Conjointly vs. Sawtooth Software vs. OpinionX

Which conjoint analysis survey platform is right for your team?

If you’re looking at conjoint analysis tools, chances are you’ve already run into Conjointly and Sawtooth Software. They’re two of the best known platforms in this space, and for good reason! Both are powerful, credible platforms that can handle serious market research.

That said, “best known” doesn’t always mean “best fit.” Depending on how big your team is, how deep your research expertise goes, and the size of your budget, neither option may feel quite right.

In this article, we’ll break down Conjointly and Sawtooth side by side, covering pricing, ease of use, methodology, and core features, and also touch on a more streamlined alternative called OpinionX that’s gaining traction with product and growth teams who want robust conjoint analysis without so much complexity.

What Is Conjoint Analysis and Why Does Tool Choice Matter?

Conjoint analysis is a quantitative research method that measures how people make trade-off decisions between price, features, brand, and other attributes. It's often used for pricing strategy, product roadmap prioritization, feature bundling, and competitive positioning.

The method is powerful, but the tool you use to run it shapes everything: how long setup takes, who on your team can run studies, how flexible the analysis is, and what you'll pay. These differences are more significant than they might seem when you're comparing feature lists on a pricing page.

1. Conjointly

Conjointly Overview

Conjointly is an all-in-one market research platform, offering MaxDiff, Van Westendorp pricing research, Gabor-Granger testing, monadic concept tests, ad pretesting, brand tracking, and claims testing. It's built for research agencies, consultants, and enterprise insights teams who need a single platform to manage diverse, complex research programmes.

Conjointly Strengths

Conjointly’s main benefit is that it offers a wide range of survey methods, including formats like Van Westendorp and Gabor-Granger, which aren’t common to find on other survey platforms.

Additionally, Conjointly offers a full-service option where you can hire their in-house researchers to manage your entire project for you, from setting the research objective to delivering the PowerPoint report at the end.

Together, this combination makes Conjointly a promising option for small agencies who need to offer a wide range of methods but will occasionally need a specialist to help them with a niche research method they aren’t familiar with.

Conjointly Weaknesses

The biggest downside of Conjointly is its rigid format. Research methods on Conjointly can only be run as standalone projects, so you can’t include other questions alongside your conjoint or maxdiff analysis surveys. In this sense, Conjointly functions as more of a collection of standalone study methods and should not be considered a survey platform.

Other trade-offs include cost and interface complexity. Conjointly's ‘Professional’ license starts at $1,895 per year for the first researcher, plus $975 per additional seat. This means a team of five researchers must pay $5,795 USD per year in license fees before sourcing their first respondent — panels and participant recruitment costs are charged separately on top.

While Conjointly’s breadth of research methods seems like an advantage, it comes with the downside of information overload, with endless categories, navigation layers, and a design that can feel overwhelming if your goal is simply to run a conjoint or maxdiff survey. Teams that are new to advanced research methods like these will face a steeper learning curve with Conjointly than with alternative tools like OpinionX.

2. Sawtooth Software

Sawtooth Software Overview

Since the 1980s, Sawtooth Software has been providing discrete choice modelling solutions to research teams. It offers two main products: Sawtooth Discover is a web-based survey tool for creating online surveys, while Lighthouse Studio is a Windows desktop application with much more advanced functionality for teams that require things like total customization and self-hosting options. For our comparison, we’ll focus on Sawtooth Discover, as it is an online research tool like OpinionX and Conjointly.

Sawtooth Discover: Strengths

Sawtooth Discover offers survey methods like conjoint and maxdiff in a flexible survey builder, so you can include these methods alongside other survey questions in a custom questionnaire, unlike on Conjointly.

Sawtooth have an academic credibility and reputation built over many years that carries significant weight. It hosts an annual research conference and is the reference platform for most peer-reviewed conjoint methodology. If you're defending methodology to a board of directors or publishing academic research, Sawtooth's reputation carries real weight that is hard to match.

Sawtooth Discover: Weaknesses

Pricing is the most obvious barrier. Sawtooth Discover, the browser-based tool, costs $4,500 per researcher per year. For a team of five, that's $22,500 annually. The more advanced Lighthouse Studio desktop application, which is needed for more complex projects like adaptive conjoint analysis, starts at $10,900 for a single user license, with team costs reaching $54,500 or more.

Sawtooth Discover has some limitations on survey design, even on the premium plan, such as a cap of 15 levels per attribute for conjoint analysis. This may be a constraint for teams that need to run studies with broader option sets.

3. OpinionX

OpinionX Overview

OpinionX is a browser-based research platform built specifically for product teams, researchers, and growth teams to take advantage of advanced survey methods without the need for a specialist background. It offers conjoint analysis, maxdiff analysis, pairwise ranking, constant sum, and more — all in an easy to use platform with automated analysis and ready-made visualizations.

OpinionX Strengths

• Price
  OpinionX's paid plan costs $900/year for unlimited researcher seats. For a team of five, that means $180 per person, compared to $22,500 on Sawtooth Discover or $5,795 on Conjointly Professional. OpinionX’s cost advantage opens up advanced survey methods to many teams who otherwise can’t afford to consider running studies like these.

• Ease Of Use
  OpinionX is designed for researchers who are new to quantitative methods. Setup for a conjoint study takes only 5-10 minutes. Automated analysis handles calculating utility scores, marginal willingness to pay, market share simulation, and segmentation — all without requiring any manual configuration. The results are presented in plain language without jargon or unnecessary complexity.

• Flexibility
  Unlike Conjointly, OpinionX lets you combine conjoint and maxdiff together with other question types (like multiple choice, rating scales, and open text) in one survey. This flexibility makes it possible to run a conjoint study and also collect demographic or segmentation questions in the same survey so you can easily filter and compare results by group afterwards. You can even run one survey with many different conjoint sections on OpinionX, without unnecessary limitations.

• Auto-Capture Abandoned Surveys
  OpinionX saves every vote cast by a respondent, even if they abandon the survey before submitting it. These votes can be included or excluded from your results with just one click, helping you to gather the maximum possible dataset for your study. Neither Sawtooth Software nor Conjointly have functionality for capturing incomplete survey sessions.

• No Arbitrary Caps
  OpinionX doesn't impose attribute-level limits like Sawtooth Software’s Discover platform. On OpinionX, you can include as many attributes and levels as your research requires, and OpinionX will suggest how to configure your survey to produce robust results.

• Additional Research Methods
  OpinionX includes question types like pairwise comparison, points-based ranking, and pricing research methods which are not available on Sawtooth Discover or Conjointly. These methods are particularly useful for surfacing true preferences in long-list prioritization.

• Free Tier
  OpinionX's free plan includes full access to all survey methods, including conjoint and maxdiff analysis, with full analysis enabled and no credit card required. OpinionX’s free tier will show results for up to 10 respondents, which makes it genuinely usable for internal pilots or small-scale studies rather than just a marketing trial.

• Expert Assistance
  All OpinionX premium plans include prepaid consulting time with expert researchers. This expert assistance goes beyond basic customer support and included dedicated time for experts to work on setup, distribution, and analysis for your survey.

OpinionX Weaknesses

Despite OpinionX using gold-standard algorithmic models for conjoint analysis, it is a newer platform that does not have the same reputation in academia as Sawtooth Software.

Additionally, OpinionX doesn’t have the same breadth of question types as Conjointly, which covers a wider range of niche research methods like volumetric conjoint, domain name likeability, and five-second recall testing.

Side-by-Side Feature Comparison

How to Choose the Right Tool

Choose Sawtooth if:

• You need Adaptive CBC — Sawtooth Lighthouse is an advanced platform that offers adaptive choice-based conjoint (ACBC) studies.

• Tool credibility is vital — If you will need to defend your methodology to a board of directors who will bring heavy levels of scrutiny, you’ll benefit by referencing Sawtooth by name.

• Budget is not a constraint — Your organisation is comfortable with per-user pricing in the range of $4500–$11,000 per user per year.

Choose Conjointly if:

• You run diverse research programmes — pricing studies, ad pretesting, brand tracking, concept testing, and more across a single platform.

• You’re running a standalone study — Conjointly only works if you don’t need to ask other survey questions alongside your advanced method like conjoint or maxdiff.

• You want a fully-managed service— You want to outsource the entire project to be run by an external consultant, such as sourcing respondents, managing fieldwork, and preparing a stakeholder-ready report.

Choose OpinionX if:

• Price matters — $900/year for your entire team on OpinionX is an easy winner when compared to $5795–$22,500 for the same headcount on Conjointly or Sawtooth Discover.

• You need mixed-method flexibility — Combining conjoint with other survey questions means you can collect segmentation data and filtering results in one click, all in the same survey.

• Your team isn't made up of specialist research scientists — OpinionX uses clever analysis automations, plain-language results, and a easy setup, all with the goal of making advanced methods like conjoint analysis accessible to every researcher, regardless of experience level.

Bottom Line

Overall, while Conjointly and Sawtooth are the established players in conjoint analysis for good reason — Sawtooth offers a rich history of academic citations and Conjointly offers the broadest list of research methods among market research platforms — OpinionX is certainly the best all round advanced survey platform, especially for researchers new to more complex methods like conjoint analysis.

For the majority of people who need an easy-to-use survey tool with advanced methods for measuring customer preferences, validating roadmap priorities, and testing pricing strategies with real data — it’s hard to find any clear reason why you should pay $22,500 or $5,795 per year when OpinionX delivers the same conjoint capability in a better research platform for $900.

When compared against alternatives like Conjointly and Sawtooth, OpinionX offers the same gold-standard methodology for conjoint, easier to use analysis tools like market simulators, and superior segmentation functionality, all at a fraction of the price of competitors.

Try OpinionX for free today — conjoint analysis and maxdiff surveys included, no credit card required.