If you are weighing Hello Customer against Delighted, the honest verdict starts with a date: Delighted shut down on 30 June 2026, so whichever tool wins this comparison on paper, only one of them still exists. That makes this a strange article to write. We are comparing our platform to a product we respected, one that taught a whole generation of teams that asking customers for feedback does not have to be a six-month IT project.
So here is the comparison the way we would give it to a friend. Delighted was the better choice if you wanted a cheap, fast, single-metric survey tool and nothing more. Hello Customer is the better choice if you want the score plus the reasons behind it, read automatically from every open answer, with workflows that turn a bad score into a saved customer. And since 30 June 2026, the first option is no longer on the table at any price.
We will go through the details anyway, feature by feature, because understanding what Delighted did well is the fastest way to work out what you actually need from whatever replaces it. If you only want the shortlist of options, we keep a separate guide to Delighted alternatives. This page is the head-to-head.
TL;DR: Hello Customer vs Delighted
| Dimension | Hello Customer | Delighted | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Status in 2026 | Active, developed, EU-based | Retired by Qualtrics on 30 June 2026, data deleted | Delighted is a migration deadline, no longer an option |
| Survey sending | NPS, CSAT, CES per touchpoint, set up in days | Famously simple NPS/CSAT/CES, Autopilot recurring sends | Both easy; you lose nothing on sending simplicity |
| Open answers | ISAAC classifies every answer by topic with sentiment, in dozens of languages | Word clouds and manual reading | You get the why behind the score, automatically |
| Closing the loop | Detractor alerts to named owners, tracked workflows | Basic alerts, follow-up handled outside the tool | Feedback becomes retention work, with ownership |
| Hosting and compliance | EU-hosted, GDPR, ISO 27001-certified | US-based, Qualtrics-owned | Simpler DPAs and reviews for European customers |
| Pricing | Volume-based, whole team included | Free tier, then per-response tiers from 17 dollars/month | You pay for feedback volume, never per seat |
| Your history | Historical CSV imports, trend lines continue | Export before 30 June 2026 or lose it | Your years of NPS data survive the move |
Who each platform is for
Delighted was built for teams who wanted a number on the board this week. A founder, a support lead, an operations manager: anyone could sign up, pick NPS or CSAT, upload a list and have responses the same afternoon. Reviewers on GetApp rate it 4.8 out of 5 across 57 reviews, and the praise is remarkably consistent: easy setup, clean interface, quick integrations with Zendesk and Slack. The free tier made it the default recommendation for anyone starting a feedback programme with no budget. That reputation was earned.
We built Hello Customer for the stage after that. You have the number. It moved last quarter and nobody can say why, because the answer is buried in two thousand open text answers no one has time to read. Our customers are B2C and B2B organisations, often across several countries and languages, who need the feedback to drive decisions: which process to fix first, which detractor to call today, which improvement actually moved the score. We are a feedback management platform with text analysis at the core, sitting deliberately between the simple survey widgets and the giant enterprise XM suites.
The honest way to put it: if Delighted was your scoreboard, we are the scoreboard plus the match analysis. And if all you ever wanted was the scoreboard, we say so plainly further down.
Survey sending and simplicity
This was Delighted's home turf, so let us give it full credit. Surveys went out over email, SMS, web and link with almost no configuration. Autopilot let you upload a panel once and resurvey people automatically on a 3, 6 or 12-month cadence, spread across weekdays at sensible times. For a relationship NPS programme run by one person, that was close to perfect. Setup measured in hours was the whole pitch, and it delivered.
We match the parts of that simplicity that matter. You can run transactional NPS, CSAT or CES per touchpoint, triggered by events like a delivery, a support ticket or an onboarding milestone, in the customer's own language. Onboarding takes days, with our team involved, so your first touchpoint is live within the first week rather than after a quarter of workshops. Delighted users who join us tend to report that the asking part feels familiar: short surveys, one score question, one open question, sent at the moment that matters.
Where we differ is intent. Delighted optimised for getting a survey out with zero thought. We optimise for getting the right survey to the right touchpoint, because everything downstream, from topic analysis to alert routing, depends on knowing which moment the feedback describes. That costs you a short conversation during onboarding. It pays back every day after.
What happens to your open answers: our win
Here is the difference that defines the comparison. Both platforms collect the open text under the score. Only one of them reads it.
In Delighted, open answers landed in a feed with keyword filtering and a word cloud. Useful for browsing, but the analysis was you, scrolling. At a few hundred responses a month that is a rainy afternoon. At a few thousand, in three languages, it simply does not happen, and the open answers quietly become decoration under the dashboard.
Our AI engine ISAAC classifies every single open answer by topic, with a sentiment per topic, natively in dozens of languages with no translate-first step. One answer that says the staff were lovely but the queue was absurd becomes two data points: positive on staff, negative on waiting time. Multiply that across every response and you get a ranked, quantified picture of what your customers are actually talking about, updated as answers arrive.
On top of that, impact analysis ranks those topics by their effect on your NPS or CSAT, so you know that fixing waiting times would move the score and repainting the lobby would not. And Ask ISAAC, the conversational layer, answers plain-language questions like "what are detractors in Belgium complaining about this quarter?" with the verbatims behind every answer, so you can check the source rather than trust a summary.
Delighted never pretended to offer this. It was a collection tool, priced like one. Just be clear-eyed that this is the gap you were living with.
Closing the loop
A score without a follow-up is a missed phone call from a customer who was about to leave. Delighted could push responses into Slack and send basic alerts, and plenty of teams built manual follow-up habits on top. But the loop itself, who owns this detractor, did anyone respond, what happened next, lived outside the product, usually in a spreadsheet with good intentions.
We treat the loop as the product. Close-the-loop workflows send detractor alerts to a named owner, the store manager, the account manager, the support lead, while the feedback is hours old rather than weeks. The workflow tracks whether the follow-up happened, and management sees the patterns across all of them, so the loop closes at two levels: the individual customer gets a response, and the organisation fixes the cause.
This is where the business case stops being abstract. Some of our customers that close the loop on both customer and management levels report minimum 2.3% annual churn decrease and 11% revenue increase. If you measure NPS and never act on individual responses, you are running the cheapest possible version of a feedback programme and getting roughly what you pay for. That was true on Delighted and it stays true anywhere else.
Integrations and CRM
Delighted's integration catalogue suited its audience: Slack, Shopify, Zapier, Zendesk, Intercom, plus a clean API that developers liked. For an e-commerce team wanting a survey after every order and scores in a Slack channel, it was quick and reliable, and reviewers regularly named the integrations as a strength.
We connect to the systems where your customer data and your follow-up actually live: CRM platforms, contact centre and ticketing tools, and data warehouses, through native connectors and our API. Triggers come in from the systems that know when a touchpoint happened, and enriched feedback flows back out, so a detractor alert lands with the account owner in the CRM rather than in a channel everyone has muted. During onboarding we map this together, which is a different experience from self-serve Zapier recipes: slightly more setup, considerably more depth.
If your whole integration need is "post scores to Slack", both tools always had you covered. If you want feedback attached to the customer record and driving work in the tools your teams already use, that is what we built for.
Hosting and compliance: EU vs US
Delighted was a US product owned by Qualtrics, and for years that was a detail most buyers skimmed past. For European organisations it has become a real workload: every US-hosted vendor in the stack means transfer mechanisms to document, assessments to run, and a longer conversation with your DPO, all for a tool that touches personal data by definition, since feedback arrives attached to email addresses and order history.
Hello Customer is EU-hosted and GDPR-compliant, and we are ISO 27001-certified. Your customers' feedback stays in the EU, your data processing agreement is short and boring, and your security review does not need a chapter on international transfers. We are a Belgian company; European data protection is our default context rather than an accommodation.
If you sell only into the US, this section is neutral. If your customers are European, the shutdown was a rare free pass to fix your compliance story and your feedback tooling in a single move, and we would make the same argument even if you were migrating to someone else.
Pricing: volume-based vs per-response tiers
Delighted's pricing was a genuine virtue and we will not pretend otherwise. A free plan, then paid tiers priced by monthly response volume starting around 17 dollars a month meant a small team could run a real NPS programme for less than a team lunch. The catch sat in the tier jumps: outgrow your response cap and the next tier could multiply your bill, and reviewers noted that getting more from the tool usually meant a significant step up. You also paid per response for collection only; the analysis remained your job.
Our pricing is volume-based too, but on a different axis: you pay in euros for the scale of your feedback programme, never per seat and never per user. That one difference changes how the platform gets used. When insight access costs nothing extra, the store manager, the product owner and the board all look at the same live picture, instead of one licensed analyst forwarding screenshots. Feedback that only one person can see changes nothing.
We will be equally honest in the other direction: we start where a serious programme starts, and there is no free tier. If your budget is twenty euros a month, we are the wrong call, and the honest section below is for you.
The shutdown changed the maths
Whatever the feature comparison says, the calendar said more. Qualtrics retired Delighted in stages: annual renewals ended on 1 July 2025, monthly subscriptions stopped renewing on 31 May 2026, and on 30 June 2026 the platform shut down and customer data was deleted, with no migration help offered. The official Delighted page says the product is no longer available and points buyers to the Qualtrics platform instead, which is a very different product at a very different price, designed for enterprise research programmes rather than for the teams Delighted served.
Three practical consequences follow. First, find your export: if you downloaded scores, verbatims and respondent data to CSV before the account closed, that file is your trend line, because the data behind the old login is gone. Second, inventory the triggers, integrations and Autopilot cadences you ran, because that list, and nothing on any vendor's feature page, is your real migration requirement. Third, choose a destination that can carry your history. We built historical CSV imports precisely so Delighted trend lines continue in Hello Customer instead of restarting at zero: your 2021 to 2026 NPS history sits in the same graphs as next quarter's responses, and your first review after migration compares like with like.
Migration is also a moment to upgrade rather than merely relocate. You are doing the work of moving anyway; moving to another collection-only tool means doing this again with the same blind spot on open answers.
When Delighted was the right choice
An honest comparison owes Delighted this section. If you were choosing in 2023 and you wanted a single NPS survey live by Friday, on a tiny budget, with no procurement process and no analyst, Delighted was the right choice, and often a better one than we were. The free tier was real. The interface was pleasant. Autopilot quietly solved recurring sends before most competitors had noticed the problem. Thousands of teams ran their first ever feedback programme on it, and the CX field is better because the entry price of listening to customers dropped to almost nothing.
It also had honest limits, which its own users named in reviews: light reporting that pushed analysis into spreadsheets, limited customisation, contact management that got confusing at scale, and tier jumps that stung as programmes grew. None of that made it a bad product. It made it a starter product, and it was the best starter product of its generation.
If you are reading this as a Delighted customer, nothing about your original decision was wrong. The product is ending; your reasoning was sound. The question is only what the next five years of your feedback programme should run on.
Verdict
For its era and its audience, Delighted earned every recommendation it got, and we would rather say that than win a comparison against a closing product. But the comparison ends the same way regardless of sentiment. Delighted stopped existing on 30 June 2026, and even before the announcement, it collected feedback without analysing it, alerted without tracking the loop, and hosted European customer data in the US.
Hello Customer keeps the part of Delighted you liked, simple sending, fast setup, volume-based cost, and adds the part you were missing: every open answer read and classified by ISAAC, topics ranked by impact on the score, detractor follow-up with named owners, EU hosting, and your historical trend lines intact. If you want a free widget, we are more than you need. If you want your feedback to change what your organisation does next quarter, this is the migration that pays for itself.
Frequently asked questions
Did Delighted shut down?
Yes. Qualtrics retired Delighted: annual renewals ended on 1 July 2025, monthly subscriptions stopped renewing on 31 May 2026, and the platform shut down on 30 June 2026, at which point customer data was deleted. Only exports made before that date survive.
What is the best Delighted alternative?
It depends on what you used Delighted for. If you want the same simple sending plus real analysis of your open answers, EU hosting and close-the-loop workflows, that is exactly the profile Hello Customer was built for. If you want to survey the wider market first, our guide to Delighted alternatives compares ten options fairly, including tools cheaper and simpler than ours.
Can I import my Delighted history into Hello Customer?
Yes, if you exported it in time. We import the historical scores and verbatims from your Delighted CSV during onboarding. Your NPS and CSAT trend lines continue where they left off instead of restarting at zero, so year-on-year comparisons survive the migration.
How is Hello Customer's pricing different from Delighted's?
Delighted priced by monthly response volume in tiered plans, with a free tier at the bottom and noticeable jumps between tiers. Our pricing is volume-based as well, in euros, with no per-seat or per-user fees: everyone in your organisation can see and use the feedback without a licence discussion. There is no free tier; we start where a serious feedback programme starts.
Does Hello Customer analyse open answers in languages other than English?
Yes, natively. ISAAC classifies open answers by topic and sentiment in dozens of languages without translating them first, which keeps the nuance that machine translation flattens. For teams collecting feedback across European markets, this is usually the single biggest difference they notice in the first month.
See your Delighted data come back to life
The work is small: your part of a migration to Hello Customer is your Delighted export and a conversation, and onboarding takes days. Book a demo, bring the CSV of your Delighted responses, and we will show you your own customers' open answers classified by topic and impact. You will leave with your trend history intact and, probably for the first time, a clear answer to why the score moved.