Qualtrics XM Discover vs Thematic: How To Use Them

Your feedback data sources keep growing, but your insights team doesn’t. So, what’s the solution? In this guide, we compare Thematic and Qualtrics XM Discover. Use the information in this guide to choose which is the best text analytics solution for your business.

Thematic vs. XM Discover: The Unique Resource Needs of These Text Analysis Tools

The choice between Thematic and XM Discover depends on specific business needs. Do you require deep integration in the Qualtrics ecosystem or a tool that's fast and easy to implement?

This table gives you a quick comparison of Thematic and XM Discover:

The following sections dive into more detail on the services, technology, and solutions.

Time to insights

Thematic and XM Discover significantly differ in how quickly they deliver value, the complexity of their setups, and the resources they require.

Thematic: within hours

• Fast and straightforward implementation – Thematic requires minimal setup and no complex configuration. Within hours, businesses can start analyzing feedback and identifying key themes.
• Granular and actionable themes from day one – Businesses get a taxonomy with granular and actionable theme descriptions and sentiment, such as 'Pricing upon renewal', within hours. The AI identifies sentiment and themes in the feedback dataset without training and can be validated and refined to fit your decision-makers' needs at any time. This helps to build trust in the quality of analysis, so teams can quickly take action on the insights.
• Minimal risk and resource dependence – Businesses can implement and scale their feedback analysis with little internal strain because Thematic doesn’t require a dedicated analytics team to maintain taxonomies or train AI models.

Overall business impact: Faster insights mean quicker responses to customer needs, leading to improved CX, higher customer retention, and more agile decision-making.

XM Discover: several weeks to months

• Extended setup and training required – XM Discover requires users to select an industry-specific AI model and train it to their business and market context. This process can take anywhere from 4 weeks to 6 months before the system is fully operational.
• Manual topic refinement – After training the AI to fit the business, organizations get a taxonomy with broad topics, such as 'Pricing.' This makes it possible to report using simple visualizations such as word clouds. Businesses work with consultants to validate the analysis and refine the taxonomy, making it costly and time-consuming to get accurate and relevant insights.
• Comprehensive team training – Because XM Discover is a more complex enterprise solution, organizations must allocate resources to train employees on how to use the platform effectively.

Overall business Impact: While XM Discover provides deep, structured insights, the long implementation period can delay business impact and increase the risk of inefficiencies during onboarding.

Business growth and scalability

When selecting a feedback analysis solution, businesses should consider long-term scalability across five key areas:

1. Data volume

Responding to insights quickly, even as the volume of feedback you collect increases, requires a solution built to process large data quantities. Both solutions handle large volumes of feedback.

• Thematic: Designed for large volumes of open-ended text data and structured data.
• XM Discover: Handles large volumes of text and structured data within its own ecosystem.

2. Channel growth

You should integrate new customer communication channels into your analysis as they emerge. Ensure your software has this flexibility and adaptability so that your business uncovers a full and true understanding of customer preferences and concerns.

• Thematic: You can add data from each channel and analyze each channel individually or in the aggregate. You can also merge theme models for each dataset, so that customer preferences can be analyzed across channels.
• XM Discover: Businesses can select data sources from the channels within the Qualtrics platform as needed, and analyze them. You can add topics from other channels, but each channel is analyzed individually.

3. The growth of your team

If you need a solution that scales with growing teams and cross-functional use cases, a self-service model offers greater adaptability.

• Thematic: Designed for broad accessibility, allowing multiple teams (product, marketing, customer service) to access granular and actionable insights without technical expertise.
• XM Discover: Requires centralized management and structured training for every new team member, making it better suited for organizations with a dedicated analytics team.

4. Integration requirements

Does your organization rely on multiple CX tools and requires seamless integration across platforms?

• Thematic: API-driven integrations make connecting with various customer feedback sources and existing analytics tools easy.
• XM Discover: Works best within the Qualtrics ecosystem, with deeper integrations into enterprise platforms but less flexibility outside its ecosystem.

5. Budget implications

Budget factors and financial risk are crucial in deciding on the best solution. Look for solutions are lower-cost with faster ROI.

• Thematic: Lower upfront investment and maintenance costs, along with a faster ROI makes it a budget-friendly solution.
• XM Discover: Requires a higher initial investment, plus ongoing costs for taxonomy management and technical resources.

6. User experience and training

Does your insights and research team have the internal resources to train and maintain a complex system? A user-friendly platform removes bottlenecks in analysis, and helps you quickly get to actionable insights.

• Thematic: Only minimal training is needed. The natural language interface simplifies asking questions and getting insights analysis, backed by verified data. Intuitive dashboards, customizable taxonomies, and exploration tools make it easy to share insights with any team.
• XM Discover: Demands extensive onboarding, involving taxonomy development training and continuous education for data analysts. This limitation confines analysis to the research and insights team, and makes it very challenging to understand why and how to act on the analysis.

Real Business Impact Stories & Scenarios

Case Study: LendingTree

Solution: Thematic

LendingTree, a leading online loan marketplace, initially used Discover XM to analyze customer feedback. However, they faced challenges in extracting meaningful insights efficiently – and at scale.

Here’s what happened when they switched to Thematic:

Faster time to insights

With Discover XM, LendingTree found that structuring and analyzing data required significant time and effort – a slow and resource-intensive process that delayed insights.

With Thematic’s out-of-the-box, AI-powered solution, LendingTree can automatically upload data and immediately see layered insights – without lengthy setup times.

Fewer resources and people demands

With Discover XM,  LendingTree had to dedicate significant time and resources to build and maintain the taxonomy, and to delve into topics to properly understand an issue. Often this wasn’t possible, resulting in the insights team failing to deliver actionable insights.

With Thematic, LendingTree provides a nearly complete analysis out of the box, uncovering themes and sentiment in real time. This enables the insights manager to focus on supporting decision-makers with rich customer stories, rather than spending time structuring data. The ease of setup and maintenance makes Thematic highly scalable and efficient.

Broader access to insights

With Discover XM, only certain teams at LendingTree had the expertise and resources to analyze and interpret insights.

Thematic’s user-friendly interface clearly shows how the AI reaches its results. During board meetings, the insights manager can quickly verify and dig into customer and marketplace insights for more detail. This has sped up decision-making throughout the business and built confidence in the insights.

Scenario: Rapid product feedback & changing consumer preferences

Solution: Thematic

Industry examples: Retail, FMCG, Marketplaces

Challenges: Fast-moving industries require real-time insights into evolving customer needs and product performance.

How Thematic solves this:

• Provides a theme taxonomy, with three layers of analysis and a full sentiment analysis of feedback, out of the box (straight away). The UI helps you refine the analysis to fit the business context in just a few minutes.
• Analyzes feedback to deliver granular insights, along with emerging or unknown themes, making it fast and easy to get the full context for confident and fast decision-making.
• Product, marketing, and operations teams can easily dive into insights and take immediate action.

Business impact: Businesses proactively identify and resolve customer issues with real-time insights. This helps them quickly identify product issues, adjust messaging, and optimize offerings.

ROI considerations:

• Faster time-to-market for product improvements.
• Increased customer satisfaction through proactive issue resolution.
• Low implementation costs compared to text analytics that require pre-training.

Scenario: Complex regulatory requirements & structured data needs

Solution: XM Discover

Industry examples: Healthcare, Finance, Government

Challenges: Strict compliance standards require controlled data governance and industry-specific reporting.

How XM Discover solves this:

• Provides an industry-specific taxonomy that can be manually customized so that feedback is tagged according to regulatory requirements and business context.
• Processes feedback in a structured manner, making it easier to generate detailed compliance reports.
• Integrates seamlessly with Qualtrics systems so customer feedback and personal identifiers are not exported to external software.

Business impact: Organizations can maintain compliance while gaining insights into customer experiences – without compromising regulation and legal requirements.

ROI Considerations:

• Long implementation time, with additional consulting fees, leads to higher investment risk
• Essential for risk mitigation in highly regulated industries.
• Requires ongoing maintenance by a dedicated analytics team.

Scenario: Scaling feedback analysis across multiple product teams

Solution: XM Discover

Industry examples: Technology, SaaS, Consumer Electronics

Challenges: Product teams require a faster and more efficient process for analyzing the noisy feedback across channels so they can be data-led in their product roadmap.

How XM Discover solves this:

• Discovers emerging or new themes and trends without manual configuration.
• Product teams get a rich, granular understanding of issues and user experiences with self-service analytics tools.
• API integrations make it easy to incorporate new data and export analyzed data to your preferred reporting tools and workflows, such as Slack.

Business impact: Faster response times to customer issues and increased alignment across product teams.

ROI considerations:

• Product teams are more agile in shipping v2 of features, addressing customer concerns
• Reduced reliance on IT teams, with fewer internal resources required
• Low operational overhead for continued insights generation.

Decision time – what’s the best choice for your organization?

Choosing the right feedback analysis tool is critical to unlocking valuable CX insights. While Thematic and XM Discover offer powerful capabilities, the best choice depends on your organization’s needs, resources, and goals. To help guide your decision, use the quick assessment below:

Which feedback analysis tool is right for you?

✅ Choose Thematic if:

• You need an enterprise solution that can adapt to a rapidly changing decision environment
• Your insights and research team inform many other teams across the business about how to improve their ability to meet customers' needs.
• Your research team wants a best-of-breed approach – and has matured beyond topic analysis.
• You need to validate and explain to stakeholders how the AI has uncovered insights.

✅ Choose XM Discover if:

• You need an enterprise solution that meets the needs of highly regulated industries.
• You need deep integrations within the Qualtrics ecosystem platforms and cannot export data.
• Your business can dedicate time, cost, and resources to working with consultants to get insights.
• Your business is new to open-ended text analytics and is not yet sure how to use the insights.

CX insight analytics that change the way you think about customers

If you need fast, accurate, actionable insights that everyone in your organization can interpret and act on, Thematic is the ideal solution. Its AI-powered approach ensures you can identify and act on customer trends faster, helping you drive meaningful improvements in CX.

Take the next step—book a demo with Thematic today to see how it can transform your feedback analysis and help you make confident, data-driven decisions.