Indie Polls

Compared

Refiner Alternative: Indie Polls vs Refiner

The closest match in this set. They part company over metering, mobile, and who they are built for.

Of the five tools on the alternatives index, Refiner overlaps with Indie Polls most closely, and this page is the least comfortable one to write because of it. Both put a short, targeted question inside a web product. Both target on who the visitor is rather than only which page they are on. Both treat NPS and CSAT as scored measures with trend lines rather than multiple-choice questions wearing a badge. Both have conditional logic, both can A/B test, and both do something AI-assisted with open text. If these two are your shortlist, neither is a mistake and the feature table is not going to decide it for you.

Three things will. The first is what you are billed for. Refiner meters monthly active users and lifts the response limit on paid tiers, which suits a product where a known population of logged-in users is surveyed repeatedly. Indie Polls meters responses (an allowance on Pro, uncapped on Max) and does not count or care how many people visit. If you have a large audience and ask rarely, that difference is not a detail; it is the bill.

The second is who each one is for, and Refiner is admirably direct about this on its own site: it is built for product-led SaaS, fintech and marketplaces, and it says plainly that it is not aimed at eCommerce, media or general market research. Indie Polls has no such opinion. The embed goes on a marketing site, a docs page, a checkout or a logged-in dashboard alike, because it takes its targeting from whatever attributes the page hands it rather than from a model of your users.

The third is the data layer, and here Refiner is the deeper tool by design. Its model is a synced user store: identify your users, keep their attributes current, segment on them, and push answers back out so a survey response becomes an attribute on the customer record, with bi-directional syncing into the CDP and warehouse tools that already hold it. That is genuinely powerful and it is an integration project with ongoing upkeep. Indie Polls keeps no user store at all. The embed carries traits from your page, every response is filed with those traits attached, and the breakdowns slice by them. Setup is a script tag and some attributes; the ceiling is that nothing here will reconcile a visitor against a record updated somewhere else last week.

Where Indie Polls is the broader tool is in the asking. The same survey is a slide-in, a centred modal, a bottom banner, an inline block, a hosted page with its own link, or the first question inside an email you send yourself, and it can stay hidden until someone clicks your own button. Add a response quota with a redirect when it closes, one recontact window that covers every survey on the account, your own stylesheet on both the hosted page and the embed, and an MCP server, and the shape of the difference is clear: Refiner goes deeper into your data, Indie Polls goes wider across the ways a question can reach someone.

Where they differ

Compared on the things that do not change every quarter. Both tools move their prices; read both pricing pages for those.

Dimension Refiner Indie Polls
Built for Product-led SaaS, fintech and marketplaces, explicitly Any website or web product; the embed does not assume a logged-in user
What you are billed for Monthly active users, with responses uncapped on paid tiers Responses: an allowance on Pro, uncapped on Max. Visitors are not counted
Who it asks Segments built on a synced user store Trait rules read from attributes your page passes to the embed
Setup before the first survey Identify users and keep the sync current A script tag and some data attributes
Where the question can appear In-app, email and link surveys, plus mobile apps Slide-in, modal, banner, inline, your own button, a hosted page, or inside your own email
Mobile apps Native SDKs for iOS, Android, React Native and Flutter None
CRM, CDP and warehouse Two-way syncing is central to the product One way out: Slack, Zapier, signed webhooks with retries, CSV, MCP
Languages AI translation of surveys One language per survey; translation is not built
Stopping and redirecting Targeting and scheduling rules A response quota, then a redirect to a page of your own
Not asking again Per-survey targeting rules One account-wide window across every survey
Branding Survey styling Your own CSS on the hosted page and in the embed, and branding off entirely

Choose Refiner if

Refiner describes itself as in-app surveys that integrate with your product and data stack: micro-surveys targeted from user traits and events, with two-way syncing into the tools your customer data already lives in, aimed squarely at product-led SaaS.

  • Your feedback needs to land back on the customer record in your CRM, CDP or warehouse, automatically and continuously.
  • You segment on user data that lives in your backend rather than on the page the visitor is looking at.
  • You need the same micro-survey inside a native mobile app, or the same survey translated into several languages.
  • You have a modest population of logged-in users you survey often, which is exactly the shape per-user metering rewards.

Choose Indie Polls if

Ten question types, a widget in four shapes, targeting by page, trait, device and event, and the analysis afterwards.

  • You want targeting to work from what your page already knows, without building an identity sync first.
  • You have a large or anonymous audience and ask rarely, so paying per response beats paying per user.
  • The site is a marketing page, a docs site or a shop rather than a product-led SaaS dashboard.
  • You want one recontact rule covering every survey, a response quota with a redirect, and your own CSS on both the page and the embed.

Moving from Refiner

The piece that does not port is the user store. Refiner segments read attributes it holds; Indie Polls rules read attributes your page hands over at render time. So the migration task is not exporting anything, it is deciding which attributes your front end can put into the embed's `data-attributes` (plan, signup age, role and country are the usual four), and accepting that anything your page cannot see is not available to target on.

For most web products that is a smaller job than it sounds, because the values are already in the session. It is a genuine blocker if your segments depend on data that only exists in your warehouse, and if that is your case this move is the wrong one.

Do the arithmetic before the work. Take your monthly responses, not your monthly active users, and check them against an allowance rather than a user count. That comparison is the whole financial case for moving, and it points the other way for plenty of teams.

The surveys themselves rebuild quickly: NPS, CSAT and rating studies map onto scale questions that score themselves, and conditional logic maps onto branching, where each answer points at the next question or ends the survey. Wire the outbound side up while the Refiner studies are still live: Slack for what a human should see, a signed webhook or a Zap for what a system should. Then swap the scripts. Historical responses stay in Refiner; export them before you close the account.

Common questions

Is Indie Polls a drop-in replacement for Refiner?
For the survey half, close to it: in-product micro-surveys, scored NPS and CSAT, trait and event targeting, branching, A/B tests. For the data half, no. Refiner's two-way sync with your CRM, CDP and warehouse has no equivalent here, and if that sync is why you bought it, you would be giving up the reason.
How do I target a survey at one plan or one cohort?
Pass the value as an attribute on the embed script and write a rule against it: plan is pro, signup_days over 30. The rules also cover the domain, the page paths, the device class, and waiting for an event your page fires through IndiePolls.track(), so "ask mobile users on the pricing page after they have opened the upgrade dialog" is three rules and no backend work.
Which is cheaper?
It depends entirely on the shape of your traffic, and no honest page can answer it for you. Per-user metering rewards a small, known, frequently-surveyed population; per-response metering rewards a large or anonymous audience asked occasionally. Count your monthly responses and your monthly active users, then read both pricing pages, because the ratio between those two numbers is the answer.
Can I stop the same person being surveyed every week?
Yes, and it is one setting rather than a rule per survey. Recontact spacing is account-wide: set the window and someone who has answered any survey is not shown another inside it.
We are not a SaaS product. Does that matter?
To Refiner it might: it says openly that it is built for product-led SaaS, fintech and marketplaces rather than eCommerce, media or market research, which is a useful thing for a vendor to admit. Indie Polls makes no such assumption: the embed only needs a page and whatever attributes that page can pass it.
What does the Indie Polls trial include?
Seven days on Max, which is the whole product: branching, A/B tests, widget targeting by trait, device and event, segment breakdowns, cross-survey trends, AI generation and insights, Slack, Zapier, signed webhooks, the MCP server, custom CSS and white label. No credit card to start it. Afterwards Pro covers the survey workflow with a monthly response allowance and two seats, and Max lifts the response cap and unlocks the rest.
Can I bring my existing responses with me, and get them out again?
Out, yes: every response exports to CSV on Max, and Slack, Zapier and signed webhooks push each one to your own systems the moment it is submitted, with a delivery log and retries behind them. In, no: there is no importer for another tool's response history. A switch starts a fresh set of results rather than moving the old ones, so the usual approach is to keep the old tool's export where it is and start the new survey clean.

See it before you decide

Seven days on Max, so nothing on this page is held back. No credit card required.

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