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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.

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Why Choose Optimal over Qualtrics? 

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Specialist Research Platforms Outperform Generalist Platforms

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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High Costs and Launch Complexity 

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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.

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• 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 

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For the Best User Insights Specialization Beats Generalization

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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.

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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.

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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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