Alternatives to Delighted

The deadline already passed

Delighted is gone. Qualtrics terminated all customer access on June 30, 2026, and every migration guide you will find about it was written to beat that date. This one is not. You are on the other side: the dashboard does not load, the surveys stopped firing, and per Qualtrics’s sunset notice, customer data is deleted after the sunset date in line with local regulations.

That changes the shape of the decision. In May this was a tool swap with an export chore attached. Now it is a rebuild, and the first question is whether anyone on your team pulled the CSV before access closed. If nobody did, your response history is not a migration input — it is gone, and you are setting a new baseline. Settle that before you shortlist anything, because “import three years of scores” and “start clean in Q4” lead to different products.

The second thing worth stating plainly: Delighted’s value was never the survey. Any tool can fire a 0-10 question. What Delighted sold was a $19-to-$249/month published price with no implementation project, no admin-of-record, and no sales call. Every option below is priced against that.

Route 1 — the module already on your invoice

Start here. For most B2B teams the replacement is a feature inside software you already pay for, and the marginal cost is zero.

Customer success platforms ship surveys. Vitally runs in-app or email NPS, scheduled or always-on, and writes each response back to the account, organization, and contact — so the score sits beside product usage, support history, and billing inside the health score instead of in a separate dashboard nobody opens. ChurnZero attacks it from the other side: NPS, CSAT, and CES collection with preset triggers, launched inside your product, wired so a score change fires a retention play rather than a weekly digest.

If Delighted was only running post-ticket CSAT, your help desk already replaced it. Zendesk sends CSAT natively on ticket solve, and responses land against the ticket, the agent, and the requester with no integration to maintain.

Pick this route when: you already own one of these and Delighted was surveying the same customers those tools already track. It is the cheapest and fastest path, and it is the right answer for more teams than the vendor blogs competing over this migration will admit.

The exception that costs money is the product-experience layer. Pendo runs NPS, CSAT, and PMF surveys in-product, but sentiment is packaged as a paid add-on rather than bundled into the base tiers, and free-tier NPS surveys carry Pendo branding. Independent pricing trackers put the Listen add-on near 30% of existing contract ARR. Guard: before you assume the replacement is free, open the contract and confirm the survey module sits in the SKU you bought, not the one above it.

Route 2 — a standalone tool in Delighted’s shape

If no platform on your invoice covers the customers you survey — or the program spans people who never touch your product — you need a dedicated tool. Retently is the closest match to what you lost, with published self-serve pricing and NPS, CSAT, CES, and 5-star scales.

The price is the story, and the tab you land on decides it. Retently’s default pricing view is the ecommerce ladder; the B2B ladder that fits a former Delighted program publishes $100/month for 3,000 surveys, 3 campaigns, and 3 seats, and $299/month for 10,000 surveys, 10 campaigns, and 10 seats, with 10% off annual billing and enterprise on quote. Basic ships without CRM sync or API access, so most teams replacing an integrated Delighted setup are buying Pro. Pro is also where account-level exportable NPS and CSAT scores sit, alongside an MCP server for Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI agents that makes the score set queryable from an AI client rather than only a dashboard. It also bills $100/month for every 100,000 stored feedback records, which is the line former Delighted buyers miss: on a multi-year program the archive becomes a recurring charge, not a sunk one. Against Delighted’s $19 floor that entry tier is roughly 5x. Against its $249 ceiling, Retently Pro at $299 is about 1.2x. The cheap end of this category died with Delighted; the top end barely moved.

SurveySparrow, Zonka Feedback, and Simplesat sit in the same lane. SurveySparrow is the one to check if seat count is low and volume is lumpy: it publishes a free tier at 75 responses per quarter and meters paid plans annually — 2,500, 15,000, and 36,000 responses per year with 1, 1, and 3 users included — then sells extra users as a paid per-user add-on on top of that. That seat charge is what decides it. A two-person CX team is cheap; a program where twelve managers each want a login is not.

Pick this route when: the survey program is the product, your audience sits outside any platform you own, and you want a card-swipe purchase rather than a procurement cycle.

Route 3 — account-level VoC for B2B

Delighted measured respondents. B2B programs are judged on accounts, and a 9 from one champion does not tell you whether the renewal is safe. CustomerGauge is built for that gap: account-centric NPS across every stakeholder on the account, scores tied to account revenue and risk, and agents that route survey signal into action. Pricing is quote-only.

Pick this route when: renewal exposure is concentrated in a small number of large accounts and the CFO asks what a 12-point NPS move is worth in revenue. If your ARR is spread thin across thousands of self-serve customers, this is over-buying — Route 1 answers the same question from usage data you already collect.

Route 4 — Qualtrics XM, the path your vendor wants

Qualtrics names XM as the default destination and tells former Delighted customers to work with an account representative on migration options. Take that offer only if you know why.

Qualtrics does not publish a rate. The estimates in circulation come from competitors courting this exact migration and land near $20K-$50K for implementation on top of an annual subscription starting around $25K; treat the figures as adversarial, but the direction is not disputed. XM is an enterprise platform with an implementation project attached, which is precisely what Delighted buyers were paying to avoid. Survey logic, automation rules, integrations, and history do not carry over on their own.

Pick it when: you were already running Qualtrics elsewhere in the business, or your CX program has outgrown a single-question tool and needs multi-channel research it never had. Buying XM to replace a $100/month survey is a category error.

When you want behavior change, not a number

AskNicely belongs on a different axis. It routes a detractor response to the specific frontline employee who owns that customer within minutes, with a coaching prompt attached. Pricing is quote-only and lands well above Delighted’s old tiers. It is the right pick for multi-location, frontline-service teams — field techs, branch managers, franchises — and the wrong pick if you want a score in a Slack channel.

Match rules

• You already run a CS platform and survey the same accounts → Vitally or ChurnZero
• Delighted was only doing post-ticket CSAT → Zendesk native CSAT, no new vendor
• Standalone program, self-serve purchase, published price → Retently
• Low seat count, lumpy volume, tight budget → SurveySparrow
• Few large accounts, revenue-linked scores → CustomerGauge
• Already a Qualtrics shop, or the program outgrew one question → Qualtrics XM
• Frontline services, coaching over measurement → AskNicely

If you cannot decide, default to the survey module in the CS platform you already own. It costs nothing incremental, ships this week, and puts the score next to the churn signal it exists to predict. Move to Retently or CustomerGauge later, once you know which part of the old program people actually used.

If none of these fit

Teams with no CS platform, no budget, and a program that was three surveys and a Slack alert have a fourth answer: run SurveySparrow’s free tier at 75 responses per quarter, or turn on native CSAT in whatever help desk you already operate, and revisit in two quarters. A dormant NPS program is not worth a $100/month line item.

Migration cost

Two costs get underestimated. The first is the trendline break. Even teams that exported cleanly are importing scores collected by a different tool, at a different sampling cadence, into a different scale treatment — the series is not continuous, and presenting it as though it is will produce a board slide you have to walk back. Label the switch date on the chart and hold the old and new baselines apart for at least two quarters.

The second is re-pointing every integration that consumed Delighted’s output. Salesforce and HubSpot field writes, Slack alerts, and any warehouse job reading the API each need rebuilding against a different payload shape. Budget engineering time, not an afternoon.

Watch-out

Delighted still appears in review-site listings, procurement spreadsheets, and comparison posts with live pricing attached, and several of those pages still frame the sunset as upcoming. None of it is buyable. Guard: treat any Delighted line item in a budget or shortlist as a data-recovery task, not a renewal, and check whether the export ever happened before you plan around historical scores.