Dovetail, headquartered in Sydney, aims to enable the world to create better products and services through deep customer understanding. Dovetail states they empower 45,000+ people, from agencies to universities to Fortune 100 companies, to make sense of their customer research in one collaborative research platform.
$0
Smartlook
Score 8.2 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Smartlook is an analytics solution tool for websites, iOS/Android apps, and various app frameworks, that answers the "whys" behind users' actions. It helps users understand precisely how customers interact with website and app — watch recordings, create heatmaps, use automatic tracked events, and build conversion funnels. Data is seen on one central dashboard, which enables sharing and collaborating with colleagues. This is to support clear, data-driven decision-making for product managers,…
$55
per month 5000 sessions
Pricing
Dovetail
Smartlook
Editions & Modules
Free
$0
Professional
$15
per month
Enterprise
Contact Sales
per year
Pro
$55
per month 5000 sessions
Free
Free forever
per month 3000 sessions
Enterprise
Custom pricing
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Dovetail
Smartlook
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
Optional
Additional Details
Discount available for annual billing on the Professional plan.
All Smartlook packages support both web and mobile app platforms.
See 1st question answer for my use case, I went into depth there for the specific use cases we have. For less appropriate (touched on this earlier) the final report is not great in dovetail. The formatting options are not great and does not look professional because of the lack of customization and layouts. For my customer we wouldn't be able to present that data as it's constructed. So we have to copy and paste all the quotes and insights to a word doc. That's ok but then it means if we want to use Dovetail as a repository of data we have to then re-import a pdf of the report into the project page.
Smartlook is best for screen recordings. Especially when you are running MVPs. However, its pricing is very high. If your daily visitors are too much then either you will have to lose many of your recordings or you will have to pay too much money.
The tagging, linking, and repository features make it simple to maintain a living library of knowledge, ensuring past work is never lost.
Dovetail enables our researchers and non-research partners to engage more directly with findings, fostering a stronger culture of evidence-based decision-making.
Dovetail makes it simple to track engagement metrics with research insights proving overall ROI.
Events -- but I think this is something that we could improve ourselves in our system.
Create some suggestions for funnels and heatmaps.
Give general insights for a certain period of time, e.g. from Oct. 7th to 12th, 75 users left the checkout step and 60% of them left due to a payment issue. IDK just bringing some ideas!
Because we are really happy with the tool and it’s capabilities at the moment. The price increase is the main issue we can have but the features are getting better and better. It really saves a lot of time for our team and allow us to collaborate more efficiently with certain stakeholders that often did not réalise how much research we conduct. Now they can just have a look to it by themself!
As my ratings show, I have been absolutely delighted with Smartlook in terms of usability, cost, support, and its benefit to our organization. I have given it such high ratings because I think it has really benefitted our organization and I think it could do the same for other companies too.
One of Dovetail’s key strengths is that it’s very easy to get started with — even for people without a research background. Uploading a transcript, tagging highlights, and generating a quick summary is intuitive and low-effort, which helped drive organic adoption at Dext. However, mastering the more advanced features — like taxonomy management, insight reporting, or strategic tagging structures — does require more time and guidance. The learning curve becomes steeper as you try to scale insight operations or enforce consistency across teams.
Smartlook is very intuitive and simple for an average programmer (I don't know if it will be as simple for a normal user). We have never had to resort to looking for information on the web or ask for help for something we didn't understand or didn't work as expected.
Regarding performance, I would say it’s satisfactory. Adding data and transcriptions is really fast and efficient, and can be done in the background, so I’m never hindered by these aspects. However, all the new AI-generated features are still somewhat slow to run. It’s nothing major, but it should improve in the future.
My customer success manager is very responsive and has always been able to answer my questions and resolve issues quickly. The collaboration is smooth, so I have no complaints in that regard.
I am always very happy when a company offers the option to use online chat, as I do not like to call customer support and writing an email is just too slow and cumbersome. I did not even expect a reply right away, yet it took the customer support team less than a minute to respond to my problem.
The training went very well, and we co-built it to really address our needs. I also think it was beneficial to have feedback coming from someone other than myself (since I manage the tool), as it helped reinforce the points I wanted to highlight. The team’s feedback on the training was very positive.
Dovetail is 10X better. So much easier and truly meant for having one centralized workspace. Everything from the highlights and tags and videos and column customization when editing makes it easy to call them the winner in this field. I wouldn't want to go back to my other tools I've used in the past due to the amount of time it takes and would choose Dovetail over Google Workspace, UserTesting, and Basecamp hands down
Like I mentioned, Smartlook is younger than FullStory and it seems like they're trying to improve. The dashboards are lacking. I wish I had more control over what I see there instead of the standard. We use the API to determine customer name and company and I'd like to see some custom dashboards.
Management is quite straightforward; it’s easy to change access if certain stakeholders need to use it. The repository features are accessible to all teams, making it a good entry point into the tool. The more people use it, the more powerful the tool becomes, so it seems truly scalable to me. The limits are more financial, in terms of accessing additional features.
Researchers and designers now spend less time digging through scattered notes or redoing similar studies. Centralizing everything in Dovetail has significantly reduced the time needed to prepare synthesis reports, align stakeholders, or onboard new teammates into past research.
With Dovetail, user insights are no longer abstract or anecdotal—they're traceable, searchable, and backed by real quotes. Product teams feel more confident making roadmap decisions based on what users actually need, not assumptions.
Dovetail has encouraged more non-designers to engage with user feedback directly. This democratization of insights helps align everyone around real user problems, which ultimately leads to better product-market fit and faster iteration loops.
We have increased the conversion rate from the beginning till now with 120%.
We redesigned our landing pages and decreased the bounce rate by 41%.
We rethinked and redesigned our menu structure and internal site linking to increase the time users spent on our site based on the data we got from Smartlook analysis.
