I love the AI capabilities to summarise my interviews, it makes it easier to spot common themes and reduce the time I'd need take to review it all by myself, it makes my workflow easier and lighter and I finish the day less mentally tired and feeling productive to all I can achieve. As a Researcher I was looking for tools to start implementing research at my company, I like the easy of use and the flexibility of having so many features and different research methods. AI capabilities are good since it saves a lot of time, I've implemented a few tools in my day to day work life such as gemini, claude etc, I also use Miro and Figma. It works well in the sense of I get the analytics I need, then for reporting I'm creating reports on the side, and presentation on the side to present the findings from the tool. it would be good to have as part of the application ways of presenting the data, such as slide decks, or pdf reports that I can export and share with my stakeholders. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Hard to understand the pricing and structure behind recruitment participants, especially the participants that we need like B2B, I don't feel confident that I will be able to properly screen my panel. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As a UX Research Lead, I rely heavily on remote research techniques, where tools like Optimal Workshop, user surveys, and tree testing/navigation testing instruments are my biggest assets. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Optimal has the best Tree Testing and card sorting tools. I often need to use these functions, and Optimal is the most user-friendly. While Optimal Workshop is on the higher end of pricing compared to basic survey tools, the ROI is high for dedicated UX research teams. The depth of quantitative data you get from Treejack (tree testing) and OptimalSort (card sorting), paired with automated visualizations, saves hours of manual analysis. It pays for itself quickly if you regularly validate information architecture and navigation flows for large-scale digital products. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like that it has a very user-friendly interface. The guides they provide are straight to the point and very helpful. Also, in the past 4–5 years I’ve been using it, I haven’t really experienced any issues or errors. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I’ve only ever had good things to say about Optimal Workshop, but my biggest issue back then was that they didn’t offer hi-fi prototype testing. I’ve tried it now, and so far I’m really liking the features. The heatmaps and clickmaps are especially helpful, and I also like that I can add a questionnaire afterwards. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Optimal Workshop offers a comprehensive suite of tools designed to streamline the research process. From theme generation to citation management, the platform provides researchers with the resources needed to conduct thorough and efficient studies. Its user-friendly interface and robust functionality make it an ideal choice for both novice and experienced researchers looking to enhance their research capabilities. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Optimal Workshop is highly regarded for its powerful theme generation, which is exceptional for establishing rigorous research themes like jobs-to-be-done, user needs, and behaviours. The platform also features a high-trust citation system that makes verifying research quality and building stakeholder trust straightforward. Additionally, the video stitching functionality is a massive time-saver for creating participant highlight reels and vox pops, and the platform serves as a reliable starting point for finding core research themes that can be exported for further analysis. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Treejack is the assessment we use the most often, especially since the price model changed from per-seat to per-test. When there was per-seat pricing, we could use any test freely. Now that it's per-test and we've had to prepay for a year, we can only use Treejack and have to find ways to replicate the other tests using other non-Optimal Workshop tools. We haven't found any other tools that work as well for the visualizations that we present to our clients. Unfortunately, because the price went from non-profit and educational $2,000 a year to approximately $16,000 a year for fewer assessments, this may be the last year we get to use it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I really desperately wish we could still license by seat rather than by test. Because of the 800%-ish year over year price hike we just experienced, my upper management says we will not renew Optimal Workshop when this license runs out and we're about to need to spend months researching alternatives that will most likely be less effective at communicating with our clients. So I get to spend months trying to replace an effective system we've used for over a decade with a probably inferior alternative because of the suddenness of that price change. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Optimal is one of our critical tools for conducting information architecture research, especially for methods like card sorting and tree testing. Compared with UserTesting, the tests are much easier to set up with modern usability patterns, and most importantly, the results options and visualizations are best in class. Optimal offers multiple ways to view the same data, which helps us spot patterns from different angles and make more nuanced decisions that UserTesting’s very limited outputs simply don’t support.

Optimal also has more mature survey capabilities than what UserTesting allows, with stronger conditional-logic flows that let me route different responses into different lines of questioning, something UserTesting still hasn’t implemented well. I also appreciate that I've never run into the same types of slow performance and page-load bugs in Optimal that I encounter in UserTesting. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I wish Optimal would seriously rethink its licensing and pricing model. Right now, our account is licensed by the number of “Studies,” which ends up penalizing teams that prioritize smaller, faster research. A study with 10 responses counts the same as a study with 200 responses, so the structure doesn’t reflect the actual scale of the work.

Because of this, our research team has to be very deliberate about using Optimal only when we truly need its analytical power. For smaller, quicker studies (and because UserTesting has a superior customer panel) we often keep that work in UserTesting so we don’t burn through our allotted Optimal studies for the year. In a large corporate environment, getting additional funding mid-cycle is basically impossible, so this licensing approach ultimately hurts Optimal’s adoption and new business rather than helping it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The AI Interviews feature is a truly one-of-a-kind system designed to support the synthesis of moderated interview analysis. Recently, it has been integrated with the usability testing feature, along with support for other unmoderated methods.

The ease of use is incredible, and it operates much faster than I initially expected. Although it requires a special subscription, it is absolutely worth the investment. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are currently no major downsides, apart from some software-level enhancements. For instance, having a well-designed research dashboard as one of the landing pages could be incredibly helpful. It would allow researchers like me to use it as an external research repository, with customizable dashboard options to better suit our needs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I really like Optimal's user interface. We've demoed a lot of tools in the past year, and Optimal stands out because its interface keeps everything clear and easy to navigate, unlike other messy user research tools. I also appreciate their great customer success team; they're proactive and genuinely pleasant to work with. Moreover, Optimal's AI analysis capabilities are impressive, especially when creating highlight reels from interview videos, which is really useful for us. Finally, the price and sophisticated features like tree testing and card sorting are compelling reasons why we switched to Optimal. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I think what could be improved is the moderated capabilities, and I'm aware that they are working on this. But yeah, I think they're catered towards unmoderated. It would be nice to have some more of the experiences, some of the features that cater more towards moderated research. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The new license structure has enabled more of our team to be able to take advantage of Optimal's platform and accessing the card sorting and tree testing features. We also love the ability to recruit participants directly through Optimal. Previously we had to recruit through other tools which burned resources unnecessarily. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We've found some limitations for specific profiles we're looking for via internal recruiting, but it's still a valuable tool for consumer research. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The depth of customization features per study. From Card Sorting to Tree testing, I can custom almost everything possible. I love the ability to create pre/post questions per study, also how can I cover qualifier questions to improve the sampling of my research, eliminating people that should not be answering our studies. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As more as we can customize a lot, we cannot update overall layout of the study pages. This is the one of the things I would say they need to focus on new releases so we can have pages more aligned with customer's branding guidelines. Also, the ability to have a REST API layer, so I can automate my study creation manually via CLI, or even connecting an AI agent to help me setup it properly, since the performance on using the UI sometimes is cumbersome, and take too much time to create. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.