15 Top Market Research Tools & Software (2024)

In this guide we'll cover the best 15 free and paid market research tools in 2024. 

We'll also cover their key features, pricing and specific use cases that each tool is best used for. 

1. Statista

Statista is primarily a statistics portal that also offers customized market research reports. 

To quickly find relevant reports, just type in a keyword (like "beverages"), and Statista will show you a list of these reports.

This information makes it easy to gauge an industry's market cap, trend direction, consumer behavior, and other critical signals to help you decide whether to invest in that market.

Statista's data comes from three primary sources:

• 49% comes from original research (it employs over 100 data analysts)
• 16% comes from publicly accessible data sources
• 35% from unique data partnerships like market research institutions

How to Use it For Market Research	Read market, consumer insight, and company insight, and statistical reports to learn more about an industry. Talk to one of their professional researchers for more detailed trend information and even create custom research.
Who is it For?	Investors researching markets for expansion. Business leaders looking for new market trends and analyzing competitor growth and consumer demand trends.
Pros	Many of the statistical reports are free. Easy to quickly search for reports and purchase individual reports that are relevant to your use case. Offers small business and individual plans. Most data platform pricing starts at over $1,000, but Statista has cheaper plans.
Cons	Data quality varies as most of the statistics (particularly the free ones) are based on public data. Reviewers complain that customer support is lacking.
Free Plan?	Yes – They offer many statistics for free.

Pricing

Statista offers accounts for small businesses that start at $39 per month and personal accounts with more forecasts and industry reports starting at $490 per month.

2. Exploding Topics

Knowing about a trend before it takes off is the holy grail of market research.

However, most trend analysis is highly subjective and based on someone's best guess about what my take off in the future. So we built Exploding Topics to help identify trends based on big data. 

The flagship feature is our Trends Database, which contains over 750,000 trending topics across 30 industries like fashion, finance, tech, marketing, pets, beauty, and more.

You'll also see a graph of each keyword's historical search volume growth trend, which you can use to gauge a topic's popularity and stability.

And notably, you can see our projected forecast of the trend's growth over the next year:

How does Exploding Topics find trending topics?

We realize you're probably making important decisions based on our trend data, so data quality is a top priority for us. With that, here's an overview of how we identify and qualify trends:

In addition to the Trends Database, Exploding Topics has a handful of other helpful tools to help you conduct market research more efficiently. Here are a few of those features:

• Trend Search: While the Trends Database is great for discovering new trends, Trends Search is great if you already know about a trend and just want to see the data behind it. This feature is similar to Google Trends. 
• Meta Trends: To help you find the products and brands riding a wave, we created the Meta Trends feature.
• Trending Startups: If you're focused on identifying trending startups, you can use this feature to sort by category and quickly find the fastest growing startups.
• Trending Products: Similar to the trending startups feature, this shows you a list of physical products seeing rapid growth. 

How to Use it For Market Research	Find under-the-radar trending topics (products, brands, and industry keywords) in seconds. Gauge a topic’s stability and long-term growth potential in seconds by viewing its historical Google Search volume trend. Stay up-to-date with new trends by reading Weekly Reports.
Who is it For?	Investors researching new markets and looking for trending startups. Entrepreneurs and business leaders monitoring new industry trends to maintain a competitive edge.
Pros	High quality trend data – AI and ML scans the internet to find under-the-radar topics. Then, a human checks topics for business relevancy (specifically, removing fads). Ease of use – Find trends in seconds by filtering the Trends Database rather than reading endless industry publications, scanning social media, and attending events. Free – View thousands of trends for free in the basic Trends Database or upgrade for access to premium trend ideas.
Cons	It doesn’t show fads or breaking news – Instead, it’s designed to surface trends with long-term growth potential. You can’t talk to a research consultant – Exploding Topics is more affordable than most enterprise tools as it doesn’t employ a team of consultants.
Free Plan?	Yes – There is a free version of the Trends Database.

Pricing

Exploding Topics has three pricing tiers at $39, $99, and $249 per month (all billed annually). All pricing tiers give users full access to all premium trends, Meta Trends, and the ability to view trending products. 

3. Market Finder

Market Finder is Google's free tool that makes it easy to discover international markets ideal for expansion. So rather than uncovering specific trends, it's best to identify new geographies and demographics with the potential for future growth.

It has two main tools:

• Dive into new markets: This walks you through a quick quiz that identifies your industry and other specifications about your company. Then, it shows you which countries would be ideal for expansion based on data from Google Ads, search volume, and household income.
• Test export readiness: Enter your website URL, and it analyzes your business's readiness for expansion by various categories like marketing performance (international traffic, ecommerce capabilities, etc.), operational abilities (payment fit, localization capabilities, etc.), and competitive position (like category demand).

If you have Google Analytics set up, it can pull data directly from the Google Analytics dashboard for a more accurate report.

How to Use it For Market Research	Find new geographies ideal for expansion based on data from Google Ads, search volume, and household income. Gauge your business’s readiness to expand based on marketing performance, operational abilities, and competitive position.
Who is it For?	Investors researching new geographical markets. Business leaders looking for new market expansion opportunities.
Pros	Quickly find general metrics for potential geographic regions you might want to explore in more detail. Free – The entire tool is free.
Cons	Data is fairly generic – Certain metrics (like household income for an entire country) aren't very insightful. Google Analytics users receive more valuable information.
Free Plan?	Yes – It’s entirely free.

Pricing

It's completely free.

4. Census Business Builder – Best For Brick and Mortar Location Research

The Census Business Builder is an excellent tool for retailers researching geographic markets. You can search by zip code, town, or state and see specific metrics like population, average household income, and education level.

It also has more advanced filters that can provide more detailed valuable insights depending on the business you're launching.

For example, if you're launching a fast casual restaurant, you can use the "Consumer Spending" filter and see how much people spend on alcoholic beverages and dining out in that selected area.

This can help you identify the best locations to open a new location.

How to Use it For Market Research	Find detailed consumer insights (education, spending on particular products, etc.) for specific geographic locations.
Who is it For?	Retail leaders researching new geographic markets for expansion. Investors researching the best geographic areas to allocate capital.
Pros	It’s free. Consumer insights are very specific, like average spending on clothing or dining out for a particular zip code. Data is fairly accurate as it’s collected by the Census Bureau.
Cons	It only provides geographical market data, so it’s really limited to brick and mortar market research. It’s easy to find metrics and statistics, but you still have to turn those numbers into insights.
Free Plan?	Yes – It’s entirely free

Pricing

It’s entirely free.

5. Grand View Research

Grand View Research is a research and consulting company that also offers market reports across a variety of industries.

Most of their market research reports provide statistics like market size, compounding annual growth rate, market breakdown by sectors, and competitive analysis.

Their paid offering allows you to segment the data to find more specific metrics (i.e., only data for the Japanese pet market).

In addition to the free reports, Grand View Research also offers custom research services, and you can talk to one of their analysts for more personalized assistance.

How to Use it For Market Research	Read market reports to find general metrics, like market size, CAGR, top competitors in the space, and the fastest-growing sectors.
Who is it For?	Entrepreneurs looking for new markets to launch a business. Business leaders analyzing the market landscape for new trends and opportunities. Investors researching market growth trends and opportunities.
Pros	Most market reports are free and offer general metrics that can help you gauge a market’s growth potential. They offer custom research services if you need more specific data. They have a large archive of market reports covering most industries from pets and beauty to AI and cryptocurrency.
Cons	It’s great for finding general market statistics, but most of the insights (at least in the free reports) are relatively limited. The free versions are great, but upgrading to the pro version is a significant jump to $10,500. Lacks online customer reviews.
Free Plan?	Yes – Some of the market reports are available for free.

Pricing

They offer plenty of marketing reports for free, though access to premium research reports site-wide starts at $10,500.

6. Spyfu

SpyFu is an SEO (search engine optimization) tool that allows you to do basic tasks like keyword research and backlink analysis. However, it really shines as a competitive analytics tool that makes it easy to discover the marketing strategies that other top players in a particular market are using.

Just type in any URL, and you'll be able to find SEO metrics like total traffic, search term rankings, and backlink analysis. It also shows some PPC metrics like Google Ads they're running, paid keywords, and ad history.

This makes it possible to estimate how much search traffic exists in that market.

How to Use it For Market Research	Access a 360 degree view of the top competitors’ marketing strategies. Identify your competitors’ strongest marketing channels. Gauge market competition to see how difficult it will be to beat the top competitors.
Who is it For?	Marketers that want more competitive intelligence data to better allocate marketing spend. Business leaders analyzing the competitive landscape (i.e., spot up-and-coming competitors, understand who owns the most digital real estate, etc.). Investors researching a company’s marketing growth trends.
Pros	It’s the only SEO/PPC tool that specializes in competitive market intelligence. It offers a generous free plan.
Cons	Many features are redundant if you already have an SEO tool, so check if you can access the metrics you need before purchasing. Many reviewers say it’s a great tool if you know how to use it, but it takes some time to learn.
Free Plan?	Yes – It offers a free plan.

Pricing

Spyfu has three different pricing tiers at $16, $36, and $149 per month (billed annually). The main difference between each pricing tier is the number of searches, data exports, and domain overview PDFs.

7. Crunchbase

Crunchbase is a database of startups that makes it easy for users to find data like money raised to date and information on key players in the company (investors, founders etc.).

It also has many other metrics like acquisition status and employee headcount, but its primary focus is on funding data.

To use the database, just type in a niche (e.g., "AI") and filter by other relevant information like total amount raised, location, and more.

From there, Crunchbase will give you a list of companies that meet the defined criteria.

How to Use it For Market Research	Accurately gauge the growth and health of any company (or companies across a specific market) using financial and hiring data. Stay on top of up-and-coming competitors by seeing which companies have raised what and from who. Set custom alerts for any companies or important metrics.
Who is it For?	Entrepreneurs exploring new markets who want to see funding and financial data of the industry leaders. Investors that want to either find promising companies in a particular market to invest in or explore the general growth of an up-and-coming market. VC firms that want to track the investments of other competing firms. Business leaders that want to keep tabs on competitor growth.
Pros	Robust filtering options (likely more than 100 different filters) with everything from employee headcount to last funding date/amount. Data is up-to-date and comes from a range of quality sources, so the information is usually fairly accurate.
Cons	It has a lot to offer, which is great for VC firms and investors, but it might be overwhelming for smaller companies. Some of the data comes from personal relationships. This gives them access to more data, it also means that the people might not be honest.
Free Plan?	Yes – You can see about five companies for free for each search.

Pricing

The their Pro plan starts at $49 per month.

8. Awario

Awario is a social mention and brand tracking tool that also doubles as a market research tool.

Specifically, the tool allows you to track various keywords across social media platforms, like brand names, product keywords, industry influencers, and more. For example, if you're considering building or investing in a mobile app for sleep tracking, you can easily track brand names like Oura Ring or keywords like "sleep tracker."

This makes it easy to see key industry conversations to better understand your ideal buyer persona and identify potential gaps in the market.

Awario also tracks sentiment analysis to see how people feel about various competitors in the space.

How to Use it For Market Research	Listen to customer conversations on social media to learn why they use the product/service, their general pain points, and what they look for in that product/service offering. Track brand keywords to learn specific pain points with each competitor in the space. Find top influencers in the space to follow or reach out to for collaborations. Set custom alerts to receive relevant reports for the keywords you care about most.
Who is it For?	Marketers who want to keep tabs on the target market’s general pain points and needs. Entrepreneurs and product developers that want to use customer data to make a better product or service.
Pros	Hear directly from the target audience what they want and how they’re underserved. Easily find and track influencers in the space to learn more about the market. It tracks most mainstream social media platforms and the general internet (this isn’t common in all social listening tools).
Cons	Users complain that the results aren’t always very relevant if you’re not very savvy with the Boolean feature (especially if the keyword is fairly generic). While it shows individual mentions, it’s difficult to identify specific trends and insights within the data.
Free Plan?	No

Pricing

Awario has three pricing tiers at $24, $74, and $249 per month (billed annually). The difference between each pricing tier is mainly the number of topics, new mentions, and stored mentions that you’re monitoring.

9. G2

G2 is one of the most popular software review websites. Which makes it a great tool to quickly find qualitative and quantitative customer data on virtually any software market.

First, you can view reviewer details, like title, industry, business size, and region, which is useful for accurately identifying the market's target demographic. You can also filter reviews by any of those categories.

The G2 review structure is also quite helpful as it consists of the following questions:

• What do you like best about (product)?
• What do you dislike about (product)?
• What problems is (product) solving and how is that benefiting you?

This customer experience data is a goldmine for investors and startup founders as it makes it easy to quickly identify gaps in the market and understand key pain points customers are trying to solve.

G2 also provides a list of competitors for each product so that you can easily find other related companies to research.

Finally, G2 makes an effort to ensure that the customer feedback is legitimate by allowing users to verify themselves and even marking incentivized reviews.

How to Use it For Market Research	Hear directly from the top companies’ customers what they like and dislike about the product and the company’s service so that you can build a better product/service. Learn about common use cases and how customers use the product/service to solve their challenges. Accurately identify the target demographic for that market by using the filters to see the customers’ title, business size, industry, and region. Find other related competitors in the side bar and conduct one-on-one comparisons to accurately identify the top competitors in the market
Who is it For?	Entrepreneurs and product marketers who want to identify gaps in a market to create a better product/service. Investors that want access to unbiased reviews to assess a potential investment opportunity.
Pros	The structure of reviews (with specific questions on what customers like, dislike, and use cases) make it a goldmine for market research. It verifies reviews and notes reviewers with a conflict of interest (such as a business partner) to improve data quality.
Cons	The ratings aren’t always a perfect representation of the company’s customer satisfaction as it’s easy for companies to encourage only happy customers to write reviews. Many of the reviews are outdated, so previous complaints and feature requests may now be irrelevant. It’s exclusively for software company reviews, so consumer businesses will need to find an alternative review website (Amazon reviews might be a good option).
Free Plan?	Yes – You can browse reviews for free.

Pricing

G2 is free for users to browse reviews, though it does offer other paid plans for marketers and investors.

10. Prisync

If you're launching a new ecommerce product, Prisync is an excellent tool for competitor price tracking, as it identifies price changes in real-time.

In fact, it can dynamically adjust your store's prices according to the rules you set and the competitive data it gathers.

While Prisync is usually best for ecommerce stores that have already launched, you can also use its competitive analysis features to track pricing trends for top players in any market.

For example, in addition to tracking real-time price fluctuations, Prisync also has a price history tracking feature that provides insight into how prices are trending over time, which helps you identify volatility in the market.

How to Use it For Market Research	Track pricing trends over time. If you notice prices continue to drop, that might be a sign that the market is declining. Gauge product demand by tracking which competitor products are out of stock most frequently. Gauge your pricing in comparison to competitors by identifying how many competitors are cheaper than you and how many are more expensive than you.
Who is it For?	Ecommerce entrepreneurs that want to stay up-to-date with the latest pricing trends.
Pros	Specializes exclusively in ecommerce pricing and is one of the top rated solutions on G2. It can track pricing data across Google Shopping and ecommerce stores. It claims historical pricing trend data is a feature unique to their platform, which is valuable for analyzing a market.
Cons	It’s only relevant to ecommerce stores. It’s designed for live stores. So if you’re just doing preliminary market research it might be a bit overpriced.
Free Plan?	No

Pricing

It has three pricing tiers at $99, $199, and $399 per month. Pricing tiers are differentiated by the number of products it tracks (up to 100, 1,000, and 5,000 products at each pricing tier) and it locks premium features behind different pricing tiers, like dynamic pricing, daily email notifications, price history, and API access.

11. SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey makes is designed to help you create user-friendly online surveys. You can choose from multiple different survey templates (NPS, product testing, customer satisfaction, etc.) and question types (multiple choice, matrix, open-ended, rating scale, image, etc.).

If you don't have an audience, you can use Surveymonkey's audience panel tool, which runs your survey to a specific demographic for you.

Just specify your target market (i.e., mons with a household income of at least $50,000), and SurveyMonkey takes care of the rest.

If you're interested in learning more about how SurveyMonkey ensures you receive high-quality responses, here's a resource on their approach to quality control.

How to Use it For Market Research	Create and send surveys to learn more about a market. Quickly gather feedback from your target demographic by using its Audience panel feature. Run side-by-side tests of different product designs with the Product Concept Analysis feature to compare which ones perform best with your ideal audience.
Who is it For?	Any market researchers that want to gather data from their ideal target markets.
Pros	It can run your survey to an audience, which is a great way to get responses if you don’t have an audience. It has a beautiful interface that’s easy to navigate and beginner-friendly. It offers a mobile app.
Cons	Audience panels tend to be relatively broad (e.g., "college graduates," "smartphone owners," etc.). The paid plans are more expensive than some of the competing survey form tools.
Free Plan?	Yes

Pricing

The survey tool starts at $39 per month, but pricing for the Audience Panel starts at $1 per response, and requires a minimum of 200 responses. So you can expect pricing to start at $200 per survey.

12. Respondent

Having a live conversation with your ideal target audience is one of the best ways to learn about a market and the audience's needs.

The problem is that it can be difficult to find people to interview and then get them to agree to talk to you.

Respondent solves this problem.

It allows you to submit a request detailing who you want to talk to (e.g., title, company size, industry, etc.), and then it finds people for you.

So if you want to talk to CFOs at healthcare companies, Respondent can help connect you with those people.

If you don't want to get on a call and prefer to just survey an audience, Respondent can run your survey to a specified audience.

How to Use it For Market Research	It connects you with your ideal target audience so that you can get on a call and learn more about the market, customer pain points, and more. Find survey respondents for your ideal target market.
Who is it For?	Entrepreneurs trying to find product-market fit. Investors that want to learn more about the target market of a particular market before making an investment. Business leaders interested in expanding into a new market.
Pros	Bypass finding and cold emailing your target audience so that you can just get on the customer research call. Cherry-pick who you want to interview from a list of applicants that applied to your submission. Only pay when you actually interview/survey a person, so you can create as many requests as you want free of charge.
Cons	The audience that applies to your request isn’t always relevant, especially as you target higher executives.
Free Plan?	No

Pricing

You choose the incentive that you want to pay respondents, so pricing varies depending on the price you set. Then, Respondent charges 50% of the incentive fee as their service fee.

13. Attest

Attest is another audience survey tool.

Like Respondent, Attest provides an audience for you to survey. All you need to do is provide demographic information about who you're targeting, and the questions you want to ask.

Attest can assemble audiences from a pool of over 125 million consumers around the world.

The company then uses a mix of AI scanning and human oversight to review the data collected by your attest survey. This is to improve the reliability and consistency of your data.

Attest won't turn your data into insights, though—once you get your results, you'll have to use other tools to help with the analysis.

How to Use it For Market Research	Survey prepared groups of people that match your target audience
Who is it For?	Businesses that want to run audience surveys but don't have access to a group of website visitors, subscribers, or customers yet Marketing teams interested in getting user feedback about a website or app before launch
Pros	You don't have to assemble an audience—Attest takes care of that Get access to international respondents that align with the groups you're interested in reaching Survey responses go through a quality check to improve the reliability of your data
Cons	Attest doesn't provide data analysis so you'll need to draw your own conclusions You still have to write your own questions, as Attest only takes care of finding an audience and issuing the survey
Free Plan?	No

Pricing

Attest offers three plans based on usage—but they don't publish their prices online. You'll need to get in touch with the company and request a quote.

14. Qualaroo

Qualaroo is an audience survey tool.

The platform makes it easy to set up questionnaires that appear on your website at different intervals during a visitor's journey.

Companies can use Qualaroo to gather more information about things like:

• Visitor needs and motivations
• App or website user decisions
• Purchase decisions
• Products for sale
• Branding

You can target specific website visitors based on time of day, location, and more. This makes it possible to research specific groups of visitors—useful for building or verifying audience personas.

You can also use Qualaroo to collect focus group feedback about website and app prototypes before you launch them.

How to Use it For Market Research	Add surveys to a live website or prototype to find out what visitors feel about the experience or content Survey only specific groups of your target audience based on their location, visit frequency, and more
Who is it For?	Companies in need of audience data to build out customer surveys, plan marketing campaigns, and more
Pros	You can collect feedback from real customers and leads that are interested in your app or website Surveys appear at the optimal time using Qualaroo's Nudge™ feature
Cons	It requires a large existing audience in order to gather enough responses to support many market research activities Qualaroo won't put together an audience for you to survey, unlike Respondent or Attest
Free Plan?	Yes

Pricing

Qualaroo's free plan allows users to collect up to 50 survey responses a month for free. If you want higher usage limits, you'll need to subscribe to a paid plan.

The company's business tier plan costs $39.99 per month (or $19.99 per month when billed annually) per 100 responses.

You'll be billed extra for any month in which you go over 100 responses; the total cost depends on volume.

15. ChatGPT

ChatGPT is an AI chat assistant that can help you plan for and analyze market research efforts.

There are several ways that ChatGPT is useful during the market research process, including:

• Reviewing information about your target audience and creating survey questions
• Processing and analyzing data collected from tools like Attest or SurveyMonkey
• Analyzing, summarizing, and answering questions about data-heavy PDF reports
• Creating customer persona documents

If you have a ChatGPT Plus plan, you can even train your own GPT to produce the analysis or content that you need. It's possible to save and reuse these GPTs, so they can speed up your workflow.

How to Use it For Market Research	Write and organize survey questions based on different audience segments Create customer persona documents and reports based on your research Analyze data collected from another tool or source Summarize reports and documents for quick reference or revie
Who is it For?	Businesses doing a lot of manual work in their market research efforts, such as writing questions, building audiences, and analyzing data
Pros	It's very versatile and can help with a number of marketing research projects You can get team accounts that allow you to easily share any custom GPTs you make with your colleagues
Cons	You have to transfer data and results between ChatGPT and other platforms There's a risk of inaccuracy with AI chatbots, so you may need to still review everything yourself
Free Plan?	Yes

Pricing

It's free to use ChatGPT, though you may run into some feature limitations. You'll also have to use a slightly older version of the GPT AI, which can lead to more errors.

To customize your experience and get more tools for document analysis, you'll need a ChatGPT Plus plan starting at $20 per month.

Conclusion

This wraps up our list of some of the best tools for conducting market research in 2024.

If you're in the market research space, you may want to check out our report on the biggest trends in market research happening right now.