Switch to ScatterSpoke if you're one person or a small group, you need the why behind the answers, and you can't get (or don't want) a sales quote: Spoke interviews each person, follows up on what they said in the moment, and gives you the themes with the quotes behind them. Stay with Qualtrics if you run an enterprise experience-management program, buy respondents from panels, need advanced statistics, or have compliance requirements Qualtrics documents. Classic surveys here are free and unlimited, and your first ten agent surveys are free.
The topic tag was right and useless. The interview found the specific behavior: reassignments by calendar invite, without a conversation. That’s a thing a manager can stop doing this week.
Qualtrics is an experience-management platform sold by quote: programs, panels, statistics, dashboards. ScatterSpoke is a tool for one question you need the real answer to, from the people you already have.
Built only from Qualtrics’s own pricing, product, security and support pages and ScatterSpoke’s docs. Where a page doesn’t say, we write “Not stated.” Qualtrics publishes no prices.
| Qualtrics | ScatterSpoke | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | See the price table below | Classic surveys and their responses unlimited; first ten agent surveys free (one-time credits that don’t expire); one seat |
| Paid plans | Not stated: pricing is by quote (“Request Pricing”), priced per product by a metric such as interactions or employee count, with “an unlimited number of users” included | Pro, Business and Enterprise; allowances are per workspace, not per seat. See pricing |
| Follow-up questions | Skip, display and branch logic send people to your next fixed question; in-survey follow-ups are not stated on the pages checked | Agent surveys: Spoke asks follow-ups live, based on each person’s reply, within the goal, topics and probe depth you set. Classic surveys: AI follow-up questions are a paid option |
| Open-ended answers | Text iQ tags responses with topics and, in the Advanced tier, sentiment; new responses are added “as they are collected.” Basic Text iQ is limited to 20,000 responses per survey; Advanced is unlimited | Themes with supporting quotes, the number of people behind each, and disagreement, built from interviews where the vague answer already got a follow-up |
| Statistics | Stats iQ: Describe, Relate, Regression and Pivot Table; “an add-on feature not included in the standard Qualtrics license.” Crosstabs in Data & Analysis | None. Counts per theme and per disagreement group in the Agent Results Brief; CSV export for anything else |
| Respondent panels | Online panels bought inside the platform: 50 to 10,000 responses per panel, up to five open at once, panels can be bought online up to a cap the support page states; larger ones go through sales; plus “research-grade synthetic respondents” | You invite your own people: link, QR code, email invitation or embed, with reminders to people who haven’t answered |
| Exports | Data & Analysis exports “in various formats,” including CSV and SPSS | CSV export from the survey; respondents can save their own transcript at the end |
| Security and compliance | ISO 27001, ISO 42001, SOC 2 Type 2, HITRUST, FedRAMP High and IL4, GDPR right-to-erasure controls | Two-factor authentication and passkeys for accounts; SAML SSO as a paid add-on on Business, included on Enterprise; audit log on Enterprise; admin-set data retention. No certifications are listed on the docs |
Qualtrics facts from its own pages, checked September 27, 2026: pricing, free account, Strategy & Research, XM for Customer Experience, XM for Employee Experience, security, and the support pages for Text iQ, Stats iQ, online panels and Data & Analysis. Quoted phrases are Qualtrics’s. ScatterSpoke facts from the ScatterSpoke docs, checked the same day. Comparing form tools instead? See ScatterSpoke vs SurveyMonkey.
ScatterSpoke is a much smaller tool than Qualtrics on purpose. If one of these is your job, stay.
Qualtrics unites surveys, contact-center conversations, digital behavior and social into one customer view, and runs employee engagement, lifecycle and 360 programs with dashboards for every leader. ScatterSpoke does one job: a survey or interview, and the answer to it.
Qualtrics sells online panels inside the platform, targeted by demographics and industry, and offers synthetic respondents. ScatterSpoke doesn’t supply respondents: you invite your own customers, users, staff or students.
Regression, drivers, crosstabs, SPSS export, conjoint and MaxDiff: that’s Stats iQ and Data & Analysis. ScatterSpoke gives you counts per theme and a CSV. If your answer is a p-value, this isn’t the tool.
Qualtrics lists ISO 27001, ISO 42001, SOC 2 Type 2, HITRUST and FedRAMP High. ScatterSpoke’s docs list account security features (two-factor, passkeys, SSO, audit log, retention) but no certifications. If your security review needs a certificate, ask us before you move.
Text iQ lists support for responses in fourteen languages. ScatterSpoke’s docs don’t document language support for respondents or the interviewer, so test with your own people first.
In a Qualtrics survey, the open text goes into a box, and Text iQ tags it with topics and sentiment after it’s collected: a thousand answers that say “management” become a theme called Management. Nobody asked any of those people which manager, or what happened. In an agent survey, Spoke asks that in the moment, while the person is still there. These are illustrative examples.
The topic tag was right and useless. The interview found the specific behavior: reassignments by calendar invite, without a conversation. That’s a thing a manager can stop doing this week.
“A bit rough” was a silent data loss that reached a customer. The theme would have said onboarding needs work; the interview says what to fix and how urgent it is.
What to keep is specific: room to repeat one exercise. The sentiment score would have said “positive” and told the instructor nothing about which week to protect.
Qualtrics doesn’t publish prices; its pricing page says to request one. So this table compares the free tiers and what each paid tier counts.
| Qualtrics | ScatterSpoke | |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 3 active surveys, 30 questions per survey, 500 responses per survey, 8 question types, skip, display and branch logic; no expiration, no credit card | Classic surveys and their responses unlimited, on every plan, with nine answer types and an NPS preset. First ten agent surveys free, as one-time credits that don’t expire. Anonymous responses need a paid plan |
| Paid | Not stated. Priced by quote per product (Customer Experience, Employee Experience, Market Research), on a metric such as interactions or employee count, with users unlimited | Pro: 20 agent surveys a month, 1–5 seats. Business: 150 a month, 5–250 seats. Enterprise: unlimited, custom seats. Classic surveys stay unlimited on all of them. Prices |
| Going over | Not stated on the pricing page | Add-on pack of 50 agent surveys; purchased credits don’t expire. Classic survey responses stay unlimited |
| Respondents | Panels bought separately, priced by survey length, incidence rate, timeframe and targeting; panels can be bought online up to a cap the support page states; larger ones go through sales | Your own people; they never use a seat |
Qualtrics free-account limits from its free account page and its pricing model from its pricing page, checked September 27, 2026; Qualtrics lists no prices, so none appear here. Panel purchase notes from its online panels support page. ScatterSpoke allowances from the plans and tiers docs, checked the same day.
Qualtrics doesn’t publish prices, so “cheaper” means avoiding a quote. On ScatterSpoke, classic surveys and their responses are free and unlimited on every plan, the first ten agent surveys are free, and paid plans are listed on the pricing page.
Qualtrics itself has a free account: 3 active surveys, 30 questions per survey, 500 responses per survey and 8 question types. ScatterSpoke’s free plan has no limit on classic surveys or their responses, and includes ten agent surveys where Spoke interviews each person.
Experience management: customer experience programs across surveys, calls, chat, social and digital behavior; employee engagement, lifecycle and 360 programs; and market research with surveys, interviews, focus groups, conjoint and MaxDiff, with online and synthetic panels. It’s sold by quote to organizations.
Its Strategy & Research page names qualitative interviews, focus groups, diary studies and ethnography among its methods, and Text iQ tags open-text responses with topics and sentiment after they’re collected. ScatterSpoke does one thing in that space: an interview that follows up in the moment, each person on their own, with the themes and quotes at the end.
Scope and price. Qualtrics is a platform for programs, panels and statistics, sold by quote. ScatterSpoke is for one question you need the real answer to: Spoke interviews each of your own people, follows up on what they said, and the Agent Results Brief shows the themes, how many people are behind each, and where they disagree. Prices are on a page.
No. ScatterSpoke doesn’t sell respondent panels, run statistical analysis, manage experience-management programs, or list security certifications on its docs. It interviews the people you already have and tells you what they said and why.
Several tools now run AI interviews. What matters here: Spoke interviews the real people you invite, not synthetic respondents; it follows up in the moment, within the goal, topics and probe depth you set; every conversation is readable as a transcript; and the Agent Results Brief shows how many people are behind each theme and where they disagree. Classic surveys stay free and unlimited alongside it.
Classic surveys are free and unlimited. Your first ten agent surveys are on us. No card.
