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Optimal vs Askable: Why an All-in-One Platform is a Better Choice than Niche Tools

When selecting user research and insight tools, product and design teams must decide between two distinct approaches: investing in multiple niche tools that address specific parts of the user research workflow, such as Askable for participant recruitment, or choosing a comprehensive platform like Optimal that supports the entire product development lifecycle from research planning through to insight.

Why choose Optimal instead of Askable?

Recruitment-Only Tools vs. Comprehensive User Research Platforms

Platform Scope and Capabilities

  • Askable's Limitations: Askable specializes exclusively in participant recruitment, requiring teams to integrate multiple third-party tools for testing, analysis, and insight generation. This fragmented approach creates workflow friction and increases project complexity.
  • Optimal's Advantage: Optimal delivers recruitment, testing, and analysis within a single platform. Teams can recruit participants, conduct UX tests, analyze results, and generate insights without switching between tools or managing multiple vendor relationships.

Global Reach and Participant Quality

  • Regional Limitations: Askable's participant panel concentrates heavily in Australia and New Zealand, limiting global research capabilities. For enterprises requiring international insights, this geographic constraint becomes a significant bottleneck.
  • Worldwide Coverage: Optimal partners with 100+ million verified participants across 150+ countries, enabling global research at scale. Advanced fraud prevention and screening protocols ensure participant quality regardless of location.

Pricing Structure and Cost Predictability

  • Variable Costs: Askable employs credit-based pricing that scales with session length, making long-form research sessions increasingly expensive and budget planning difficult.
  • Transparent Pricing: Optimal offers flat-rate pricing regardless of session duration, eliminating hidden fees and enabling predictable research budgets for extended studies.

Why Enterprises Choose Optimal Over Askable

  1. Operational Efficiency. Teams using Askable must coordinate between recruitment services and separate testing platforms, creating project management overhead. Optimal eliminates this complexity by providing integrated recruitment and testing capabilities.
  2. Advanced Research Capabilities. While Askable focuses on participant recruitment, Optimal includes: Built-in UX testing tools, AI-powered analysis and insights, Automated reporting and visualization, Survey and prototype testing capabilities
  3. Enterprise-Grade Support. Optimal provides dedicated account management and comprehensive fraud prevention assurance, whereas Askable offers standard support options without the specialized enterprise features global brands require.
  4. Scalability for Growing Teams. Askable's recruitment-only model doesn't scale with research program maturity. As teams need more sophisticated testing and analysis capabilities, they must invest in additional tools. Optimal grows with research programs from basic recruitment through advanced insight generation.

Ready to see how leading brands including Lego, Netflix and Nike achieve better research outcomes? Experience how Optimal's platform delivers user insights that adapt to your team's growing needs.

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Insight Discovery In Seconds To Take You From Data To Impact Faster

In our Value of UX Research report, nearly 70% of participants identified analysis and synthesis as the area where AI could make the biggest impact.

At Optimal, we're all about cutting the busywork so you can spend more time on meaningful insights and action. That’s why we’ve built automated Insights, powered by AI, to instantly surface key themes from your survey responses. 

No extra tools. No manual review. Just faster insights to help you make quicker, data-backed decisions.

What You’ll Get with Automated Insights

  • Instant insight discovery
    Spot patterns instantly across hundreds of responses without reading every single one. Get insights served up with zero manual digging or theme-hunting.

  • Insights grounded in real participant responses
    We show the numbers behind every key takeaway, including percentage and participant count, so you know exactly what’s driving each insight. And when participants say it best, we pull out their quotes to bring the insights to life.

  • Zoom in for full context
    Want to know more? Easily drill down to the exact participants behind each insight for open text responses, so you can verify, understand nuances, and make informed decisions with confidence.

  • Segment-specific insights
    Apply any segment to your data and instantly uncover what matters most to that group. Whether you’re exploring by persona, demographic, or behavior, the themes adapt accordingly.

  • Available across the board
    From survey questions to pre- and post-study, and post-task questions, you’ll automatically get Insights across all question types, including open text questions, matrix, ranking, and more.


Automate the Busywork, Focus on the Breakthroughs


Automated Insights are just one part of our ever-growing AI toolkit at Optimal. We're making it easier (and faster) to go from raw data to real impact, such as our AI Simplify tool to help you write better survey questions, effortlessly. Our AI assistant suggests clearer, more effective wording to help you engage participants and get higher-quality data.


Ready to level up your UX research? Log into your account to get started with these newest capabilities or sign up for a free trial to experience them for yourselves.

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1 min read

Bye-bye Beta 👋🏼 Hello Prototype Testing 🚀

After months of invaluable collaboration with our incredible community, we're thrilled to announce that Prototype Testing has officially graduated from beta and is now available to everyone on the Individual+, Team, and Enterprise plans!

Reflecting on the Beta Journey ⭐

The Prototype Testing Beta was launched with a singular mission: to gather feedback from our community to help shape the future of the tool. Over the past few months, we've been privileged to work alongside a diverse group of customers and UX leaders— who provided invaluable feedback, completed many Usability Tests, and helped us refine the tool.

From the initial rollout to the most recent updates, your input has shaped our decisions, from design tweaks to functional improvements. Together, we’ve tackled challenges, explored creative solutions, and built something that truly aligns with user needs.

Highlights from the Beta 🥳

  • Figma OAuth Integration: One of our most anticipated features, this seamless integration enabled testers to connect their design workflows directly with our platform, paving the way for smoother collaboration.

  • Improved security with password management: A new "Password settings" button allows users to manage stored passwords, which participants receive before starting their Prototype Study. Additionally, users are prompted for a password when importing protected prototypes.

  • Improvements to usability: Your feedback was taken onboard, and we’ve updated the buttons, including "Re-sync to file" and "Change prototype," to improve usability.

  • Results sharing: You can now easily share specific sections (e.g., analysis, tasks, clickmaps) via a URL with your stakeholders in just a few clicks. With the added protection of a password for secure access.
  • Participant data view: To speed up your data analysis and improve your workflows we’ve added task metrics in the "Results > Participants" table, showing tasks completed, skipped, and success percentage.

  • Notes tab in analysis: Users can now take notes directly in the Analysis section for Task Results, Click Maps, Paths, and Questionnaires.

What's next for Prototype Testing ❓

Introducing Video Recording

We're thrilled to announce our most requested feature is coming to Prototype Testing: seamless video recording that captures the full depth of user experiences.

A Frictionless Experience

  • Browser-based recording - no plugins needed
  • Automatic consent management for screen, face, and voice recording
  • Seamless integration with your existing test flow
  • Secure storage and easy access to recordings

Why video changes everything

Video recording transforms your research by:

  • Capturing authentic user reactions and emotions
  • Understanding the "why" behind user behaviors
  • Sharing compelling user stories with stakeholders
  • Building deeper empathy across your team

Beyond video: The road ahead

Your feedback during the beta has shaped an exciting roadmap for 2025 and beyond. While we can't reveal everything just yet, know that every feature and enhancement planned has been inspired by your needs and suggestions.

A thank you from our team 🫶

To our incredible beta participants: your partnership has been invaluable. You've shared your expertise, challenged our assumptions, and helped us build something truly special. Every piece of feedback, every suggestion, and every bug report has contributed to making Prototype Testing a tool that truly serves the UX research community.

Join us on the journey

This is just the beginning of our mission to make expert research accessible to all. Stay tuned for regular updates as we continue to evolve Prototype Testing based on your needs and feedback. Here's to the next chapter of creating exceptional digital experiences together!

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1 min read

Optimal vs Qualtrics: When More Isn’t Always Better

Enterprise teams frequently encounter pressure from leadership to adopt consolidated platforms like Qualtrics that promise to handle multiple functions including PX, EX, and CX, in a single solution for all user feedback needs. While these multidisciplinary platforms may seem appealing from a procurement perspective, they often fall short for specialized use cases. UX and product teams typically find that purpose-built platforms like Optimal deliver superior results and stronger ROI. These specialized solutions offer the depth of functionality teams actually need while maintaining significantly reduced complexity and cost compared to enterprise-wide platforms that try to be everything to everyone.

Why Choose Optimal over Qualtrics? 

Specialist Research Platforms Outperform Generalist Platforms

  • Feature Overload: Enterprise platforms like Qualtrics provide hundreds of features across multiple use cases, creating complexity and inefficiency for research and product teams looking for user insight to drive their decisions. 
  • Purpose-Built Research Features: Specialized platforms eliminate feature bloat while providing deep capabilities in their area of focus, enabling teams to achieve better results.
  • Multi-Department Compromise: Enterprise platforms often represent compromises across multiple departments, resulting in tools that serve everyone to some degree but no one team really well.
  • Research Team Optimization: Purpose-built research platforms optimize specifically for product and research team workflows, participant experience, and user insight quality.

What does this look like when you compare Qualtrics to Optimal? 

  • Qualtrics' Broad Scope Challenge: Qualtrics serves customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX), and product experience (PX) across entire enterprises. This broad scope creates feature overload that overwhelms UX research teams who need focused, efficient tools. They are a “jack of all trades, master of none”. 
  • Optimal's UX Research Focus: Built specifically for UX and product research, Optimal eliminates unnecessary complexity while providing deep capabilities for user testing, prototype validation, and product insight that UX teams actually use.

High Costs and Launch Complexity 

In addition to feature complexity, platforms like Qualtrics often come with high costs for the features your team doesn’t really need.  While some of these larger, multi-department  platforms may appear cost-effective because they offer tool consolidation , the total cost of ownership often includes substantial professional services, extended training periods, and ongoing support requirements that specialized teams end up absorbing, despite utilizing only a fraction of available capabilities.

  • License Costs: Qualtrics pricing ranges from $50,000 to $300,000+ annually with complex modular licensing that forces teams to pay for CX and EX capabilities they don't need for UX research.
  • Transparent UX Research Pricing: Optimal offers straightforward, flat-rate pricing focused on UX research capabilities without forcing teams to subsidize enterprise modules irrelevant to their workflow.
  • Professional Services Requirements: Qualtrics implementations often require expensive professional services, extended onboarding periods, and ongoing consulting to achieve success.
  • Get Started in Minutes: Optimal's intuitive design enables teams to launch studies in minutes, no complex set up, no engineering support required 

For the Best User Insights Specialization Beats Generalization

While Qualtrics serves enterprise survey needs across multiple departments, UX research teams achieve better results with purpose-built platforms that eliminate unnecessary features while providing clear ROI. Optimal delivers 90% of Qualtrics’ enterprise platform value with 10% of the complexity.

User research excellence requires tools designed specifically for UX workflows. Smart research and product teams choose platforms that enhance your research impact rather than adding implementation overhead and workflow friction.

Ready to see how leading brands including Lego, Netflix and Nike achieve better research outcomes? Experience how Optimal's platform delivers user insights that adapt to your team's growing needs.

Seeing is believing

Explore our tools and see how Optimal makes gathering insights simple, powerful, and impactful.