Comparing The Top 10 Most Popular Conjoint Analysis Tools (Free vs Paid)
“Conjoint analysis software runs from free to five figures a year, and the price has almost nothing to do with what you get. This compares ten pieces of conjoint analysis software on what they charge, whether you can test them before buying, and whether the conjoint tool inside is any good. Teams are moving off Qualtrics and Conjointly onto OpinionX, and the feature table below shows why.”
Conjoint analysis uncovers which product attributes matter most to people when they're comparing products and making a purchase decision. It's how teams make defensible calls on pricing, feature prioritisation and bundling.
Most conjoint analysis software is priced as though the method were exotic. It isn't. Several platforms on this list charge five figures a year for a question type, gate it behind their most expensive tier, or won't let you see it at all without a sales conversation.
New to the method? The conjoint analysis hub covers the basics, 13 types of conjoint analysis covers the formats, and when not to use conjoint analysis covers where it's the wrong choice.
The 10 conjoint analysis tools compared
| Platform | Entry price for conjoint | Test before buying? | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| OpinionX | Free, then $900/yr | 🟢 Full method free, 25 participants | 🟢 Simulator, prohibited pairs, MWTP, segmentation |
| Conjointly | $2,895/team/yr | 🔴 No free conjoint | 🟡 Broad methods, one advanced method per survey |
| Sawtooth Discover | Not published | 🟢 Free up to 50 respondents | 🟢 The rigour standard for ACBC and MBC |
| QuestionPro | Top tier only, quoted | 🔴 No | 🟡 Cheaper than Qualtrics, same limitations |
| Alchemer | Quoted, max 3 seats | 🟡 7-day trial | 🔴 No simulator, no MWTP, no prohibited pairs |
| Qualtrics DesignXM | Licence + paid add-on | 🔴 Sales process only | 🔴 Dated interface, rigid setup |
| Quantilope | Quoted, 3 users min | 🔴 No | 🟡 Enterprise insights teams only |
| 1000minds | Quoted per project | 🟢 15-day trial | 🟢 Best pick for formal MCDM work |
| SPSS | Perpetual licence, quoted | 🔴 No | 🔴 Analysis tool, not a survey platform |
| SurveyMonkey | Enterprise + per project | 🔴 No | 🔴 Not a tool. A service you commission. |
What separates conjoint analysis software
Every piece of conjoint analysis software here can run a choice-based survey. What separates them is what happens after the votes land, and whether you can see any of it before signing a contract.
| Capability | OpinionX | Conjointly | Qualtrics | Alchemer | Sawtooth |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Market share simulator | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Prohibited pairing logic | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Marginal willingness to pay report | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Segmentation on conjoint results | ✅ | 🟠 | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Several advanced methods in one survey | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Run a real study before paying | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | 🟠 |
Two rows decide most evaluations.
Several advanced methods in one survey. Conjointly permits one. A study needing conjoint and MaxDiff together becomes two surveys, two recruitments and two datasets you join yourself.
Run a real study before paying. Nobody else here lets you design a conjoint survey, collect real responses, read the utility scores, open the simulator and check the willingness-to-pay report before a purchase order exists. Sawtooth comes closest with 50 trial participants.
Teams are switching, and they say why
This isn't theoretical positioning. Two of the comparisons this page exists to inform have already been made by people running real pricing studies:
Pace Pricing, a specialist pricing agency, moved off Qualtrics to OpinionX and says it's better and easier to use.
Émilie at Soucy Group evaluated Conjointly and Alchemer alongside us and picked OpinionX.
Neither had a reason to pick the cheaper option unless it did the job, and in Pace Pricing's case research is the product they sell.
1. OpinionX
Verdict: the only platform here where you can build a conjoint survey, run it, read the segmented results and use the market simulator without paying anything first.
OpinionX is built for ranking preferences and priorities. Teams at Google, Amazon and Shopify use it.
Conjoint sits on the free tier with every feature unlocked, capped at 25 participants per survey. That's a real study, not a demo: full design, full analysis, full simulator.
^ Building a conjoint analysis survey on OpinionX
Conjoint runs inside a normal survey
More than half the tools reviewed here won't let you put conjoint inside a larger survey. It's a standalone project, separate from your other questions.
On OpinionX, conjoint is a block like any other. Demographics at the start, open text at the end, branching logic sending participants to different conjoint questions based on earlier answers. For most researchers that flexibility is the deciding factor, because a conjoint study you can't attach anything to is half a study.
No design limits
As many attributes and levels per attribute as your research needs. Sawtooth caps each attribute at 15 levels.
Best practice still applies, and the point is that the constraint comes from your research design instead of your billing tier.
Segmentation is the whole point
Filter results in one click to compare how groups voted, or put up to 20 segments side by side in a single table to spot the ones whose preferences differ sharply from everyone else.
^ Example from Dogo’s pricing optimization conjoint → read the full case study
Segments build themselves from any multiple-choice question in the survey. If you already hold the data in a CRM or product analytics tool, the enrichment feature matches it to participants' votes so you don't have to ask for information you already have.
Knowing which attributes matter overall isn't enough. You need to know which types of customer care about them, because that's what decides pricing, positioning and what you build next.
The advanced reports other tools charge extra for
Market share simulator. Build three competing products and see how share and revenue split between them, calculated automatically from your conjoint results.
Marginal willingness to pay. Quantify how much more someone will pay for a specific upgrade, like moving from a 128GB iPhone to 256GB. Calculated for you, no spreadsheet.
^ Representation of how Prohibited Pairs works on OpinionX
Prohibited pairs. Conjoint shows random combinations, and some combinations are nonsense. A $0/month plan bundled with a dedicated account manager tells you nothing. Profile Logic stops illogical pairs appearing together.
Of the five platforms in the feature matrix above, Alchemer is the one missing all three.
Pricing
Free. Unlimited conjoint surveys, every question type, every analysis feature, all the advanced reports. Capped at 25 participants per survey. No credit card.
Analyze, $900/year. Removes the participant cap. Unlimited participants, unlimited surveys, unlimited researcher seats.
Accelerate, custom. Dedicated consulting hours, 2FA, SAML SSO, procurement support.
OpinionX Summary
🟢 Price: free to run a full study, $900/year to scale it.
🟢 Trial: the free tier is the trial, and it isn't crippled.
🟢 Conclusion: conjoint here is a survey format, not a gated enterprise feature.
2. Conjointly
The closest direct competitor on this list, and the one OpinionX gets compared against most often.
Conjointly does self-serve conjoint, MaxDiff and pricing research for non-specialists, and it's SOC 2 and ISO certified, which matters if you're going through a security review. Their method and question-type range is broader than ours.
Two things separate them. Conjointly allows only one advanced method per survey, so a study needing conjoint and MaxDiff together means running two surveys. And entry is $2,895 per team per year, checked live on their pricing page today, with an enterprise tier from $10,000. There's no free conjoint.
Émilie at Soucy Group evaluated Conjointly and Alchemer alongside OpinionX, and chose OpinionX.
🟠 Price: $2,895/team/year, roughly 3x our entry price. Enterprise from $10,000/year.
🔴 Trial: no free conjoint.
🟠 Conclusion: genuinely capable, more complex to use, and the one-advanced-method-per-survey limit catches people out. Pick them if compliance certification is a hard requirement today.
The head-to-head detail is in OpinionX vs Conjointly.
3. Sawtooth Software
Sawtooth pioneered digital conjoint in the 1990s and has been the reference point for 30 years. Deep expertise, webinars, training programmes, and genuine methodological authority.
Two products. Lighthouse Studio is a Windows desktop application, and it's the most advanced discrete choice software available, supporting Menu-Based Choice, Adaptive Choice-Based Conjoint and designs nobody else offers. Sawtooth Discover is the cloud platform for standard choice-based conjoint and MaxDiff, with a free tier up to 50 respondents per survey.
🟠 Price: Sawtooth withdrew public per-seat pricing and now quotes per customer.
🟢 Trial: free up to 50 respondents on Discover.
🟢 Conclusion: if you need adaptive conjoint or menu-based choice, buy Sawtooth. We don't do adaptive conjoint and won't pretend otherwise. For standard choice-based conjoint, Discover costs meaningfully more than OpinionX for comparable functionality.
Two comparisons cover this in depth: Conjointly vs Sawtooth vs OpinionX and OpinionX vs Sawtooth.
4. Qualtrics DesignXM
Qualtrics sells DesignXM as a premium market research platform. The conjoint tool inside it's both expensive and underwhelming.
Getting to conjoint means a Strategic Research seat plus a separate add-on purchase, and the participant allowance is capped before per-response fees start. After the demos, the pricing discussions and the contract, what arrives is a barebones conjoint tool that looks like it was built in 2009.
Pace Pricing, a pricing specialist agency, moved off Qualtrics to OpinionX.
🔴 Price: quoted, and only after the add-on conversation.
🔴 Trial: none. Conjoint can only be seen through a sales process.
🔴 Conclusion: avoid. Five figures for the screenshot above isn't a defensible purchase. Hard pass.
5. SurveyMonkey
You'll see conjoint listed on SurveyMonkey's website. Don't be fooled: SurveyMonkey doesn't have a conjoint analysis tool.
Conjoint is a custom market research service. You can't build one yourself on any plan. You submit a request and a SurveyMonkey researcher builds it manually, and the result can't be combined with your other question types. It's a standalone deliverable, not a survey you can modify.
🔴 Price: a per-project fee on top of an enterprise agreement, quoted after a sales conversation.
🔴 Trial: none.
🔴 Conclusion: avoid. The only people using SurveyMonkey for conjoint are people whose company already signed an enterprise agreement. Nobody picks it for the conjoint, because there isn't any.
6. QuestionPro
An all-in-one platform competing with Qualtrics and SurveyMonkey on a broader feature set at a lower price. The interface suffers for it, with a lot crammed in and little attention to usability.
Conjoint sits on the top-tier Research Suite plan only, with per-response fees after an included allocation. There's no way to trial it or see the conjoint tool without engaging sales.
🟠 Price: quoted, top tier only.
🔴 Trial: none, and conjoint is on the highest plan only.
🟠 Conclusion: cheaper than SurveyMonkey or Qualtrics, with the same fundamental problem: you can't see it before you buy it.
7. SPSS
First released in 1968, acquired by IBM in 2009, and still widely used in academia and government. SPSS is a statistical analysis tool and not a survey platform, and conjoint sits on the top-tier Premium plan as a perpetual licence.
🔴 Price: a per-user perpetual licence, quoted.
🔴 Trial: no free tier or trial covering conjoint.
🔴 Conclusion: built for a different era. Dated interface, steep learning curve, no cloud, heavy manual setup. If you already run SPSS for analysis, you'll still need something else to collect the data.
8. 1000minds
A decision-making platform built for health economics, public policy and academic research. Launched 2002, and best known for its patented PAPRIKA algorithm, an alternative to the Hierarchical Bayes and linear regression models most conjoint platforms use.
🔴 Price: quoted against a specific project or use case, not organisation-wide access.
🟢 Trial: 15-day free trial with core features.
🟠 Conclusion: if you're an academic or policy researcher running formal multi-criteria decision analysis, 1000minds is the right tool and it beats us for that job. For commercial product research, the pricing structure and narrow scope make it overkill.
9. Quantilope
A consumer intelligence platform for large enterprises, with a broad suite of advanced methods including choice-based conjoint, real-time automated analysis and an AI assistant for study design and reporting.
🔴 Price: quoted, with a multi-user minimum.
🔴 Trial: none. Access requires a sales demo and a contract.
🟠 Conclusion: a serious option for enterprise insights teams replacing agency-led research with a done-for-you partner. For smaller teams or occasional conjoint studies, the entry price is impossible to justify.
10. Alchemer
Alchemer, formerly SurveyGizmo, positions itself as a cheaper general-purpose alternative to SurveyMonkey and Qualtrics for small teams.
🟠 Price: quoted annually, capped at three researcher seats.
🟠 Trial: 7-day trial, no free plan.
🔴 Conclusion: competitively priced as a general survey tool, and it falls short for conjoint specifically. No prohibited pairing logic, no market simulator, no segmentation analysis, no marginal willingness to pay report. Four things you need, none of them present.
When not to use conjoint analysis tools
Before comparing prices, check you need conjoint at all. Most projects people buy conjoint software for don't need it, and the cheaper methods answer the question faster.
Conjoint suits a simulated purchase decision between similar products, made by one person who already knows what kind of product they want, on attributes you can name in advance. Miss any of those and you're paying for machinery you won't use.
If you're ranking a list of problems, features or messages instead of product configurations, pairwise comparison or MaxDiff will get you there with far less setup. If you have no price benchmark at all, conjoint can't help until you do, and Van Westendorp can.
When not to use conjoint analysis covers ten scenarios in detail, and 8 alternatives to conjoint covers what to use instead.
Which conjoint analysis tool should you pick?
Pick Sawtooth if you need adaptive conjoint, menu-based choice or the methodological depth that comes with 30 years of it. Nothing else here competes on that.
1000minds is the answer for formal multi-criteria decision analysis in health economics or public policy.
Conjointly makes sense if you need SOC 2 or ISO certification signed off today and can work within one advanced method per survey.
OpinionX covers everything else, and specifically the case where you want to run a real conjoint study before deciding whether to pay for one. It's the only conjoint analysis software here that allows it. You get the market simulator, prohibited pairs, marginal willingness to pay and segmentation on the free tier, capped only on participants.
The rest of the conjoint analysis software here charges four or five figures a year for a question type, and most won't let you see it working before you commit.
Frequently asked questions
What's the cheapest conjoint analysis software?
OpinionX runs full conjoint studies free, capped at 25 participants per survey, with paid plans at $900/year. Sawtooth Discover has a free tier up to 50 respondents. Every other platform here requires payment before you can build a conjoint survey at all.
Which conjoint analysis software has a free trial?
OpinionX (free tier, full functionality, 25 participants), Sawtooth Discover (50 respondents), 1000minds (15 days) and Alchemer (7 days). SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, QuestionPro, SPSS, Quantilope and Conjointly have no free conjoint access.
Can you run conjoint analysis inside a normal survey?
On some platforms. More than half the tools here treat conjoint as a standalone project that can't be combined with other question types, which rules out adding demographics, open text or branching logic around it.
What's the difference between OpinionX and Conjointly?
Conjointly has broader method and question-type coverage plus SOC 2 and ISO certification. OpinionX allows several advanced methods in one survey where Conjointly permits one, costs roughly a third at entry, and puts the full conjoint toolkit on a free tier. Full comparison here.
Do you need a market simulator for conjoint analysis?
If you're using conjoint for pricing or product decisions, yes. The simulator is what turns utility scores into a market share prediction you can act on. It's the feature most commonly missing from cheaper general-purpose survey tools.
Over 42,000 researchers and product people get one method breakdown like this each week in The Full-Stack Researcher.
About The Author:
Daniel Kyne is the Co-Founder of OpinionX, a free research tool for stack ranking people’s priorities — used by thousands of product teams to better understand what matters most to their customers. OpinionX has a bunch of free research methods for ranking people’s preferences — including Conjoint Analysis and other ranking methods like Pairwise Comparison and Points-Based Voting.
→ Create a FREE Conjoint Analysis Survey now