Discuss.io, Remesh, and Forsta are the three platforms market research agencies most often shortlist for live, video-based, or large-scale qualitative sessions in 2026. Discuss.io specialises in moderated video interviews, Remesh runs AI-moderated conversations with hundreds of participants at once, and Forsta bundles quantitative and qualitative research in one suite, now under Qualtrics ownership after a $6.75 billion (€6.2 billion) acquisition. All three collect conversations well; none is built to code and analyse the resulting transcripts with research-grade rigour.
What are Discuss.io, Remesh, and Forsta actually built for?
Unlike the UX-repository or CX-analytics tools covered elsewhere on this blog, this cluster exists specifically for market research agencies and consumer insights teams running live or large-scale qualitative sessions, often for client work rather than internal product decisions. All three sell primarily through enterprise, sales-led contracts rather than transparent self-serve pricing.
| Discuss.io | Remesh | Forsta | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Core format | Live, moderated 1:1 or small-group video interviews | AI-moderated conversations at scale (up to roughly 1,000 participants at once) | Combined quantitative survey and qualitative research suite |
| Recognition | Named a Forrester Wave Leader for Experience Research Platforms, Q1 2026 | Positioned around real-time, large-scale conversational research across 35+ languages | Formed from the 2021 merger of Confirmit, FocusVision, and Dapresy |
| Pricing model | Subscription plus per-project fees; full studies commonly run $15,000–$27,000 (€13,800–€24,900) | Enterprise custom quotes, reportedly starting around $10,000+ (€9,200+) per year | Enterprise custom quotes |
| Ownership status | Independent | Independent | Acquired by Qualtrics in 2026 (see below) |
| Best fit | High-stakes studies where human moderation and video nuance matter | Large-sample qualitative work needing fast, structured synthesis across many voices at once | Agencies wanting one vendor for quant and qual |
| Weak fit | Analysing arbitrary document corpora after the session | Deep, researcher-controlled coding of nuanced individual narratives | Depth of qualitative analysis specifically, given its quant-survey heritage |
What is Discuss.io?
Discuss.io is a video-first platform built around participant recruitment, screening, scheduling, and recording of live moderated interviews and focus groups. It is aimed squarely at enterprise teams running occasional, high-stakes qualitative studies where a trained moderator and real-time client observation justify the cost and lead time. Discuss.io does not publish transparent per-session pricing; end-to-end studies bundling recruitment, incentives, translation, and transcription typically run into the tens of thousands of dollars.
What is Remesh?
Remesh solves a different problem: getting structured, quantifiable signal out of a genuinely large group of people in real time. Its AI moderates a live conversation with up to roughly 1,000 participants simultaneously, across more than 35 languages, then clusters responses so a client can see where consensus forms and where it breaks down. That scale is exactly what makes it a poor fit for the kind of close, line-by-line coding a market researcher needs when the goal is deep interpretation of a smaller number of rich narratives rather than a directional read across a crowd.
What is Forsta, and why does its ownership matter now?
Forsta has changed hands three times in five years, which is the single most important fact about it for an agency making a multi-year commitment:
- 2021: Confirmit and FocusVision merge to form Forsta, a suite spanning quantitative surveys, panel management, and qualitative research tools including video discussions and smartphone ethnography.
- April 2022: Press Ganey, a healthcare experience measurement firm, acquires Forsta, creating Press Ganey Forsta.
- May 2026: Qualtrics completes a $6.75 billion (€6.2 billion) acquisition of Press Ganey Forsta, folding it into the Qualtrics XM platform.
Each of those transitions moved Forsta further from its origin as general-purpose market research technology and closer to healthcare experience measurement. That is a documented pattern in the ownership history, not a prediction.
What we can state as fact: Qualtrics' announcement frames the deal around healthcare data, benchmarking, and building what it describes as the largest AI dataset for human experience. It does not announce plans for Forsta's general market research qualitative tooling either way. What follows from that is an inference rather than a stated fact, and worth treating as such: a product line that is not mentioned in an acquisition's strategic rationale is not necessarily being deprioritised, but it is also not being publicly committed to.
What should an agency do about the Forsta acquisition right now?
If your agency runs live projects on Forsta, or has a renewal coming up, the acquisition is a reason to ask questions rather than a reason to panic. Forsta remains operational and supported. These are the checks worth making:
Ask for a written roadmap commitment. Get specifics from your account team on which qualitative features are planned for continued investment versus maintenance mode, particularly anything specific to non-healthcare verticals. A vendor confident in a product line will put that in writing.
Export your historical data now. This is worth doing regardless of what happens next, and regardless of vendor. A clean export of past studies, coding frameworks, and client deliverables held outside the platform protects you against any future migration, pricing change, or feature deprecation, and costs you an afternoon.
Get a comparative quote before renewing. Not because a price increase is certain, it is not, but because a renewal negotiated without a comparison point is a weaker negotiation. Ask Discuss.io or a specialist platform to quote the same scope.
Keep the collection layer and the analysis layer loosely coupled. If your workflow assumes one vendor handles recruitment, fielding, recording, and analysis, any change to that vendor disrupts all four at once. Agencies that run collection on one platform and analysis on another absorb vendor change far more easily, which is a sound principle independent of anything happening at Forsta specifically.
How do they compare on recruitment and panel access?
For most agencies this is the first question, not an afterthought. A platform with excellent session tooling and no route to qualified participants in your target market solves the easy half of the problem.
Discuss.io treats recruitment as core product rather than an add-on: participant sourcing, screener surveys, scheduling, and incentive handling are built into the workflow, which is a large part of why full-study costs land in the $15,000–$27,000 (€13,800–€24,900) range. You are buying a managed service, not just software.
Remesh generally expects you to bring your own audience. Its value is what happens once several hundred people are in the room together, not getting them there. Agencies typically pair it with a panel provider or use it with an existing customer or employee population.
Forsta includes panel management as part of its full-suite positioning, oriented toward organisations running ongoing panels rather than one-off recruits per project.
If recruitment specifically is your bottleneck rather than moderation or analysis, the category-correct tool may be a recruitment marketplace such as User Interviews rather than any of these three.
What about multi-market and multi-language studies?
Agencies running international work should weight this heavily, because it eliminates options quickly.
Remesh states support for more than 35 languages and is designed to run a single session across a multilingual participant group, which is genuinely unusual and its strongest differentiator for international work. Discuss.io supports global studies with translation and interpretation bundled into project costs, which is one reason those costs are high. Forsta's international reach was a stated rationale for the Press Ganey acquisition in 2022.
The step teams most often underestimate is what happens after fielding. A multi-market study produces transcripts in several languages that still need to be coded against one consistent framework, and translating everything into English before coding introduces a layer of interpretation between the participant and the analysis. Skimle analyses documents in multiple languages within a single project and shared category structure, so a French and a German transcript can sit under the same codes without a translation round first.
If you are already fielding on one of these platforms, the transcripts they produce export cleanly into a dedicated analysis project, so a rigorous coding layer can be added without changing how you recruit or record. See how that fits market research agencies and insights teams.
What about asynchronous and bulletin-board qual?
One format none of these three centres on, and worth naming because it is a distinct category agencies shortlist separately: asynchronous qualitative research, where participants respond over days rather than in a single live session. Online bulletin boards, diary studies, and mobile ethnography all sit here, and the specialist platforms include Recollective, itracks, and Qualzy.
Asynchronous formats suit research questions that a 60-minute session cannot answer well: how a behaviour changes over a week, how someone actually uses a product in their own environment, or topics where participants give more considered answers with time to reflect. They also tend to cost less per participant than live moderated video.
The analysis challenge is the mirror image of a focus group's. Instead of one dense transcript with crosstalk, you get many short, scattered contributions across days and participants, which is a large volume of fragmented text that still needs one coherent coding structure applied across all of it. That is a corpus-analysis problem rather than a session-analysis problem, and it is the same shape as analysing open-text responses at scale.
Why is the global research budget behind these platforms still growing?
The market these three platforms compete for is large and still expanding. ESOMAR's Global Market Research 2025 report puts the global insights industry at over $153 billion (€141 billion) as of 2024, with continued growth expected through 2025 and beyond. That scale is why an acquisition the size of the Qualtrics deal is possible in the first place, and why agencies should expect more consolidation, not less, across this cluster of tools over the next few years.
Where does Skimle fit next to Discuss.io, Remesh, and Forsta?
None of these three platforms is trying to be a specialist qualitative analysis engine, and to their credit, they mostly do not claim to be. Discuss.io and Remesh exist to get the conversation to happen and captured well. Forsta exists to give an agency one vendor across quant and qual. The step after the recording, turning a stack of transcripts into a coded, defensible, client-ready analysis, is where a separate tool typically takes over, and it is where the quality of the eventual deliverable is often decided.
Skimle takes the transcripts these platforms produce (or any interview recording, document, or survey export) and applies a rigorous, bottom-up coding structure that a named researcher can review, adjust, and stand behind. Every insight traces back to its source quote, and every document shows what was and was not coded, which is the check an agency needs before a finding goes into a client deliverable. Exports go to REFI-QDA, Word, or Excel, and a full written research report can be generated directly from the coded structure.
For most agencies, this is not an either/or choice. Discuss.io or Remesh collect and record the conversation; Skimle analyses it with the rigour a client deliverable demands. If your team already runs sessions through one of these platforms, the transcripts export cleanly into a separate analysis project. See our guide for market research agencies specifically and the broader market research tools landscape review for how this fits alongside the other categories of tools agencies use.
| Question you're actually answering | Better fit |
|---|---|
| "We need a trained moderator and real-time client observation for a high-stakes study." | Discuss.io |
| "We need directional read across hundreds of participants in real time." | Remesh |
| "We want one vendor covering both quant surveys and qual research." | Forsta (with the ownership caveat above) |
| "We need to code these transcripts rigorously and defend the findings to a client." | Skimle |
| "We need participants observed over days, not a single session." | Recollective, itracks, or Qualzy (async qual) |
| "Our bottleneck is finding qualified participants, not talking to them." | A recruitment marketplace such as User Interviews |
If you work at a market research agency or in-house customer insights team, it is worth testing the analysis layer directly against a real transcript rather than assuming your current collection platform's built-in analysis features are sufficient for client-facing work.
Frequently asked questions
Did Qualtrics really acquire Forsta?
Yes. Qualtrics completed a $6.75 billion (€6.2 billion) acquisition of Press Ganey Forsta in May 2026, combining Forsta's research and experience technology with Press Ganey's healthcare experience data under the Qualtrics XM platform.
Can Remesh replace one-on-one qualitative interviews?
Not directly. Remesh is built for structured, real-time signal across a large group of participants at once, which is a different research design to a small number of deep, individually moderated interviews. Many teams use both: Remesh for directional, large-sample reads and traditional interviews for depth on the questions Remesh surfaces.
Do Discuss.io, Remesh, or Forsta include qualitative coding and analysis tools?
All three include some level of built-in tagging or summarisation, but none is built as a specialist analysis engine with researcher-editable coding frameworks, two-way source traceability, and export formats suited to academic or client-facing rigour. Most agencies pair them with a dedicated analysis tool for the coding step.
How much does a Discuss.io or Remesh project typically cost?
Neither publishes transparent public pricing. Discuss.io studies bundling recruitment, incentives, translation, and transcription commonly run $15,000–$27,000 (€13,800–€24,900) per study. Remesh sells on enterprise custom quotes, with reported starting points around $10,000+ (€9,200+) per year.
Is Forsta still a safe long-term platform choice for a market research agency?
Forsta remains operational and supported under Qualtrics. The relevant context is that it has changed ownership three times since 2021 (Confirmit and FocusVision merging into Forsta, then Press Ganey in 2022, then Qualtrics in 2026), and each transition moved it closer to healthcare experience measurement. Qualtrics' announcement does not address general market research qualitative tooling either way, so agencies with multi-year renewals ahead should ask for a written roadmap commitment rather than inferring one in either direction.
What are the alternatives for asynchronous or diary-based qualitative research?
Discuss.io, Remesh, and Forsta all centre on live or near-live sessions. For research that follows participants over days (online bulletin boards, diary studies, mobile ethnography), the specialist platforms are Recollective, itracks, and Qualzy. These formats suit questions about behaviour over time or contexts a single session cannot capture.
Which platform handles multi-market international studies best?
Remesh supports 35+ languages within a single session, which is its clearest differentiator for international work. Discuss.io bundles translation and interpretation into project costs. Whichever you field with, the analysis step still needs one consistent coding framework across all languages, which is a separate capability from multilingual fielding.
Need a rigorous analysis layer for the transcripts your collection platform produces? Try Skimle for free and see how a coded, traceable analysis holds up against a client's questions.
Related reading: qualitative research tools for market research agencies, our market research tools landscape review, and Thematic vs Chattermill vs Enterpret.
About the authors
Henri Schildt is a Professor of Strategy at Aalto University School of Business and co-founder of Skimle. He has published over a dozen peer-reviewed articles using qualitative methods, including work in Academy of Management Journal, Organisation Science, and Strategic Management Journal. His research focuses on organisational strategy, innovation, and qualitative methodology. Google Scholar profile
Olli Salo is a former Partner at McKinsey & Company where he spent 18 years helping clients understand the markets and themselves, develop winning strategies and improve their operating models. He has done over 1000 client interviews and published over 10 articles on McKinsey.com and beyond. LinkedIn profile
Sources
- Qualitative Research Data Analysis Software for Market Insights - Discuss.io
- Qualtrics Acquires Healthcare Experience Leader Press Ganey Forsta
- Press Ganey advances technology via acquisition of Forsta - Press Ganey
- Inside the $153bn insights industry - Research World / ESOMAR Global Market Research 2025
