Choosing Between Insights Platforms: A Guide for Market Research Teams

When you’re picking a qualitative research platform, you’re not just choosing software. You’re choosing a way of working: how quickly you’ll get insights, how deeply you’ll understand your audience, and how confidently your team can influence decisions.

In 2025, choosing the best qual platform isn’t about ticking boxes on a features sheet.

It’s about speed, scale, and strategy. It’s about how research shows up for your stakeholders. And it’s about whether your tools actually help you understand people, or just keep you stuck in a pile of transcripts.

If you're here, you're probably looking for the right qualitative research platform for your enterprise. Maybe you're Googling best modern qual platform. Or asking ChatGPT for comparisons. Or scrolling through LinkedIn trying to spot what your peers are using.

Conveo is a major in the space, but there are many. Each promises speed, scale, and AI all in one platform. But they’re built for very different workflows.

What kind of qual research do these platforms prioritize?

Let’s start with the big picture. Each platform reflects a different philosophy about how to collect, scale, and activate qualitative insight.

1. Online human-moderated qual platforms streamline online focus groups and IDIs. They help you find participants (and sometimes freelance moderators), plan video-calls, host, record, transcribe and analyze them.

2. Video survey platforms allow you to build surveys using open-ended questions that are answered using video recordings. Sometimes this is the core feature of that platform, sometimes it was originally a quant platform (aka. traditional form builder) that added video. Often they will help you find participants and offer automated analysis of the recordings.

Both categories often have AI features or even AI-interviews as a new capability to jump on the trend. If you’re convinced that AI-interviewing should be a part of your toolbox, we recommend testing one of the purpose-built AI interviewer platforms, typically started in 2023-2024.

Conveo is such a platform and is fully centered on AI-moderated, 1:1 interviews with no live scheduling, no group dynamics, and no moderation needed. It delivers real human voices (not avatars), deeply analyzed by multimodal AI that understands tone, language, and behavior. If you’re looking for rich qual at scale without adding operational drag, this is it.

Side-by-side feature overview (2025)

When to Use Conveo (and when not to)

Let’s clear this up: Conveo doesn’t replace surveys.

If you already run quant studies, great. Conveo is the missing layer that adds speed, nuance, and persuasion to your existing research stack.

It’s built for moments when:

• You’re exploring a new market, segment, or message

• You need depth before launching a quant survey

• Timelines are tight but insight still needs to be rich

• Your team needs help moving the business, not just reporting the past

Focus groups and IDIs are powerful. But let’s be honest: they come with trade-offs. Scheduling takes time. Dominant voices can skew the conversation. And in a group setting, people often say what sounds good. Not what they really feel.

Conveo solves this by creating a safe, 1:1 space, moderated by AI, always-on, and bias-aware. No groupthink. No delays. Real human feedback, turned into strategy-ready insight.

What makes Conveo different

A lot of platforms say they use AI. Conveo was built around it.

Instead of layering AI on top of traditional workflows, Conveo reimagines the entire qual stack:

• AI moderator: Learns your goals and moderates interviews that adapt in real-time, without needing a moderator or scheduler.

• Deep search: Ask a question and get answers across all past studies. Find quotes, insights, themes, and patterns instantly.

• Multimodal analysis: Goes beyond transcripts. Understands voice tone, brand mentions, emotional cues, and more.

• Research logic built-in: From sequencing and quota logic to targeting and analysis, Conveo builds with best practices baked in.

This makes it ideal for insights teams who need depth, speed, and clarity, without spending 3 weeks wrangling logistics.

How to make sure you’re choosing the right platform

Choosing the right qual research platform isn’t just about ticking off features. It’s about matching your workflows, your timeline, and your organizational reality.

Start with your team's most common use cases.

• Do you need to run fast creative tests and produce stakeholder-ready clips?

• Are you exploring new markets or messaging?

• Is your research team stretched thin and looking to reduce back-and-forth? Or do you need live interactions to unpack deeply emotional or behavioral insights in real time?

Next, think about your capacity.

• Do you have trained moderators available, or are you looking to streamline ops?

• How important is global, 24/7 reach?

• How fast do you need to go from input to insight?

Finally, consider where your research will land. Will the findings live in a deck, a repository, a campaign brief? Are you reporting for leadership or shaping the next product launch?

The right platform should fit how your team already works, and streamline what’s possible without slowing you down.

So…which platform is right for you?

If you want to continue to rely primarly on classic live sessions, online human-moderated qual platforms are your go-to. It's for teams who want end-to-end live research capabilities, with AI features focused on accelerating scheduling and analysis of human-moderated recordings.

If you’re looking to upgrade your open-ends with video, video survey platforms would be the right choice. Especially for teams who need to keep up with content cycles. It’s made for survey-style scale, with built-in tools for highlight reels, video tagging, and audience sourcing.

But if you’re trying to move fast and go deep, without scheduling, moderation, or delays, Conveo is the modern qual layer your stack might be missing.

It’s not just a tool. It’s an always-on AI research teammate that helps your team:

• Move at the schedule of your fast-paced business

• Ground strategy in real human language

• And build influence across the business

Is Conveo just AI-led Interviews?

Just like other platforms are moving into our space, we’re moving into theirs. But we are doing it with deliberate thought, taking a fresh take on what research looks like in an AI world. We have added quant as surveys will always exist, but in a way that might surprise you, that tackles the challenges, getting to a hybrid experience that give you a perfect blend of quant and qual questions to get to scale and depth. We’re planning features to support teams that want to keep live interviews as part of their toolbox as well.

Ultimately, choosing the right platform, doesn’t always boil down to certain platforms being "better" or "worse." It’s about fit.

What kind of research do you want to run? How fast do you need answers? How deep do you need to go?

That’s the real decision. And once you answer it, the right tool for your team usually becomes obvious.