Is Medallia better than Qualtrics? Or vice versa? Hopefully, our Medallia vs Qualtrics comparison will help you find the answer!

In this article, we’ll:

Give a quick intro to Medallia and Qualtrics
List the features that Medallia and Qualtrics have in common
Explore the standout features of Medallia and Qualtrics
Understand the limitations of Medallia and Qualtrics

Medallia vs Qualtrics: Intro

Qualtrics, an American experience management company, is a form-building tool for helping companies analyze and manage all experiences on one platform. Qualtrics started as a single-product survey tool for academics. Over the years, they’ve built a pretty solid multi-product feedback software.

Their current market cap is $9B.

Medallia, another American company, is a customer and employee experience management software. They provide survey features and in-app feedback and review features. The software can also analyze and aggregate comments on review sites.

Their current valuation is $5.47B.

Medallia vs Qualtrics: Similar Features

Medallia and Qualtrics both offer several features to refine the user experience and drive growth. But, first, let’s look at the key features of both Medallia and Qualtrics.

Feature	Medallia XM Software	Qualtrics XM Software
Survey & form generation	✔️	✔️
Customizable survey templates	✔️	✔️
Omnichannel survey sharing	✔️	✔️
Multi-lingual forms	✔️	✔️
Apps & integration marketplace	✔️	✔️
API	✔️	✔️
Real-time reporting	✔️	✔️
Visual analytics	✔️	✔️

Medallia vs Qualtrics: Unique Features

In this section, we’ll drill down into the features that make Medallia and Qualtrics stand out.

Qualtrics website

First, let’s take a look at Qualtrics’s key features

Comprehensive experience management
Customer segmentation and analysis
Predictive behavior analytics
Audience panel services
Enterprise-grade security

Comprehensive experience management

Qualtrics is a great tool to have if you want a centralized platform to assess the four core experiences of your company – customers, employees, product, and brand.

It also has 100+ survey question types and 30+ graph types for easy reporting. Additionally, it enables advanced statistical analysis, including regression analysis, cluster and correlation analysis.

Customer segmentation

Companies can review feedback based on customer demographics, such as age, gender, and background, with Qualtrics’ conjoint analysis feature. Segmenting customers in this way helps companies to serve them better.

Data such as these can be invaluable for determining the optimal configuration, starting price, or target audience for each product.

Predictive behavior analytics

Qualtrics uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to flag unhappy survey responses, and suggests ways to improve them.

Additionally, Clarabridge, a text analytics tool acquired by the company, allows you to scan text responses for sentiment analysis, trend alerts, behavior forecasting, and research data reports.

Audience panel services

Looking for a faster way to validate your research? With Qualtrics’ Online Panel distribution feature, you can send surveys to a targeted group of people.

Upon purchasing a panel, this feature becomes available in the survey ‘Distribution’ options.

Enterprise-grade security

Qualtrics takes the security of their client’s data seriously. According to their G2 page, they are currently GDPR, HITRUST, and FedRAMP compliant.

According to their current security statement, they are also ISO-27001, 27017, and 27018 certified.

Medallia website

Now let’s take a look at Medallia’s key features.

Omnichannel CX management
Medallia AI
Action management
Online review and reputation management
Text analytics

Omnichannel CX management

If you want to understand your customer journeys, Medallia is an excellent tool for capturing customer data at all touchpoints. It covers every primary brand touchpoint – including online surveys, in-app feedback, reviews, messaging platforms, call and chat recordings, IoT devices and IVR systems.

Additionally, Medallia has expanded its capabilities recently with its acquisition of Mindful, the global leader in contact center callback technology.

Medallia AI

When you have masses of customer data to sort through, it helps to have a “second eye” that can quickly pinpoint unhappy feedback and suggest possible actions. That is what Medallia’s Athena AI does.

Medallia claims that Athena also uses machine learning to discover data trends (such as a sudden spurt in customer dissatisfaction) and recommend the best course of action.

Action management

Customer service representatives can use Medallia to hear and respond to customer feedback within the platform. They can also record the action taken, and whether or not the issue has been resolved.

In addition, the tool automatically categorizes CES and CSAT surveys by the associate who performed the transaction, thus, giving managers the ability to recognize individual employees who perform exceptional customer service.

Online review and reputation management

One of Medallia’s key strengths is automatically generating alerts for all new reviews or triggering alerts based on review scores or keywords. This feature works for over 25 social and review sites, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, and TripAdvisor.

With Medallia, you can also enable location managers to respond directly to bad reviews from within the platform.

Text Analytics

Medallia has omnichannel Text Analytics capabilities that are more than a decade old and constantly improving. In addition, it comes with Natural Language Processing and is supported by Athena AI.

In other words, it can help you respond more appropriately to customer conversations by pinpointing the emotion behind the words and scoring the effort you will need to retain them. This is also helpful for prioritizing support tickets and discovering where your agents may have missed an opportunity.

Medallia vs Qualtrics: Limitations

Now let’s explore the current downsides of each tool.

Qualtrics: Cons

Qualtrics’ interface can be hard to figure out. So managing more advanced or complex survey projects will require some support calls.
Compared to other survey applications, it is not as visually appealing. Moreover, the templates and questions don’t lend themselves to easy customization.
Qualtrics is one of the pricier options out there, and the cost of the software depends on what products you need, how many people will be using the software, etc.

They don’t mention pricing plans on their website either. So you’ll have to work with Qualtrics support to figure out an optimal plan.

Looking for a more cost-effective alternative to Medallia and Qualtrics? Try SurveySparrow for free.

Medallia: Cons

Like all AI-powered tools, the text analytics feature is a work in progress. G2 users have reported that sometimes it tends to flag good feedback as unfavourable.
No-code survey creation capabilities are limited, and it’s hard to feel a sense of ownership over the platform. Additionally, Medallia’s service model leans more toward managed services rather than self-service. This means you might have to talk frequently with your CS team to do surveys, make changes, customize your reports and dashboards, and so on.
Compared to Qualtrics, Medallia is tougher to set up and do business with.

For example, a TrustRadius reviewer reported that they charge for both “units” and users. Now, “units” are defined as named individuals in survey forms but don’t have log-in privileges.

An example would be a customer service agent who interacts with the client on chat via Medallia but doesn’t have admin permissions for the platform.

Wrapping Up

We hope our Medallia vs Qualtrics article told you the key things you need to know about both platforms. To support these points, here are the numbers from G2:

Medallia Customer Experience is rated at 4.5 out of 5 stars from 95 reviews.
Qualtrics CoreXM is rated at 4.4 out of 5 stars with 2,422 reviews.
Qualtrics Customer Experience is rated at 4.3 out of 5 stars with 338 reviews. Meanwhile, their Employee Experience solutions are rated at 4.2 out of 5 from 317 reviews.

The difference in reviews is staggering. It is because Qualtrics currently has more customers than Medallia – 16,750 worldwide. On the other hand, according to the LATKA SaaS database, Medallia currently has 2,000 customers.

If you still aren’t sure which tool to pick, check out our top 10 alternatives to Medallia and Qualtrics alternatives as well.

Medallia vs Qualtrics: A Detailed Comparison