Medallia overview: products, pricing, and alternatives

Medallia is a customer experience company that helps large enterprises capture and analyze customer and employee feedback through AI-driven analytics. Its flagship Medallia Experience Cloud processes over a billion feedback signals monthly and serves organizations like Marriott and Airbnb, though 2026 brought a major ownership shakeup from Thoma Bravo to a Blackstone-led group.

Medallia at a glance

What is Medallia?

Medallia addresses the challenge large enterprises face in turning scattered customer and employee feedback, across surveys, calls, chat, and social channels, into prioritized action. Its main product, Medallia Experience Cloud, uses AI to analyze this feedback and route insights directly into frontline workflows rather than just executive dashboards, a shift the company calls Frontline-Ready AI. Medallia has grown its text analytics depth through acquisition, absorbing MonkeyLearn's no-code AI platform in February 2022 into Experience Cloud's Theme AI capabilities.

Medallia products

• Medallia Experience Cloud: core CX/EX platform for feedback capture, analytics, reporting, and admin.
• Medallia Experience Orchestration: real-time, individualized customer journey decisioning.
• Medallia Digital Experience Analytics (Decibel): digital and web/app behavioral analytics with session replay.
• Medallia Agent Connect (Stella Connect): contact-center agent engagement, coaching, and QA.
• Mindful: intelligent callback and call-queue management.
• Medallia Concierge (Zingle): personalized SMS and in-app messaging.
• Medallia Video (LivingLens): video-based customer feedback collection.
• Agile Research: self-service survey and research platform.

Medallia pricing

Medallia's pricing is not publicly specified, and there is no free tier or self-serve option. The company charges through a proprietary Experience Data Record (EDR) model, billing by the volume of interaction records ingested rather than by seat, with unlimited users included. Buyers must contact sales for a quote; current figures can be verified at medallia.com/pricing.

Data, privacy, and safety

Medallia does not use customer data beyond providing the service when acting as a processor, and AI features are governed by each customer's specific agreement rather than a blanket training policy.

Certifications: SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, 27017, 27018, 27701, ISO 42001, GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, HITRUST, FedRAMP High, PCI DSS.

No confirmed breach or privacy issue was found in current-year searches.

Who's behind Medallia and how stable it is

Medallia is backed by a new investor group led by Blackstone, Apollo, and FS KKR Capital Corp and is actively shipping, most recently rolling out Frontline-Ready AI capabilities on July 14, 2026. Founders Borge Hald and Amy Pressman started the company in 2001; Mark Bishof has been Chairman and CEO since January 2025. Prior owner Thoma Bravo, which took Medallia private in 2021 for $6.4 billion, lost nearly all of its roughly $5 billion stake in a 2026 debt-for-equity recapitalization.

Medallia strengths and limitations

Strengths

• Processes over a billion feedback signals monthly through Medallia Experience Cloud across surveys, calls, chat, and social channels.
• Rates 4.5/5 on G2 across 210 reviews for the Customer Experience product, with insights generation cited as a top strength.
• Combines real-time omnichannel feedback capture with closed-loop action routing, per G2's AI-generated review summary.
• Includes unlimited users under its Experience Data Record pricing model rather than charging per seat.
• Deepened its text analytics depth by acquiring MonkeyLearn's no-code AI platform in February 2022, now built into Experience Cloud's Theme AI.

Limitations

• Just underwent a lender-driven ownership change after Thoma Bravo wrote off nearly all of its roughly $5 billion investment, per martech.org's analysis.
• Multiple G2 and Capterra reviewers describe a steep learning curve and an overwhelming interface for new users.
• Offers no self-serve or free tier, so smaller organizations without dedicated CX teams should look toward Qualtrics or other lower-cost platforms instead.
• Headcount has declined roughly 25% since 2023, per Revelio Labs, alongside several quarters of lender debt markdowns.

Medallia alternatives

Anyone weighing Medallia usually compares it against Qualtrics, Verint, and Sprinklr. All three lack Medallia's recent ownership turbulence, since none has just gone through a lender-driven change of control.