The best user interview tools for remote UX research

User interviews are a very accessible research method—it’s part of why they’re so valuable. In their simplest form, they require little more than a pen, some paper, and an inquisitive mind.

However, one thing's for sure—a user interview tool makes user interviews a whole lot easier, especially when done at scale. From organizing participants, automating admin tasks, and recording interviews to generating transcripts, analyzing conversations, and creating reports—a great selection of user interview tools can take your interviews to the next level.

We reviewed the best options for your shortlist and put them head-to-head below, so you can quickly find the right tool for your user interview process.

A good tool can streamline the process of conducting user interviews and bring objectivity to your UX research. It enables you to move with speed and precision by effortlessly scheduling interviews, organizing responses, and analyzing data. These tools also cut down on manual tasks to maximize productivity and speed up the user research process.

Besides these core benefits, here are a few other reasons you need a user interview tool:

You can also integrate several tools to interview users with your user research repositories or qualitative data analysis tools. This works well for synthesizing customer feedback from different studies to deepen your understanding of user behaviors.

Here’s an overview of the nine top user interview software we’ve shortlisted and reviewed.

Maze is an AI-first user research platform offering a suite of tools to conduct end-to-end product research, from interviews and UX surveys to usability testing and prototype testing. It enables strategic decision-making for UX design and development and helps build an airtight research ops setup.

The Maze Panel enables you to recruit your own users for research studies, or filter and choose from its database of over six million real users from 130+ countries. You can then keep track of participants from existing and previous research projects in the platform’s purpose-built UX-focused CRM, Reach.

While it’s an all-in-one solution for planning and managing interviews effortlessly, Maze also offers an AI moderator that can lead structured interviews for you, ask follow-up questions, and keep sessions consistent across participants and time zones. Once interviews are complete, Maze AI supports analysis with thematic clustering to surface key themes and user quotes, highlight important moments, save reusable clips, and generate research reports you can share with your team.

Plus, Maze Clips helps you turn any usability tests into unmoderated interviews by capturing video and audio recordings from test participants. It’s a quick and easy way to get additional qualitative insights from users without needing to schedule follow-up interviews.

Maze offers pricing options for organizations and product teams of all sizes:

Zoom is a popular video conferencing tool that doubles as a user interview tool for many UX teams. While its primary use case is remote collaboration, you can also use the app to speak with users in a remote interview setup.

The built-in chat function allows interviewers to interact with participants before and after the interview to share relevant information. It also offers multi-language captioning and translations for interviewing a global audience. Plus, built-in transcription and AI Companion features summarize calls and highlight key topics and action items. Recordings, transcripts, and summaries are stored in the Zoom cloud and can be exported or passed into other tools via integrations and APIs.

Hotjar Engage is a part of Hotjar’s suite of tools for understanding user behavior. With Engage, you can recruit participants for your research studies, schedule interviews, and analyze user feedback sessions.

Hotjar provides a pool of 200,000+ testers from which you can recruit participants for your UX research. Once recruited, you can use the tool to efficiently manage their activities and incentives. Hotjar records the interview, generates AI transcripts, and lets you create and share clips so stakeholders can review key moments without watching the full recording.

Besides interviews, you can also rewatch session recordings, see heatmaps, and conduct A/B testing to closely monitor user behavior.

Optimal Workshop supports user interviews through Optimal Interviews, a dedicated analysis tool that sits alongside its other UX research solutions. Once you upload your interview videos, AI automatically highlights key themes, pain points, and opportunities. You can also ‘chat’ with the data to ask follow-up questions backed by real clips.

The tool generates transcripts, highlight reels, and downloadable video snippets so you can share with stakeholders. It’s important to note that Optimal Interviews is designed only for working with recorded interviews—it doesn’t host or run the live interview sessions itself.

Lookback is a qualitative research tool that allows you to conduct user interviews across desktop and mobile (via its Participate app). The tool’s native video conferencing platform records and saves all your sessions on the cloud so you can access them anywhere. Stakeholders can sit in a virtual ‘observation room,' watching sessions live and chatting with the moderator without being visible to participants, so the interview feels natural.

The interview player is designed for real-time note-taking or creating timestamped notes when you’re analyzing your remote user research data.

Dscout is a user research platform that handles the full workflow for 1:1 user interviews through its Live mission type. You can recruit from its scout panel or bring your own users, then let the platform handle scheduling, time zones, reminders, and pre-session tech checks.

You can run moderated video calls, with support for mobile interviews, where you see both the participant’s face and their screen. Stakeholders can join as invisible observers and use a private backchannel to suggest follow-up questions without disrupting the conversation. You get automatic transcripts, searchable timelines, clips, and AI summaries across multiple interviews.

Dscout doesn’t publicly publish its pricing plans. Based on buyer reports, individual projects are said to start around $3,000 each, with annual subscriptions averaging just over $60,000/year, and Enterprise plans reportedly starting around $75,000/year. In practice, that makes Dscout a better fit for mid-to-large companies with dedicated research budgets.

Lyssna supports moderated user interviews by combining participant recruitment, scheduling, and analysis in one workflow. You can recruit participants from Lyssna’s panel using detailed demographics and screener questions or invite your own target audience.

The tool integrates with Google Calendar to schedule sessions and send reminders automatically, then generates Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams links so you can conduct interviews. After each research session, Lyssna extracts the recording and uses AI tools for transcription and search, turning user interviews into actionable insights.

Albus Research is a user interview tool that helps with the analysis stage of user interviews, not the interviewing itself. You record sessions in tools like Zoom or Meet, generate transcripts or structured notes, and then import that text into Albus. The platform uses AI to summarize each interview, group similar quotes into themes, and organize findings into a clear structure you can turn into a report.

Hubble lets you design AI discussion guides for an AI moderator to run interviews, ask follow-up questions, and collect qualitative data. For live, moderated research sessions, Hubble handles scheduling sessions, confirmations, reminders, and recording. It connects to external participant panels for recruitment, uses screeners to qualify people by demographics and role, and automates incentives after each session.

The user research tool you choose should help you connect product promises to what your team does day to day, like recruiting participants, scheduling sessions, and turning interviews into actionable insights.

Use the criteria below to compare tools based on how well they support your current research workflow and where you want it to be in the next 6–12 months:

Before you start evaluating multiple options, you need to scope out your needs for user interview studies. Who you want to interview (participant profile and key demographics), how many participants you need, and whether you’ll recruit your own users or need access to a panel. Decide if you want to automate scheduling across time zones or can manage this manually, and whether you need more than simple recordings—for example, automatic transcription, sentiment, or thematic analysis.

You also want to factor in your budget and decide how much you can spend on this tool. If you’re on a tight budget, you can prioritize your needs and choose tools offering limited features—like a tool to automate scheduling and conducting interviews. However, if you have the budget, you can pick an all-in-one tool to manage your entire user interview workflow.

You need to be clear about what you expect AI to handle today and what you’ll need it to do as your research practice matures. Our 2025 Future of User Research report found that product teams already rely on AI for:

Maze, for example, can support all of these needs. Other tools, like Albus Research, can only support some of these needs.

Next, check whether the roadmap moves into agentic behavior, AI that can connect themes across studies, flag contradictions with past work, help plan or adapt studies, or even support AI-moderated interviews. Choosing a tool that treats AI as a long-term research assistant reduces the risk of outgrowing it and having to migrate your whole research archive later.

Good user interview tools provide a minimal learning curve. The tool should be intuitive enough for product teams to create studies in minutes. You also want to consider end-users, and how easily they can understand the interface during interviews.

Features like interview scheduling, transcription, participant management, and data analysis are crucial for product teams tasked with conducting user interviews. You also want to look out for accessibility and technical stability to deliver a seamless interview experience to participants. This helps ensure that providing feedback is an enjoyable experience they’re likely to repeat.

Remember to check out the different support options available, like documentation, webinars, training resources, and support chats, to get an idea of each tool’s support capabilities.

Consider looking at reviews of the tool’s support function, before deciding on a tool to avoid any blockers that can potentially derail your research process further down the line.

Another important consideration is how quickly your chosen user interview tool can scale your research efforts. For starters, your user interview tool should support multiple research methods alongside 1:1 interviews, like card sorting, unmoderated usability testing, surveys, and more.

You should also look for integration capabilities to sync this interview tool with your existing workflows, data stack, and design tools. Advanced capabilities for permissions management, data security, and compliance are also important for scalability.

Once you’re clear on your criteria, who you need to talk to, how often you run research, and what you expect from AI, you can map user interview platforms in this guide to specific needs. For example, Zoom gives you a stable place to host and record sessions, but it does not recruit participants, handle incentives, or analyze calls.

If you want user interviews to sit alongside usability tests, prototype validation, and surveys in one AI-first platform, Maze is the end-to-end solution. You can recruit participants via Maze Panel and Reach, then schedule and run interviews with the AI moderator. The AI moderator greets participants, follows your discussion guide, adapts follow-up questions based on their answers, and can run many interviews at once across time zones.