Qualitati vs Looppanel: AI-Moderated Research vs Interview Analysis for UX Teams
Looppanel is an AI analysis and repository layer for interviews your team moderates — transcripts, auto-notes, and a searchable repo from your calls; Qualitati moderates the interviews itself (text + voice), adds conversational surveys and focus groups, and starts free with published usage pricing.
At a glance
Qualitati is an AI user research platform that collects data (AI-moderated interviews, conversational surveys, focus groups) and analyzes it end-to-end, starting free with published usage pricing. Looppanel is an AI-powered analysis and repository tool for user interviews that humans moderate: it records and transcribes calls, generates notes mapped to your discussion guide, and organizes everything into a searchable repository. Looppanel publishes pricing — Pro at $395/month for 5 editors with 30 hours of monthly transcription — while Qualitati starts at zero and charges per use. The core difference: Looppanel makes your interviews faster to analyze; Qualitati also runs the interviews for you.
Qualitati is best for
Teams that want AI to run the research — moderated interviews (text + voice), conversational surveys, and focus groups in 10 languages, feeding ThemeLens thematic analysis and QDA coding — with a free tier and pay-as-you-go pricing.
Looppanel is best for
UX research teams that moderate their own interviews (often over Zoom) and want dramatically faster analysis — automatic transcripts, AI notes mapped to discussion-guide questions, and a repository stakeholders can browse with unlimited free viewer seats.
Qualitati vs Looppanel: feature-by-feature
| Feature | Qualitati | Looppanel |
|---|
| Core focus | Collect + analyze — AI runs the interviews | Analyze + organize — interviews your team moderates |
| AI-moderated interviews | Yes — text + voice, adaptive follow-ups | No — records and transcribes human-led calls |
| Auto-notes on human-led calls | Active Listener — real-time AI assist | Strong — AI notes mapped to your discussion-guide questions |
| Conversational surveys | Built-in with adaptive AI follow-ups | Not offered |
| Focus groups | Synthetic + live AI-moderated | Not offered |
| Repository & stakeholder sharing | Project workspaces | Searchable repo; unlimited free viewers; stakeholder views (Enterprise) |
| Pricing transparency | Published per-credit + per-seat Team tier | Published — Pro at $395/month (5 editors, 30 h transcription); Enterprise custom |
| Entry price | Free — 30 credits, then pay-as-you-go | From $395/month ($4,200/year) |
| Free tier | Yes — 30 credits on signup, no credit card | No permanent free tier; demo-led |
| Thematic analysis | ThemeLens — up to 100 transcripts, quotes verified before display | Auto-themes grouped by question across calls |
| Languages | 10 participant-facing languages; Xunfei ASR for Chinese | Multilingual transcription; 96-language translation on Enterprise |
| Coding rigor (QDA) | Inductive + deductive coding, codebooks, Cohen's kappa | Tags + affinity mapping; no reliability statistics |
| Voice analytics | Yes — per-speaker emotion and delivery metrics | Not offered |
| Best fit | End-to-end AI research, multilingual studies | UX teams speeding up analysis of their own moderated calls |
Choose Qualitati when…
- You want AI to moderate interviews for you instead of scheduling every call yourself.
- You need conversational surveys and focus groups, not just interview analysis.
- Your research load is intermittent — a free tier plus pay-as-you-go beats a $395/month floor.
- You run participant-facing studies in Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, or other non-English languages.
- You need coding rigor (codebooks, Cohen's kappa) for defensible analysis.
Choose Looppanel when…
- Your team moderates its own calls on Zoom and wants automatic notes mapped to the guide.
- You need unlimited free stakeholder viewers browsing a polished repository.
- You transcribe a high, steady volume monthly and prefer a flat predictable bill.
- Your workflow is analysis-only and you already have recruiting and moderation covered.
Frequently asked questions
Is Qualitati a good Looppanel alternative for B2B user research?
It depends on who moderates your interviews. Looppanel is an AI analysis and repository layer for interviews your team runs — it records, transcribes, and auto-notes your calls and organizes them into a searchable repo. Qualitati moderates the interviews itself (text + voice), adds conversational surveys and focus groups, and analyzes everything with ThemeLens and a QDA workspace. If your bottleneck is moderating and scheduling every session, Qualitati removes it; if you like moderating yourself and just want faster analysis, Looppanel fits that workflow well.
How does Qualitati pricing compare to Looppanel?
Both publish pricing, which is refreshing in this category. Looppanel starts at $395 per month (or $4,200 per year) for 5 editors with 30 hours of monthly transcription, with extra editors at $75 per month; Enterprise is custom. Qualitati starts free — 30 credits on signup, no credit card — then charges published usage rates (1 credit per minute for text interviews, 5 per minute for voice, 1 credit per 1,000 words of analysis) plus a per-seat Team tier. For small or intermittent research loads, Qualitati's floor is much lower; for constant heavy transcription of your own calls, Looppanel's flat rate can be predictable.
Which languages does Qualitati support compared to Looppanel?
Qualitati ships 10 fully translated participant-facing languages: English, Chinese (Simplified), French, Norwegian, Dutch, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Arabic — with Xunfei ASR for Chinese and a Google/ElevenLabs ASR cascade for other languages. Looppanel supports multilingual transcription and advertises translation across 96 languages on its Enterprise plan, but it analyzes interviews you moderate — there is no participant-facing AI interviewer to localize.
Can my product / UX research team trust the methodology behind Qualitati?
Yes. Qualitati was founded by an HEC Paris researcher and the AI moderator behaviour, the thematic-analysis pipeline (ThemeLens), and the supervisor/agent dual-model architecture are all documented in publicly accessible product notes and continually iterated against the academic qualitative-research literature. This is a real differentiator vs purely commercial AI moderators that ship "best-effort" prompts without methodological grounding.
What kind of companies use Qualitati instead of Looppanel?
Qualitati is used by in-house UX research teams, product managers running discovery, customer insights teams at scaleups, and research agencies. The transparent pricing model fits teams that want to run user research as a continuous practice (weekly studies) rather than as expensive one-off enterprise projects. Multilingual depth makes Qualitati a particular fit for global research functions — APAC, LATAM, EU.
How quickly can my team get started?
Qualitati is self-serve: sign up at qualitati.com/register (no credit card), get 30 free credits, paste your outline into the AI Interviewer, and share the link — first analysis runs as soon as a transcript exists. Looppanel is demo-led: you book a demo, and trials are arranged from there. If you want to run a study this afternoon without a call, Qualitati is the faster path.