Beyond Qualtrics and Medallia: Customer Experience Feedback for App Teams
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"We need a feedback tool" can mean two very different things. Sometimes it means we need to know how customers feel about us, across every channel, measured over time. Sometimes it means we need to know what to build next. Qualtrics and Medallia are built for the broad question. Feature-voting boards like FeedbackKit are built for the specific one.
They get compared because both collect feedback, and both can run inside an app. They collect different kinds of feedback, for different people in the company, at very different price points. This post sets out what each does, based on their own public pages, and when each one is the right call.
A note on sources: every Qualtrics and Medallia claim below comes from their own websites and documentation, checked on 11 October 2026 and linked where it is used. Both products are large and change often, so check anything decision-critical with them directly.
What Qualtrics and Medallia are for
Both are experience management (XM) platforms: enterprise systems for measuring and improving customer (and often employee) experience across a whole organisation.
Qualtrics describes its CX platform as unifying "every signal — surveys, chat, email, digital behavior, real time feedback — into 360-degree profiles of your customers". Its product list includes Voice of Customer, Digital Experience Analytics, Contact Center Experience Analytics and Location Experience Management. Surveys are still at the core: Qualtrics also offers a free survey account (500 responses, 3 active surveys, 8 question types, according to that page).
For apps, Qualtrics has a Mobile App SDK. You set up "intercepts" in a Website/App Insights project: prompts or in-app feedback that appear inside your app based on targeting rules, and lead into a Qualtrics survey. Its Mobile App Feedback documentation lists Android, iOS and React Native among the supported platforms. A related page covers in-app feedback placed inside the app. Flutter is not mentioned there, so this post does not claim it either way.
Medallia positions itself similarly, as an experience management platform covering customer experience, employee experience, contact centres and market research. Its pricing page lists "100s of signals", including surveys, speech, social, digital feedback and video feedback, plus text and speech analytics, case management and closed-loop feedback. Its digital product offers in-app feedback "across both native and hybrid applications", with text or video feedback and real-time alerts for teams.
The common thread: these platforms are designed to answer questions like How satisfied are our customers? Where in the journey do they struggle? Which store, agent or page is underperforming? They are built for CX, research and operations teams, often in large organisations with many touchpoints.
How they are sold
Neither publishes a price list. Qualtrics's pricing page offers a "Request pricing" form and describes paying "for planned usage". Medallia's pricing is based on what it calls the Experience Data Record (EDR), "all data associated with a discrete interaction between an end-customer (or employee) and a company", priced in annual tiers, via its sales team. As of 11 October 2026, Medallia's pricing page lists unlimited users as part of that model. In both cases you will be talking to sales, and the contract will be sized to your programme.
That is not a criticism. It is what enterprise software for company-wide programmes usually looks like. It does tell you who the products are built for.
What an in-app feature-voting board is for
A feature-voting board answers a narrower question: Of the things users are asking for, which matter most to the most people?
Instead of you asking users questions (a survey), users bring their own ideas. Each request is public to other users, who can upvote it and comment on it, rather than filing a duplicate. You get a ranked list of what your users want, in their words. Then you close the loop: when a request's status changes, the people who asked can be told.
FeedbackKit is this kind of tool. You add an SDK to your app (Swift, Kotlin, React Native, Flutter or JavaScript), users browse, vote, comment and submit, and you triage from native admin apps for iPhone, iPad and Mac or from the web dashboard. Merging moves votes and comments from duplicates onto the request you keep, counting each voter once, so the same idea is not split across three phrasings. The Swift SDK requires iOS, macOS and visionOS 26.
On Pro you can push requests into Linear, GitHub, ClickUp, Notion, Monday.com, Trello, Airtable, Asana or Basecamp, and you can connect Slack, HubSpot, Salesforce and the email-list tools (Mailchimp, Kit, beehiiv and MailerLite). Every one of those integrations requires Pro. Team includes what Pro includes. Free is 1 project, Pro is 2, and Team is unlimited projects and team members. Dollar figures are on our pricing page.
Status email goes out for the statuses on that project's list. A new project starts with a default list — approved, in progress, completed and rejected — and choosing a different list needs Pro. The person who submitted the request receives the email, on any plan, when they gave an address. A voter receives it when they opted in and the project is on Team. On Free or Pro the vote still counts, and the voter opt-in is not stored.
The core differences
| Qualtrics / Medallia | In-app feature voting (for example FeedbackKit) | |
|---|---|---|
| Main question | How do customers feel, and where does the experience break? | What should we build next? |
| Who starts the conversation | You (surveys, intercepts, prompts) | The user (they post an idea when they have one) |
| Shape of the data | Scores, ratings, free text, sentiment, operational signals | A ranked list of specific requests, with votes and comments |
| Visibility to users | Usually private: each response goes to you | Public by design: users see and build on each other's ideas |
| Closing the loop | Case management and alerts for internal teams (Medallia lists closed-loop feedback; both offer alerting) | Status emails to the person who submitted the request, for the statuses the project notifies on. Voters who opted in are included when the project is on Team. |
| Main users internally | CX, research, contact centre, operations | Product managers and developers |
| Buying process | Talk to sales; pricing by usage or EDR | Self-serve; a free plan to start |
When Qualtrics or Medallia fits
- You are measuring experience across many channels. Stores, call centres, websites, apps, email. If the app is one touchpoint among many, an XM platform is designed to bring them together.
- You need scores you can compare over time. NPS, CSAT or effort scores tracked by segment and journey stage, with statistical analysis on top.
- You have a CX or research team to run it. These platforms are powerful because they are configurable. That power needs people.
- You need enterprise governance. Role-based reporting across a large organisation, security reviews and procurement processes are part of what these vendors offer.
When in-app feature voting fits
- Your product is the app. You are a small team or indie developer, and the question is what goes into the next release.
- You want users to tell you what to build, not just how they feel. A survey score tells you something is wrong. A request with 40 votes and 12 comments tells you what to fix.
- You want fewer duplicates. When users can see existing requests, they vote instead of filing the same idea again.
- You want to close the loop. A status email when their request ships, and a reply they can read on the request, builds trust in a way a survey cannot.
- You need to be live this week. No sales call, no implementation project.
When you need both
In larger companies, these tools sit side by side. The XM platform measures the overall experience and spots where it is breaking ("satisfaction drops after onboarding"). The feature board collects the specific product ideas from the users who care most ("let me import my data from X"). Survey responses can even point to the board: "Got an idea? Add it to our feature board."
What does not work well is forcing one to do the other's job. Running feature requests through survey free-text fields means someone has to read, de-duplicate and tally thousands of comments by hand, and the people who asked never hear back. Using a voting board to measure satisfaction gives you a biased sample: the people who post ideas are your most engaged users, not your average customer.
Summary
Qualtrics and Medallia are enterprise experience management platforms: broad, configurable, analytics-heavy and sold through sales. They are the right tool when you need to measure customer experience across an organisation. An in-app feature-voting board is a focused product tool. It is the right fit when you need a clear, user-driven answer to "what should we build next?" and want to keep the people who asked in the loop.
If you are an app team trying to answer that second question, an enterprise CX contract is not required to start.
Try FeedbackKit for free
FeedbackKit has a free plan. Add the SDK to your app and see what your users ask for.