Pulseri vs Qualtrics

A platform and a point tool

Qualtrics presents itself as an experience management platform, with products for customer experience, employee experience and market research ⁶. A research team, a product team and a people team can each run programs, and the data meets in one place.

Pulseri does one smaller thing. It asks customers and your own team a short question on a schedule or after an event, shows the trend, and tells you when someone is unhappy. There is no research studio and no custom survey design.

How Qualtrics prices its products

Qualtrics lists Request Pricing on each product and no prices. It says customer experience is priced by interactions and employee experience by employee count, and that market research is priced by interactions including survey responses. The page also says pricing includes an unlimited number of users ¹.

You talk to a salesperson and get a quote. We show no Qualtrics price here, since the company shows none.

Pulseri lists its plans on the pricing page. You pay by the number of People you track, and every answer is included. Larger teams can talk to us about an Enterprise plan. We show no amount for it, because it depends on what you need.

If you talk to Qualtrics, ask three questions. What will we pay in year one? How does the price change when we double the number of surveys? Who on our side will build and run this?

A first week with each tool

With Pulseri, a small team can sign up, add People, pick a question and send the first survey in an afternoon. The result is a score, the comments, and a chat message when a score falls under your line.

With a platform, the first week often goes to scoping, because someone has to decide which uses you need first.

Alerts and follow-up

Qualtrics can send a Slack message to people or channels when a response is recorded, and conditions on the workflow decide when it runs ³. Its NPS guide also mentions closed-loop follow-up and customer ticketing ². These tools suit a team that wants to design its own flow.

Pulseri ships the common path ready to use. A rule says what counts as low. When an answer matches, a channel gets a message and a person can follow up. If your flow is unusual, a platform gives you more room.

Employee pulse

Qualtrics offers employee engagement software and says it can deploy pulse surveys ⁴. Pulseri also runs a team pulse (eNPS and ESAT) and keeps employee surveys apart from customer reports. Team answers are tied to the person, and Pulseri has no anonymous mode. If your program needs anonymous employee surveys with many demographic cuts, a platform is the better home.

Custom survey flows

Qualtrics branch logic sends respondents down different paths in a survey ⁵. Researchers want that control for long, branching studies.

Pulseri keeps surveys short: a score and a comment. It can follow up differently by score, but it has no flow builder. For surveys with many paths, use a platform, and Pulseri for the everyday score.

When Qualtrics is the better choice

Choose Qualtrics if several departments want one platform, you run research that needs custom flows, or a quote and a contract are how you normally buy software.

Choose Pulseri if one small team wants to start this week, see the plans first, and mainly needs a regular score, an alert for low ones and the themes in comments.

Starting small beside a suite

You do not need to retire anything.

1. Pick one program to run in Pulseri, for example a quarterly customer NPS.
2. Add the People for that program and the facts you group them by.
3. Use your current question wording, so scores stay close.
4. Set a low-score rule and the channel that should hear about it.
5. Keep your suite for research projects, and compare the two by date.

Pulseri does not import old scores. Keep the export from your suite and mark the switch date on any chart you share.

Keep reading

• Pulseri vs enterprise experience suites: Qualtrics and Medallia as a group.
• The survey builder: what you can build in Pulseri this week.