10 Real Medallia Competitors in 2026 (Who Actually Rivals It, and Why)

Most "Medallia alternatives" content is written as a switch-away pitch: here's why you should leave, here's what to replace it with. That's a different question from the one this article answers. Who actually competes with Medallia in the enterprise Voice of the Customer market, according to the buyers and analysts who evaluate this category? We pulled that answer directly from Gartner Peer Insights' own Medallia alternatives page, cross-checked it against the competitive_landscape data in our own competitor research, and mapped out how the market is actually structured. One name on this list is open-source. The rest are the real incumbents and specialists Medallia is actually measured against.

What Is Medallia?

Medallia is an enterprise Customer Experience Management (CEM) platform founded in 2001. It captures feedback across email, web, SMS, contact center interactions, social media, and mobile apps, then applies AI to route insights to frontline teams in real time.

Medallia's own positioning is "Real-time insight. Real-world results." The company reports 2,000+ leading brands as customers, 1,800+ employees, and more than 1 billion signals processed per month. It holds a 4.5 rating across 634 reviews on G2's seller page and 8.9 out of 10 across 44 reviews on TrustRadius.

Medallia prices on a proprietary metric called the Experience Data Record (EDR), one record per discrete customer or employee interaction, rather than per survey response or per seat. The pricing page describes the model qualitatively but publishes zero public dollar figures; every call to action routes to "Talk to Sales."

Important context: Thoma Bravo, a private equity firm, acquired Medallia in October 2021 for approximately $6.4 billion, taking it private after it had traded on the NYSE since 2019. That's a relevant data point for anyone evaluating Medallia's long-term product direction and pricing stability, independent of how the platform performs today.

Medallia's Actual Position in the Voice of Customer Market

Gartner Peer Insights maintains a live "Voice of the Customer Platforms" market page that tracks which vendors buyers evaluate against Medallia and how reviewers rate each head-to-head. That page is the closest thing to ground truth on who Medallia actually competes with, as opposed to who a blog post says it competes with.

The page's "Top alternatives ranked by recent software buyers" section lists these vendors, in order, each with a live rating and review count:

Vendor (per Gartner Peer Insights)	Rating	Ratings count
Qualtrics	4.5	198
Qualtrics (InMoment)	4.9	74
Verint	4.3	41
Concentrix	4.6	27
SMG	4.2	13
NiCE	4.8	41
Alchemer	4.5	80
QuestionPro	3.5	2
Sprinklr	4.5	146
SurveySparrow	4.5	108

Two things stand out. First, Gartner's own listing groups InMoment under the label "Qualtrics (InMoment)," a naming convention that reflects the two brands converging on Gartner's tracked market data, worth knowing if you see InMoment listed elsewhere as a fully independent vendor. Second, on nearly every head-to-head comparison Gartner surfaces, reviewers rate Medallia ahead of the alternative specifically on "service and support" and "easier to integrate and deploy," while the alternative usually wins on a narrower, specific capability. That pattern (Medallia wins on breadth and support, challengers win on a specific edge) is the actual shape of this competitive market, not a simple "better or worse" ranking.

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Medallia Competitors at a Glance

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Top 10 Medallia Competitors in 2026

1. Formbricks: The Open-Source Entrant in an All-Closed-Source Market

Every other name on this list, and every name on Gartner's own Medallia alternatives page, is closed-source and cloud-only. Formbricks is the exception, and that's the actual basis of its competitive position here, not a marketing claim.

Why it's positioned differently from the rest of this list:

Formbricks is an open-source feedback and experience management suite built around three pillars: feedback management (website, in-app, link, and email surveys unified on one platform), feedback analytics (response dashboards, drop-off tracking, and segmentation), and workflows and integrations (Formbricks Workflows for post-response automation, plus native integrations to Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, Google Sheets, and Notion, all through a free API on every tier). It doesn't attempt to match Medallia's EDR model or its unstructured-signal breadth (speech, video, social). It competes for the narrower, much more common requirement: transparent, self-hostable feedback infrastructure.

Key features:

• Multi-channel surveys: link surveys, website pop-ups, in-app micro-surveys, and email-embedded surveys on one platform
• Attribute-based targeting: show surveys to specific segments based on behavior, attributes, or customer journey stage
• Feedback analytics: aggregate and per-response views, drop-off tracking, and custom segmentation
• Formbricks Workflows: automate what happens after a response comes in, without a separate case-management product
• Open API and webhooks on every tier, including the free plan, unlike Medallia's fully quote-based enterprise contracts
• iOS and Android SDKs for native mobile in-app surveys
• Self-hosting option, the one deployment model that appears nowhere in Medallia's own security documentation

Pricing (Cloud):

• Hobby (Free): 250 responses/month, 1 workspace, full API access (including MCP), hosted in Frankfurt
• Pro: $74/month ($890/year billed annually) for 3 workspaces and 2,000 responses/month, unlimited seats, branding removal
• Scale: $325/month ($3,900/year billed annually) for 5 workspaces and 5,000 responses/month, teams and access roles, two-factor authentication

Pricing (Self-Hosted):

• Community Edition: Free forever, AGPLv3, unlimited surveys and seats
• Enterprise Edition: Custom pricing for SSO, branding removal, and white-glove onboarding

Best for: Teams evaluating Medallia's Voice of Customer capability specifically, who don't need its EDR pricing model, hierarchical enterprise reporting, or unstructured-signal breadth, and who have a data residency requirement self-hosting solves directly.

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2. Qualtrics: Medallia's Most-Cited Direct Rival

Qualtrics is the name that shows up most consistently across every source we reviewed. Gartner's own Medallia alternatives page ranks it first among "Top alternatives ranked by recent software buyers," at 4.5 across 198 ratings.

How the market positions it against Medallia: the relationship runs both directions. Qualtrics' own competitive research names Medallia as its most frequently compared rival too, per the competitive_landscape data cited in our Qualtrics research (sourced from CustomerGauge's Qualtrics comparison, Gartner's Qualtrics alternatives page, and Pollfish's Qualtrics competitors guide). In other words, if you asked "who is Qualtrics' main competitor," the honest answer sourced from that same research is Medallia itself. The two platforms are each other's default comparison point in this market.

Where they diverge: Qualtrics leans into research-grade survey design (StatsIQ statistical tooling, 20+ guided academic methodologies), while Medallia leans into real-time frontline action and unstructured-signal breadth.

Key features:

• Three product lines: Customer Experience (CX), Employee Experience (EX), and Strategy & Research, each separately priced
• StatsIQ: regression, clustering, and R-integration for statistical depth
• 23 question types including video and audio responses
• 500+ pre-built integrations including Salesforce, Slack, and ServiceNow

Pricing: Almost entirely custom, quote-based annual contracts. The one exception is the self-serve Strategic Research plan at $420/month ($5,040 billed annually), capped at 1,000 total responses shared across all users. Third-party benchmarking cited by UXtweak (sourced from Vendr) reports a median annual spend of $28,533/year, ranging $6,525-$126,000/year.

Best for: Enterprises that specifically need research-grade survey design and statistical depth across customer, employee, and market research use cases in one (separately-priced) portfolio.

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3. Verint: Contact-Center-First, VoC Second

Verint is the fourth name on Gartner's Medallia alternatives ranking, at 4.3 across 41 ratings. It's a legitimate competitor, but the comparison only makes sense once you understand what Verint actually sells.

How it compares to Medallia: Verint (taken private by Thoma Bravo in a $2 billion deal that closed November 2025, then combined with its existing portfolio company Calabrio) is primarily a contact-center AI and workforce engagement platform. Voice of the Customer is a real product line, but per Verint's own G2 review-count breakdown, that listing carries 45 reviews against 692 and 324 reviews across its Workforce Management-related listings. The center of gravity of Verint's business is contact-center automation, not survey-first experience management, which makes it a narrower competitive overlap with Medallia than Qualtrics is.

Key features:

• CX Automation and AI bots: Coaching Bot, Knowledge Automation Bot, Genie Bot for GenAI-generated insights
• Voice of the Customer: web and mobile digital feedback, Survey Management, Enterprise CX
• Workforce engagement management: scheduling, forecasting, and speech/text analytics via Calabrio

Pricing: Custom, quote-based. No public rate card for any product line.

Best for: Organizations that need contact-center workforce automation and speech analytics bundled with their CX program, not teams looking for a dedicated survey or VoC tool.

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4. NICE: The Cloud-Native Rival to Both Verint and Medallia's Contact-Center Overlap

NICE rates 4.8 across 41 ratings on Gartner's Medallia alternatives page, the highest score of any vendor on that specific list.

How it compares to Medallia: NICE is a vertically integrated CCaaS platform (contact-center infrastructure, workforce management, and analytics under one roof) with LLM-based sentiment and intent analysis built in. Where Medallia unifies signals under its EDR pricing model, NICE unifies contact-center operations and analytics under a single cloud-native architecture. Reviewers on Gartner describe it as "a robust and intuitive platform for customer experience management."

Key features:

• Omnichannel routing across voice, chat, email, and social channels
• AI-powered performance management and predictive insights
• Forecasting, scheduling, and real-time adherence monitoring
• IVR, chatbots, and self-service automation

Pricing: Custom, quote-based, similar to Medallia. Third-party comparison guides describe NICE's pricing structure as marginally more transparent, though it still requires a sales conversation for a number.

Best for: Large, complex, multi-channel contact centers that want CCaaS, workforce management, and analytics from a single modern vendor rather than a survey-first VoC platform.

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5. InMoment: AI-Powered Analytics, Now Tracked Alongside Qualtrics

InMoment is the second-highest-rated name on Gartner's Medallia alternatives page, at 4.9 across 74 ratings, listed there as "Qualtrics (InMoment)."

How it compares to Medallia: InMoment positions itself as an "integrated CX" platform, aggregating survey data, social reviews, support tickets, and other unstructured signals into one analytics layer. Where Medallia focuses on real-time signal routing to frontline staff, InMoment goes deeper on AI-driven text and sentiment analysis out of the box, pulling in sources Medallia doesn't natively cover, like review sites and social media.

Key features:

• AI-powered text analytics with theme detection, sentiment scoring, and intent analysis
• Aggregation of reviews, social mentions, and support transcripts alongside survey data
• Customer journey mapping with automated touchpoint analysis
• Industry-specific solutions for retail, healthcare, and hospitality

Pricing: Custom, quote-based. Vendr's buyer guide reports an average annual cost of roughly $13,488, a benchmark figure rather than a list price.

Best for: CX teams that need advanced AI analytics across multiple unstructured data sources, particularly in retail, hospitality, and financial services.

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6. SMG: The Multi-Location Retail and Restaurant Specialist

SMG rates 4.2 across 13 ratings on Gartner's Medallia alternatives page. Its own positioning, "Unified Experience Management (UXM)," targets a narrower vertical set than Medallia's broad enterprise footprint.

How it compares to Medallia: SMG's own homepage names restaurant, retail, consumer packaged goods, consumer services, and hospitality as its core industries, with client logos including Wendy's, Papa John's, McDonald's, Nestle, and L'Oreal NYX. Where Medallia sells broadly across enterprise verticals, SMG is built specifically for multi-location brands that need location-level and market-segment insight, with its Ignite platform explicitly framed around gathering feedback earlier in the experience design process, not just after an interaction.

Key features:

• Ignite: AI-native platform unifying brand, customer, and employee experience insights
• Location- and segment-level reporting for multi-unit organizations
• Real-time strategic recommendations tied to specific store or market performance
• Cross-functional BX, CX, and EX data connected in one view

Pricing: Custom, quote-based. No public rate card.

Best for: Restaurant, retail, and hospitality brands with many locations that need experience insight broken down to the individual store or franchise level.

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7. Sprinklr: Unified CXM Spanning Social, Service, and Marketing

Sprinklr rates 4.5 across 146 ratings on Gartner's Medallia alternatives page, the second-highest review count of any vendor on that list after Qualtrics.

How it compares to Medallia: Sprinklr positions itself as "the definitive AI-native platform for extraordinary customer experiences," spanning four suites: Sprinklr Service (CCaaS), Sprinklr Social, Sprinklr Marketing, and Sprinklr Insights (which includes a dedicated Sprinklr Surveys module). That survey module is the closest overlap with Medallia's VoC use case, but it's one small piece of a much larger unified suite, similar in shape to how Verint's VoC module sits inside a bigger contact-center platform. One Gartner reviewer described it as a platform where "it can take some time to learn everything, but once you are familiar with it, it becomes a valuable tool for monitoring customer experience."

Key features:

• Sprinklr Service: inbound/outbound contact center, omnichannel routing, agent copilot
• Sprinklr Social: publishing and engagement across 30+ digital and social channels
• Sprinklr Insights: social listening, competitive benchmarking, LLM Insights, and Sprinklr Surveys
• SOC1/SOC2 Type II, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, and FedRAMP authorization

Pricing: Custom, quote-based only. Sprinklr's own pricing page returned a 404 when checked, and multiple G2 and Capterra reviewers independently describe the product as "super expensive" and enterprise-only.

Best for: Large enterprises that want social media management, contact-center AI, marketing, and CX insights unified in one platform, and don't need a dedicated, lightweight survey tool.

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8. Alchemer: The Mid-Market Alternative to Enterprise Complexity

Alchemer rates 4.5 across 80 ratings on Gartner's Medallia alternatives page, notably strong review volume for a platform explicitly positioned below Medallia's price point.

How it compares to Medallia: Medallia is an enterprise-only platform with no self-serve option. Alchemer serves teams of all sizes with transparent pricing and a product you can evaluate without a sales call, at the cost of Medallia's real-time action management and unstructured-signal breadth.

Key features:

• Advanced survey logic with branching, piping, and quotas
• 40+ question types including MaxDiff, conjoint, and custom HTML
• White-label surveys with full brand customization
• HIPAA, GDPR, and SOC 2-ready compliance posture

Pricing: Self-service plans from $49-55/user/month, with a dedicated VoC/CX platform priced by quote. No free plan, but a free trial is available.

Best for: Mid-market companies that need more survey sophistication than a basic tool offers but can't justify (or don't need) Medallia's enterprise complexity.

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9. QuestionPro: Enterprise Features at a Fraction of the Cost

QuestionPro is the lowest-rated name on Gartner's Medallia alternatives page at 3.5 across just 2 ratings, a small sample size worth noting before weighing it too heavily against the other entries here.

How it compares to Medallia: QuestionPro isn't trying to be a real-time CX action platform. It's a survey and research tool with CX capabilities layered on, at a price point far below Medallia's enterprise contracts. One Gartner reviewer praised its "great customer service and competitive prices."

Key features:

• 350+ survey templates across CX, EX, and market research
• Advanced question types including MaxDiff, conjoint, and Van Westendorp pricing
• Offline surveys via mobile app for field research
• Community Management for ongoing research panels

Pricing:

• Essentials: Free (1 user, 200 responses per survey, 30 question types)
• Advanced: $99/user/month (billed annually, 25,000 responses/year, 38 question types)
• Team Edition: $83/user/month (billed annually, 5+ users, 100,000 responses/year)
• Research Suite: Custom pricing (52 question types, advanced methodologies)

Best for: Budget-conscious teams that need enterprise-grade survey capabilities without Medallia's enterprise pricing, especially in market research and academic use cases.

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10. SurveySparrow: The Highest-Reviewed Conversational Alternative

SurveySparrow rates 4.5 across 108 ratings on Gartner's Medallia alternatives page, and is also named directly in Verint's own competitive landscape research as a primary competitor, giving it unusual cross-market visibility for a mid-market tool.

How it compares to Medallia: Medallia captures feedback at enterprise scale across dozens of touchpoints. SurveySparrow focuses on making the survey experience itself more engaging through a chat-like, conversational interface. It's not a replacement for Medallia's frontline action management, but for teams whose core problem is low response rates, it's a strong feedback-collection layer at a fraction of the cost.

Key features:

• Conversational surveys with chat-like UI (web and mobile)
• Recurring surveys for automated NPS, CSAT, and employee pulse programs
• 360-degree feedback for employee performance reviews
• Offline kiosk mode for in-location feedback

Pricing:

• Free: 75 responses/quarter, 1 user, 3 active classic surveys
• Basic: $19/month (billed annually) for 2,500 responses, 1 user
• Starter: $37/month (billed annually) for 15,000 responses, 1 user
• Business: $79/month (billed annually) for 36,000 responses, 3 users
• Billing is yearly or quarterly only, no monthly option

Best for: Teams that want to improve survey completion rates through a conversational format without Medallia's enterprise contract and implementation timeline.

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Medallia vs Qualtrics: The Head-to-Head Everyone Actually Asks About

This is the comparison Gartner's own data, and Qualtrics' own competitive research, both point to as the default. If someone asks "who is the main competitor for Qualtrics," the sourced answer is Medallia itself, per the competitive_landscape data behind our Qualtrics research (citing CustomerGauge, Gartner, and Pollfish). The relationship runs both ways: Medallia's own Gartner alternatives page ranks Qualtrics first too.

Factor	Medallia	Qualtrics
Ownership	Thoma Bravo (private, since October 2021, ~$6.4B)	Silver Lake and CPP Investments (private, since June 2023); previously SAP (2018-2021), then public via 2021 IPO
Core strength	Real-time frontline action, unstructured data (calls, reviews)	Research-grade survey design, StatsIQ statistical depth
Gartner VoC market rating	Baseline (this page)	4.5 (198 ratings)
Pricing transparency	None, fully EDR-based custom quotes	1 of 8 tiers public ($420/mo self-serve research plan)
Employee experience	Present but secondary to CX	Full EX suite (People Engage, People Lifecycle)
Self-hosting	Not offered anywhere in documented platform	Not offered anywhere in documented platform
Best for	Frontline-heavy enterprises needing real-time action routing	Research teams, academic-style methodologies, multi-departmental XM

The short version: choose Medallia if real-time frontline action and unstructured-signal breadth matter most. Choose Qualtrics if flexible survey design and research depth matter more. Notice that neither offers self-hosting at any budget, which is the actual gap covered next.

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The Gap None of These Competitor Rankings Mention

Gartner's Medallia alternatives page, and every source we reviewed for this article, ranks vendors on review scores, service quality, and ease of integration. None of them ask a data residency question: can you deploy this on infrastructure you control?

Across all 10 competitors above, not one publishes a genuine self-hosted or customer-premises deployment option. Medallia itself runs a distinctive but still vendor-managed model: a single-tenant private cloud on Medallia-owned hardware in Tier III colocation facilities, per its own security documentation. That's more isolated than typical multi-tenant SaaS, but it's still entirely Medallia-managed infrastructure, not customer-controlled. Sprinklr, Qualtrics, Verint, NICE, and every other name on this list show the same pattern: Sprinklr's regional data-hosting add-ons (Switzerland, Saudi Arabia) are still Sprinklr-managed, and Qualtrics' security documentation describes only centrally-hosted cloud infrastructure.

Formbricks is the exception. Its Community Edition, licensed under AGPLv3, is free and self-hostable on infrastructure you control, with no response caps and no vendor dependency for where the data physically lives.

This matters most for organizations in banking, healthcare, government, or any sector where a compliance or data residency mandate rules out third-party-managed hosting entirely, regardless of how good the platform is otherwise. If that's the actual constraint, the real comparison isn't Medallia vs. Qualtrics vs. Sprinklr. It's whether self-hosting is on the table at all, and today, Formbricks is the only name in this market where the answer is yes.

How to Choose the Right Medallia Competitor

Picking the right platform depends on which part of Medallia's scope you actually need to replace or compete against.

Start With Your Use Case

• Transparent pricing and self-hosting: Formbricks
• Research-grade survey design and statistical depth: Qualtrics
• Contact-center workforce automation bundled with VoC: Verint or NICE
• AI analytics across unstructured, multi-channel data: InMoment
• Multi-location retail, restaurant, or hospitality CX: SMG
• Unified social, service, marketing, and CX in one suite: Sprinklr
• Mid-market CXM without enterprise complexity: Alchemer
• Budget-conscious enterprise-grade surveys: QuestionPro
• Conversational surveys with high response rates: SurveySparrow

Then Evaluate These Criteria

Criteria	Questions to Ask
Pricing transparency	Can you get a real number without a sales call, or is everything quote-based?
Data residency	Where does your feedback data live? Can you self-host if compliance requires it?
Scope match	Do you need Medallia's EDR breadth, or lightweight ongoing feedback collection?
Vertical fit	Does the vendor specialize in your industry (retail, contact center, B2B), or is it generalist?
Review-verified strengths	What do Gartner and G2 reviewers say the vendor is actually better at, not just its marketing claims?
Implementation timeline	Are you prepared for a multi-month enterprise rollout, or do you need faster time-to-value?

For related reading, see our Medallia alternatives, Qualtrics competitors, and Verint competitors guides, all covering different angles of the same enterprise experience management category.

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Frequently Asked Questions

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If your evaluation of Medallia (or any of the 10 competitors above) comes down to transparent pricing and the option to self-host, Formbricks gives you feedback management, feedback analytics, and workflows on one platform, with a free tier and no sales call required to see a real price.