Top Medallia Alternatives & Competitors (And What They’re Best At)

You’ve been searching for the best customer experience platform and came across Medallia. But, a few things are stopping it from being the best choice for your organization, so you’re looking for alternatives.

While some Medallia competitors offer similar all-in-one solutions, there are other alternatives you can use to build the customer experience tech stack that helps your organization deliver an exceptional customer experience. Ultimately, the best Medallia competitor for you will be the one that meets your business requirements.

To help you make that decision, we’ve collated a list of nine Medallia alternatives and competitors divided into four categories:

1. Customer Experience Management
2. Contact Center Experience
3. Feedback Collection
4. Feedback Analysis

Each category covers the pros and cons of each solution, what they’re best for, and how each compares to other options in its respective category. This article also looks at how feedback analysis software can help you understand and improve various areas of customer experience.

Short on time and looking for the best Medallia alternative for customer feedback analysis?

Jump straight to Thematic’s solution to learn more.

What is Medallia?

Medallia is an enterprise-level, experience management software platform. Its core purpose is to help organizations understand, manage, and improve customer and employee experience.

How does it do this? It captures experience signals across digital platforms and human interactions for a complete view of your customer and employee experience. Then, it uses predictive intelligence and machine learning technology to extract valuable insights your organization can use to improve customer satisfaction and make strategic business decisions.

Why do companies use Medallia?

So, why do companies choose to use Medallia? For some organizations, it provides a mix of enterprise experience solutions in one platform.

Customer Experience

Medallia's customer experience software helps you track and measure customer satisfaction across the entire customer lifecycle. Its CX measurement capabilities enable you to capture and analyze customer interactions to predict behavior.

Employee Experience

With Medallia, you can measure and analyze employee experience using Medallia Experience Cloud. You can collect real-time employee feedback and use its advanced features to make data-driven decisions that empower your teams.

Contact Center

Medallia provides conversation intelligence and quality management tools for contact centers to help improve agent engagement and service delivery.

Market Research

Medallia's Agile Research product features pre-built survey templates for gathering quick insights and in-house experts for customized research.

Why you may be looking for a Medallia alternative

Like all software, Medallia has advantages – and disadvantages.

While the tool has many features that cover customer experience, employee experience, contact center engagement and service, and market research, there are several reasons why you might consider shifting to a Medallia competitor.

Here are four reasons why a Medallia alternative may be a better fit for your organization based on reviews from G2, TrustRadius, and Gartner:

Price

Medallia is an enterprise-level tool designed for large organizations with large budgets. So, if your organization falls more into the mid-market and small to medium-sized business categories, Medallia's pricing, which increases with add-ons and premium features, may not align with your budget.

Complexity

Implementing any software comes with challenges. Compared to other customer experience tools, Medallia can be more complex and time-consuming to set up and manage. Because of this, it’s better suited for larger VOC and CX teams. The platform is said to be user-friendly, but users say it has a steeper learning curve than some Medallia alternatives.

Text analytics

While Medallia provides text analytics, the company has other focuses. As a result, it lacks the power to process and analyze large amounts of customer feedback and provide actionable insights. If this is an essential tickbox for your organization, you'll want to look for Medallia alternatives.

Customization

Some organizations may find Medallia's customization options limited, particularly if you require highly tailored survey tools and reporting.

Best Medallia Alternatives for Customer Experience Management

One of Medallia's biggest drawcards is that it's an all-in-one solution for customer experience management, from gathering feedback to personalized automation.

The following two Medallia alternatives have similar features that help manage customer experience data, employee engagement, and text and speech analytics.

Comparing CX management Medallia alternatives:

Qualtrics

Like Medallia, Qualtrics provides a comprehensive customer and employee experience ecosystem. The platform goes beyond basic survey capabilities, including feedback collection and consolidation, customer data analytics, and advanced reporting features.

Qualtrics uses AI and machine learning to help you monitor CX responses in real time and identify the factors impacting those experiences the most. Using behavioral analytics, CX, and insights, you can also spot future trends and patterns.

Pros:

• All-in-one solution for customer feedback, market research, and employee management.
• Superior analysis and reporting capabilities

Cons:

• Price – more expensive compared to other options in this category.
• Implementation – complex and potential users should be prepared for a steep learning curve to unlock the platform's full potential.

NICE

NICE is another go-to Medallia alternative. The voice of customer (VOC) solution lets you gather survey responses and combine customer feedback from direct, indirect, and operational sources.

With a built-in drag-and-drop editor, easily customizable survey templates, and supercharged admin tools, the platform is well-liked for its intuitive and user-friendly interface.

Pros:

• Simple onboarding process
• Helpful analytics charts and graphs
• Great customer support

Cons:

• Lacks advanced analytics capabilities
• Limited customization for customer feedback

Best Medallia Alternatives for Contact Center Experience

These Medallia competitors specialize in frontline CX interactions using conversational intelligence, making them great alternatives for improving the contact center experience.

Comparing contact center Medallia alternatives:

CallMiner

CallMiner is an AI-driven alternative to Medallia’s contact center feature that uses conversational analytics to drive improvements in the contact center experience.

The platform combines deep domain expertise, AI and machine learning to analyze the nuances of voice and text-based interactions and identify opportunities to improve customer support.

Pros:

• Customizable interface and dashboard
• Review and grade calls within the app and share results with agents and leads.

Cons:

• May require extensive training
• Transcriptions aren’t super accurate
  

Zendesk

Many organizations have used Zendesk to improve their customer service. It's a multifaceted platform that works for businesses of all sizes.

Compared to other Medallia alternatives, its greatest strengths are streamlining and centralizing customer service processes and operations. But it does lack in-depth feedback analysis compared to other specialized VOC platforms.

Pros:

• Easy to set up
• Features include essential feedback capabilities
• Native integrations available to collect reviews

Cons:

• Only CSAT survey built-in
• Lacks advanced analytics

Klaus

Klaus is a quality management software and an innovative Medallia alternative for customer support teams that want to improve the quality of their customer services.

With Klaus, you can record and transcribe live customer interactions. Real-time performance and analytics dashboards highlight areas and support processes that require the most attention, fostering a culture of continuous improvement.

Pros:

• Combine customer feedback and internal quality reviews
• Analyze conversations to identify areas for improvement
• Integrate seamlessly with other contact center tools

Cons:

• Limited automation features
• Needs third-party tools for more comprehensive customer feedback.

Best Medallia Alternatives for Feedback Collection

Here are your options if you’re looking for Medallia competitors that help you gather customer feedback in real-time and from a wide range of channels, including surveys.

Comparing feedback analysis Medallia alternatives:

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a general survey tool that is highly regarded for its flexibility. It has various use cases, from research to customer satisfaction surveys.

While it provides valuable insights around CX, website visitors, and employee engagement, it doesn't offer the same advanced feedback analysis as other Medallia alternatives.

Pros:

• Easy to create online surveys and gather feedback
• Provides some feedback data analysis
• Plenty of survey templates and customizable surveys

Cons:

• Customer support varies depending on your payment plan
• Simple dashboards provide limited customer insights

InMoment

Many CX professionals choose InMoment as a Medallia alternative, particularly for collecting feedback and engaging with customers across various channels. Its AI Engagement Engine nurtures rich conversations by listening and responding to customers in real-time. However, the cloud-based solution doesn’t seem to provide the same depth of insights as Medallia or some of its other competitors.

Pros:

• Advanced text and sentiment analysis
• Easy-to-use interface
• Experience Hub – enables company-wide data sharing.

Cons:

• Price may be a barrier for some organizations
• Only works for CES, CSAT, and NPS surveys

Best Medallia Alternatives for Feedback Analysis

So, you’ve collected all this customer feedback. What's next? The best Medallia alternatives go beyond the gather feedback stage – with advanced analytics features that provide actionable insights.

Comparing feedback analysis Medallia alternatives:

Thematic

Thematic is the best Medallia alternative for turning your customer feedback into accurate and actionable insights.

Feedback analysis software can be applied to any text—open-ended survey responses, interviews, and reviews—and has the power to analyze large quantities of direct and indirect feedback, allowing you to gain deeper insights into what's impacting customer experience in real-time.

The benefits of thematic analysis

Using natural language processing, Thematic automates the process of thematic and sentiment analysis. The software can autonomously identify and extract recurring themes and help you understand the 'why' behind your feedback data without human biases or oversight.

With this knowledge, you can deliver customer insights that business leaders need to make impactful, data-driven decisions to improve customer experience.

Relative Insight

Another Medallia alternative is Relative Insight. Using AI, the text analysis tool transforms unstructured data from qualitative sources like NPS surveys and CES surveys into actionable insights.

With it, you can quickly segment, analyze, and compare open-ended survey responses from different respondent groups and turn them into quantified business intelligence across customer experience and employee engagement.

Pros:

• Produces fast insights
• Data visualization tools

Cons:

• UX can be confusing for first-time users
• Lacks some theme customization

XM Discover

XM Discover is an AI text analysis tool you can use to analyze customer feedback from conversations across different channels, including chat, emails, surveys, reviews and more. Layer on top its topic models and machine learning algorithms, and you get insight into what your customers really want and need.

However, ideally, you need to gather data with Qualtrics—XM Discover's parent company—to use the tool. Moreover, as you add more data, XM Discover's pricing increases.

Pros:

• Upload feedback and interaction data from multiple sources and channels.
• Use industry and vertical spefici categorization templates to theme feedback.
• Create customised dashboards to share insights across your organization.

Cons:

• Complex user interface = steep learning curve.
• Cost may be a significant barrier for smaller companies.
• Getting fast customer support can be challenging.

Three ways that Thematic is the best Medallia alternative

Requires less setup time and AI training.

Medallia requires you to create rules to build your own topic (or theme) model. This approach works well for organizations where issues tend to stay the same, but as CX professionals, you know customer needs are constantly changing.

Thematic's AI saves you time and does the theme building for you. When new datasets come along, you can add them to Thematic's pipeline without extensive work to set up themes and categories or training algorithms so you can quickly produce insights. The AI automatically builds a hierarchical code frame from text, customized to your industry and audiences based on your datasets.

It makes it easy to extract higher quality insights.

With Medallia, you can collect feedback, analyze feedback, and organize feedback data into topics (or themes). However, the findings are more generic. Human analysis is required to understand the 'why' behind the topics, the sentiment behind the feedback, and why it all matters.

Thematic has features that make it easier and faster to understand what your customers are saying—like what improvements will positively impact customer experience. The best feedback analysis software doesn't just help you find those answers. It gives you what you need to act on them, too—like Thematic's LLM-powered Theme Summarizer feature, which instantly summarizes any theme.

Gives you more control.

Medallia uses rule-based theme modeling, which takes time to set up. If you need to make any changes or customizations, you'll need a Medallia specialist to configure them.

With Thematic, you can easily make your own changes to themes and applied sentiment without needing our customer support – which helps keep implementation and ongoing costs down.

Thematic and Contact Center Operations

Thematic’s world-class AI and powerful analytics can help you find ways to optimize your contact center operations utilizing hidden insights in interactions, such as phone calls, support chats, and help emails.

Contact center teams can use Thematic to:

• Automatically measure metrics like satisfaction and sentiment
• Understand the factors behind call length, volumes, CSAT, and more.
• Identify and resolve process bottlenecks
• Pick up on issues in near real-time

Thematic and Customer Experience

To deliver a better customer experience, you need to know what your customers are thinking – and what’s driving their behaviors. With Thematic, you can blend, analyze, and track customer feedback in one platform.

Customer experience teams can use Thematic to:

• Track how CX initiatives are performing
• Get real-time alerts of potential issues
• Blend qualitative and quantitative data for a better understanding of CX priorities.

CX case study:

Thematic and Employee Analysis

With Thematic, you can turn employee feedback into insights that can help you empower managers and improve the employee experience.

People, HR, and managers can use Thematic to:

• Efficiently analyze feedback from employees for patterns and trends.
• Slice and dice your feedback data using advanced filters and custom attributes.
• Uncover why employees feel dissatisfied and productivity levels could be higher from text responses.
• Measure what your employees are feeling with AI-powered sentiment analysis.

Collect customer feedback and improve customer satisfaction.

In the world of customer and employee experience management software, Medallia is a firm favorite within the large enterprise community. However, because of its price tag and lack of advanced capabilities, one or multiple of Medallia's competitors may be better, more cost-effective alternatives.

Remember, when evaluating the best Medallia alternatives, it's important to ensure the tools you choose align with your unique set of business requirements.

If those business requirements involve elevating voice of the customer by acting on customer feedback and CX analytics, then Thematic could be the suitable Medallia alternative.

Uncover the insights that will transform your customer experience. Watch Thematic in action or chat with our team about a Thematic demo using your own data.