UserTesting vs Modal

Side-by-side comparison of AI visibility scores, market position, and capabilities

UserTesting

ChallengerProduct Management

User Research

Human insight platform for unmoderated video user research; 2M+ panelist access enabling same-day prototype and website testing for Apple and Salesforce competing with Maze and Hotjar.

AI VisibilityBeta
Overall Score
C45
Category Rank
#1 of 2
AI Consensus
70%
Trend
down
Per Platform
ChatGPT
39
Perplexity
50
Gemini
49

About

UserTesting is a human insight platform providing on-demand access to targeted panelists who record their screen and voice while completing tasks on websites, apps, and prototypes — enabling product, UX, marketing, and research teams to watch real users navigate their products and hear authentic reactions within hours rather than weeks. Listed on NYSE (NYSE: USER) before being acquired by Thoma Bravo private equity in 2023 for approximately $1.3 billion, UserTesting is headquartered in San Francisco and serves thousands of companies including Apple, Salesforce, Microsoft, and Walmart for rapid user research.\n\nUserTesting's platform enables teams to recruit from a panel of over 2 million contributors globally, filtered by demographic characteristics, and have them complete structured tasks while recording their screen, voice, and facial expressions. Researchers receive video clips sorted by predefined test metrics within hours, rather than waiting weeks to schedule in-person usability studies. Machine learning tools analyze videos to identify emotional reactions, sentiment, and task completion rates across participants.\n\nIn 2025, UserTesting competes in the user research and experience insight market against Maze (prototype testing), Lookback (live user interview platform), Hotjar (behavioral analytics), and Medallia (enterprise experience management). The user research market has consolidated as companies invest in continuous discovery practices rather than periodic research sprints. UserTesting's acquisition by Thoma Bravo and combination with UserZoom (another Thoma Bravo portfolio company) created a more comprehensive research platform covering both unmoderated video testing and moderated live interview capabilities. The 2025 strategy focuses on the combined UserTesting-UserZoom platform, expanding AI-powered insight synthesis from video research, and growing enterprise adoption of continuous research practices.

Full profile

Modal

EmergingAI & Machine Learning

Serverless ML

Serverless GPU cloud platform for AI/ML with Python-native deployment and per-second billing; developer-favorite scaling from zero competing with Replicate and Beam for AI compute.

AI VisibilityBeta
Overall Score
C45
Category Rank
#1 of 1
AI Consensus
55%
Trend
up
Per Platform
ChatGPT
38
Perplexity
50
Gemini
53

About

Modal is a serverless cloud computing platform purpose-built for AI and machine learning workloads — providing on-demand GPU compute that scales instantly from zero with per-second billing, container management, distributed training support, and a Python-native developer experience that makes running ML workloads in the cloud feel as simple as running code locally. Founded in 2021 in New York City and backed by Redpoint Ventures and other investors, Modal has grown rapidly as AI development has accelerated demand for flexible, developer-friendly GPU infrastructure.\n\nModal's developer experience is its primary differentiator — engineers write Python functions decorated with @modal.function() and deploy them to the cloud with a single command, with Modal handling container building, GPU provisioning, auto-scaling, and execution. The platform supports training jobs that need distributed compute across multiple GPUs, model serving endpoints that scale to zero when unused (eliminating idle GPU costs), and batch inference jobs that process large datasets. The per-second billing model means developers pay only for actual compute time, not provisioned instances.\n\nIn 2025, Modal competes in the AI infrastructure market with Replicate, Beam, Banana, and major cloud providers' managed ML services (AWS SageMaker, Google Vertex AI, Azure ML) for serverless GPU compute. The market for AI-specific cloud infrastructure has grown dramatically as the number of ML engineers deploying models to production has expanded — traditional cloud providers require significant DevOps expertise to use GPU instances effectively, while Modal's Python-native approach reduces the barrier to entry. Modal has attracted a strong developer following among AI researchers and ML engineers building production AI applications. The 2025 strategy focuses on growing the developer community, adding enterprise features (dedicated GPU capacity, private networking, compliance), and expanding the hardware options available (H100 GPUs, custom accelerators).

Full profile

AI Visibility Head-to-Head

45
Overall Score
45
#1
Category Rank
#1
70
AI Consensus
55
down
Trend
up
39
ChatGPT
38
50
Perplexity
50
49
Gemini
53
51
Claude
39
44
Grok
37

Capabilities & Ecosystem

Capabilities

Only UserTesting
User Research
Only Modal
Serverless ML

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