Cycle vs. Dovetail: the ultimate comparison

Why you need a User Research tool

When building software, having a robust user research tool is essential to meet the needs and expectations of your users and ship the best product possible. Here’s why:

Understand User Needs and Pain Points

User research tools help you dive deep into the minds of your users. By employing methods such as interviews and surveys, you can gather rich, qualitative data about their needs, pain points, and workflows. This understanding is particularly crucial in B2B settings where users often have complex requirements and rely on your software to perform critical business functions. Knowing their specific challenges allows you to design solutions that are not just functional but also intuitive and efficient.

Inform Product Roadmap with Qualitative Insights

With a good User research, you gain actionable insights that can shape your product roadmap. Instead of relying on assumptions or anecdotal evidence, you have qualitative data on what features users find most valuable and where they encounter friction. This approach helps ensuring that you’ll will have the most significant impact on your users' success and, consequently, your product’s success in the market.

Foster Empathy and Collaboration Across Teams

User research tools help build a user-focused culture in your organization. They keep your team empathetic by regularly sharing real user quotes.

When all stakeholders (product, design, development, business) have access to user insights, it promotes collaboration and ensures everyone is working towards the same goal: creating the best possible user experience.

The 5 components of a great user research tool

When they scale, companies need to have a proper User Research system in place to maintain an effective stream of customer understanding, without hitting on their productivity.

Here below are the 6 components required for great User Research tools, along with a comparison of how Cycle and Dovetail score for each of them:

• Exhaustive feedback capture: Capture both inbound & outbound feedback
• AI engine: Can the AI distinguish different types of feedback & extract the relevant quotes?
• Actionability: Use customer insights to close feedback loops
• Collaboration and editing
• Flexibility

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Feedback capture & exhaustivity

If you don’t make it buttery smooth for your team to share feedback, they won’t. An efficient feedback capture must be both frictionless and fast.

Cycle’s way of capturing feedback

• Feedback island: We've found that the most natural way for folks to capture feedback is to take a screenshot and drop it somewhere – no thinking, no hassle, just drop it. That’s why we shipped Cycle’s feedback island. From anywhere, just drag & drop a file or a screenshot and watch the island do its feedback magic.

• There's more... Cycle generates optical character recognition (OCR) for your images & PDFs... as well as transcripts for your audio and video files.

• Native integrations: of course, we integrate with your favorite tools too. Hubspot, Intercom, Freshdesk, Salesforce, Gong, you name it. And, if you’re using a very specific tool, our graphql API got you covered. We’ll be happy to help you with setting up a custom integration.

• Recorder: Cycle comes with a built-in meeting recorder, that automatically generates transcripts. This way you don't have to use yet another tool and create an information silo for user interviews & onboarding calls.

Those different ways to capture feedback ensure the exhaustivity of the customer context: both inbound (passive) feedback from customers and outbound (proactive) feedback are captured with Cycle.

Dovetail’s focus on outbound feedback, without a recorder

Dovetail only covers outbound feedback (research, surveys, interviews, etc) — no inbound feedback is captured here.

The tool doesn’t integrate with many feedback sources. At most, it connects to your existing repository of data (Notion, Googe Drive, MS OneDrive, Atlassian, etc), but doesn’t fetch the data from actual feedback tools directly (like Intercom, Zendesk, HubSpot, Gong, etc).

The company recently announced the launch of its Channel feature set — leveraging AI to set User Research on a more automated motion. But so far it’s still in beta and results haven’t been vocalised much by their customers. So far, the Dovetail team uses a third-party tool to collect feedback for their own product through a public upvote portal, which comes with its own drawbacks.

Still, it has a Zapier integration if you want to build your own automation.

Their editor is quite rich and user-friendly, not to the likes of Notion or Cycle, but still allowing you to take most of your notes directly.

The biggest drawback is that they don’t offer anything with regard to recording sales, CS, or user research calls. So you need to equip yourself with yet another recorder tool for this central use case. This is quite limiting as the richest source for capturing outbound feedback is user interviews.

“We tried them all, no other software beats Cycle. We redesigned our feedback loop to extract concrete customer insights in no time with the autopilot feature. It’s a no-brainer for any product team.” – Aurélien Georget (CPO at Strapi)

AI engine

Manually processing feedback is a thing of the past. User Research folks don’t have time for such grunt work, and should focus on brainstorming and delivering on the best features instead.

Cycle’s AI autopilot

We believe that categorizing feedback should be on autopilot. Cycle AI will learn from your company’s context & feature set. Once an initial calibration phase is completed, your Cycle AI will scan feedback for relevant customer quotes and map them to existing topics, problems or features, or create new ones.

We're also building our very own "Cycle Ask", which you can use to ask any questions about your feedback data.

We're working with the very best experts in the field to build AI that blows your mind, saves days of work, and make your product org future-proof.

“Cycle is a slick AI tool that enables teams to build better products by getting smarter on what their customers want.” – Olivier Godement (head of product at OpenAI & Cycle angel investor)

Dovetail Channel & Magic suite

With Magic Highlight, Magic Redact, Magic Search, users can leverage Dovetail’s AI capabilities to gain a fair amount of time when categorizing feedback, creating summaries of topics across user feedback, and searching for such information in an augmented way.

Yet, those features revolve more around the notion of a co-pilot, and there is no autopilot function. Users will have to manually process each feedback, using AI to speed up the process.

Crunching data from your insights repository

Where User Research tools often fall short is in the query and access to the insights repository. Things end up in long lists that can barely be filtered or sorted on particular tags. This makes it quite complex to surface the most important trends and truly highlight what to focus on.

Also, such insights tend to be categorized once and can’t be accessed through multiple angles. When working on a new topic, getting a basic understanding of it across all insights is quite complex.

Cycle’s flexible and actionable insights

Cycle offers 3 ways to highlight trends and deeply understand customer context

• Flexible views: display insights according to your needs — apply specific filters and sorts to create your own kanban and list views
• Custom dashboards: we’ll generate dashboards displaying breakdowns, trends and abnormalities across your feedback data to help you prioritize. Such dashboards can be filtered based on customer attributes to focus learnings on particular market segment
• Cycle Ask: start from a topic and get an AI-generated summary of it, cross-insights. This is the ultimate discovery tool, combining both the flexibility and depth of your research.

Dovetail’s functional insights module

This is an area where Dovetail has been investing for some time already, and they know their game. Thanks to their flexible tagging system (see more in the Flexibility section), users can organize their data in a structured way, and easily access and search it from different angles.

They also developed a comprehensive set of view types: boards, tables, canvas, grids, lists — to enable users to visualize and share their findings in multiple ways.

One caveat though is that such insights views tend to be messy and non-coherent between teams and projects, making it hard to keep a consistent User Research methodology across the organization.

Insight actionability

A great insight system only holds value if it can be actioned into concrete product outcomes. This is why it’s important to look at how research data can be leveraged into actual product features and planning when considering a User Research or feedback tool.

Although we strongly believe that feedback has more value for creating trust with customers by closing the feedback loop, feedback and research data can still be useful for infusing feature prioritization. The volume of feedback or requests linked to a particular problem or feature is a good proxy for assessing the demand of customers. This is why most feedback tools tend to have prioritization functionalities and don’t just stop at collecting and processing such feedback.

This is also the area where there is a clear difference in how various User Research and feedback tools approach their offering.

Cycle’s actionable insight model

We’re convinced of one thing: keeping the discovery (research, feedback, ideation) and delivery workflows separated in different tools will create information and collaboration silos — hence diminishing product quality and shipping velocity.

Cycle allows linking every insight to a solution object (fully flexible on that end) so that every insight will be made actionable. Product teams can then collaborate on such features — while using the full research and insights repository captured — and connect those to their issue-tracking tool, to ensure everything is connected until the delivery of such initiatives.

Regarding pure feature prioritization, Cycle hasn’t invested much in this area and prioritization features are quite basic: mostly allowing you to create custom views through filters and sorts. One key element that helps product teams make relevant decisions though is the Voice of Customer dashboard — highlighting major breakdowns and trends of problems and features, based on the volume of insights linked.

Dovetail’s siloed approach to User Research

Although a great tool to capture and organize insights from your research, Dovetail lives in a complete silo to your solution space. This is a true red flag for teams who want to make sure that customer insights are being acted upon and incorporated into their product development cycle.

With no concept of features or solutions, very few product teams are using Dovetail in their ideation and documentation process — leaving the product to be accessed only by designers and user researchers.

Collaboration and editing

The best product teams are excellent collaborators. The product should never be a “black box” to the rest of the company. Yet, this is the number one complaint we heard from many prospects: “Nobody else than the product and research team ever goes into our UX Research tool, it’s not a collaborative space”.

Most User Research tools chose to keep their text editing features to a bare minimum, pushing product teams to turn to separate tools like Notion or Coda to do their work. This systematically results in new information silos, which is the exact problem you’re trying to solve in the first place. 🤷‍♂️

Cycle’s collaborative doc as the atomic object from day 1

We built Cycle with collaboration in mind from the beginning. Live activity indicators, @mentions, in-line comments, advanced notification preferences, cross-source feedback loops, the list goes on.

Cycle comes with a rich markdown editor that lets you edit feedback & write specs with nifty “/” commands, images, videos & embeddings. Since product folks spend a lot of time writing, you need a tool with a top-notch writing experience.

Dovetail

When it comes to collaborating and documenting your findings, Dovetail has got you covered too. Their rich editor enables researchers to go long and detailed when summarizing all captured insights and write exhaustive research conclusions.

Such content can then be re-used in other collaborative tools like Atlassian, Notion or Google Docs to fuel product initiatives — although the information will remain siloed and duplicated.

Their rich commenting features also make it a great collaborative tool. The only sad thing is that it doesn’t foster collaboration with other teams in the organization (PMs, developers, business folks).

Does it enable feedback loops?

The key behind every successful feedback system is an effective feedback loop. Feedback shouldn't be seen as a prioritization tool but rather as a tool to create trust. The system breaks when there's no way to close the loop at each release.

By closing the feedback loop with customers, companies improve engagement, trust, and loyalty – ultimately leading to increased revenue. When users see their feedback being implemented, they feel acknowledged and are less likely to churn. It creates a sense of value and trust between the product and its users.

If you've ever opened a support ticket with a software company, you know how frustrating it can be to have them tell you: "This is on our roadmap," or "I'll tell the product team." 🤔 But in many companies, communication between support and product teams is broken. The support team rarely gets an update from the product team... and neither do you.

Cycle’s native feedback loop system

This changes with Cycle. When the product team marks something as “shipped”, all the related customer insights are automatically updated with the new status. Cycle’s integrations will show this to support agents who can then easily close the feedback loop with users. Without even leaving their support tool. Additionally, your team will get custom status updates notifications by Slack and/or email so they can easily stay on top of things.

Your product team is most likely being pinged regularly with questions such as "When will this get shipped?" or "Has this bug been fixed?". Now they can simple use our /Cycle-status command to get a quick update on the status fo roadmap items tied to a specific customer.

“What hooked me on Cycle is the ability to close the loop with users. With Cycle, teams can communicate with customers in the right source with the right message when they shipped something they asked. On top of making customers feel special, it leads to higher NPS and increased Net Revenue Retention.” – Alana Goyal (Managing Partner at Base Case)

Next to the 1-1 feedback loop, Cycle’s Release module allows for organizing release notes and publishing a public changelog. “Don’t share your plan. Show your results.” they say..

Dovetail siloed from all delivery workflows

As detailed in the Actionability section, Dovetail doesn’t have any concept of solutions backlog, making it fully detached from what's happening on the delivery side.

This has for consequence that there is no link to close the feedback loop: when a feature is shipped, product teams can’t go back to all customers and stakeholders who shared something in relation to that feature.

Flexibility

There are as many ways to ship products as there are product teams.

Products that lack flexibility usually fail to meet the expectations of power users, while products that lack opinions can be confusing and hard to use. Striking the right balance between the two is critical.

Cycle’s flexible yet opinionated data model

We’re strong believers that there are as many ways to ship products as there are product teams. Yet, we do have strong opinions on how to help you do it well.

Cycle’s approach is flexible. By default, everyone has access to "feedback", "insight", "feature" & "release" objects. But we created a way for users to customize these objects to their individual needs.

Below you can see an example of a setup in which a user has created 5 different objects: "goal", "need", "feature", "dev" & "design".

There's more. You can actually customize the relationships you want to have between your custom objects. In the example above, "goals" can be broken down into "needs", which themselves can be broken down into "features". We basically allow for multi-level nesting across objects. That's our custom hierarchy feature. Definitely the most powerful aspect of our data model.

Dovetail’s native flexible tagging system

Dovetail allows its users to benefit from a great flexibility to organize their findings. Their global and nested tags system fulfils the needs of every context. Teams can easily spin up research projects in a few clicks, and share their findings thanks to comprehensive boards created based on such project tags.

It’s definitely a fast and intuitive way to categorize the information to be used from multiple angles.

Wrapping up

Comparing the two tools Cycle and Dovetail revolves around comparing two different approaches to User Research.

If you’re a designer or researcher looking for a tool that will essentially help you organize and visualize insights data within the scope of a particular User research project, then Dovetail can be good match. They’ve been digging the space for long and have developed most features needed for that use case.

However, if you’re looking to build up an insight system on which your entire product team will be able to collaborate to turn such insights into product initiatives and ship actual features, then Cycle has been built for that reason, based on this gap in the market.