The fastest way to waste the first hour inside any new tool is to start clicking around looking for things instead of already having a rough sense of where they are before you start - opening menus one at a time, half-guessing which section might hold the thing you actually need, closing tabs you opened by mistake. It's a small tax individually, and it adds up into a first impression that has nothing to do with whether the product is actually good. This tour exists to skip that tax. It isn't a marketing walkthrough of everything Opionate can theoretically do somewhere down the line - it's a plain map of what's actually in the workspace today, where each piece lives, and which one is worth opening first depending on what you're actually trying to get done.
Table of Contents¶
- The Workspace, at a Glance
- Classic Surveys: Building and Publishing
- Visual Tests: Image and Preference Testing
- Text Analytics: Making Sense of Open-Ended Responses
- Reports: Dashboards Built From Your Data
- Your Account, Credits, and Billing
- Where to Go First, Depending on Your Goal
- FAQ
The Workspace, at a Glance¶
Everything in Opionate hangs off a single sidebar on the left, and the whole thing is organized more simply than it might first appear: a Surveys section holding the four actual working areas of the product, and a smaller Quick Links section underneath for getting back to the marketing site or reaching support when you need it. There's also a plain Workspace link sitting above both, at the very top - a home dashboard, and the right place to land if you're not sure yet what you're looking for and would rather see an overview than commit to one tool immediately.
The four items under Surveys - Classic Surveys, Visual Tests, Text Analytics, and Reports - are genuinely independent of each other. You don't need to touch all four to get real value out of one, and plenty of people never do. But they're built to connect where it makes sense: a survey you put together in Classic Surveys is the same survey whose open-ended answers you'd eventually run through Text Analytics, and the same survey whose results you'd turn into something presentable in Reports. Nothing about using one locks you out of, or forces you into, any of the others.
Classic Surveys: Building and Publishing¶
This is where a traditional survey actually gets built - choice questions, open-ended fields, rating scales, yes/no questions, contact information, and quieter tracking questions respondents never see, all assembled into a single flow, with logic and AI follow-up questions layered on top when they're genuinely useful. It's called "Classic" purely to distinguish it from Visual Tests, not because it's older or somehow secondary - for the large majority of what people actually use Opionate for (customer feedback, NPS, employee engagement, market research), this is the tool that matters.
You can build here entirely by hand, question by question, the way survey builders have always worked, or you can describe what you're trying to learn in plain language and let AI put together a starting draft for you to edit - covered in more depth in our guide to writing good AI survey prompts. Either path lands you in the exact same builder afterward, free to reorder, rewrite, and adjust logic before anything actually goes out.
Visual Tests: Image and Preference Testing¶
Visual Tests is a newer, separate part of the product - currently marked beta in the sidebar - built specifically around testing images, videos, and 3D concepts, rather than the text-based questions Classic Surveys is built for. It's made up of two purpose-built pieces you can combine inside a single test: a Stimulus Section, which lets you draw labeled areas over specific parts of an image and attach a targeted question to each one, and a Pairwise Comparison section, which runs a set of images through a head-to-head knockout so a clear preference winner actually emerges instead of a pile of similar-looking ratings.
This is the tool to reach for when what you're testing is fundamentally visual - a logo direction, a packaging concept, an ad, a landing page design - something you'd never naturally phrase as a normal survey question in the first place. We've written dedicated, deeper guides on both pieces: testing designs with the Stimulus Section and running preference tournaments with Pairwise Comparison.
Text Analytics: Making Sense of Open-Ended Responses¶
Open-ended questions produce the richest feedback a survey ever collects, and also the hardest to actually make sense of once volume climbs - fifty free-text answers are easy enough to read start to finish, five hundred simply aren't, no matter how much time you set aside for it. Text Analytics exists specifically for that gap: it takes a pile of open-ended responses and turns it into a structured set of categories and themes you can actually report on, rather than a wall of text that quietly never gets read in full by anyone.
Reports: Dashboards Built From Your Data¶
Once responses start coming in, Reports is where they turn into something you'd actually put in front of someone else - a dashboard built directly from your survey data, starting from an auto-generated set of default charts you then customize, filter, and cross-tabulate as needed. It sits apart from the builder itself on purpose, so getting from raw responses to something presentable never requires digging back through the survey question by question first.
Your Account, Credits, and Billing¶
Everything account-level lives outside the four working areas, tucked under My Account at the bottom of the sidebar - a dropdown covering your profile, your account security, and billing, which is also where your plan and credit balance live. Credits are worth understanding early, because they're not a charge on everything you do - they're specifically the usage unit for AI-powered features. Generating a survey with AI, running AI follow-up questions, or asking AI analytics a question about your results all draw from that balance, while the core, everyday work of building, publishing, and collecting responses on a survey that isn't leaning on AI doesn't touch it at all. If you're planning a project that's going to lean heavily on AI features, it's worth a quick look at that balance before you start rather than partway through.
Where to Go First, Depending on Your Goal¶
If you already know roughly what you want to ask, Classic Surveys is where to go - build it manually if the questions are already clear in your head, or describe the goal in plain language and let AI hand you a draft to edit instead of starting from nothing.
If what you actually need feedback on is a visual concept rather than something you'd naturally phrase as a question - a design, a logo, a piece of creative - Visual Tests is the better starting point. It's built around a genuinely different kind of input, not a variation on the same one.
If you've already got a survey running and a backlog of open-ended responses nobody's had time to read properly, Text Analytics will get you to a structured answer far faster than doing it by hand ever would.
And if you're past collecting responses entirely and need something to actually put in front of a stakeholder, a client, or a team, Reports is where raw data turns into something someone else can look at and immediately understand.
FAQ¶
Do I need to use all four areas of the workspace?
No - they're independent. Plenty of projects only ever touch Classic Surveys and Reports; Visual Tests and Text Analytics exist for the specific problems they solve, not as a mandatory pipeline every project has to pass through.
What's the difference between Classic Surveys and Visual Tests?
Classic Surveys is for text-based questions - choice, rating, open-ended, and similar - assembled into a traditional survey flow. Visual Tests is for testing images, videos, or 3D concepts directly, using highlight-based feedback or head-to-head preference tournaments instead of standard question types.
Do credits get used for every survey I publish?
No - credits are specifically for AI-powered features. A survey built manually, without any AI features enabled, doesn't draw down your credit balance to publish or collect responses.
Where do I check my credit balance?
Under My Account at the bottom of the sidebar, in Billing.
Is Visual Tests fully released or still in beta?
It's currently marked beta in the product - fully usable, but newer, and still evolving faster than the more established Classic Surveys area.
Ready to build something? Head to Classic Surveys to start your first survey, or Visual Tests if what you need feedback on is a design rather than a set of questions.