Ever wondered what secret ingredient distinguishes thriving SaaS companies from those that miss the mark? It’s simple: they collect feedback from their users and act on it to make informed product decisions.

In this article, I will show you different ways to collect app feedback from your users. I also cover 10 best-in-class feedback platforms and share some best tips for using them.

What is app feedback?

User app feedback is the data you collect within web, desktop, or mobile apps to understand the user experience and note areas for improvement.

In-app feedback can be both passive and active. Active feedback is when you prompt users for insights, while passive feedback is when they provide feedback when they want.

How do you collect in-app feedback?

There are plenty of ways to collect app feedback, here’s an overview of the main ones:

In-app surveys

In-app surveys are short forms that appear on the screen when the user is engaging with your product.

You can send them to users at a specific time, like NPS or CSAT surveys, or in response to specific user events. For example, to gauge how easy it was to complete an action, just like this Jira survey.

Feedback widgets

A feedback widget comes to my mind when you say ‘passive feedback’.

In short, it’s a form that allows users to submit their feedback or requests whenever they need it. For example, when they come across a bug or realize they need a feature that your product isn’t offering.

Here’s an example of Userpilot’s feedback widget in its resource center.

App store reviews

App store reviews are a treasure trove of passive feedback. You can use them to identify what drives user satisfaction, what hinders it, and what you can do to satisfy your user needs better.

The best teams use reviews not only to zero in on their product but also on competitors to identify their strengths and find underserved needs that your product could solve.

In-app customer behavior

The main advantage of in-app behavior tracking? It’s objective.

When you ask customers for feedback via a survey, they often struggle to describe accurately what they do inside the product. Reflecting on their actions and feelings while navigating the product doesn’t come naturally.

Behavior monitoring solves the problem. You see exactly what users do, both individually and as groups.

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10 Best app feedback tools to collect valuable insights

To collect the different types of feedback, you need the right tools. Here are 10 excellent feedback tools worth considering for your SaaS.

1. Userpilot – best all-in-one in-app feedback tool

Apps covered: Mobile and web.

Tool pricing: From $249/month, free trial available.

Userpilot is a product growth platform with excellent feedback and analytics features that now work on mobile apps, too.

You can use it to collect user feedback, analyze in-app behavior, and use the insights to create engaging in-app experiences.

• Survey template library: Pick one of the 14 templates, including NPS, CSAT, PMF, and CES surveys, and customize it in the visual editor to get the surveys up and running in no time.

• Granular audience and triggering settings: Choose who sees the survey, when they see it, and on which page. This allows you to gather targeted feedback.

• Survey analytics: Track user engagement with the surveys and analyze the results in dashboards where you can find the breakdown of all quantitative data and track trends over time.

• Product analytics: Gain granular insights into user behavior by analyzing their app interactions through session recordings, heatmaps, path analysis, and funnel analysis.

2. Hotjar – best for 360 user experience analysis

Apps covered: Web.

Tool pricing: Free Basic plan; paid plans start from $32/month.

Hotjar is a powerful UX analytics platform that combines user analytics and in-app feedback tools to give teams a complete picture of user interactions with their web app or website.

• In-app feedback widget: Collect passive user feedback directly within your app. As users interact with your platform, they can use the feedback widget to leave comments, rate their experience, or make feature requests.
• AI-powered surveys: Describe what kind of data you want to collect, and Hotjar creates the survey in the blink of an eye. The platform also uses AI to help you get actionable insights from the surveys.
• Contextual triggering: Create surveys that trigger based on user behavior, like completing a specific action within the app. This lets you collect contextual feedback.
• Session recordings and heatmaps: Visualize the behavior of individual users and whole segments to discover usability issues and inform the UX design process.

3. Typeform – best for conversational surveys

Apps covered: Web and mobile.

Tool pricing: From $25/month.

Typeform is a dedicated survey and form builder known for its simple UI and engaging UX.

It stands out with visually appealing surveys and feedback forms that feel more like conversations than traditional questionnaires.

• Conversational interface: Presents questions one by one to create a more natural flow and make the survey less overwhelming. This can lead to higher survey response rates and more thoughtful answers.
• Logic jumps and branching: Tailors the survey questions based on previous user responses.
• Customization and embed options: Customizes and embeds in-app feedback surveys in your app through pop-ups, slide-ins, or dedicated pages.

4. Alchemer – best for complex surveys

Apps covered: Web and mobile.

Tool pricing: From $55/user/month.

Formerly SurveyGizmo, Alchemer is a versatile survey tool that offers robust in-app feedback tools for creating, deploying, and analyzing surveys.

The platform offers deep customization capabilities, allowing users to craft in-app surveys that closely align with their branding and complex workflows.

• Wide range of question types: Alchemer supports more question types than its competitors. They range from basic questions like multiple choice to more specialized formats like image choice, matrix tables, and sliders. You can even embed video or audio.
• Advanced survey logic: The tool allows you to implement complex survey flows with skip/branch logic, answer piping (using responses to personalize later questions), quotas, and custom scoring.
• Reporting and analytics: You can generate detailed data visualizations, perform statistical analysis, and filter in-app feedback results to drill down into specific segments.
• Sentiment analysis: You can automatically analyze customer feedback sentiment. This helps understand how customers feel about your app and identify areas for improvement.

5. Qualtrics – best for survey analytics

Apps covered: Web and mobile.

Tool pricing: Custom pricing.

Qualtrics provides sophisticated in-app feedback tools as a part of a broader suite designed to capture, analyze, and act on user experience data.

• Survey design tools: Qualtrics offers a drag-and-drop survey builder that helps create surveys quickly. You can find many question types (multiple-choice, ratings, open text, etc.), sophisticated logic options (branching, skip logic), and multiple customization options.

• Closed feedback loop: The platform allows you to set up automated actions triggered by in-app feedback. For example, you could automatically alert your customer support team when new users provide negative feedback about your onboarding flow.
• Predictive intelligence and text analytics: Qualtrics leverages AI and machine learning to analyze open-ended feedback to identify user sentiment, themes, and trends across responses.

6. Intercom – best for instant feedback

Apps covered: Web and mobile.

Tool Pricing: From $29/seat/month.

Intercom is a customer communication platform that integrates messaging, management, and feedback collection into a single system.

Its standout feature is the real-time chat interface, which allows you to interact with users, gather in-app feedback on the spot, and resolve issues quickly.

• In-app messaging and surveys: Intercom allows you to send targeted surveys to app users based on their behavior or attributes. Surveys can appear as conversational chat-like messages or more traditional pop-up forms within your app.

• Closed-loop feedback: Connect survey responses with customer support interactions so you can follow up on individual feedback and build stronger customer relationships.
• Multi-channel surveys: Capture feedback across multiple channels, including traditional surveys on web and mobile apps, email surveys, live chat, and app rating prompts.

7. Mopinion – best for collecting mobile app feedback

Apps covered: Web and mobile.

Tool pricing: From $259/month.

Mopinion is a flexible feedback tool designed for collecting and analyzing user feedback across multiple channels, including mobile and web apps.

Its customizability makes it a great choice for companies that need tailored feedback solutions for different use cases.

• Custom feedback forms: Mopinion lets you create highly customizable feedback forms with features like conditional logic, design adjustments, and multiple question types to fit your branding and feedback needs.
• In-app feedback targeting: Trigger feedback forms based on user behavior, such as time spent on a page, specific user actions, or exit intent. This ensures you’re gathering feedback at the most relevant moments.
• Advanced reporting dashboards: View and analyze feedback through customizable dashboards. Mopinion also includes sentiment analysis and text analytics to help identify trends and key themes.

8. Survicate – best for small and medium-sized businesses

Apps covered: Web and mobile.

Tool pricing: Free plan available, paid plans start from $99/month.

Survicate is a lightweight, easy-to-use feedback tool for small to medium-sized businesses. It offers a range of in-app and email survey options to help you gather user insights.

• Pre-built survey templates: Choose from multiple templates like NPS, CSAT, and CES surveys, which makes it easy to launch feedback campaigns quickly.

• Targeted surveys: Create targeted in-app surveys triggered by user behavior or journey milestones. This helps collect highly relevant feedback from active users.
• User segmentation: Segment survey respondents by behavior, location, or custom attributes to gather data from specific audience groups.
• Analytics and reporting: Analyze survey results in real-time with dashboards that display trends and segment-specific insights.

9. AppFollow – best for review management

Apps covered: Mobile.

Tool pricing: Free plan available, paid plans start from $139/month.

AppFollow specializes in review management and user feedback analysis for mobile apps. It helps businesses improve their app store performance and gather valuable in-app insights.

• App review monitoring: Automatically track and analyze user reviews across app stores like Google Play and the App Store to understand user sentiment and identify trends.
• Reply automation: Use AI-powered templates to quickly respond to user reviews, improving customer relationships and app ratings.
• In-app feedback collection: Collect user insights directly from your app via customizable surveys and feedback forms.
• Competitor benchmarking: Compare your app’s reviews and ratings with competitors to identify areas of improvement and opportunities for growth.
• Performance tracking: Monitor metrics like keyword rankings, feature adoption, and user engagement to optimize your app’s success in the marketplace.

10. Mixpanel – best for user behavior analysis

Apps covered: Web and mobile.

Tool pricing: Free plan available, paid plans start from $24/month.

Mixpanel is a powerful analytics tool that helps businesses gain user behavior insights to inform product decisions.

• Event tracking: Monitor specific user actions like button clicks, feature use, or page visits to understand usage patterns.
• Cohort analysis: Analyze how user engagement evolves and pinpoint what keeps them coming back — or causes churn.
• Funnels and Journeys: Track how users progress through different stages of their journey with the product.
• Spark AI: Generate custom reports from a chat-like interface. This feature allows non-technical users to access data without the help of an analyst or developer.

Best practices for making the most out of app feedback

To finish, let’s go over a few best practices for collecting app feedback.

Collect contextual user feedback from users

I’ve already touched upon the importance of contextual feedback when covering the tools.

In short, triggering surveys when the experience is still in the user’s mind helps you get valid and reliable results. That’s because the more time passes, the less likely they are to remember what happened or how they felt.

For the same reason, contextual surveys have higher response rates. As time progresses, a survey loses relevance, and consequently, users don’t feel like it matters anymore.

Localize in-app feedback collection to increase response rates

Another way to increase response rates is by translating your surveys into your users’ language.

Think about it:

When you don’t feel confident using a foreign language, how likely are you to respond?

And even if the user does respond, the insights might not be as valuable or reliable. There’s always a risk that they misunderstood the question or can’t express their thoughts clearly.

Don’t go overboard with feedback collection

If run too often, surveys can lead to user fatigue. The same if they include too many questions or require too much time to respond.

The result? Low response rates leading to nonresponse bias (only the extremely satisfied or dissatisfied users respond) or poor-quality feedback.

To avoid it, keep the number of surveys to a minimum. One NPS survey a quarter is the most optimal frequency. Write clear and simple questions and make sure users can answer them in 1-2 minutes. So that’s 1-3 questions per survey.

And close the feedback loop.

Always close the customer feedback loop

Closing the feedback loop is when you acknowledge the feedback and keep users informed about your response to it.

Why does it matter?

It shows users that you value their feedback and use it to improve their app experience. Otherwise, they won’t bother to take part in future surveys. This will erode your ability to make informed decisions.

Start by triggering an automatic thank you message when the user completes the survey. Tell them what happens next: how you’re going to use the feedback and when they should expect more details.

And when you finally implement changes based on the feedback, let them know. For example, via an in-app message or an update email.

Identify recurring themes in customer feedback

When you analyze feedback, it’s easy to get too preoccupied with individual user responses. Especially, if the feedback is negative and it stings.

But here’s the kicker: individual responses don’t matter that much (unless it’s your only customer).

It’s the general themes and patterns in feedback that help you make informed decisions that benefit a broader user population.

In Userpilot, you can make sure you aren’t losing sight of the forest for the trees by tagging the qualitative responses. It allows you to quickly identify the prevalent themes in the NPS responses.

Conclusion

App feedback is invaluable for product teams. It tells you what you’re doing well and what you need to change to improve user experience and build a product that satisfies genuine needs.

To gain a complete picture of user problems, needs, and wants, you need different types of active and passive feedback from multiple sources. So, surveys should be used, as well as reviews and behavior analysis.

This requires the right tool stack.

If you’d like to learn how Userpilot can help you collect and analyze app feedback, book the demo!

Try Userpilot to Help You Collect and Analyze App Feedback

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