Medallia Pricing in 2026: What the EDR Model Actually Costs, and Why There's No Rate Card
Johannes
Co-Founder @ Formbricks
10 Minutes
Updated November 13, 2026
Medallia pricing is quote-only. The Medallia pricing page explains its Experience Data Record (EDR) model in detail and publishes no dollar figure. This guide uses real contract benchmarks, third-party cost breakdowns and Medallia's 2026 ownership change to show what buyers actually pay.
Medallia pricing at a glance
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Published price | None. Every pricing CTA routes to "Talk to Sales" |
| Pricing metric | Experience Data Records (EDRs), one per customer or employee interaction |
| SMB average | $14,759 per year (SpendHound, 160 customers tracked) |
| Enterprise average | $755,772 per year, up 1.71% year over year (SpendHound, 27 enterprise customers) |
| On top of the license | Module licenses, implementation and professional services (getperspective.ai) |
| Free plan or trial | None |
| Ownership | Recapitalization agreed with lenders on June 17, 2026 (Bloomberg Law) and closed on August 3, 2026, moving ownership to a Blackstone-led creditor group (Medallia) |
Verdict: budget low five figures for a small deployment and mid six figures for an enterprise program, before services. If you need a number before the first sales call, Medallia will not give you one.
What is Medallia?
Medallia is an enterprise customer and employee experience platform founded in 2001. The name refers both to the company and to its product, Medallia Experience Cloud. Its main US office, Medallia, Inc., is in McLean, Virginia, with further offices in Pleasanton, London, Paris, Madrid, Prague, Tokyo, Sydney and Toronto, per its contact page. Medallia says it serves 2,000+ brands, including 9 of the Fortune 10 (About Medallia). Named customers on its customer stories page include 3M, ADP, Airbnb, Albertsons, Best Western, Comcast, Cox and Deliveroo.
What the EDR model covers
Medallia prices on one metric, the Experience Data Record. Each EDR holds all data tied to one interaction: a survey response, a call, a social mention or a video. The pricing page calls pricing based on survey response volumes or number of users "obsolete."
Captured from medallia.com/pricing.
| Medallia lists in EDR pricing | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Signal types | Surveys, speech, social, digital feedback, video |
| Analytics | Medallia AI, text, speech and acoustic analytics |
| Workflow | Unlimited users, role-based reporting, alerts, case management |
| Security and admin | PII redaction, developer portal, admin suite, sandboxes |
The page implies one EDR price covers the platform. Third-party analysis tells a different story: getperspective.ai, citing ITQlick estimates, reports that digital, contact center, employee experience and text analytics are licensed as separate modules on top of EDR volume.
What about the $5 per user price on Capterra?
Capterra lists a "Basic" starting price of $5 per user per month. Medallia's own pricing page does not mention seat pricing, and its EDR model includes unlimited users. Treat the Capterra figure as a directory placeholder. No contract benchmark we found comes close to it.
Medallia pricing from real contracts
SpendHound benchmarks de-identified spend data. Its Medallia page (updated October 29, 2026) now tracks 160 customers:
| Segment | Average annual spend | Change |
|---|---|---|
| SMB | $14,759 | Not stated |
| Enterprise (27 customers) | $755,772 | +1.71% year over year |
For context, SpendHound puts Gainsight at $112,413 a year for SMB and $598,329 for enterprise. Medallia's enterprise average runs about 1.26 times Gainsight's.
Other anchors you will see: getperspective.ai cites an entry license around $20,000. QuestionPro, a competitor, says Medallia "seems to charge" a $300,000 annual minimum. Neither is a Medallia-published figure, so use them as negotiation context only.
Total cost of ownership
The license is only part of the bill. Based on the getperspective.ai breakdown, a first-year Medallia budget looks like this:
| Cost line | What to expect |
|---|---|
| EDR license | Scales with interaction volume |
| Module licenses | Digital, contact center, EX and text analytics priced separately |
| Implementation and onboarding | $5,000 to $50,000+ one-time fees reported |
| Professional services | Custom integrations, dashboards and program design |
| Internal labor | Admins and analysts to run hierarchies, alerts and reports |
| Time to value | Reviewers report multi-month rollouts before full use |
Ask for each line in writing. A quote that only shows EDR volume hides the lines that usually grow at renewal.
How to negotiate a Medallia quote
- Get benchmarks first. Bring the SpendHound averages to the first call so the opening number has an anchor.
- Cap EDR growth. Agree a price per EDR band for years two and three before signing.
- Bundle modules up front. Modules added mid-contract carry less discount.
- Fix services scope. Ask for a fixed-fee implementation with named deliverables.
- Use timing. Quarter-end and multi-year terms are the usual levers in enterprise software deals.
- Cite the ownership change. A vendor under new owners may value a signed renewal more than list price.
Medallia's 2026 ownership change
Thoma Bravo took Medallia private in 2021 for $6.4 billion. The deal was partly debt-financed. By 2026, Medallia carried about $3 billion of debt held by lenders including Blackstone, KKR, Apollo and Antares, and Reuters reported that a handover to lenders would wipe out Thoma Bravo's roughly $5.1 billion equity (Private Equity Wire, citing Reuters). After Thoma Bravo declined to inject fresh cash, Medallia signed a recapitalization agreement with its lenders on June 17, 2026 (Bloomberg Law). The deal closed on August 3, 2026, moving ownership to a creditor group led by Blackstone, with Apollo and FS KKR Capital Corp (Medallia).
The product still works and still has strong reviews: G2 shows Medallia Customer Experience at 4.5 from 212 reviews (G2). But new owners who need cash flow tend to push renewals and price increases. Ask about roadmap commitments and price caps in writing.
The rest of the market is consolidating too. Qualtrics closed its $6.75 billion purchase of Press Ganey Forsta in May 2026, which brings InMoment (bought by Press Ganey in 2025) under the same owner (Research Live). See our Forsta pricing breakdown for what that means for Forsta customers.
Formbricks for teams leaving Medallia
Formbricks is an experience management suite you can run on infrastructure you control. Enterprises switch for three reasons.
Data sovereignty. Run Formbricks on your own servers or in your own AWS, Azure or GCP account, or use Formbricks Surveys on the Public Cloud (EU, Frankfurt). Dedicated cloud and Managed by Formbricks (EU or Saudi Arabia) for the Experience Suite are coming soon. Responses stay in your jurisdiction. Medallia runs a single-tenant private cloud on Medallia-owned hardware (Medallia security), which is isolated but still Medallia's infrastructure. See how Formbricks self-hosting works.
Security and compliance. Formbricks is ISO 27001 compliant and GDPR and CCPA compliant, and its hosted Public Cloud is covered by a SOC 2 Type II audit (compliance, SOC 2). An Experience Suite license adds SAML and OIDC SSO, teams and roles, audit logging, a DPA and custom terms. Self-hosted, you run your own controls on the same codebase and there are zero sub-processors.
Cost that follows usage. An Experience Suite license is annual and priced by responses and workspaces, by quote, with unlimited seats. You can start with a free 15-day trial license key.
For IT, that means a deployment you choose, Helm charts for Kubernetes and a security review backed by audit reports. For CX teams, it means surveys across web, app, email and link, plus Experience Suite capabilities: Unify Feedback brings in feedback from other sources with AI enrichment, Topics and subtopics label it with AI (in preview), dashboards and charts show the results, and Workflows (beta) trigger actions such as an email when a response completes.
Open source is how we deliver this: you can read the code, and your data never depends on our business. Own your experience data instead of renting it back.
Where Medallia is stronger: speech analytics, video feedback, social listening and contact-center tooling at very large scale. If those are core to your program, Formbricks will not replace them today.
Small teams can also use Formbricks Surveys self-serve (Pro at $89 a month, or $74 a month billed annually).
Medallia vs Formbricks pricing
| Medallia | Formbricks | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | EDR volume plus modules and services | Annual license by responses and workspaces, unlimited seats |
| Published price | None | Experience Suite by quote; Surveys plans listed on pricing |
| Trial | None | Free 15-day trial license |
| Deployment | Medallia-owned private cloud | Self-hosted (your servers or your own cloud account); Dedicated cloud and Managed by Formbricks coming soon |
| Compliance | Enterprise security program | SOC 2 Type II (hosted Public Cloud), ISO 27001, GDPR, CCPA |
| Signal breadth | Surveys, speech, video, social, digital | Surveys plus feedback unification add-on |
| Ownership (2026) | Creditor group led by Blackstone (since August 3, 2026) | Independent |
Medallia pricing FAQ
How much does Medallia cost?
What does Medallia mean?
Who acquired Medallia?
Where is Medallia located?
Which companies use Medallia?
What is Medallia's Experience Data Record (EDR)?
Is Medallia really $5 per user per month?
What costs come on top of the Medallia license?
How can I negotiate a lower Medallia price?
Does Medallia have a free trial or free plan?
Does Medallia offer self-hosting?
What is a self-hosted alternative to Medallia?
Final verdict
Medallia is worth the price if you need speech, video, social and survey signals in one platform at global scale, and you have budget for a six-figure program plus services. Get SpendHound benchmarks, a full TCO breakdown and price caps in writing before you sign, especially now that lenders own the company.
If your requirement is experience data you control, with a security review that ends quickly and a price that follows responses, talk to us about Formbricks.
Related comparisons
- Medallia alternatives: how to switch, run a pilot and build a shortlist
- Medallia competitors: who Medallia competes with and how the market is structured
- Forsta pricing: what Forsta costs now that Qualtrics owns it
- Chattermill pricing: contract benchmarks for an AI feedback analytics layer