Understanding your users and customers is key; it brings them back and gets them to spread the word about your service. While AI streamlines code creation, the question remains: Are you building what truly matters?

This is where in-app feedback shines. By actively collecting input from your users within the app, you gain a clear roadmap for product enhancements. That's why we've compiled a detailed guide to choosing the best in-app user feedback tools. These tools will transform how you collect, analyze, and utilize user insights, paving the way for continuous improvement and enhanced user satisfaction.

What’s in-app feedback, and why is it 6x better?

In-app feedback is a method of collecting feedback from users while they are using the app. Instead of redirecting users to external platforms or surveys, in-app feedback methods enable users to share their thoughts seamlessly.

“Why is it better?” you ask. Well, first of all, in-app surveys have a 6x higher response rate than emailed-out surveys. So to get the same amount of insight, you have to bother a lot fewer people. Or from the same amount of people you can harvest a LOT more insights.

Additionally, you get feedback directly when a user experiences your app, instead of pinging them hours later when they are in a completely different context. So in-app feedback gives you more insights of higher quality while having to ask less often.

How to gather in-app feedback

Depending on the tools you use, you can collect in-app feedback through the following methods:

• Chatbots: Chatbots can be used to collect feedback conversationally and provide real-time support to users.
• Embedded forms: Embedded forms can be used to collect feedback on specific pages or workflows within the app. The huge advantage is that they seamlessly integrate into the existing UI, avoiding survey fatigue completely.
• Feedback widget: Feedback widgets are a valuable tool for app developers and website owners who want to gather user insights and improve their products or services. They are small snippets of code installed on the entire website.

Picking the right in-app feedback tool

Here are some of the things to look for in an in-app feedback tool. According to these 7 criteria, we will rate the 6 tools we found most useful:

1. Pre-segmentation & Targeting 🎯 You want to avoid asking everyone the same questions. The ability to target specific segments differs widely.
2. Native Look & Feel 😍 You’ve spent a lot of time crafting that UX and you likely don’t wanna ruin it with a popup survey. Am I right?
3. Insights Assistance 🧠 Here we look at to what extent the tool helps you get the insights you need and how to share them with the right people in your team.
4. Integrations with third-party tools 🧩 How well can you implement the tool in your existing product stack?
5. Extensibility 🛠️ Wanna do more? We look at how much you can customize and extend each of the tools.
6. Pricing 💸 How expensive is it and is it worth it?
7. Privacy and Compliance 🔒 Can you use it with full GDPR, CCPA, or even HIPAA compliance?

The next section will explore 6 of the best tools to gather user feedback and rate them on the criteria listed above

The best tools to gather in-app user feedback

Among the plethora of tools available in today’s market, this section will guide you through a curated selection of top contenders in the world of user feedback collection tools. Each is designed to empower you with the knowledge to refine your products and elevate user satisfaction.

1. Formbricks

Formbricks is an open-source micro-survey solution designed to gather specific user feedback at the perfect moment in their journey. It allows you to create and deploy targeted surveys within your app without disrupting the user experience.

Formbricks boasts a user-friendly interface, making it easy for both technical and non-technical users to create and deploy micro-surveys. The no-code editor removes the need for coding knowledge, while the intuitive design guides you through the process. Being the only open-source feedback app out there, privacy-focused users will love this!

Pre-segmentation & Targeting 🎯🎯🎯🎯

With Formbricks pre-segmentation and targeting feature, you can send user attributes and user events to Formbricks and build segments based on them. Also, the introduction of Advanced Targeting provides granular control to target any group of users, even individual users, with precision.

Native Look & Feel 😍😍😍😍

Formbricks supports several means of styling the survey to match the existing UI. You can change the main color of the survey and in which corner it appears. As an engineer, you can add a stylesheet to change every element in the survey. The team is currently working on a UI to make this possible with no code as well.

In the medium term, Formbricks will provide an open-source SDK to embed surveys inline, instead of having them pop over. This depth of embedding is only possible due to Formbricks open-source approach.

Insights Assistance 🧠🧠🧠

Formbricks provides base analytics with a few insightful add-ons like the Drop Off Analyzer and measuring time to completion for each question. The Formbricks team is scoping out AI-supported insight generation as well as custom dashboards for Q1 2024.

Integrations with third-party tools 🧩🧩🧩🧩

Formbricks packs direct integrations into Google Sheets, Airtable, Zapier, and Make.com. Currently in progress are a Notion and a Slack integration. With webhooks or platforms like Zapier, you can send your data exactly where you need it!

Privacy and Compliance 🔒🔒🔒🔒🔒

Formbricks takes data privacy very seriously. Hence, we take on considerable additional effort to collect as little data as necessary and handle it safely and securely.

Formbricks is easily self-hostable and if you do so you have full control over the data you collect. This removes a huge chunk of privacy compliance and security reviews because the data never leaves your servers. Our privacy policy does not apply here, since no data is ever processed by Formbricks (the company).

We also offer Formbricks as a managed service in the Cloud. Formbricks Cloud is hosted by a German entity (GmbH) in Germany and comes with full GDPR and CCPA compliance. Learn more about how we handle private data on our Cloud in the Privacy Policy. We also provide a guide on how to create a GDPR compliant survey as well as GDPR FAQs.

Extensibility: 🛠️🛠️🛠️🛠️🛠️

Formbricks stands out for its open-source nature and extensive API access, available on all plans. This unique feature allows users to customize and enhance their experience without limitations.

Pricing 💸💸💸💸💸

Both tools have free plans, but Formbricks gives you more value on a free plan than Hotjar. Ultimately, Formbricks offers a lot more value for your money, especially if you’re mostly interested in running forms and surveys.

If you decide to self-host Formbricks on your servers, the community edition is completely free. If you require the Enterprise Edition because you need Team Roles, Advanced Targeting or Multi-language Surveys, please reach out.

Overall, Formbricks is a very promising solution that packs a lot of useful features and gets better by the day. The open-source approach guarantees maximum data ownership and control. Worth checking out!

Let’s have a look at Userpilot!

2. Userpilot

Userpilot empowers you to engage and understand your users like never before. Through its comprehensive suite of features, Userpilot helps you gather valuable feedback, personalize the user experience, and ultimately increase growth metrics.

With Userpilot, you can get started quickly with ready-made templates for common use cases.

Pre-segmentation & Targeting 🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯

Userpilot's pre-segmentation and targeting capabilities empower you to create personalized user experiences based on shared characteristics that resonate with your audience. You can segment your users based on user attributes, customer behaviors, customer preferences, and lead scoring.

Native Look & Feel 😍😍😍

When you create a flow with Userpilot, you also have full control over the theme of the flow. The theme controls different general appearance aspects such as fonts, background colors, and buttons. However, it always feels “added” instead of being a native part of the experience.

Insights Assistance 🧠🧠🧠🧠

Userpilot offers quite a range of insights on its own. You can get insights into product usage data, user engagement data, and user sentiment data. You can also analyze your product data with third-party integrations.

Integrations with third-party tools 🧩🧩🧩🧩🧩

You can use Userpilot with other apps in your stack. You can integrate with tools like Segment, Amplitude, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Heap, Intercom, Kissmetrics, and Mixpanel.

Privacy and Compliance 🔒🔒

Userpilot cannot be self-hosted. The GDPR-compliant EU cloud is only available in the $500/month plan. If you need SOC-2, you have to go with the Enterprise plan.

Extensibility 🛠️🛠️🛠️

The extensibility is fairly limited but Userpilot provides a JavaScript API developers can build upon.

Pricing 💸💸💸

Userpilot comes at a starting price of $249 / month going up to $749 if you want advanced targeting or GDPR-compliant hosting in the EU.

Overall, Userpilot empowers data-driven decisions and continuous improvement, helping you to increase user engagement and reduce churn. Userpilot offers a free plan to determine if the high price point is justified.

Next up: Pendo 👇

3. Pendo

Pendo does a lot more than gathering feedback (product analytics, in-app guides, roadmaps). Once you have implemented it, you can run NPS surveys to measure your users' satisfaction with your application and gather actionable insights for driving app success. Its comprehensive suite of tools helps you understand user behavior, collect valuable feedback, and optimize your app for maximum impact.

Pre-segmentation & Targeting 🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯

Since Pendo packs analytics, you get to leverage the same events and segments you’re using to analyze your cohorts. With Pendo, you can also divide your user base by behavioral, demographic, or customer attributes. The granular segmentation lets you run the NPS survey with users who experienced the true value of your product.

Native Look & Feel 😍😍😍

Pendo enables you to style your user-facing UI by setting the formatting and layouts your team can use to communicate with the user base. This helps you keep in line with your brand identity. While the styling capabilities are comprehensive, you won't be able to get a 100% native look & feel of your user-facing components.

Insights Assistance 🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠

Pendo provides analytics tools that enable you to evaluate product usage and visualize users’ paths. The analytics are informative and easily accessible. If needed, you can also combine Pendo with other third-party tools for a deeper analysis.

Integrations with third-party tools 🧩🧩🧩🧩🧩

You can connect Pendo to other apps in your stack for data integration and data syncing. You can also integrate with CRMs like Salesforce. Given all these integrations you should be able to embed Pendo nicely in your current product stack.

Privacy and Compliance 🔒🔒🔒🔒🔒

Pendo cannot be used on-premise, so the data resides within the Pendo Cloud. It comes with GDPR, CCPA, SOC-2, and HIPAA compliance if required - that’s great!

Extensibility 🛠️🛠️🛠️🛠️🛠️

Pendo provides its API for developers to build up on, but it’s only available in its Growth plan.

Pricing 💸💸💸💸💸

Pendo only provides pricing information on request. Different sources shared different estimations but it seems to start somewhere around $6000 / year.

Overall, Pendo stands out as a powerful and customizable platform, empowering you to create exceptional user experiences, gather valuable insights, and optimize your app for success.

Let’s have a look at Appcues now ⬇️

4. Appcues

Appcues is a versatile user onboarding and engagement platform that offers a seamless experience for both users and developers. It provides a comprehensive toolkit that offers a way to streamline the journey from onboarding to feedback collection, providing valuable insights to refine your app.

Pre-segmentation & Targeting 🎯🎯🎯🎯

Appcues enables you to target specific segments with the experiences with the flows or NPS surveys you have created. You can segment your experiences based on new users, including or excluding a subset of them.

Native Look & Feel 😍😍😍

Appcues is somewhat versatile in customizations. However, even after adding your brand color, the user-facing components will always look like Appcues. It feels bolted on top of your app instead of being a native part of it.

Insights Assistance 🧠🧠🧠🧠

Appcues lets you track key product events to better understand user behavior, all with data visualizations—no coding needed. The insights dashboard is fairly comprehensive giving you a good insight into what's happening.

Integrations with third-party tools 🧩🧩🧩🧩

You can send data exactly where you need it with third-party integrations which include Fullstory, Google Analytics, Logrocket, and Mixpanel among others.

Privacy and Compliance 🔒🔒🔒

Appcues cannot be used on premise, so the data resides within the Appcues Cloud. It comes with GDPR and CCPA compliance and requires additional work on the customer side for HIPAA compliance.

Extensibility 🛠️🛠️🛠️

Appcues offers a public API that can be used to perform a variety of tasks which can make using Appcues more versatile for developers and it’s available on all plans.

Pricing 💸💸

Appcues pricing starts at $249/month for smaller apps (2.500 users) jumping to $10.500/year for the Growth plan (only yearly plan available). In the Growth plan you get access to the majority of the really cool features. Surveying in mobile apps (iOS and Android) always costs an additional premium.

Overall, Appcues empowers you to design personalized tooltips, tours, and modals to guide users, highlight key features, and enhance their initial journey. It can be used to gather feedback in-app but it isn’t built for that.

The next one has great value for money: Survicate 💰

5. Survicate

Survicate is a powerful feedback and survey tool designed for simplicity. Users can effortlessly create and deploy surveys through an intuitive interface, with features like drag-and-drop survey builders and customizable templates. Survicate powers email, link, website and mobile app survey.

Pre-segmentation & Targeting 🎯🎯🎯

Survicate tracks behavior in a very useful and product-agnostic way. This means that you can perform quite granular segmentation without having to set up tracking for custom events or actions. While this significantly shortens the setup time, you might not reach the exact segment you want with Survicates built-in targeting.

Native Look & Feel 😍😍😍😍

Survicate enables you to design your surveys quite flexibly. You can change colors, fonts and even add custom CSS to get exactly the look and feel you are looking for.

Insights Assistance 🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠

Survicate has a powerful analytics dashboard. They offer custom visualizations like Word Cloud for question types where it makes sense to display one. Overall, the insights section offers a lot of depth - our favorite in this comparison 👑

Integrations with third-party tools 🧩🧩🧩🧩🧩

Survicate supports a significant amount of integrations. They offer two-way sync with all relevant customer data platforms as well as one-click integrations with most other common productivity and marketing tools.

Privacy and Compliance 🔒🔒

As a European company, Survicate is fully GDPR compliant. There is no information about CCPA and it is not HIPAA compliant, as per their support page. Since self-hosting is not an option, Survicate cannot be used by a relevant segment of users.

Extensibility 🛠️🛠️🛠️🛠️🛠️

Survicate provide a data export API that allows you to retrieve survey data from your Survicate account. You can use it to pass all the information collected with Survicate surveys to a database, CRM, or any other custom solution you built.

Pricing 💸💸💸💸💸

Survicate has a great value for money. You get most of the standalone survey products for $50/month. However, this does not include website or mobile app surveys, which start at $112/month for 1000 responses. Anything above is on request.

Overall, Survicate offers a lot of feature depth. Having been around for over 10 years, the team keeps shipping! It comes at a fair price and is versatile enough to cover most surveying use cases. The only downside is a lack of compliance support so big companies won't be able to use it.

6. Qualaroo

Qualaroo empowers you to gather valuable user feedback through targeted "Nudges" that appear at key moments on your website. This unobtrusive approach minimizes user disruption while effectively capturing feedback that drives user experience improvements and product success.

Pre-segmentation & Targeting 🎯🎯🎯🎯

Qualaroo offers various pre-segmentation methods to help you target your surveys and gather the most relevant feedback from specific user segments. These methods include user attributes and website activity like click and scroll depth, page targeting and exit intent among others.

Native Look & Feel 😍😍

Qualaroo provides you with an option to style your nudges - whether light or dark palettes. While they offer a range of options, the surveys tend to look like add-ons to the UI.

Insights Assistance 🧠🧠🧠🧠

Qualaroo analytics and insights help you view detailed reports on survey responses, including answer choices, open-ended feedback, and sentiment analysis. You can also segment responses by user demographics, website activity, and other criteria to gain deeper insights into specific user groups. They also incorporate some AI to shorten the time to insight.

Integrations with third-party tools 🧩🧩🧩🧩

Qualaroo integrates with various third-party tools including Slack and Zapier.

Extensibility 🛠️

Since its internal workings are not readily accessible (as it’s not open-sourced), developers are limited in their ability to augment the platform's core functionality and tailor it to specific needs. Qualaroo does not provide APIs for developers to build on top of it.

Pricing 💸💸💸

Qualaroo is quite affordable for a small number of responses. You can access the complete product for $19.99 with 100 responses/month. If you need more, you need to reach out to their sales team.

Privacy and Compliance 🔒🔒🔒🔒

Qualaroo cannot be self-hosted, so the data resides within the US-based cloud. The privacy compliance information is not super comprehensive, but it seems that Qualaroo supports GDPR, CCPA and even HIPAA compliance.

Overall, Qualaroo is a solid solution for running surveys on public websites.

Transform user feedback into a growth engine for your app

Throughout this article, we've explored the power of in-app feedback and how it can revolutionize your understanding of your users. Now it's your turn to take action.

Formbricks offers a robust and user-friendly in-app feedback solution that simplifies collecting, analyzing, and acting on valuable user insights. With FormBricks, you can deploy a variety of feedback mechanisms (surveys, polls, NPS scoring) tailored to your specific needs, gain real-time user insights to identify areas for improvement and prioritize features, effortlessly analyze data, and measure the impact of your changes based on user feedback.

Sign up for a free trial on Formbricks today and unlock the power of in-app user feedback.