GfK is now part of NIQ. Its research comes as a dashboard subscription, scoped and priced per contract. Outfindo research starts from a category and a market. It's delivered in one to two weeks, at a published price, as a PDF, a spreadsheet, or a live endpoint your team and your AI tools can query.
Both get called "consumer research." They answer different questions. NIQ measures what the market did. Outfindo maps how the customer decides. Different question, different output, different contract.
NIQ provides sales, share, and brand health across the market, while Outfindo shows what buyers in your category want, expect, and worry about, as well as what each type of buyer does not care about.
NIQ delivers information via a dashboard and periodic reports, whereas Outfindo offers a PDF, a spreadsheet, or a live endpoint that your people and AI tools can query in plain language, delivering one study in three distinct formats.
NIQ scopes and prices each project in a custom contract. A new custom study typically takes 4 to 12 weeks and includes a questionnaire and sample sign-off. Outfindo publishes its prices. The brief is the category and the market. Delivery is one to two weeks.
NIQ's core business is measurement. Sales tracking from 530,000+ points of sale in 60+ countries. Brand tracking. Price and promotion monitoring. Consumer life, a trend study that has run every year since 1997. It answers: what sold, where, at what price, and how is my brand doing.
Outfindo answers a different question: how does a person choose in this category? Every study gives you ranked buyer needs (what they want, what they expect, what annoys them, how they'll use the product), the goals behind those needs, and distinct buyer profiles with an estimated share of the category. It also lists what each profile doesn't care about, which is useful when deciding what to leave off a product page.
NIQ delivers through GFKnewron, its platform, plus reports and workshops. Users log in, read the charts and export what they need.
Outfindo delivers in three formats:
- A PDF report, if you want to read it.
- A spreadsheet, if you want to work with it.
- A live endpoint (MCP), if you want to ask it questions. Open Claude or any compatible assistant and ask "what do first-time TV buyers worry about most?" The answer comes from the research itself. Your systems can ask the same questions without a person in the loop.
One study, delivered in the format each team works in.
This is the widest gap. NIQ's licence permits AI use for internal summarising, querying and translation. It prohibits using the data to train or improve any AI model, and limits sharing to excerpts with no commercial value on their own. In short: a person reads it, an AI summarises it, and it stays there.
Outfindo research is built to be worked with. It lives on a live MCP endpoint, so anyone on your team can ask it questions in plain language. Feed it to your own agents. Brief a campaign against it. Pressure-test a product launch before you commit. Check your strategy against what buyers actually say. No analyst in between, no export, no seat licence.
You've heard it a hundred times – pricing varies, everything is tailored, and public rates are impossible to provide. That's true for most agencies, including NIQ.
99
€/month
All you need for one category
599
€/month
Essential, plus advanced tools:
Talk to us
Ultimate customization & support:
From €2,500 per category research
At Outfindo, transparency is key.
No published price. Every engagement is a Statement of Work.
Quote-based approach.
Feature-by-Feature Comparison
Outfindo
NIQ (GfK)
Features
Time to a new category study
1 to 2 weeks
Typically 4 to 12 weeks for custom work
Adding another market
Few days
Another full fieldwork cycle
What the client provides
The category and the market
Objectives, sample design, questionnaire review and sign-off
Questionnaire to approve
None
Yes
Delivered as
PDF, spreadsheet, or live endpoint (MCP)
Dashboard + periodic reports + workshops
Queryable by your own AI tools
Yes, over MCP
AI summaries inside their platform only
Buyer voice in the local language
Yes. Sources are read in-market
Localised surveys, standardised analysis
Niche and long-tail categories
Any category buyers discuss publicly
Only where a tracking panel already exists
Market share and sell-through
No
Yes
Price and promo tracking
No
Yes
Published pricing
Yes
No
Both help you understand your customer. They start from opposite ends.
Checkout data from hundreds of thousands of stores. Survey panels with a stated method. Trend studies running for decades. Built for knowing what happened, at scale. It lands in a dashboard, licensed to named users, for internal use.
Expert reviews, customer reviews, forum threads, in the local language. Every need found, scored, traced back to its source, ranked. Delivered as a PDF, a sheet, or an endpoint your AI tools can query, and licensed to be built into product pages, guides and filters.
Outfindo is intuitive, quick to set up, and completely hassle-free. Try the free trial and see firsthand how seamlessly it improves your customers' shopping journey.
They look like the same purchase. They aren't. One counts. The other explains.
NIQ tells you a segment grew 8% and your share slipped. It won't tell you why that segment picked the competitor, in their own words, or what to put in front of them to win them back. Outfindo reads the articles, reviews and forum threads where buyers explain themselves, and turns them into ranked needs, goals and profiles.
End-to-end product data enrichment solution powered by proprietary AI agents. Outfindo automates the entire process: from sourcing and cleaning to standardizing and enriching product data. Our AI agents utilize deep insights into customer behaviour and shopping patterns to ensure that the product data is accurate and tailored to meet customer needs. This solution is designed for businesses looking for a fully automated system, where they simply upload their product feed and let Outfindo handle everything. The platform requires minimal setup and maintenance.
