Lyssna Pricing Overview

I've been doing CRO for over 15 years and have relied on Lyssna (formerly UsabilityHub) to back up my recommendations and get client buy-in on test ideas. I find it more powerful to SHOW them that 75% of users don't know what their value prop is, for example, rather than merely telling that to them, myself. I also use it to uncover problems that I didn't initially think of.

I appreciate that the feedback is super quick and affordable. And I like the variery of tests/polls I can run.

In recent years, they added more filters, which I like, such as hobbies, technology use, financial products, etc to better target the right respondents. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I sometimes feel like the repondents don't match the criteria I requested. It makes me wonder what type of screening or verification there is to ensure that users truly fit the demographics they claim to. Also, there are times that I get snarky responses, which aren't worth paying for. So I'd like Lyssna to invest in improving -- and checking in on -- the quality of their panel, which I use exclusively. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Lyssna's mix-and-match study builder is its main asset. You can easily combine different methods, task types, etc. in a fairly flexible way. The builder UI is intuitive (easy to navigate with keyboard, supports bulk pasting to build response trees, functional Figma integration), and data export is rich (although occasionally plagued with special character issues). It is very good for quick, single-purpose studies with rapid recruitment and flexible screening tools. I often don't need to write custom screeners because they collect a lot of demographic data you can use when building your sample - for example, if I want to survey homeowners, I can select that attribute rather than writing a screener question (for which they charge extra...). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Lyssna's pricing is wildly unpredictable. Where other platforms charge a consistent rate for a specific type of research (e.g. $5/head for surveys, or $60 for unmoderated usability testing), Lyssna prices based on predicted length of study, and those predictions seem to have little relationship to reality. Sometimes this is useful - I find Lyssna's rates are often below competitors for shorter studies or single tasks - but sometimes it's prohibitive, as estimates snowball for longer studies and rapidly become unreasonable. I wouldn't recommend them for larger usability studies with many tasks, or for benchmarking studies where you want users to perform multiple tasks with each of several competitors, both because the randomization feature can't handle this, and because you'll have no idea of your cost until you've built the whole study out.

I also consistently experience crippling performance issues with their study builder, which is laggy under the best of circumstances and unusable under the worst. (Notably, PlaybookUX has the same problem here. I wouldn't recommend them either.)

Lyssna has zero qualitative analysis functionality for interviews - not even the ability to export video clips, let alone tag things. I would absolutely not recommend them for synchronous studies right now.

Finally, Lyssna's study builder does not autosave, and won't save your study with errors or incomplete fields. This makes it risky to work with - you can't build out a click test protocol preemptively without uploading your images, for example, because it won't save - and I've lost large amounts of work many times. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.