy for you to test out the product unless you do very limited research interviews per month, you will quickly run into the transcription and storage limits as a restriction:
- 10 transcript hours/month
- 50 GB storage
Team | $375 / month: Team plans offer a more generous transcription limit and the ability to keep certain project folders private. However, if you’re storing large numbers of audio and video recordings, the storage limit is something to keep your eye on:
- 25 transcript hours/month
- 100 GB storage
- Private projects
Business | $1,200 / month: Business plans are built for unlimited needs on transcription, storage and more. It’s also built to keep high-strung legal teams happy: you can have different user groups with different permissions, security reviews, and Single Sign-on.
- 100 transcript hours/month
- 500 GB storage
- User groups
- Security reviews
- Single sign-on
Enterprise | Custom pricing: The Enterprise is handy if you have a ginormous team, HIPAA / auto data deletion requirements, or the need for custom legal contracting / support.
- Custom data retention
- Optional HIPAA add-on
- Customer success manager
- Custom legal contracting
Integration
Dovetail’s integrations allow you to import and export data easily. Integrations with Google Drive and SharePoint let you easily import call recordings or notes, while integrations with Slack, Jira, Notion and Confluence allow you to share findings with your team where they live.
Integrations beyond the basics with tools like Google Sheets, Calendly, or TypeForm are only possible via Zapier. Zapier is a separate tool that can create integrations between your platforms. That does mean that you would have to pay for Zapier as well (this can be pricey).
Check out more details on the integrations here.
Condens
Condens is a research repository that keeps notes, recordings, images and files in one place.
It automatically transcribes the audio and video clips you upload (transcription available in many languages). It also lets you tag your notes and files as a way to organise your data. You can add multiple tags. Condens will also use AI to suggest some tags automatically!
Collaboration
To magnify the impact of your research, it is crucial to be able to share your research findings with the people in your team. With Condens you can share research reports with stakeholders across your team. You can embed video clips, images and audio in your reports and share them with a simple link so your stakeholders can view your findings without the added friction of having to log in.
Cost
To check whether the platform serves your needs you can try any plan for free for up to 15 days. After that, you need to pay an amount of $15 per month or $165 per year (if you are an individual researcher).
Individual | $15 / month: You can add 1 researcher for $15 a month, but the cost goes up if you add more researchers. With this, it limits the ability to automatically transcribe research interviews for a maximum of 12 hours every month, though this plan fits those who wish to conduct a restricted number of research interviews. It also lets you collaborate with the your research team for research notes and findings in real-time. A few other limitations are listed below
- Cannot invite external stakeholders to work together
- No Slack and Zapier integrations available
- Cannot bring in existing research findings to Condens
- No single sign-on feature
Team | $190 / month: Team plan scale into hundreds or thousands of dollars per year depending on your needs. With $190 per month you can add just 3 researchers and increasing the number of researchers scales up the cost. In addition, it restricts you to conducting research interviews for up to 50 hours per month. You can store as many audio and video recordings as you'd want without running out of space. Other limitations include
- No stakeholder collaboration
- No single sign-on feature
- No auto-data deletion functionality
Business | $450 / month: Pricing for the Business plan begins at $450 per month, and it allows you to add a minimum of 5 study research members. Like other plans, you can add more researchers as needed, although this might get expensive. However, this comes with additional benefits such as the ability to transcribe unlimited interviews, work on a large number of projects and store files of any size and format.
Enterprise | $1,200/month: Enterprise is for large organizations requiring a dedicated customer management, stakeholder collaboration or automated data deletion feature. It also includes:
- Single sign-on
- Custom contracting
- Service legal agreement
Check out the detailed price here!
Integration
Below is a list of integrations offered by Condens to help you centralize your data:
- Zoom
- Slack
- Teams
- UserTesting
- Microsoft Cloud
- Google Drive
- Miro
- Mural
- Figma
- User Interviews
- Google Drive
- Zendesk
- Excel
- CVS
If Condens doesn’t already integrate with a tool you use, you can set up an integration via Zapier. See all Zapier integrations here (once again, comes with a separate added cost).
Aurelius
Aurelius lets you collect, organize, and analyze qualitative research data.
An interesting feature of Aurelius is all three tiered subscriptions include unlimited data storage space, unlimited users and unlimited projects.
Collaboration
Aurelius offers unlimited users on all plans; meaning you can invite any number of users from your team with no extra charge and work on an unlimited number of projects. However, you can restrict who can view your project by opting Read Only option feature and allow access to specific projects to specific users. This advanced permission feature is only available for the Enterprise plan.
Cost
Aurelius offers subscriptions for individual and agency researchers for $49 per month, in-house UX and product teams for $199 per month and enterprises need to contact them to customize the price.
To assist you in making a more informed decision, we have mentioned some of the limits of each plan below.
Professional | $49 / month: Jira and Zapier integrations are not offered in the Professional plan, but it does include transcription in over 180 languages, tagging options, and an analysis board where you can view tags, drag and drop notes, and create themes.
- No advanced permission feature to allow users edit or access entire projects
- No cross project insights and recommendations
- No single sign-on feature
Premium | $199 / month: Although Jira integration is not accessible under Premium but it enable Zapier integration free of cost. Other limitations to consider before selecting Premium include no IP whitelisting, no customised onboarding, and no single sign-on.
Enterprise: The enterprise package is designed for large organisations that require custom onboarding, IP whitelisting for added security, and advanced permissions to limit who may see and access your individual projects.
Read more on Aurelius subscription here.
Integrations
Aurelius doesn’t offer any native integration. They integrate with Zoom, Jira and other tech stack tools via Zapier. If you don’t have a Zapier account, you can sign up for free and connect Zapier to Aurelius. Their Zapier integration is available only to Premium and Enterprise plans.
Notion
Notion is an all-inclusive workspace from note-making to project management. You can list your tasks, create a product roadmap and even design repositories.
Although Notion isn’t a UX research repository tool per se, it can be repurposed for this use case. If your team already lives in Notion, this may be a good bet.
Of course, since it isn’t a research repository tool, it also comes with some limitations—no transcription capabilities, make-shift tagging, and no real in-built analysis space.
Collaboration
Notion also has excellent collaborative features, allowing an unlimited number of people to work together in real-time, comment on products or ongoing projects and provide feedback. You can share your workspace with your team and modify teamspace setting to control who can edit or view.
Also, you can share a page with your client even if they don’t use Notion, you just need to share the URL (enable Share from the Share menu) and they can view the page but won’t be able to make edit and comment on it.
If your team already works in Notion, it’s handy to be able to tag them on specific insights or feedback you want them to review.
Here's a guide on Building a Product Feedback Repository
Cost
Individuals can use Notion for free and get access to amazing features like collaborative workspace, basic page analytics, and integration with tools like Github, Slack and more.
The free version is a good fit to store and organize your research data at the initial stage of using it as a repository (also ideal for students, educators and personal use). You can plan, create, organize and share your work with multiple teams along with creating dedicated areas for team space where people can join and work together.
The free version limits the number of users you want to invite. It lets you invite up to 10 clients, upload files up to 5 MB, have no control over team space permission and Single Sign-On among others.
In addition to the free version, Notion features a three-tiered subscription model. Here are a few limitations for each paid plan that you should consider when making decisions.
- Plus | $8/user/month: The Plus plan is economical and dedicated to small teams. It allows you to invite up to 100 clients or collaborators but it doesn’t give you advanced control over who can view or have edit access to your content. Additionally, the Plus plan does not support the export of all of your content as PDFs or a secure single sign-on feature.
- Business | $15/user/month: This plan gives you an edge over plus plan as it allows you to invite up to 250 guests, create private team spaces where people you add can access sensitive information, a single sign-on feature and more.
- Enterprise: If you run an enterprise that needs advanced support and other administrative features you can get in touch with their sales team.
Integrations
Notion integrates with SaaS tools including GitHub, GitLab, Zoom and more. All Notion’s integrations are built through Notion’s API and these are free to use. But their partners may charge a service fee for using their integrations.
Notion has partnerships with services like Typoform, Zapier and Automate.io. You can use these to connect with their integrations to your workspace via OAuth.
Read on to learn more about AI-powered Research Repositories
Still unable to decide?
If you are still unable to decide which UX research repository to choose, Looppanel is the best bet. Sign up for free now.
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