Koji vs Viable: Collect-and-Analyze vs Analyze-Only (2026)

Short answer: Viable and Koji both use AI to make sense of customer feedback, but they solve different halves of the problem. Viable is analyze-only — it aggregates feedback you already collected (support tickets, surveys, reviews) and summarizes themes with a GPT-powered layer. Koji collects and analyzes — it runs AI-moderated voice and text interviews that generate fresh, deep conversational data and then clusters it into themes automatically. If you only need to mine the feedback you already have, Viable helps. If you need to go ask customers a specific question and get probing, structured answers, you need Koji.

The core distinction: passive analysis vs active research

This is the single most important thing to understand before choosing.

• Viable sits downstream of your existing data. It connects to Zendesk, Intercom, Delighted, Google Forms, and similar sources, then uses large language models to surface themes, sentiment, and answers to natural-language questions. It is excellent at making a backlog of existing feedback readable. But it cannot ask a follow-up question, because there is no live respondent — only static records.
• Koji is upstream. It actively interviews people. You define a research question, and Koji''s AI consultant builds a brief and interview plan; respondents then have a real conversation by voice or text, with the AI probing every answer in real time. Koji generates the data and then analyzes it in the same platform.

In short: Viable reads what customers already said. Koji goes and has the conversation you actually need.

Koji vs Viable at a glance

What Viable does well

Viable is a strong feedback aggregation and summarization layer. If your support and survey channels generate thousands of messages a month, Viable will unify them, detect recurring themes, break sentiment down by topic or channel, and let you ask questions in plain language and get answers with supporting quotes. Weekly digests to Slack or email keep teams aware of shifting sentiment. For a CX team drowning in tickets, that is real value.

Where Viable hits a wall

The limitation is structural, not a flaw in execution: Viable can only analyze what already exists.

1. No probing. A ticket that says "the onboarding was confusing" cannot be asked "which step, specifically?" The depth you get is the depth the customer happened to volunteer.
2. No targeted questions. If you want to test a new pricing idea or understand why a specific cohort churned, the data may simply not be in your tickets. You cannot mine an answer that was never given.
3. Biased toward the vocal. Existing feedback over-represents the people who complained or praised loudly. It misses the quiet majority and anyone who already left.
4. Free-text only, no structure. Viable ingests unstructured text, so you cannot attach a clean NPS scale, a ranking, or a single-choice question to the conversation and aggregate it quantitatively.

Koji is built to do the part Viable cannot: generate the right data in the first place.

How Koji is different: it creates the conversation

Koji is an AI-native customer research platform. Instead of waiting for feedback to accumulate, you launch a study and Koji''s AI interviewer talks to real people.

Active, probing interviews

Respondents click a link and have a genuine conversation — by voice or text — with an AI that asks your questions, listens, and follows up automatically. When someone says onboarding was confusing, Koji asks which step and why, and keeps going until the reason is clear. That is data Viable could never extract from a static ticket.

Structured questions plus open-ended depth

Koji supports six structured question types — open_ended, scale, single_choice, multiple_choice, ranking, and yes_no. You can capture a clean NPS scale, rank feature priorities, and probe an open-ended "why" all in the same interview, then aggregate the quantitative answers into charts while the qualitative answers cluster into themes. Viable, ingesting only free text, has no equivalent.

Analysis is built in — no separate tool

Because Koji collects the data, it also analyzes it natively: every interview is clustered into ranked themes with supporting quotes and sentiment, and a real-time report updates as responses arrive. You do not need a separate analytics layer like Viable bolted on top — collection and analysis live in one platform.

Reach the people your tickets miss

Koji interviews run over a shared link with no SDK required, so you can reach churned users, lost prospects, trial users, and non-customers — exactly the voices absent from your existing feedback. With tools like Koji, "we have no data on why they left" stops being an excuse.

Can you use both?

Yes, and some teams do. Use Viable to monitor the firehose of existing tickets and reviews, and use Koji when that monitoring raises a question you need to go ask — a churn spike, a confusing feature, a pricing reaction. Viable tells you something is happening in the existing data; Koji lets you launch a targeted interview to explain it. That said, if budget forces a single choice, Koji is the more complete platform because it both generates and analyzes data, whereas Viable depends on data flowing in from elsewhere.

Pricing

Viable''s plans start around $600/month (up to 2,000 data points) and rise to $1,000+/month. Koji starts at €29/month (Insights) and €79/month (Interviews), with a free tier of 10 credits. A text interview costs 1 credit, a voice interview 3, and a report refresh 5 — and Koji''s quality gate means only conversations scoring 3 or higher consume credits, so you never pay for junk responses.

When to choose which

• Choose Koji when you need to ask customers a specific question, want probing follow-ups, need structured + qualitative data in one study, or want to reach people who are not already in your ticket queue.
• Choose Viable when your only goal is to summarize a large, existing stream of support tickets and reviews and you do not need to collect anything new.

The bottom line

Viable is a capable analyze-only layer for feedback you already have. Koji is the complete research platform that creates the feedback you actually need — through probing, structured AI interviews — and analyzes it in the same place, at a fraction of the price.

Related Resources

• Structured Questions Guide — the 6 question types Koji studies use
• AI Feedback Analysis Tools — the broader analytics landscape
• AI Interviews vs Surveys — why conversations beat static data
• Chat With Interview Transcripts (AI) — ask questions of your own research
• Customer Feedback Analysis — turning raw feedback into decisions
• Sentiment Analysis in Interviews — how Koji scores tone and emotion