Top 12 Persona Tools & Templates [2026 Update]

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customers, built from various data sources, such as your existing customers, past prospects, and competitors. They are pivotal to your business and not something you can do without.

After all, buyer or customer personas make audience targeting easy and efficient. They help you avoid costly mistakes and ensure that you don't waste your efforts on a market segment that will never need or use your product.

Yet, building buyer personas from scratch is not easy. You could hire a market research team to chalk them out for you, but it will be expensive, time-consuming, and impractical for your business in the long run. Thankfully, there are many persona tools and services available online.

In this post, we list out the top 12 persona templates and tools (both AI-powered and manual). This list is straight to the point and doesn’t beat around the bush, so check them out and pick the persona development tools that suit your needs!

1. Persona Generator by Delve AI

We may sound a bit biased, listing out our tool at the top and all, but Delve AI’s AI Persona Generator software is one of the best tools for creating buyer personas this year.

Featured on Gartner and Forbes, the AI persona builder takes your first-party data (web analytics, CRM data, and surveys) and enriches it with second-party (social media, competitor intelligence) and public data sources (from reviews, blogs, forums, and news) to automatically create segment-wise, data-driven personas for your brand in minutes.

None of the other tools in this article do any of this.

You can pick from an assortment of six persona types, depending on your data availability and use case: User Persona, Website Persona, Customer Persona, Social Persona, Competitor Persona, and Employee Persona. Our AI marketing tool handles both B2C and B2B-specific scenarios, and adds industry-specific insights and sample journeys for each persona segment.

Once your personas are generated, you instantly gain insights into audience demographics, sources of influence, preferences, interests, goals, challenges, hobbies, values, personality traits, and emotions.

Besides these elements, you can find a persona-level audience distribution tab, along with a list of popular influencers and organizations (depending on your persona type).

The best thing about these personas is that you can chat with them using the Digital Twin of the Customer software. Delve AI’s persona generator also keeps your persona segments and digital twins automatically updated with fresh data, so your persona-centric marketing decisions always remain relevant.

Updated personas further help businesses and marketers gain a deeper understanding of their preferred customer segments. They enable exceptional customer experiences and drive market growth.

Pricing: No coding is required, and you can try the tool for free. Paid plans start at $89 per month, billed yearly.

Alternatives: Honestly? None. There aren’t really any tools out there capable of generating data-driven personas for you.

2. Make My Persona

Make My Persona is an interactive web tool developed by HubSpot that helps businesses generate buyer personas. All you need to do is describe your target audience, enter their biggest challenges, explain how your solution helps them succeed, and describe your product/service.

HubSpot's Make My Persona tool takes care of the rest. It creates a basic buyer persona using AI that includes:

• Demographics (age, industry)
• Communication preferences
• Goals, challenges, and objectives
• Job responsibilities, who they report to, and tools used

Now, the persona editor gives you the flexibility to add or remove sections and customize the template to align with your objectives. The only problem is the amount of personal information you have to give (email, phone number, website, everything’s mandatory) to get the filled-out buyer persona template in the first place.

In addition to the buyer persona tool, HubSpot has other free resources, articles, and guides to assist you with persona development. Make My Persona is built for people who already have some relevant customer data and need a platform to organize their buyer profiles.

Price: The template is completely free, and you can download the buyer persona document as a PDF file and/or share it with different departments in your organization.

Alternatives: Try Research Persona by Delve AI; the process is the same – describe your ideal customer profile and upload additional research data. But unlike Make My Persona, the output is not generic but unique to your actual users.

3. Xtensio

Buyers are not the only ones who can be analyzed using persona templates. You can create effective user personas and compare them without knowing a single line of code as well. Xtensio’s User Persona Template is the right step in this direction. The persona creator is a simple way for teams to create, collaborate, and share all their persona documents online.

You can create visually engaging user personas without any design experience, either manually or with AI. Xtensio’s persona templates allow you to manually outline user demographics, goals, frustrations, motivations, communication channels, brands, interests, and more.

For the AI-generated version, like HubSpot, you’ll need to describe your user persona and pick your images and color palette (or let AI create/pick them for you). You can edit any of these attributes and export them in PDF and PNG formats.

Xtensio's user persona template is a good choice for companies with multiple contributors, since it enhances accountability and productivity among team members.

Pricing: With the free version, you can build up to 5 personas and get access to all of the software’s tools and modules. If you have the budget, subscribe to any of the three paid plans. They give you access to unlimited personas and exports.

Alternatives: UserForge, UXPressia, and Research Persona by Delve AI.

4. UserForge

If you know what you want to include in your marketing efforts, then UserForge will work for you. It provides a simple user persona template that gives you the freedom to add your own variables. Recently, the company has also introduced a “Create with AI” feature that uses textual prompts to generate the first draft of your personas.

You get the basic user demographics, goals, frustrations, and behaviors. Like HubSpot and Xtensio, you can add/remove sections and edit everything in the document to fit your product use case.

Although the layout is a bit too simple, it is an excellent collaboration tool for individuals wanting to create lightweight personas. It not only provides a platform for different aspects of the UX design process but also offers empathy maps, customer journey maps, and user stories.

Pricing: UserForge offers a trial workspace wherein you can create a persona and invite a collaborator for free. It does not include AI personas or downloadable files, only a share link.

Apart from this, it has two paid plans:

1. Personas Lite: The most basic plan, available at $8 per month, lets you create 5 AI personas and add 5 collaborators.
2. Power Workspace: Priced at $24 per month, this plan contains unlimited AI personas, user stories, and journey maps.

Alternatives: Xtensio, Smaply, and UXPressia.

5. Smaply

Smaply’s Persona Generator Tool visualizes customer experiences by helping you create customer personas and realistic buyer journey maps for different target groups. The persona creation process is entirely manual; you can add detailed information about your personas, highlight important data, and link relevant sources to establish a common ground for your entire team.

Smaply’s Drag & Drop editor further permits you to add elements, like images, quotes, designs, text, and other details, to customize the template to your preferences. It doesn’t matter what your needs are; you’re likely to find a customization option available for it on the platform.

The persona template will empower you to identify your customers’ needs, goals, and motivations, and help you optimize your products toward their interests.

Pricing: Smaply offers a free version that lets you create 10 personas and explore other product functionalities before moving to paid plans, namely: Basic (59 USD per month), Pro (99 USD per month), and Enterprise (139 USD per month).

Alternatives: UserForge, Venngage, and Milanote.

6. Online Persona Creator

You can develop customer journeys and impact maps using UXPressia's Online Persona Creator. The persona maker has an assortment of templates designed to create user, buyer, or customer personas for your business.

You can build your own customer profiles, change the template structure, experiment with layout designs, and enrich personas with over 20+ sections with different content types.

The name and photo generator tools go a step further by incorporating realistic names and humanistic profile photos to your personas. The platform also allows you to color-code certain characteristics for easy identification.

Like some of the tools mentioned above, UXPressia also gives its users the ability to create personas using AI. You can either create a new persona from scratch (eg, “b2b customer for a crm software”) or improve your existing persona profiles.

UXPressia’s persona tools facilitate real-time collaboration on personas from anywhere, making it easy to share them with teammates and individuals outside the team.

Pricing: The free plan lets you generate three personas, while their Pro and Business plans (priced at $36 and $95 per user) have a higher threshold.

Alternatives: Research Persona by Delve AI.

7. Venngage

Venngage is an online graphic design tool (sort of like Canva) that helps businesses create infographics, data visualizations, reports, mind maps, brochures, presentations, and the likes. What’s even better is that it has a free online user persona maker with over 190 templates for persona building.

Here’s an example.

With its wide array of persona guide templates, users can effortlessly design visually appealing personas by leveraging thousands of icons, images, and illustrations in the media library.

Now, developing a buyer persona on Venngage is extremely easy; all you have to do is follow these steps:

• Sign up for free with an email, Gmail, or Facebook account
• Choose the right persona template for your company
• Insert your content, research and findings
• Use icons and images for visual aesthetics
• Download or share your persona directly with your team

Venngage’s user persona guide will help you find your perfect customer in a sea of prospects and ensure the data is passed on to every stakeholder in your company.

Pricing: The free plan allows you to create and publicly share five persona templates. For unlimited designs, move on to their paid plans, starting at $10 per month.

Alternatives: UserForge, Smaply, and Milanote.

8. Miro

Miro’s persona tool claims to build personas directly from your research data. It’s “Create with AI” feature pulls context from the user research already on your board, like survey responses, interview transcripts, competitive analysis, and team discussions, to inform user persona creation.

The tool uses AI credits to synthesize all of your data and generate detailed profiles that include user goals, priorities, motivations, frustrations, communication channels, and decision-making patterns. The AI-generated first draft can then be edited and validated by your entire team.

Pricing: You get 10 AI credits/month per team under the free plan.

Alternatives: Research Persona by Delve AI.

9. Milanote

Milanote’s Customer Persona Template is a pretty standard tool compared to others in the market, but it’s the right solution if you are looking for something that is basic, detailed, and free. The template is pre-populated with a persona example to give you an idea of what you need to add to bring the persona to life.

The dashboard has placeholders for:

• Demographic details (eg, age, occupation, location, income level)
• Pain points, needs, and ideal experiences
• Hobbies, interests, values, and aspirations
• Notes, images, charts, and videos

You can export these customer persona profiles and invite your teammates to comment and give feedback on your work.

Pricing: Milanote’s free plan allows you to add 100 notes, images, or links, and upload 10 files.

Alternatives: UserForge, Smaply, and Venngage.

10. Inodash, Founderpal, & LiveChat AI

Recently, there’s been a noticeable increase in the number of “AI persona generators” online. The way they work is simple: they’ll ask you for a brief description of your target audience or persona, maybe also your business, and your preferred language. The three listed in this section – Inodash, Founderpal, and LiveChat AI – are some of them.

What’s interesting is that they’re probably ChatGPT wrappers with pre-built prompting frameworks focused on market research.

Here’s the persona output generated for a Gen Z beauty brand using Founderpal and LiveChat AI (didn’t want to give out an email to Inodash; the former two didn’t require any email sign-ups).

[Persona generated with FounderPal]

[A section of the persona generated with LiveChat AI]

To be fair, these tools are not completely useless. Sure, they’re dull and not very engaging, but they’re fairly okay for quickly spotting broad audience patterns. However, synthesizing generic internet-native archetypes is not the same as getting a unique persona built from data specific to your customers and company.

Pricing: Free.

11. Content Harmony

Content Harmony’s free customer persona template is easy to understand, even for those who don't have a basic idea of marketing, content, or otherwise. The software breaks down their persona template into eight sections.

Given below is an example of their B2B persona template.

It is a two-page document available in Google Docs, which can be directly accessed and copied from their website. It covers the following sections:

1. Photo - Add a picture to a set of data to help people empathize with the person behind the persona.
2. Backstory - Use CRM data to learn more about the person; even the smallest details matter.
3. Psychographics attributes - List down the habits, preferences, attitudes, and values of the personas you wish to generate. Find patterns through qualitative and quantitative market research.
4. Demographic identifiers - Gather demographic data from customer surveys, competitor research, and CRM.
5. Goals and Motivations - Write down the goals and motivations, both personal and professional, that people aim to achieve with your product.
6. Roadblocks - Identify reasons preventing them from reaching their goals.
7. Sales objections - Think why your prospects might not want to convert into your customers. Develop responses to handle these objections.
8. Quote - Choose a quote that aptly describes your buyer.

To create a customer persona profile, you have to fill in these sections with your own audience data.

Pricing: It’s free. The Word document is public; you just need to click the link and make a copy for personal use.

12. Buyer Persona Template

The Buyer Persona Template from the Buyer Persona Institute is the OG (translation: the original or originator) of persona templates and tools.

It is based on Adelle Revella’s 5 Rings of Buyer Insights that represent customers at different stages of the buyer journey.

• Priority initiatives explain why your buyer has decided to purchase a product or service similar to the ones you sell.
• Success factors describe the results buyers expect after buying your solution.
• Perceived barriers are any misconceptions or doubts that buyers might have about you.
• Buyer’s journey explains the "work" that buyers do in order to select, buy, and recommend your brand.
• Decision criteria is an advantage your solution provides which compels buyers to choose you over your competitors.

Each of these insights refines your audience and shapes your customer personas. This framework helps businesses understand and efficiently use the data acquired by sales and marketing teams.

Pricing: The Buyer Persona Template from the Buyer Persona Institute is completely free of charge.

Why Do You Need Buyer Personas in The First Place?

It is a simple question with a simple answer: We create personas to understand customers' goals and objectives. Without analyzing their motivations, interests, pain points, likes, and dislikes, you’ll see that it’s almost impossible to learn why people want a product or solution like yours.

Also, buyer personas make consumers the focal point of all your business decisions. They connect stakeholders and act as a guidance system, hence every plan is executed with the end users in mind. You learn how people search for brands, the channels they use, the media content they consume, and the tools they prefer.

Brands often tend to be product-centric, but with user personas, they can be more customer-centric, focusing on building solutions rather than just features. Potential buyers will naturally gravitate towards a company that says, “Hey, here's how you will benefit from our service. Your business will generate more leads by using this specific solution.”

Essentials of A Good Persona Template

Now, suppose you want to create your very own B2B and B2C persona templates. What elements or attributes would you include? Remember, the templates you develop will serve as a guide for designing products, features, and marketing strategies that connect with your target audience.

So, make sure to incorporate the elements listed below.

Basic information

Your persona tools should always include basic details like age, gender, location, occupation, job title, industry, marital status, alumni connections, and personality traits. This information provides a quick snapshot of your ideal user and helps you conceptualize and tailor your strategies to meet their preferences.

Contextual images

Whether it's a recent graduate or an old CEO, visualizing your ideal customer can guide important decisions. After all, profile pictures humanize your archetypes, fostering empathy and aiding the design process. They add clarity and help you build a personal connection with the user.

Personality type

You should define the personality traits of your persona profiles using the Myers-Briggs test or by providing a descriptive paragraph outlining their quirks and mannerisms. For B2C persona templates, focus on behavioral similarities. With B2B personas, look into the types of websites they frequent for information on related products and pages.

Motivations and objectives

For both B2C and B2B persona templates, list the goals and motivations related to your product or service, clarifying why someone would want to make a purchase. You need to identify the actual reasons behind buying decisions so you can personalize your marketing campaigns in a way that hits all the right spots.

Prospect’s problems

Find out the challenges your target audience faces by exploring their goals and digging deeper into their pain points. Ask a variety of questions about their expectations and preferences, along with the features they desire in a product, to figure out how your business can provide valuable solutions.

Other considerations

The more detailed you are, the better your personas will be. You can improve the thoroughness of your persona templates by exploring additional aspects, like:

• What are their favorite brands?
• Why do they like a particular brand?
• Why do they hate a few brands?
• How often do they purchase from the brands they like?
• What are the marketing channels they usually use (websites, social media networks, and online forums)?

Add a quote and a background from someone who was a part of the interviews to add more personality to your B2B personas.

Misunderstandings with User Personas

We've discussed the top tools and attributes required to create a buyer persona. Let's address some common misconceptions brands have about personas.

They don’t work for every industry

When you are selling, you want your customers to know that you have the best solutions in the market for them. This is possible only when you know their problems.

User personas help companies belonging to any industry spot user pain points and challenges. Even if multiple people are involved in the buying process, creating personas for each stage can guide customers deeper through the sales funnel.

Personas don’t represent real customers

We don’t know everything about our customers; there is a lot of information that simply gets left out while creating personas. To truly understand and discover more about them, engage in active listening and ask probing questions. This approach can unravel insights crucial for decision-making.

You need to develop personas just once

Buyer personas need regular updates as customer behaviors evolve. If you are still depending on documents that you created three years ago, you are in for a rude surprise. You will have to constantly edit these files to keep up with shifting consumer trends.

Personas are too narrow or broad

Personas are a work in progress and are as flexible as you want them to be. With data and analytics, it is possible to provide the necessary direction and ensure accuracy. Having said that, selecting the right B2B or B2C persona templates is essential to building the personas you need.

Buyer persona are hard to make

While personas offer exceptional benefits, reaching out to customers for input can be challenging. Fortunately, the AI persona tools like the ones we mentioned have simplified the process. Access to user-friendly templates further streamlines persona creation, especially when you have quality customer data.

Wrapping Up

So there you have it. We’ve listed out the top persona templates and tools this year, covering both manual and AI-generated personas. Pick the right ones and use them to understand your buyers’ perspectives and actions!

Tough time making sense of customer data? Use Delve AI’s buyer persona templates to simplify the process and streamline your marketing efforts.