Prism and Dovetail
Prism or Dovetail?
Dovetail keeps the research your team has already gathered and helps you find patterns in it. Prism helps your team ask new questions about an idea, run the interviews and surveys, and read what people said.
Checkout interviews, Q3
Project · 12 calls · 84 highlights
Each call is transcribed, and the team tags the passages that matter.
A tag called "Shipping cost" collects 23 highlights.
Someone writes the insight up by hand at the end.
Would you pay for faster shipping?
- AI interviews by link18 done
- Imported transcripts from Zoom12 added
- Survey with follow-ups214 answers
- Theme: shipping cost decides it38%
Every theme opens onto the answers behind it
Where the two part ways.
- 1
Prism runs the study itself
Your team writes a survey or sets up an AI interview, shares a link, and people answer in their browser with no account.
- 2
Interviews and surveys land in one analysis
Transcripts you import, AI interviews and survey answers all feed the same themes, and each theme shows how many people raised it.
- 3
It starts before there's anything to ask
Your team can branch an idea on the canvas, pin the versions worth testing, and turn a card into a study that asks people about it.
- 4
Numbers come with their tests
Prism cuts results by audience, tests each group against everyone else, and says when a group is too small to call. Trackers keep the questions fixed so each wave compares to the last.
- 5
What you learn travels
A theme can go to Ledger as an observation, and the idea your team picks can go to Compass as a proposed change.
When Prism is the right choice
- You want interviews and a survey on the same question, read together.
- You want each result cut by audience with an honest test behind it.
- You want to run the same questions every month and see the trend.
Job by job
Getting answers
Dovetail: Your team records calls and uploads them.
Prism: Your team shares a survey or AI interview link, and imports transcripts from calls held elsewhere.
Interviews
Dovetail: Recordings are transcribed, and people tag highlights.
Prism: Each interview gets a summary of claims, tensions and quotes, with the quotes marked in the transcript.
Surveys
Dovetail: Built around research your team has already gathered.
Prism: Scales, rankings, MaxDiff, pricing questions, screeners, quotas and display logic, with short follow-ups.
Finding patterns
Dovetail: Highlights, tags, AI search and dashboards across every project.
Prism: Themes ranked by how many people raised them, with every answer behind each one.
Comparing groups
Dovetail: Filters and dashboards over tagged data.
Prism: Cuts by audience with a significance test, and a warning when a group is too small.
Agents reading it
Dovetail: An official MCP server.
Prism: MCP tools for studies, results and the research digest.
Keep the repository in Dovetail. Ask the next question in Prism.
Dovetail holds what your customers have already told you. When a pattern there raises a new question, Prism puts it in front of people and comes back with themes and numbers.
- Bring call transcripts into a Prism study as text, Word or caption files, and they join the same themes.
- Connect Dovetail's MCP server, and Zero can read your highlights while it drafts a study with you.
- Keep what you learned in Ledger, where the decision it informs is written down.
Questions
- Can I tag interviews and answers myself?
- Yes. Your team can tag any interview or survey response, and Prism writes the themes across them.
- Can Zero read our Dovetail workspace?
- Yes, once a workspace admin connects Dovetail's MCP server, with each action approved by a person where your admin requires it.
Try Prism with your domain.
Bring the question your last round of research left open.
No website? Describe what you do
If you'd like help with the first changes, talk to us.