Mimir vs Dovetail

Dovetail is built for research teams that need a home for all their qualitative data. It excels at organizing interview transcripts, tagging themes, creating highlight reels, and making past research searchable across the organization. If your challenge is "we do great research but nobody can find it later," Dovetail solves that elegantly.

Mimir is built for a different problem: "we have customer feedback and need to decide what to build." It is less interested in being a long-term archive and more interested in turning today's inputs into today's product decisions. You paste or upload your data, and Mimir gives you ranked recommendations with evidence.

The distinction matters because it shapes who uses each tool. Dovetail is a research team's daily workspace. Mimir is a product leader's decision-making tool.

In Dovetail, you highlight passages, apply tags, and manually build up a picture of what your research is telling you. This process is collaborative and thorough — your team develops shared understanding through the act of tagging itself. But it takes time, and the quality depends on how consistently your team tags.

Mimir automates the synthesis step entirely. It reads every source, extracts entities like pain points and feature requests, clusters them into themes, and ranks recommendations by evidence strength. You skip the hours of tagging and go straight to the output. The tradeoff is that you lose the collaborative sense-making that comes from manual analysis.

Dovetail is exceptional as a research knowledge base. If you run dozens of studies a year and need to quickly answer "what did we learn about onboarding in Q3?" — that is Dovetail's sweet spot. Its search, tagging taxonomy, and highlight reel features make past research accessible in a way that raw transcripts and Google Docs never will.

Mimir does not try to be a research repository. It is built for the moment after research is done, when you need to translate findings into product action. If your team needs both a research archive and a decision engine, using Dovetail alongside Mimir is a reasonable combination.