OpinionX vs. Sawtooth Software: Product Comparison

Both OpinionX and Sawtooth Software are research platforms that offer advanced survey methods like conjoint analysis and maxdiff analysis. However, one costs $900/year for unlimited researchers while the other costs $4500 per user — this guide explains the key differences to help you choose the right platform for your research.

Summary

OpinionX

OpinionX offers advanced market research survey methods like conjoint, maxdiff, and segmentation analysis in an easy-to-use online platform. It’s core customer segment is in-house researchers like product managers, growth teams, and UX researchers, offering useful automations and reduced complexity to make advanced survey methods more accessible for everyone.

At $900/year, its premium plan includes unlimited researcher seats, covering your entire team for unlimited advanced surveys with methods like conjoint, maxdiff, and segmentation analysis. OpinionX has a range of research tools for market simulators, willingness to pay, churn prediction, crosstabulation, AI-powered clustering, and more. Customers receive 90 minutes of prepaid consulting time with expert researchers to support them with survey setup, distribution, and analysis. Everything is easily accessible from your browser and takes just 5 minutes to get started. OpinionX has a free entry plan to test its functionality thoroughly, with no credit card required and no time limit.

Sawtooth Software

Sawtooth Software has been a market leader in market research methodologies for decades. They offer an advanced platform designed for academic specialists and quantitative market researchers, with a broad range of functionality in their Windows application and online tools.

Sawtooth Software has two separate platforms with very different offerings and advantages:

1. Sawtooth Discover: An online survey builder with some basic conjoint capabilities and question types. Pricing starts at $4,500 per user per year.

2. Sawtooth Lighthouse Studio: A Windows-only desktop application with advanced conjoint functionality like adaptive CBC and volumetric CBC. Pricing starts at $10,900 per year for a single-user license. For a team of five, this comes to approximately $54,500 per year.

Sawtooth’s decades-long reputation has been built around the comprehensive Lighthouse Studio, which is a legacy platform designed for specialists. Their newer Discover tool is an online platform that doesn’t require a desktop installation, but lacks many of the features Sawtooth are best known for, like adaptive conjoint analysis. Additionally, with no templates or sample projects on Discover, both platforms have a steep learning curve for those not already familiar with research methods like conjoint and maxdiff analysis.

This is made clear in a review from Silvo, who summarized that Sawtooth Software is “Efficient for choice modelling, but not much beyond that. Expensive and few usability improvements over the years.”

Pricing Summary

For a team of five, OpinionX costs 96% less than Sawtooth Discover and 98% less than Lighthouse Studio, making OpinionX an obvious winner on price for advanced methods like conjoint analysis and maxdiff surveys.

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OpinionX Pros and Cons

OpinionX is a professional research platform built specifically for teams with little or no experience in advanced survey methods like conjoint and maxdiff analysis, helping them to measure user needs, map customer segment differences, and model pricing decisions.

Choice-Based Conjoint Analysis

Run conjoint surveys to measure how customers trade off between price, features, and product attributes. OpinionX has an easy to use survey builder that includes conjoint analysis, and it automates all of the results work like:

• Utility scores for each attribute level.

• Marginal willingness to pay and price sensitivity analysis.

• Conjoint simulators for market share, revenue projections, and churn prediction.

• Rejection rate analysis for each individual product attribute.

• Ranked list of concepts by preference, approval, and average revenue per customer.

• Compare groups with filters, crosstabs, and head-to-head segment comparisons.

• AI-powered clustering analysis of conjoint results.

Flexible Survey Builder

OpinionX treats conjoint analysis like any other survey method, so you can drop it into your questionnaire however you’d like — you can even have many different conjoint sections and use branching logic to send respondents to different ones based on their survey answers. Alongside conjoint analysis, OpinionX offers a range of other survey methods, some of which cannot be found on platforms like Sawtooth Software:

• MaxDiff Analysis — ranks a long list of options by showing 3-6 options at a time and ask people to pick the best and worst from each set.

• Pairwise Comparison — breaks a long list into a series of head-to-head votes to surface true preferences without list-order bias.

• Points-Based Ranking (Constant Sum) — allocates a fixed budget of credits for respondents to distribute across options, simulating real trade-off decisions.

Unlimited Team Members

Your workspace includes unlimited researcher seats. Everyone can create surveys. No per-seat fees. No artificial limits. Survey roles for editors and viewers. Publish your interactive results online with a shareable link for view-only guest access. Add external collaborators to individual projects without them joining your team’s research workspace. Sawtooth Lighthouse Studio, in contrast, has no team collaboration functionality.

No Attribute Caps

Many conjoint tools, including Sawtooth Discover, have a limit of 15 levels per attribute on conjoint analysis questions. OpinionX doesn't impose arbitrary limits like this, so you can include as many attributes, levels, and survey questions as your research requires. It also includes dynamic calculators within the survey setup flow to guide you through the process and help you pick design variables like the number of profiles per voting set and voting sets participant.

Built For Accessibility (especially helpful for non-specialists)

OpinionX has a clean uncomplicated interface, automated analysis, and ready-made visualizations to take as much manual work out of advanced surveys like conjoint and maxdiff. You can design a conjoint study in minutes without needing a PhD in discrete choice modeling or specialist training. The platform guides you through setup and interprets results in plain language, with templates and sample surveys to show you what best practice looks like. All premium plans include prepaid time with expert researchers to guide you through survey setup, distribution, and analysis, and OpinionX even offers all free-tier users a complimentary 30 minute call to help them design their first survey.

Auto-Capture Abandoned Surveys

OpinionX saves respondent data every time they answer a question or vote on a set of conjoint profiles, so if someone gives up mid-way through your survey, you’ll still be able to include their answers in your survey. This Partial Completion feature is enabled by default on OpinionX surveys and can easily be toggled on or off to suit your research needs.

Enrich With External Data

One of the strongest areas of OpinionX is segmentation analysis — comparing how people’s preferences and priorities change when you look at different groups separately. While you can use survey questions to power these segmentation features, you can make it even more valuable by pulling in data from external sources like your CRM, product analytics, or payments platform. Methods range from manual spreadsheet imports to dynamic enrichment using URL parameters.

Mobile-Optimized Conjoint and MaxDiff

Conjoint Analysis was traditionally a table-like display, which doesn’t work well on mobile. OpinionX designed a new conjoint voting format that’s purpose-built for mobile and touchscreen voters (which accounted for 60% of all OpinionX survey respondents in 2025). This mobile-optimized conjoint approach gives you a data-collection advantage over legacy research tools by providing a substantially better experience.

Overall, OpinionX is a well rounded research tool with a broad range of question types and analysis modes, with careful attention to detail in how it was designed to make the research process as easy as possible, and with unique functionality to supercharge your advanced surveys at the cheapest price of any conjoint analysis platform.

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Sawtooth Software Pros and Cons

Sawtooth actually has two products, each of which come with their own advantages and trade-offs.

Sawtooth Lighthouse Studio is Sawtooth’s legacy conjoint platform. It offers mathematically-elaborate methods beyond standard choice-based conjoint analysis, like adaptive conjoint, menu-based choice, and alternative simulator methods. However, it runs as a Windows-only application that requires a manual install, an outdated user interface, a steep learning curve, high licensing costs, and significant operational overhead. This tool is specifically for quantitative specialists, generally either academics requiring significant customization to normal conjoint, or stats-focused market research agencies.

Sawtooth Discover is browser-based and can be accessed on any laptop. Its conjoint capabilities are limited in comparison to Lighthouse Studio, but cover the basics without things like adaptive methods, research flexibility, and simulation alternatives. While its user interface is much more modern than Lighthouse, it is a newer build and still lacks some product necessities like conjoint templates or sample surveys. Paid plans with Sawtooth Software do not include any research consulting time included for hands-on support, which leaves you more on your own for running projects.

What are your research needs?

If you're running academic market research that requires advanced customizable conjoint or you need a deep base of academic literature to back up your methodology, then Sawtooth’s reputation and Lighthouse Studio’s breadth will give you the rigor you need.

Otherwise, OpinionX is better suited to the majority of advanced survey occasions than Sawtooth Software. It’s ideal for measuring what features or offerings your customers value most, testing pricing strategies, comparing preferences across customer segments, and validating your roadmap with real data. With OpinionX, you get the look and feel of Typeform together with the advanced toolkit of Qualtrics Enterprise, all at an affordable price.

With OpinionX, you get a professional conjoint analysis platform and proactive support for $900/year instead of $22,500 for a do-it-yourself tool like Sawtooth.

OpinionX vs Sawtooth Software: Feature Comparison

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Bottom Line

If you're a market research agency billing clients $50K+ per study, running complex academic research, or managing Fortune 500 product launches, Sawtooth's premium pricing reflects premium capabilities.

If you're a research team that needs to understand customer preferences, test pricing, and validate roadmap decisions with real data, OpinionX gives you everything you need for $900/year instead of $22,500. Same conjoint methodology. Same market simulators. Same segmentation insights. 96% less expensive.

Create your conjoint study for free on OpinionX — no credit card required, full analysis included.