Every product development team needs at least one product discovery tool. Why? Because product discovery is critical to the product development process. It involves researching your target audience to understand user needs, preferences, pain points, and more. Insights from the research will help you validate product ideas and reduce your risk of building a product no one wants.
However, you’ll only experience these benefits with a product discovery tool that fits your target audience and user research goals. Keep reading to learn more about product discovery tools, including the various types and the best tools for SaaS product development.
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Types of product discovery tools
Various product discovery tools are available. While some focus on researching the market and competitors, others provide valuable insights into user behaviors, preferences, and pain points.
Understanding the various tool types will help you pick a product discovery tool that fits your product and research goals. You can also combine various tools to better understand your market and equip your team to build a successful product.
Below are the most common product discovery tool types:
1. User testing tools
User testing tools are invaluable whether you are building a new product or updating an existing product. The tool facilitates usability tests that observe how users interact with your product. User interaction insights will show you ways to optimize your UI and UX to boost user engagement and shorten time-to-value.
2. Feature request tools
Users seek products with features that help them solve problems and achieve goals. With a feature request tool, users can tell you the specific features they want. You can then prioritize and implement the most requested or liked features. It eliminates guesswork during product development, allowing you to create a product roadmap that will help you build the SaaS software your users want.
3. Market research tools
Market research tools help you understand the current state of your target market. Advanced tools also predict future market trends, especially regarding user behavior and preferences. Such product discovery tools are valuable because they provide insights that help determine if there’s a market for your product idea.
The insights from market research tools can also reveal barriers to entry, level of competition, and potential profitability. All of these are vital information for determining if a product is worth building.
4. Social listening tools
With social listening tools, you can eavesdrop on what target users think about your brand and proposed or existing product. If public opinion is positive about a product idea, that’s a good sign to continue with development. You can also use social listening tools to get new product ideas from users and implement the ideas to boost your product’s attractiveness.
5. Survey tools
Survey tools are another tool for hearing your users’ opinions, but instead of eavesdropping, these tools let you ask users to share their thoughts. Use these tools to create surveys that ask users questions about your product, such as questions regarding what they would like added, improved, or removed. Such surveys provide in-depth and clear insights that aid product discovery by showing you what real users want so you can make better products.
6. Competitive analysis tools
A competitive analysis tool is a product discovery tool that analyzes the online marketing efforts of competitors. It can also provide insights into how users interact with competing products. Knowing what users like or dislike about your competitors gives you an advantage. With these insights, you can tailor product development and marketing to replicate what top competitors are doing correctly and avoid the harmful ones.
7. Ideation and prototyping tools
Don’t leave your users and stakeholders out of coming up with product ideas. Get them in on the fun with ideation and prototyping tools. These are collaborative tools for inviting people to suggest ideas for a better product. You can then create prototypes of the best ideas and get user feedback to verify if customers like the idea.
Such tools are excellent for getting valuable and accurate insights from real users regarding what to build. Also, taking this path increases your chances of building a great product that attracts, converts, and engages your target audience.
8. Product analytics and event tracking tools
Another product discovery tool you should add to your arsenal is product analytics and event tracking tools. These tools are invaluable if you have an existing SaaS product you’d like to improve with new or updated features. With one, you can track and monitor customers as they use your SaaS application.
For example, you can use heatmap and session recording tools to see how users interact with specific features or pages. Alternatively, use a product analytics platform to track user flows within your app. These will provide insights into features or pages that cause users to bounce or quit your application.
20 best product discovery tools by our product managers
We’ve simplified choosing the best product discovery tool for your project by compiling and comparing the 20 most popular tools used by product teams. Here are the discovery tools that made our list, including their function, features, and pricing.
1. Jira
Tool Type: Ideation and brainstorming tool
Jira is a versatile collaboration tool that product managers and teams can leverage for ideation, brainstorming, and more. Jira also offers a dedicated product discovery tool for capturing and prioritizing ideas.
You can use the product discovery tool to record ideas and gather user or stakeholder feedback to validate ideas. Users can also submit feature requests, and your team can prioritize the recommendations to implement in your software. Another notable feature is Jira supports agile product development, allowing teams to iterate, test, and perfect features before launching.
Features
Roadmapping
Idea and insight-capturing
Agile product development
Integrations to connect your entire workflow
Backlog management
Stakeholder and cross-functional team collaboration
Pricing
A free Jira plan is available, but you can access more features with a paid monthly plan.
2. Productboard
Tool Type: Feature request tool
Productboard simplifies collecting and managing feature requests from real users and stakeholders. Collecting feature requests provides accurate insights into what users want, allowing you to build a product that will resonate with your target audience.
Besides collecting feedback, Productboard can help you prioritize requests and visualize them on a roadmap. The tool uses AI to provide easy-to-understand summaries of trending requests, simplifying feature prioritization.
Features
AI-generated feature request summaries
Feedback collection from multiple sources
Customizable, easy-to-adapt roadmap templates
Flexible feature idea organization
Pricing
You can pay $20 or $80 monthly if you choose a yearly plan.
3. Frill
Tool Type: Feature request tool
Frill is another impressive feature request tool. It motivates users to provide feedback and feature requests by keeping things simple. For instance, Frill provides an in-app widget that users can click on to submit feedback or feature requests without leaving your app.
Other users can comment or upvote provided feedback or feature requests, allowing product teams to easily identify the ones to prioritize. With the real-time feedback provided via in-app widgets, you can complete product discovery faster and accelerate the implementation of product ideas.
Features
Feedback prioritization matrix
Roadmap and idea submission widget
Multiple integrations
Multi-language support
Pricing
Frill’s Startup plan costs $25 monthly, making it suitable for businesses on a budget. Alternatively, choose the $49 or $149 monthly plan if you’d like to generate unlimited ideas.
4. UserTesting
Tool type: User testing tool
UserTesting equips product teams to conduct usability tests with users interacting with their app or website. With the product discovery tool, you can view and understand user behavior and preferences through video recordings, surveys, and feedback.
For example, you can watch and listen to users share their opinions as they use your SaaS product. Their reaction will help you identify friction points to fix to improve user experience and value delivery. Alternatively, run usability tests in hi-fi prototypes to validate product ideas. Positive feedback means you can move from prototyping to building well-received features.
Features
AI-powered analysis
Data visualization
Suitable for startups and large businesses in various industries
Multiple integration options for sharing insights in real-time
Pricing
Each customer gets a custom quote.
5. Marker.io
Tool type: User testing tool
Marker.io tackles user testing from a different angle. Instead of directly monitoring how users interact with your product or prototype, Marker.io gathers insights through user feedback. Users can provide feedback and bug reports in real-time via widgets or feedback forms.
Users can also send feature requests and express their desires or opinions with Marker.io’s website annotation and markup tools. Alternatively, use the product discovery tool’s session replay feature to view user interactions with your product and get a clearer picture of their feedback.
Features
Live website feedback
Session replay
User and stakeholder collaboration tools
Two-way integration with development tools and more
Pricing
$39 and $99 monthly plans are available, or you can get a custom quote.
6. Canny
Tool type: Feature request tool
With Canny, you can collect user feedback and feature requests and use the insights to build better products. Besides submitting feedback, users can comment and vote on feedback. You can prioritize implementing the feature requests that get the most upvotes and discard the downvoted ones.
Features
Integration with project management and collaboration tools
Feature prioritization and roadmapping
Idea and feature request management
Pricing
Canny has a free lifetime plan that supports one roadmap. If you want more roadmaps and other advanced features, you must pay at least $360 monthly.
7. SurveyMonkey
Tool type: Market research tool
SurveyMonkey is an effective product discovery tool for market research. Conduct your market research by building surveys with questions that will help you understand market and industry trends, consumer behavior and needs, and more. SurveyMonkey offers hundreds of templates for building such surveys, including product testing surveys.
The platform also simplifies analyzing and understanding surveys by providing AI-fueled insights. You can send surveys to users via links, email, and social media, or embed surveys into your webpage.
Features
Hundreds of survey templates
AI-powered survey insights
Support for multiple languages
Pricing
$25 and $75 monthly plans are available.
8. Google Trends
Tool type: Market research tool
Google Trends helps product teams develop an effective product strategy. It accomplishes this by revealing what’s trending in your target market. For example, if you have a product idea, you can search terms related to it to see if it’s trending by looking at user interest over time.
You can also look at user interest by region to see if your target market is viable. If people in your target market aren’t currently searching for products like yours, it may mean the market isn’t ripe for your idea.
Features
View and filter trends by time, region, related topics, and more
Free tool
Up-to-date market trend data
Pricing
Google Trends is free.
9. Brandwatch
Tool type: Social listening tool
Get to know your users by listening to what they say about your brand or product. You can do this with a product discovery tool like Brandwatch. It’s a social listening software that allows you to monitor brand mentions and sentiment on social media. Understanding how real users perceive your brand and product can guide your product development process toward building a more user-centric product.
Features
Cross-channel social media monitoring
Historical and real-time consumer data
AI analysis for accurate insights
Insight sharing via Excel, PPT, PDF, or the Brandwatch API
Live data viewing
Pricing
Users must get a custom quote.
10. BrandMentions
Tool type: Social listening tool
BrandMentions is another way to hear what users say about your brand and product on social media. The platform searches and analyzes billions of social media mentions to find the ones relevant to your brand. You can narrow searches with keywords to quickly understand people’s sentiments about your searched topic.
Besides monitoring users, you can use BrandMentions to scope out competitors and do market research. The research can reveal competitor weaknesses and missed opportunities. You also get a hashtag tracking tool for monitoring the performance of your hashtags.
Features
Real-time notifications
Cross-channel social media monitoring
Accurate insights
Pricing
$79, $249, and $399 monthly plans are available.
11. Qualtrics
Tool type: Market research tool
Qualtrics provides an all-in-one platform for executing market research to get high-quality insights. Product teams get access to automation and AI tools to fast-track the process and prevent errors. You can split users into segments and track their behavior to understand how each type of user perceives your product. The product discovery tool also lets you monitor industry and market trends to take advantage of upcoming opportunities.
Features
Fast access to impactful insights
Automated analytics and reporting
Access to research and advanced analytics specialists
Pricing
Clients get custom quotes tailored to their unique needs.
12. Hootsuite
Tool type: Social listening tool
Hootsuite is a popular product discovery tool for understanding target user preferences. The tool lets product teams monitor the social media conversations of target users, especially brand and product-related conversations.
Understanding what users want facilitates building products that align with user desires and pain points. Besides monitoring your target users, you can use Hootsuite to keep an eye on trends and competitors. With these insights, you can find opportunities to improve your product and grow your business. Also, social media platforms you can monitor with Hootsuite include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, and more.
Features
Streams to monitor mentions, keywords, and hashtags
Brandwatch integration to track and analyze mentions and conversations
User-friendly dashboard
All-in-one social media management tool
Pricing
All clients get a custom quote.
13. Typeform
Tool type: Survey tool
You can learn about customer wants and preferences by conducting user interviews, but this is a long and resource-intensive process. Typeform offers a more efficient alternative in the form of surveys. With the platform, you can create and distribute interactive and engaging surveys for collecting user feedback and market research data.
However, if you believe interviews are your best option for getting your desired insights, Typeform obliges with VideoAsk. The solution lets you ask survey questions with a video, and users can respond with text, audio, or video.
Features
Text, audio, or video user responses
Various integrations, including APIs and webhooks
Fast and user-friendly
Hundreds of templates
Pricing
Typeform offers a free plan and $24 and $40 monthly plans.
14. SEMrush
Tool type: Competitive analysis tool
Learn what your competitors are up to with SEMrush. The competitive analysis tool examines the online marketing efforts of competitors so you know how they are winning over your target audience. You can discover details such as a competitor’s unique value proposition (UVP) to improve on it or discover new market opportunities.
Features
Competitor tracking and analysis
Online visibility optimization recommendations
User trend and preference insights
Pricing
The most affordable SEMrush plan costs $129.95 monthly.
15. SimilarWeb
Tool type: Competitive analysis tool
SimilarWeb is a valuable product discovery tool for market analysis. With it, you can gain insights into competitors and audience behavior. Use the platform to monitor the websites of your industry counterparts and discover the UVPs they use to win over your target audience. The insights will help you determine if your UVP can get user attention or if you need to improve it.
Features
Website and app analysis
Industry and audience research
Brand performance analysis
Customer journey insights
Pricing
SimilarWeb offers a host of free tools, but you need a paid plan to access its advanced tools. The cheapest plan costs $125 monthly.
16. Amplitude
Tool type: Product analytics and event tracking tool
Amplitude provides a product analytics platform for understanding the behavior of your product’s users. With the tool, you can track events, user flows, and engagement, and leverage the insights for product discovery. Another way Amplitude contributes to product discovery is you can use it for A/B testing to verify what your users prefer. The insight will help you build a product optimized to achieve your user and business goals.
Features
Multiple integrations
Integrated A/B testing
Built-in data quality checks to resolve issues in real-time
AI support
Pricing
Choose the free plan or the $49 monthly plan.
17. Figma
Tool type: Ideation and prototyping tool
Product teams use Figma to ideate product ideas and build interactive prototypes to showcase the ideas. Users and other stakeholders can interact with the prototypes and provide feedback. Positive feedback will serve as a green light to implement the product idea in the final product.
Features
Low and high-fidelity prototyping
Collaborative tool for developers and users
Mobile and PC compatibility
Pricing
There’s a free plan and several paid plans. The cheapest paid plan is $12 monthly.
18. Hotjar
Tool type: Product analytics and event tracking tool
Instead of asking users what they think about your product, Hotjar lets you see it for yourself. The tool provides heatmaps and session recordings that reveal user interactions with your website or app. You can use this to identify areas of interest or friction in the user experience. This is crucial to the product discovery process because it reveals if a feature requires improvements before implementation.
Features
Heatmaps and session recordings
User interviews and surveys
AI support for survey creation and analysis
Pricing
Choose the free plan or pay as little as $32 monthly for advanced features.
19. Crazy Egg
Tool type: Product analytics and event tracking tool
Crazy Egg is a versatile product discovery tool with various features for understanding how users feel about your product. For example, you get product analytics tools like session recordings, A/B testing, error tracking, and heatmaps for identifying your software’s areas for improvement. You can also create surveys for users to submit feature requests and feedback.
Features
Track website goal fulfillment
Heatmap and scroll map reports
Automatic JavaScript error notifications
Pricing
You can pay as little as $29 monthly for Crazy Egg.
20. Miro
Tool type: Ideation and prototyping tool
Miro is a collaborative online whiteboard for brainstorming ideas and developing low-fidelity prototypes. Your team can use it to collect ideas from stakeholders during the product discovery phase. They can also use it to gather customer feedback before high-fidelity prototyping.
Features
Diagramming and process mapping
Hundreds of integrations
Prototype, product roadmap, and customer journey mapping templates
Pricing
Choose the free plan or pay $8 or $16 monthly for advanced features.
At DevSquad, we simplify SaaS product development by handling all aspects of your project on your behalf, including product discovery. Contact us today to learn more about how we can bring your product ideas to life.
