Dovetail Reviews & Insights

Score8.4 out of 10

41 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Dovetail are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Recommendations

The following recommendations were observed from user reviews:

Users recommend giving Dovetail a try or watching a tutorial video to understand its capabilities, especially since they find it easy to use and intuitive. They believe that there may be functionalities that they are not fully utilizing.
Dovetail is highly recommended, particularly for user testing or video analysis in research. Users find value in how it simplifies the insights development process and allows more time for empathizing with interviewees.
Users suggest creating standards for tagging and information structure in Dovetail to ensure consistent and easy access to stored information. This recommendation aims to improve the organization and accessibility of qualitative research documentation.

Additionally, some users mention that Dovetail may not be the best option for granular tagging and comprehensive analysis, suggesting considering alternative tools specifically targeted at ethnographers and anthropologists for these needs.

Reviews

23 Reviews

Great Repository tool for Research Teams

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

September 19, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Dovetail as our primary repository for our research artifacts, which include recorded video and written documents. Dovetail addresses our need to access a large library of research insights across several products in my organization. Dovetail also addresses the need for researchers to have a central place of storage for unstructured data such as video files from interviews, and easy transcription of these files.

Pros

Auto-transcription of videos in an easy and fast way
Smart search functionality to make it easy to find what you are looking for
Ability to create folders and organize our materials in an intuitive way for our stakeholders to find what they need

Cons

Although I think the smart search features which were launched within the last year or so are great, I would like to see more genAI-driven features. For example, auto-summarization of documents uploaded would be great.
I think DT could make it a little easier for researchers to know how to categorize their files. When I want to create a 'space' for a new project I choose 'Project' but others on my team choose other categories, so there is no consistency in how we understand the same thing.
DT needs to make their tagging process easier to do. It takes my researchers a long time to set up tagging across all files. I think this is something where genAI can help.

Likelihood to Recommend

DT is the best repository service I have used for a team that supports a diverse array of products with research. It is great when you have multiple categories of products but also of research types. For use cases of research teams with very simple needs (i.e. 1 product supported, <20 reports a year) they could probably just use existing free tools in their org, such as sharepoint.

Jose Montero

Head of Customer Research, Payments in Marketing at Amazon (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

A game changer in the research process but it still freezes

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

September 16, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Dovetail to both analyze and parse through our user testing results and also as a research repository. We have to handwrite our notes and so we transcribe the items, then tag them by topic (we create for our team), group them by type (usually starting with the AI then manually updating and refining), then create insights. The insights AI feature is an ok start but doesn't work as well on our data set because of the handwritten notes. We use that as reference but then make our own. The AI ones are usually too general. We do things like Task completion rate and likert scales outside of Dovetail (in Excel) and create the final report in word. There is not enough functionality in Dovetail for either of those use cases and when working with a teammate it tends to freeze.

Pros

Tagging with a teammate. This is great for general topics and tracking trends for later analyze. We usually cross tag by sentiment + topic from our testing session. Creates a system that can be used by multiple people.
User repository. For each interview we create a new user or cross reference if existing. This helps us keep track of who we have talked to across sessions and helpful if we want to see the change in responses for various features as we move through the app development process.
Having all the tag options in the insights. I like having the columns where we can mark it by progress, type, user working on it, status, etc.

Cons

The filters on the insights don't stay. I will set something to sort by A-Z and then it resets when I leave the page. This wouldn't be an issue if I didn't have to reset the page so much. Dovetail will freeze and make me refresh.
The highlights pages freezes when 2 people try to work on it and there is a medium amount of tags.
It would be nice to have an option to see not only if a tag was added to the current highlight board but if its been added to a board at all. We usually do a page per topic and sometimes there is cross reference so we manually have to double check sometimes.
I don't love the new layout for hiding the filters bar especially on the data page. I had a template that filtered by "planning docs" vs" interview docs" and at first glance looked like I lost the interview ones. The old layout was better.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Verified User

Team Lead in Research & Development (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Powerful research repository that makes insights discoverable and actionable.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

September 7, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As a UX Research Program Manager supporting a small team in a large tech company, I’ve found Dovetail to be an indispensable tool for housing our research repository. It has transformed the way we organize, store, and share insights. One standout feature is the ability for stakeholders to ask questions and interact with research documents using AI. They no longer need to comb through lengthy studies to get the insights they need. Dovetail has increased the visibility of UX research across our org. Product managers, designers, and other stakeholders can now quickly self-serve insights, which reduces bottlenecks for researchers and speeds up decision-making. It has become our single source of truth for customer insights.

Pros

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.

Cons

Increased metrics tracking for individual projects/folders.
Use case sharing across different companies...how are others utilizing Dovetail that maybe we haven't even considered yet...maybe in a newsletter.
Research Newsletter development feature, direct from/within Dovetail, would be amazing. What my team primarily does now is link reports into an email or email builder tool. It would be amazing if maybe AI could whip that up for me in the Dovetail platform..

Likelihood to Recommend

There's always a little room for improvement, but Dovetail does most things right! It is a researcher's playground for running studies, analyzing, and producing social reports and outputs. Dovetail is an ideal platform for our research repository/library. The tagging and categorization are done with ease, and options are only limited to how big you can think. Dovetail is currently not a tool for running surveys or moderating interviews, but it stands alone and strongly as supporting all of the tasks that may precede and follow.

Keisha Amador, MBA

UX Research Program Manager in Research & Development at Amazon (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

My FAV Research Repository.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

September 7, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Dovetail more than ever now to share valuable user research insights and organize our user research along with market research in one central place. I love the transcripts and often find them more accurate than other tools I've used. The ability to highlight, tag, quickly create demo reels, and share each of them so easily has greatly improved my team's workflow. I love being able to add comments on videos and tag teammates and stakeholders who would be interested in the insight, especially for relevant projects. We operate in a fast-paced environment, so tools like this are essential not only to speed up our workflow but also to maintain order. Without them, we would lose track of important data, making it less convenient for the team to access and we'd be much less efficient and doing research analysis reports.

Pros

Sharing insights with stakeholders.
One centralized space for all our research.
Transcripts for research sessions.
Tagging of highlights.
Demo reels based off custom filters.
dashboard views for interviews and user sentiments with quotes attached

Cons

When creating documents the formatting feature could be easier.
More custom formatting options especially in showing the demo reels.
Ability to share out PDFs of analysis reports.

Likelihood to Recommend

Dovetail works well if you have research to organize and want a single place you can hold it all, while making it super easy for team members, especially across marketing, to access. This has made our lives so much easier, and we no longer have to hunt and dig through so many files. If you also want structure across the board, especially with multiple research teams, Dovetail excels at that. At the moment, it would be less appropriate if you want it to actually conduct the research, as it holds it, but doesn't offer capabilities to run the research, which would be nice and make them unstoppable in my opinion.

Nic Nieves

Sr. UX/UI Designer in Marketing at BambooHR (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Dovetail use in a large company.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

September 4, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it for 2 main reasons: - First, gathering our rights in the same place, with a big company, we always struggle to have it stored in one place. With numerous teams conducting qualitative and quantitative research, we utilize it extensively as researchers to analyze our interviews or surveys. The AI features really help, specifically the Chatbot to discuss with our data. We primarily use it within the design team, but hope to expand its use among our stakeholders.

Pros

A chatbot to discuss the interview data works really well if you do it interview by interview.
AI Insights to get a quick view of what you learn from your research.
Find insights among a large sample of data.

Cons

We should have a trust indicator for our insights, as it is difficult to quickly determine when they are trustworthy or not.
Chatbot analysis within different data, I mostly use it with a small sample and replicate the process instead of using the chatbot for more global analysis.
Insight creation, the format is not always really engaging, and you can't really create a presentation from it. It does not align with some stakeholder expectations and requires us to redo the work.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you want to quickly transcribe your interview and analyse it really fast, it is the right tool. If you want to add a quantitative data report, I think it is less relevant at the moment, except if you have the authority to connect a quantitative source to Dovetail directly and use channels, but quantitative analysis within reports is not good enough. The consequence is that the AI cannot efficiently mix qualitative and quantitative data to create insights.

Verified User

Consultant in Research & Development (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Must have UXR repo tool

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

April 23, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

At PayFit, we use Dovetail as our centralized research repository to scale our user research practice across a growing design and product organization. Our goal is to ensure that user insights are easily accessible, reusable, and actionable by designers, product managers, and other stakeholders—regardless of whether they were directly involved in the research. Previously, research lived in scattered docs or wasn’t documented at all. Dovetail gives us a single source of truth that teams can trust.

Pros

Centralized Repository: Having all our research in one place—raw data, highlights, insights—makes it easier for everyone to access and build on past work.
Insight Boards & Reports: The ability to quickly turn findings into shareable, visual reports has helped us communicate research outcomes more clearly to stakeholders.
Search Functionality: Being able to surface specific quotes or themes across projects has saved us hours of manual digging.

Cons

Scalability for Large Teams: As our research library grows, we’re exploring how best to maintain consistency in tagging and avoid duplication. Some governance or taxonomy support would help
Granular Permissions: We’d love more flexibility when it comes to access control for sensitive research or in-progress findings.
Integration Ecosystem: While Dovetail already connects well with tools like Figma and Slack, deeper integration with our internal knowledge bases would streamline our workflows even more(salesforce / Dust.tt / looker / Snowflake)

Likelihood to Recommend

Dovetail has helped democratize research at PayFit. Non-researchers now feel more confident diving into user insights, and we're seeing stronger alignment around user needs across the product organization. It’s not just a tool—it’s become a shared space for empathy and learning.

Verified User

Director (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Unlocking Customer Insight at Scale with Dovetail

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

April 23, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Dovetail has been adopted organically across teams as the go-to space for capturing, organising, and sharing customer feedback. What started with Research team members rolling it out, has grown into our wider R&D org, enableding us to effectively democratise the ability to deliver to high-quality research.

Business Problems It Solves

Teams can access insights easily resulting in higher impact on product and customer.

Customer feedback used to live in disconnected places — documents, Slack threads, private notes. Dovetail allows us to bring those insights together in one structured, searchable place.

Missed patterns and duplication with organic, decentralised research happening, it was easy to lose track of what others had learned. Dovetail helps surface what’s already known and lets us build on existing insight instead of starting from scratch.

Increasingly, it’s becoming a shared memory of customer insights, helping us make better, faster decisions grounded in real experiences.

Pros

Dovetail supports that grassroots research culture without requiring a full-time research ops function.
Searching past research is easy with Dovetail
Easily analysis recordings with customers
Quickly generate shareable insights that are liked back to the source material
Auto generates reels for each insight

Cons

The canvas could be improved to match Fig Jam; we replicate boards in both tools

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited: Sharing Insight With Leadership: Product wants to justify investment in a new workflow automation feature. Dovetail helps: Highlight reels from user calls, tagged evidence, and a quick insight summary can be dropped straight into a slide deck. The “show, don’t tell” effect of hearing customers firsthand is much more persuasive.

Less suited: Quantitative Feedback at Scale: The marketing team runs a survey with 5,000 responses. Limitation: Dovetail isn’t ideal for analysing or charting large-scale quant data — you’d want a tool like Qualtrics, Google Sheets, or Excel first, and then only pull in rich open-text responses into Dovetail if they need thematic analysis.

Alaine Burns Laycock

Head of Customer Insight in Research & Development at Dext (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Dovetail Review

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

April 23, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have used Dovetail in our organization primarily for analysis, synthesis and sharing of qualitative research and as a research repository to make insights accessible to individuals across the organization. This addresses the business problem of enhancing our workflows related to generating company intelligence and providing access to all employees of the business.

Pros

Qualitative Interview Analysis
Qualitative Interview Synthesis
Insight Development

Cons

Synthesis of High Volume Information Streams (e.g., customer feedback)
Effective AI Research Support
Live Notes
Livestreaming

Likelihood to Recommend

Dovetail is an effective tool for processing low volume / high content data like interviews, as it has a usable and effective flow for interview tagging and can support different approaches to synthesis and insight development. As well, the insights look great and are inviting to viewers. However, Dovetail's AI doesn't work as well as its competitors and its ability to process high volume / low content information (like customer feedback) is limited.

Verified User

Strategist in Research & Development (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Using Dovetail as a Research Repository

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

April 23, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Dovetail as our single source of truth for all product discovery and research artefacts

Pros

Tagging data and linking that raw data to insights

Cons

The usability is lacking. I frequently find myself questioning where to find a specific function (and I use Dovetail regularly!)
Dovetail has changed concepts/functions multiple times in the past leaving us scrambling to figure out how to migrate our setup to the new concept
The AI powered search doesn’t work as one would expect it to; often it doesn’t show results one was looking for but shows a whole bunch of stuff that is completely irrelevant
The intro text for the presentation view of the insights does not offer basic formatting options

Likelihood to Recommend

It is the best research repository tool I’ve come across so far but unfortunately that does not make it good.

Verified User

Contributor in Research & Development (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Thank you DT

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

April 18, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Dovetail has helped our team not only scale research, but share key insights across orgs. Design has been the leader in driving research and now has a mechanism to not only share insights, but influence by showing reels so stakeholders can hear feedback straight from the mouth of the customer.

Pros

Creation of reels
Synthesizing process/board
Usage of AI to generate insights

Cons

Tagging has felt irrelevant bc we haven't been able to create standard conventions, so tags feel disorganized

Likelihood to Recommend

Dovetail has really helped me personally with leadership reviews. We can waste time by spinning wheels debating and arguing about hypothesis. Now I have a few clips from customers ready to play to combat potential derailers and I'm able to keep us on track. Dovetail's shortcoming is that it has a couple barriers to entry which has sometimes made it difficult to get x-org adoption and usage.

Verified User

Contributor in Customer Service (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Loading Reviews List....

A game changer in the research process but it still freezes

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

September 16, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Tagging with a teammate. This is great for general topics and tracking trends for later analyze. We usually cross tag by sentiment + topic from our testing session. Creates a system that can be used by multiple people.
User repository. For each interview we create a new user or cross reference if existing. This helps us keep track of who we have talked to across sessions and helpful if we want to see the change in responses for various features as we move through the app development process.
Having all the tag options in the insights. I like having the columns where we can mark it by progress, type, user working on it, status, etc.

Cons

The filters on the insights don't stay. I will set something to sort by A-Z and then it resets when I leave the page. This wouldn't be an issue if I didn't have to reset the page so much. Dovetail will freeze and make me refresh.
The highlights pages freezes when 2 people try to work on it and there is a medium amount of tags.
It would be nice to have an option to see not only if a tag was added to the current highlight board but if its been added to a board at all. We usually do a page per topic and sometimes there is cross reference so we manually have to double check sometimes.
I don't love the new layout for hiding the filters bar especially on the data page. I had a template that filtered by "planning docs" vs" interview docs" and at first glance looked like I lost the interview ones. The old layout was better.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Team Lead in Research & Development (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience