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In the ever-evolving landscape of research, organising and analysing vast amounts of data can be a daunting task. Fortunately, the advent of research repository tools has brought about a new era of efficiency and collaboration for researchers. These tools offer a range of features designed to streamline the research process, from data importing and analysis to synthesising insights and reporting findings.
In this blog post, we will delve into the capabilities of several popular research repository tools, namely Dovetail, Condens, Aurelius, Enjoy HQ, and Consider.ly. By comparing their key features, strengths, and weaknesses, we aim to help you make an informed decision on which tool best suits your research needs. Let's dive in and explore these tools to discover which one will become your go-to companion in your research journey.
In our comparison of research repository tools, we created a comparison table highlighting key attributes that our researchers value when selecting a tool for our clients.
This table provides a quick overview of the tools' capabilities in various areas, including integrations and data import, data analysis, synthesising insights, reporting, search functionality, collaboration features, transcribing capabilities, templating options, and privacy measures.
The priority of attributes can differ for your organisation, so have a look and assess which tool aligns best with your specific research requirements.
Whether you prioritise seamless integration with existing apps, powerful data analysis features, efficient synthesis of insights, robust reporting options, advanced search functionality, or collaborative capabilities, this comparison table will serve as a valuable resource to guide your decision-making process.
Dovetail is a versatile research repository known for its excellent performance across all aspects. It offers a wide range of integrations, including Zapier, Slack, Jira, CVS files, and Google Drive, making data import seamless.
Analysing data is a breeze with its user-friendly tagging system and intuitive UX. The platform provides various useful features like tag merging and highlighting. Synthesising data is highly efficient, thanks to diverse data visualisation options and additional features such as auto clustering themes.
Reporting in Dovetail is impressive, presenting insights through mini blogs containing quotes, videos, tags, and themes. Stakeholders can easily be updated using the presentation mode, and the clean and sleek interface makes creating insightful presentations a breeze.
The search functionality supports complex queries for targeted information retrieval. Collaboration is well-designed, allowing users to tag fellow researchers, share notes and insights, and provide quick updates to stakeholders.
Dovetail also offers accurate transcriptions in multiple languages, with options to specify the number of speakers, ensuring precise and well-formatted transcriptions.
The user experience is intuitive and beginner-friendly, with helpful platform explanations and small video explanations for features. Dovetail is GDPR-compliant and offers a 14-day free trial period for users to explore its capabilities.
Condens is a user-friendly research repository that offers convenient features to enhance your workflow. It performs well across various aspects, making it a reliable choice.
Importing data from CSV files is effortless with the preview window, allowing you to easily edit data columns. It also integrates seamlessly with popular apps like Google Drive, Slack, and Zapier.
The tagging system for data analysis is robust, offering project tags and global tags, which enable cross-project tagging and benefit larger organisations.
A unique feature of Condens is the ability to use short keys while tagging, providing a small but valuable convenience. Synthesising data is effective, with a whiteboard view and helpful templates. However, it lacks a regular board view, which could have been a useful addition.
For reporting, Condens offers multiple options, including text-based documents and visual representations like journey maps or empathy maps, similar to a Miro whiteboard. The search function performs well but has room for improvement.
While you can combine keywords for complex search queries, the ability to combine filter options is currently unavailable. Collaborating with researchers and stakeholders is possible, with different access rights. However, it's not possible to tag other researchers or stakeholders within tags and themes.
Condens prioritises data security and GDPR compliance, offering the option to hide user data or automatically remove it. Users can try Condens for free for a period of 15 days, providing an opportunity to explore its features and capabilities.
Aurelius falls short in terms of features required for a robust research repository tool. Importing data is adequate through Zapier, allowing the import of notes, but the absence of an option to import meta fields makes segmenting participant data challenging. Importing a CSV file is also not supported, which further limits its capabilities.
Analysing data in Aurelius involves breaking them up into separate notes, resulting in additional steps and increased effort. The tagging functionality lacks useful features that would streamline the tagging workflow, such as auto-suggesting recent tags or keyboard shortcuts.
The platform utilises an analysis board for synthesis, but is not as effective. With only two layout options available, gaining a clear overview becomes difficult. The workflow for affinity mapping feels cumbersome due to the absence of visual feedback, making it challenging to determine if a tag is placed inside a theme. Moving tags does not remove them from their original tag group, leading to confusion.
In terms of reporting, Aurelius has limited capabilities. The base for reporting is text-based documents and the user must manually upload artefacts such as videos, images, or research recordings. Sharing reports is straightforward by sharing a PDF file, and no account is required for access. However, customising the report takes considerable time, as the editing tool is difficult to work with.
Searching in Aurelius is satisfactory at best. The inability to construct complex search queries limits its search capabilities, as it only allows searching for a single keyword.
Collaboration with other researchers is functional, with the ability to add collaborators, and share insights without requiring an account. However, the absence of features like tagging team members or leaving comments on notes is a notable drawback.
Overall, Aurelius feels lacking in comparison to other tools, primarily due to the absence of key features offered by its competitors. It is GDPR-compliant and offers a free trial period of 30 days, providing an opportunity to explore its capabilities.
Enjoy HQ is a well-designed research repository tool, but it has a significant drawback when it comes to data importing. Before uploading your data, you need to prepare the CSV file, which can be time-consuming. While there are templates available to simplify the process, setting it up still requires some time and effort.
On the positive side, the platform offers interesting analysis features that involve working with tags and properties for added context. Instead of directly tagging information, you first need to highlight it, which may initially feel cumbersome but introduces a new workflow option.
Synthesising data in Enjoy HQ is effective with its Trello board-style view and convenient options for sorting findings into themes. The platform also provides good visualisation choices such as bars and graphs. However, it lacks different view types for sorting findings.
Reporting in Enjoy HQ is intuitive and includes various appealing features. You have control over what stakeholders see and can interact with, and there are many visualisation options available for bars and charts. The search function is robust, allowing you to build complex queries and save them for future use.
Collaboration is well-supported, although an account is required. You can leave comments on highlights, assign data to team members, utilise custom templates for insights and reports, and even share insights with Jira.
Overall, Enjoy HQ performs well and offers innovative features, with the only downside being the difficulty with data importing. Enjoy HQ is GDPR-compliant and offers a free version for up to 2 seats.
Consider.ly falls short in several areas as a research repository tool. Importing data is severely limited, as it only allows for generating notes within the platform and lacks the ability to import CSV files.
On a positive note, the analysis tool performs surprisingly well, with a dedicated feature for processing data. Clicking automatically selects entire sentences, which speeds up the process.
However, Consider.ly lacks options for using short keys when tagging. Other aspects of the platform leave much to be desired. Synthesising data is intended to be done through a grid view, but it only allows highlighting notes and importing them as insights, lacking the ability to perform affinity mapping within this view.
The absence of alternative view types is also noticeable, especially when compared to other platforms. Consider.ly does offer data visualisations that can be imported into insights, which is a promising feature that aids the synthesis process to some extent.
Reporting is subpar, with limited styling options, and the workflow for adding highlights to insights is impractical. The search function is acceptable, allowing for complex queries, but there is no option to save them for future use.
Collaboration in Consider.ly is lacking, as there are no options to tag other researchers or assign tasks. Sharing insights on the platform is not possible; they can only be downloaded as PDF files. Consider.ly is GDPR-compliant and offers a 30-day free trial.
Airtable is a versatile tool that functions as a hybrid spreadsheet-database, and while it may not be designed specifically as a research repository tool, its flexibility and capabilities make it worth considering.
Importing data is a strong suit, with a wide range of integrations available, including Google Drive, Miro, Jira, and CSV files. Automation and Zapier connections are also supported.
Analysing data, however, requires effort and creating a custom workflow within the platform. Managing multiple sheets within a document can make it challenging to maintain an overview, and manually connecting data can lead to losing context.
Synthesising data in Airtable is complex and time-consuming. While different view options are available, manual selection of data can lead to context loss. The ability to save different view types is a helpful feature.
Reporting lacks a dedicated feature for sharing collections of insights. While extensions can be used to create dashboards with charts and graphs, it becomes evident that Airtable is primarily designed as a database tool rather than for information presentation.
The search feature in Airtable is robust, with numerous filtering options and the ability to save and copy filters across different views.
Collaboration capabilities in Airtable are decent, allowing for sharing insights and assigning files or leaving comments for fellow researchers. However, creating a custom workflow is necessary to achieve these functionalities.
Airtable boasts strong privacy measures, including certifications and a robust internal security protocol. They offer a free subscription with limited features.
After comparing the features and functionalities of the different research repository tools, it is clear that Dovetail emerges as the winner.
Even though Condens is a strong contender, Dovetail offers a comprehensive set of features for organising, analysing, synthesising, and reporting research data. Its wide range of integration options, user-friendly tagging system, advanced data visualisation capabilities, and efficient collaboration tools make it a standout choice.
The clean and sleek interface of Dovetail enhances the user experience, ensuring a smooth and intuitive research process. With its commitment to user-friendly interface and a comprehensive feature set, Dovetail solidifies its position as the top research repository tool among the options discussed.
Be sure to list your requirements for a repository, to find a tool that matches your company’s needs. We’re happy to have a chat and help you out.
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