Dovetail Reviews & Product Details

I like having one place where all of our customer research lives. I use Dovetail to store research calls and organize projects, and everyone at the company can access and view our customer insights, even though we only have 5 writing seats. Anyone can use the chat feature to ask questions about what we’ve learned from customers. I also like that Claude can look in Dovetail for answers, so people can access the research without leaving Claude. It’s easy and seamless, and brings the customer data to more of the team. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I find spreadsheet imports and handling survey data in Dovetail difficult. When I try to tag text in a table cell, I have to highlight it just right; otherwise, it highlights the whole cell, which you can't tag, and I have to redo it. I also have a hard time creating a new project in the right folder. It sometimes ends up in a random folder, and I have to move it. The onboarding is a little difficult, too. There are videos and training to watch, but I feel like I’m not using the system as much as I could because I just don't know. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Dovetail makes research and customer data more accessible, actionable, and scalable beyond the Research team. With user interviews, connected sales notes, and other customer feedback in one place, anyone in the company is able to use the AI chat to ask questions and get reliable answers immediately. The Research team no longer has to go searching through drives or local folders for answers, often unable to efficiently triangulate insights - Dovetail makes that possible for us now. Dovetail's transcription is best in class, the highlighting, tagging, and reel generation has been immensely helpful in speeding up our analysis and synthesis process to we're able to deliver insights, better and faster to teams. The AI generated summaries at the interview level have also been an accelerant to get folks up to speed on what was learned during an interview they didn't attend. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It’s difficult for an individual to navigate to a specific project folder or interview unless they have a direct link. To get to a particular project folder, you have to open a project first and then use the breadcrumb trail to back into the folder. With the way we organize our data, some people want to chat with an entire folder rather than just a single project or interview, while others want the opposite: to chat with one project or one interview without having to use the entire repository. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like that Dovetail is incredibly easy to use and easy to get stakeholders on board. I can bring in tools like Zendesk support tickets into a channel, giving our research team a bird’s-eye view of customer feedback that we can triangulate with our qualitative research. All our research is in one place that I can refer stakeholders to. They can get answers to their own questions via the AI-powered chats and agents, which increases my capacity to do other things. Initial setup was pretty easy, and Dovetail is great for use as a research repository and qual analysis space. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I don’t have many issues. Sometimes Dovetail makes changes that feel like it’s moving away from being a repository tool. The digital twins feature feels odd for a research repository. Getting all our existing research into it was time-consuming, though I expected that. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I can code my interviews and then analyze the codes within each category in groups; I can also ask questions of the built-in AI chat and converse with the data. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I would like it to be even more interactive and to allow for downloading data into Word or Excel, in case I want to work on it outside the platform. Currently, to do this, I ask the chat to generate a list of transcriptions organized by code and interviewee; however, I then have to manually copy the data from the chat if I want to view it as text in an Excel file. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Without question, the best part of Dovetail is it's MCP functionality. We've been able to democratize years of user research across our entire organization with a single MCP connection. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

One thing that’s been frustrating is the connection experience when trying to connect Dovetail to our various internal tools. We’ve gone back and forth between Dovetail and our internal IT/Security team, but it’s never quite been fully resolved. That said, once the connection issues are sorted out, it works extremely well. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Dovetail is a great home for our raw research data. Interview recordings and transcripts are easy to store, organise and find, and it’s become our central place for customer evidence. The built-in Dovetail AI has improved a lot over the past year, and it’s useful for quick analysis inside the platform. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We want to use Dovetail mainly through its MCP connector, so our own internal tools can query our research. At the time of writing, two critical gaps stop us from doing that properly:

No OAuth on the MCP. For an enterprise team, this is a blocker for rolling it out securely and at scale.

The MCP can’t read PDFs in Docs (insights). It can read PDFs in Data (raw transcripts), but not in Docs. Nearly all our Docs are PDFs, so the MCP misses most of our synthesised insights. That’s arguably the most valuable layer of our research. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like that Dovetail integrated AI from the start: I can chat with the data and query the repository easily. This way, people can find answers directly in the repository without having to go through the research team, saving time. It also helps me rediscover older insights, including those collected by people who no longer work at the company. I appreciate being able to organize and share both raw material and research reports on the platform. The AI can analyze transcripts and bring out things the researcher hadn't noticed, as well as secondary insights. I can find these insights thanks to tags and use them in future research. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The initial learning curve is quite steep, and some elements have recently changed names. I don't always understand where I am in the navigation, and if I want to change the folder structure, it's really complex to move the contents. I find the information architecture complicated and don't always understand what certain elements of the interface and system objects are. I'm not sure I've managed to define an effective information architecture for our needs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like that Dovetail gives our organization a shared place to understand customers and centralize scattered research, so we can check what we already know before doing more research. I appreciate the efficient collaboration across teams, the reels that bring customer stories and problems to life, and the accurate AI transcripts. I also value the Contacts feature because it helps us gather information about customers before inviting them to interview again and avoid contacting the same group each time. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I think Dovetail could improve the Contacts feature with better panel management. Only admins should be able to create new category inputs for contact information so we can keep data inputs clean. Our organization hasn’t found much benefit in uploading quantitative research to Dovetail; it seems to clutter the feed. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Dovetail gives us a secure place to store and mine employee insights over time. The platform makes it easy to share engaging reports, and it’s straightforward to mine insights across projects. The MCP server is awesome as well, since it lets us read from and write to Dovetail directly from Claude. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The Dovetail development team works in two-week sprints. Every so often, you come in during the morning and find that some tools have been moved. It’s not a big deal, but it can slow you down a bit. That said, I really appreciate their spirit of continuous improvement, so I can’t honestly call this a “dislike.” Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The new AI functions to help make writing our reports quicker and helping to analyze the results definitely helps speed things up. I also love the toggle feature and Table of Contents, I know they're small, but they're huge in helping with readability of our longer reports! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Without the same folder structure, it's been hard to find all our older data. But the search does help with that! I'd say more ways of clearly organizing the data and making it accessible for everyone at the organization. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.