We make RawQuotes, so it is listed first. Everything else comes from each vendor's own pages, checked on November 11, 2026.
The short answer
If you are looking for an alternative to Caplena for coding open-ended survey answers, reviews or other written feedback, these five tools all turn that text into topics you can count. RawQuotes reads a few hundred answers a month and opens every count into the quotes behind it. The table shows what each tool reads, what it costs and whether it links its results to source quotes.
| Tool | Built for | Feedback it reads | Starting price as listed (date) | Free plan or trial | Links insights to source quotes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RawQuotes | Small teams reading tens or hundreds of answers a month | Survey answers, CSV, Excel and JSON exports, pasted text, the API | Free; Basic $29/month (Nov 11, 2026) | Free plan; 14-day trial on Basic | Yes: every insight opens into the answers it was counted from |
| Displayr | Research agencies and in-house insights teams that analyse and report on survey data | SPSS (.sav), Excel and CSV files; data pulled from Qualtrics and SurveyMonkey | Professional: from €2,919 per user/billed annually (Nov 11, 2026) | Free plan; 14-day free trial, no credit card required | Says it "traces every number back to the source" |
| Thematic | Enterprise customer experience teams with thousands of comments | Survey responses, conversations, support chat, app reviews, social media and community chat | Foundation: $25,000 / year (Nov 11, 2026) | Custom demo on your data, or a paid pilot | Yes: themes "each traced back to real comments" |
| Kimola | Turning reviews, surveys and support conversations into product research | Excel, CSV and TSV files; reviews from Amazon, Google Play, the App Store, Trustpilot, Tripadvisor and Google Business | Basic: $49/month, billed monthly (Nov 11, 2026) | Free Starter plan | Not stated |
| ChatGPT | Everyday tasks, including questions about a spreadsheet you upload | Files you upload, such as a CSV or Excel export | Free plan (Nov 11, 2026) | Free plan, with data analysis listed as "Limited" | Not stated |
What Caplena does
Caplena describes itself as "The intelligence layer for Customer Feedback" (caplena.com). Its AI text analysis page sums it up as "Text coding for Market Research, CX and EX teams" (caplena.com). You upload open-ended answers, and Caplena builds a codebook of topics from them: "Create a codebook in seconds, fine-tune in minutes, then cross-tab with quant variables."
You can also "import your existing codebook", add topics or change their hierarchy. Caplena assigns topics and topic-level sentiment, and in its words, "it highlights the phrase that justified each assignment and shows how confident it is." Data comes in through "Excel, SPSS, API or integrations", and its pricing page lists "Multilingual analysis in 100+ languages".
The pricing page lists three plans: Team "For small brand-side teams", Enterprise "For brand-side organizations" and Agency "For market research agencies". Each has "Book a call" in place of a price (checked November 11, 2026).
If you came to Caplena with a file of open-ended answers and one question, "what do people bring up most?", every tool below answers it.
How we chose the tools
We looked for tools that people searching for a Caplena alternative can use for the same job: reading written answers they already have and grouping them into topics they can count.
- Each tool reads text you bring, such as survey answers, reviews or support messages, and groups it.
- Each one publishes its price, or says plainly that pricing comes through a call or a demo.
- We read only each vendor's own pages. No review sites, no directory prices.
- Every price is copied word for word from the vendor's own page, with its address and the date we read it.
We left out tools that do a different job: interview repositories, feature voting boards, bug reporting and in-app survey builders. We have not measured how well any of these tools groups text, ours included, so nothing on this page is a claim about accuracy.
1. RawQuotes
RawQuotes reads written feedback in one place and groups the repeats into named insights. Each insight opens into the exact words it was counted from. You bring the text as a CSV, Excel or JSON export, paste it in, send it through the API (Basic and Pro), or collect it with a short survey on any page where you can add one script tag. Exports from Google Forms, Typeform, Tally, Google Play Console and Google reviews (from Google Takeout) have a preset, so the columns are matched for you. Any other spreadsheet works as CSV or Excel.
For a Caplena user, the main difference is that you do not build a codebook first. You upload the file and pick the column with the text. Before anything is saved, you see how many rows were read, which ones were rejected and why. Then RawQuotes names the groups. Each insight shows how many responses back it and what share of answers that is, and it opens into the answers behind it, word for word.
Small files get a count. Until a period has ten complete responses, RawQuotes names no insight. It shows how many responses you have and how many are missing, and lets you read the ones that came in.
Illustration with example data.
What happens between the file and the insights:
- Import. The text comes in from a survey, a file, a paste or the API, and is read together under the same rules.
- Masking. Before any text reaches our AI provider, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, IBANs and similar details are replaced with a placeholder. Masking is best-effort and names are not masked. The quotes you read always come from the original text.
- Grouping. Answers that say the same thing are grouped and named in one sentence: a problem, a piece of praise or a reason.
- The ten-response check. RawQuotes names an insight once a period has ten complete responses. Before that, you see how many you have, how many it needs and how many are missing. One imported review, e-mail or row counts as one response.
- Insights with quotes. Each insight opens into at least three of the answers behind it, unshortened.
Diagram
If a recalculation fails, RawQuotes says so and shows the last good result with its date. You can also compare two periods, a week or a month against an earlier one: every insight shows its share of answers in both and how many percentage points it moved, and a problem that grows is marked red.
Who it fits: a small team with tens or hundreds of answers a month that wants to read the evidence before acting on a number. It also suits anyone who wants to start free and pay by the month at a published price.
What you can rely on: RawQuotes names an insight only from ten complete responses in a period. With fewer, you get the count and the raw answers, so a small file is shown as it is. Every insight opens into its quotes, so you can check each count against the words behind it.
Price: Free; Basic $29/month; Pro $69/month. Prices exclude VAT and other sales taxes. Basic comes with a 14-day trial. The limits for each plan are on the pricing page.
2. Displayr
Who it fits: Displayr says it "turns your survey data into analysis, reports, and answers" (displayr.com). Asked whether it is for agencies or in-house insights teams, it answers "Both."
Price: Professional: "From* €2,919 per user/billed annually"; Enterprise: "From* €3,649 per user/billed annually" (displayr.com/pricing), checked November 11, 2026. The asterisk reads "Additional fees may apply." There is a Free plan "For small data sets", and the page offers a "14 day free trial. No credit card required." Billing is annual.
Strengths: Displayr codes open-ended text and then works with it like any other survey variable. Its text analytics page says its AI can "read open-ended text, categorise it into themes, and analyse sentiment" in any language, then "quantifies those themes as scores you can crosstab, track over time, and drop straight into dashboards and reports." The same tool covers "crosstabs, banners, driver analysis, segmentation, MaxDiff, correspondence analysis, conjoint, weighting, and more." It imports "SPSS (.sav), Excel, and CSV files" and pulls data from Qualtrics and SurveyMonkey.
3. Thematic
Who it fits: Thematic calls itself "the customer intelligence layer for enterprise CX" (getthematic.com).
Price: Foundation: "$25,000 / year" for "25,000 comments a year, up to 3 datasets". Enterprise: "Custom pricing" (getthematic.com), checked November 11, 2026. Instead of a free trial, Thematic offers "custom demos on your data or a comprehensive paid pilot".
Strengths: Thematic builds themes from customer comments, each one, in its words, "traced back to real comments". Of its theme model, it says: "You can see inside it, adjust it, and steer it." It connects to Zendesk, Intercom, Gong, Trustpilot, app stores and your data warehouse, and every integration is included in the plan. We compare the two in more detail in RawQuotes vs Thematic, side by side.
4. Kimola
Who it fits: teams that want to "Turn reviews, surveys and support conversations into product research", in Kimola's words, including feedback in more than one language.
Price: Basic: $49/month, billed monthly (kimola.com/pricing), checked November 11, 2026. Standard is $179/month, Business $359/month and Enterprise custom. The free Starter plan includes 150 queries a month, and each analysed row of up to 500 characters counts as one query.
Strengths: Kimola lists "30+ Language Support" on its pricing page. You can "Import customer feedback in Excel, CSV, or TSV formats" (custom data sources) and sort it with pretrained models or custom AI models of your own, which start on the Basic plan. It can also collect reviews from Amazon, Google Play, the App Store, Trustpilot, Tripadvisor and Google Business, so you may not need to export them first.
5. ChatGPT
Who it fits: anyone who already uses ChatGPT and wants to ask questions about one export. OpenAI's own page puts it as "Upload your data and start asking questions" (chatgpt.com).
Price: Free plan (chatgpt.com/pricing), checked November 11, 2026. On that page, data analysis is "Limited" on Free and included on Go, Plus and Pro.
Strengths: you add a spreadsheet with "Add photos & files" and ask in plain language. OpenAI lists prompts such as "Summarize the key insights from this spreadsheet" and "Turn this data into a bar chart", and Plus and Pro customers can pull files from Google Drive and Microsoft Teams. You decide what to ask and how the answer is shaped. We go through the differences in RawQuotes vs ChatGPT.
FAQ
Does Caplena publish its prices?
Caplena's pricing page lists Team, Enterprise and Agency plans, each with "Book a call" in place of a price (checked November 11, 2026). Every other tool on this list shows a starting price on its own page.
Can I move my Caplena data?
Caplena's export docs describe exporting a project as Excel or CSV. Any tool here that accepts file uploads can take that file. In RawQuotes you pick the column with the text, and RawQuotes groups it again from the words. Your Caplena topics are not carried over.
Which tools combine coding with crosstabs?
Caplena codes answers and lets you "cross-tab with quant variables". Displayr does the same inside a full survey analysis tool, with weighting and statistical tests.
How many answers do I need before the results mean anything?
In RawQuotes, ten complete responses in a period before any insight is named. We explain why in how many survey responses you need.
Which tools have a free plan?
RawQuotes has a free plan, and Basic has a 14-day trial. Displayr has a Free plan and a 14-day trial with no credit card. Kimola has a free Starter plan. ChatGPT has a Free plan, with data analysis listed as "Limited". Thematic offers a custom demo on your data or a paid pilot. Caplena offers a free live report for your use case.
Prices last checked
Prices last checked November 11, 2026. We re-read every vendor's pricing page each quarter, or sooner when a vendor changes its plans, and the date above only moves after a real re-check. If you spot a price that is out of date, write to us.
If you want to try RawQuotes on your own export, see the plans.