The 13 Best Market Research Tools to Use [2024]

For your business to succeed, customers must like what you offer. How to find out what they like? Market research tools will help you do this. In this article, you will learn about the best tools to make your market research process easier and more efficient. Let’s discover them!

Market research tools help you conduct market research or support this process. With such tools, you will quickly identify target groups and market trends and collect & analyze data from customers. This will enable you to understand what the market expects from your product or service.

Are you carrying out market research? Choose tools from here!

I tested all the tools on this list, so you don’t have to waste your time.

Here are the top 13 market research tools:

01 Brand24

Free 14-day trial.

Brand24 is a powerful market research and media monitoring tool. It monitors the Internet in general and discovers consumer insights.

Does someone write something about your brand, product, or service? Thanks to Brand24, you immediately know about it.

It captures people’s opinions on literally everything across:

• Social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X (Twitter), LinkedIn
• Blogs
• Forums and review sites
• News and other sites
• Newsletters
• Podcasts
• And many others!

You get information about what customers think of you and what their expectations are.

The collected mentions of your brand, product, or service show your customers’ needs and problems.

They often express dissatisfaction, such as poor product quality, bad customer service, delivery delays, or other experiences.

Brand24 monitors the situation in real-time, so you can detect pain points, react quickly, and improve your products or services.

You should use the AI Brand Assistant, which works just like ChatGPT. You can ask the Brand Assistant about literally anything.

Let’s check it out using FedEx as an example and ask, what are the negative reviews about FedEx:

Brand Assistant summarises all the negative mentions and presents them to you in an understandable way.

Based on this, you know what your company needs to improve. You can also ask the Brand Assistant about specific recommendations:

FYI, FedEx received over 51,000 mentions in just one month, of which over 15,000 were negative!

Imagine analyzing them yourself – impossible!

What’s more, you can perform competitor analysis with this market research tool!

You can:

• Create a project to monitor keywords related to your industry to identify your real competition
• Also, use the Brand Assistant and ask, “What are the main competitors in the market (here, specify which market)?“

As you can see, FedEx’s three most significant competitors are UPS, DHL, and Amazon Logistics.

Once you know who your competitors are, set up a project in Brand24 with their names or products. This will provide information that can help you address market needs that your competitors have overlooked.

You can even compare yourself with your greatest enemies thanks to the Comparison feature:

Brand24 also helps you to identify trends in your industry!

Thanks to the Topic Analysis feature, you can quickly discover them.

This will allow you to stay in the loop and quickly adapt your offer to current consumer demands, especially as market trends emerge quickly.

You will always be one step ahead of your competitors!

Key features:

• Consumer insights
• AI Brand Assistant (smarter than ChatGPT)
• Many AI features like Topic Analysis, Sentiment Analysis, AI Insights, Metrics Analysis
• Real-time data analysis
• Interactive dashboards
• High-quality data visualization
• Delivers your market research reports

02 Startquestion

Startquestion is an online survey creation tool. It allows you to easily create different types of surveys to gather market research data!

The answers collected by Startquestion will provide reliable data from your target audience about whatever you want, whether your company is already in the market or just entering it.

It offers ready-to-use templates, including different questions (multiple-choice, open-ended, rating scales, matrices, etc.). You can customize them according to your needs.

What’s more, Startquestion is powered by AI!

If creating a market research survey sounds like a big challenge, it will prepare it for you. You just need to specify the purpose.

Downsides of this tool? It doesn’t draw conclusions from analyses.

Key features:

• AI Survey Creator
• Real-time data analysis and reports
• Ready-to-use templates
• Personalized surveys, including your logo, customized colors, and fonts
• Different question types

03 SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is another market research tool for creating, launching, and analyzing surveys. It is probably my favourite among survey tools.

AI broadly supports it. Thus, it offers a lot of powerful features.

However, creating surveys is super easy with SurveyMonkey:

• It offers a variety of pre-made templates that you can personalize
• You can create surveys from scratch

What’s more, surveys can be easily integrated into different systems.

SurveyMonkey is free, but only if you want to ask a maximum of 10 questions and have a small representative sample. You must pay to create complex market research surveys and use all the advanced features.

Key features:

• Many AI-powered features
• Multilingual surveys
• Pre-built survey templates
• Automated integration of survey data
• Custom reports
• Easy to use

04 Typeform

Typeform is another market research tool for creating forms and surveys.

What makes Typeform unique?

It offers excellent possibilities regarding the visual aspect of your surveys!

You can customize EVERYTHING – from logos to colors.

In addition, you can create your brand kit. This way, everyone can effortlessly build forms consistent with your branding.

When the design is nice, people are more likely to respond. Therefore, there is a high probability that you will gain more data and deeper insights.

Typeform is ideal both if your business is B2B or B2C.

It is quite an expense if you want this tool in your company.

Key features:

• Visually captivating surveys
• Ready-made templates
• High level of customization & branding
• Brand kit
• Connection with many apps

05 Make My Persona

Hubsport’s Make My Persona is one of the market research tools to create buyer personas.

This persona maker will help you better understand your customers, users, and buyers.

Unfortunately, it is specifically targeted at B2B buyer personas. So, I would not recommend it for B2C.

Why do I like Make My Persona so much?

Because it’s a free tool, but sufficient!

The whole process of creating a persona is incredibly simple. You don’t have to worry about the template’s format and design; you enter the relevant information about your persona, like name, age, education, job title, etc.

What are the disadvantages of this tool? You cannot edit the template, so staying consistent with your branding is impossible.

Also, you have a limited choice of avatars, and they may seem too childish.

Key features:

• Step-by-step guidance
• Comprehensive persona details
• Export and share option
• Easy to use

06 UXPressia

UXPressia provides its own Online Persona Creator. This builder is very versatile; you can make any persona such as:

• Marketing persona
• B2B and B2C buyer
• Employee persona
• User persona

The creation process is really easy; it is based on AI. You only enter the input data, and the AI takes care of the rest.

UXPressia will even create a realistic avatar for you!

Moreover, working with your teammates and other people on one persona is possible! You can post text and voice notes, start discussions, or add stickers.

If you have already created personas for your business, you can compare them in the tool.

UXPressia offers many possibilities, not just creating personas. The biggest players in the market use this tool, so I would recommend something other than it as the first choice for small and medium-sized businesses.

Key features:

• Rapid creation
• Detailed data like industry and custom details
• Demographic research
• Templates library
• Personas comparison
• AI-powered avatar creation

07 Google Trends

I guess we all know Google Trends. It tells how popular a given keyword is, and it’s a great starting point for market research!

It is one of the completely free market research tools.

With Google Trends, you gain valuable insights for free!

You can see how the interest in your company, products, or services changes over time and in different regions.

By analyzing search trends on Google, you can quickly identify trends and monitor consumer interest in your industry.

And you can conduct comparative keyword research!

Google Trends itself also gives you the most popular trends currently.

What I miss about this tool is the context of why a particular topic is popular.

But what to do? You can’t have everything.

Key features:

• Search volume insights
• Real-time data and historical data access
• Trending searches
• Keyword research and comparison
• Geographic data
• Interactive dashboards

08 Answer the Public

Answer the Public is another market research tool to discover what people are asking about. How lovely!

It provides datasets not only from Google searches but also from:

• Bing
• YouTube
• TikTok
• Amazon

It is very helpful when building marketing strategies.

The research data are presented in the form of easy-to-understand interactive visuals.

What’s cool is that you can do three searches using this tool per day for free.

Of course, more searches and advanced features are chargeable.

Key features:

• Search volume
• Cost Per Click
• Search comparison
• Visual data
• Alphabetical searches
• User=friendly interface

09 Tableau

Tableau is a business intelligence tool for data visualization.

Very handy in market research! It transforms raw data; you can visualize data from your study nicely and connect multiple sources.

It is especially useful when conducting broad market research and presenting the data to external parties.

This tool is quite expensive, so think twice before purchasing it! But no worries – you can always try it for free.

Key features:

• High-quality data visualizations
• Connection to multiple sources
• Interactive and shareable dashboards

10 Census Bureau

The Census Bureau is a U.S. government agency. Its purpose is to collect data on the U.S. population and economy.

You go to their web page and have access to thousands of:

• Data tables
• Data maps
• Whitepapers
• And many more!

I doubt you could conduct as accurate surveys as the Census Bureau does.

It’s a free resource providing extensive data!

So use their Census data and their industry reports as much as you can!

There is a lot of useful information out there that you can use for your business.

The only downside is that the data only applies to the United States. So, if this country is not one of your target markets, you have nothing to look for there.

Key features:

• Consumer data
• High-quality, detailed data
• Advanced search engine
• Sector analysis
• Regional analysis
• Reports and briefs on various topics containing valuable insights

11 Statista

Statista is a market research tool that collects worldwide data on various topics from reputable sources. It’s a data aggregator.

If you cannot find some data, you will likely find it on Statista.

Even though many of the datasets are very complex, Statista always presents neat visualizations along with the data.

It provides market, company, and consumer data.

Importantly, all of them are kept up-to-date, and if possible, there are forecasts.

Although Statista does not conduct research, it has its own experts who inspect everything and look for gaps.

The downside? Limited access. Full access only if you pay a few thousand dollars.

The pricing is so high because it is undoubtedly irreplaceable support for your research to gain consumer insights.

Key features:

• Wide range of data
• Data from reliable sources
• Customizable infographics, charts, tables, and graphs
• Industry trends in reports
• Market forecasts

12 Pew Research Center

Pew Research Center is a non-profit organization that conducts market research and data analysis. It studies various topics, including social media usage, IoT, and online privacy.

This tool is one of the best market research tools for delivering data about your target audience.

While much of the Pew Research Centre’s studies focus on the U.S., it also conducts research in other countries.

It’s a free tool – it costs NOTHING to use data provided by Pew Research Centre!

Key features:

• Wide range of data
• Industry trends and insights
• Public opinion polling

13 G2

G2 is a platform for user reviews and software product ratings. It is beneficial for market research if you work in the software world.

You can gain reliable insights based on the experiences of actual users.

Also, you can check what customers are saying about our competitors’s products and services.

The good news is that you do not need an account to see the reviews posted there. But you do need to have one to give them.

Key features:

• Verified reviews
• Rating categories
• Data updates
• Products comparison

What are the most important features of a great market research tool?

My list of the best tools could continue forever; many excellent market research tools exist.

I’m sure you’ll also find some other yourself.

So, which tools to choose? How to initially verify that the given tool is the best?

For you to verify and choose the best one, the tool must offer the five following features:

• Real-time and reliable data: Regardless of their type, market research tools must be able to provide updated data in real-time and from reliable sources. Access to such information is necessary for effective market research.
• AI features: AI improves the functionality of market research tools. AI automates many tasks, saving you time. The more AI functions, the more easier the market research is. The tool relies heavily on AI? Better for you!
• Data visualizations: Who cares that you collect data if no one knows what it is about? Interactive visualizations present data attractively, making it easier to understand and quicker to conclude.
• Reports: The great market research tool should generate reports, but ones that can be easily customized. You should be able to add elements of your brand identity, such as a logo and specific colors. Reports are essential because they allow you to present the data to whomever you wish, so you do not have to dig into the dashboard. The reports delivered by Statista and other data sources are also significant; they show new trends in the market. It’s worth keeping track of them.
• Interactive dashboards: This is another important feature. They make reading data easier and faster, and thanks to filters, they can be easily adapted to every user’s needs.

What are the tools for market research?

As you might have noticed after reading this article, there are a lot of various market research tools.

Market research is a complex process, so tools differ in their intended use:

• Brand24 – the best for media monitoring, competitor analysis, and trend research
• Startquestion – the best for the rapid creation of surveys
• SurveyMonkey – the best for AI survey creation
• Typeform – the best for creating visually appealing surveys
• Make My Persona – the best for creating B2B personas
• UXPressia – the best for creating B2B/B2C personas
• Google Trends – the best for identifying trends
• Answer the Public – the best for search listening
• Tableau – the best for market research data visualization
• Census Bureau – the best for understanding the target audience in the U.S.
• Statista – the best for obtaining rapid global statistics on a wide range of topics
• Pew Research Center – the best for getting data on the target audience
• G2 – the best for checking what the target audience says about software products

What are the free market research tools?

Price should not be the main determinant of whether you will use a tool (or not). However, I know how it is in practice.

So, which of the best tools are free?

Most offer a free trial or free basic plan, and some are COMPLETELY FREE. Look at the lists below!

Free market research tools:

• Make My Persona
• Google Trends
• Census Bureau
• Pew Research Center
• G2

Market research tools that offer free plans with some limitations:

• Startquestion
• SurveyMonkey
• Typeform
• UXPressia
• Answer the Public
• Statista

Market research tools that offer only free trial:

• Brand24
• Tableau

Conclusion

Want to understand the needs of your target audience? You need to carry out market research.

It is time-consuming, so you must use the proper market research tools!

Once again, take a look at the tools tested by me; I confirm they are top of the top:

Final thoughts:

• In market research, you can mix the data you obtain and those others offer. However, remember to check carefully that the source is reliable. It is best to use data from the Census Bureau, Statista, and Pew Research Center.
• All the data should be organized and analyzed adequately so that patterns, trends, and key findings can be easily identified.
• Be aware of the scale of your market research. Free market research tools may be more than enough.
• Some market research tools may be quite expensive. However, investing in them and conducting the research yourself is sometimes more cost-effective than hiring an external company to perform the market research.

Conducting market research has never been easier – try Brand24, one of the best market research tools! Start a 14-day free trial!