Great Question vs Prolific
Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.
Entry price
From $129 per seat/month (self-serve; $1,290/year annually)
Free tierFrom $8 per participant/hour minimum incentive, plus platform fee
PaidWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Self-serve is $129 per seat/month, or $1,290 a year paid annually; enterprise is quoted. Recruitment from external panels is billed on top of the subscription.
You set the incentive subject to a fair-pay floor of $8/hour ($12 recommended), then Prolific adds a platform fee — around 42.8% for commercial customers, 33.3% for academic and non-profit. Budget the fee: it is a large fraction, not a rounding error. Still far cheaper than moderated-research platforms.
Free tier
Free trial rather than a lasting free plan.
No subscription; pay per participant.
Open source
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Emerging
Great Question · since 2020
Widely used
Prolific · since 2014
Strengths
- One workflow instead of separate recruiting, scheduling, testing and repository tools.
- Recruits from your own CRM, which reaches real customers rather than panel participants.
- Handles incentive logistics.
- Notably better data quality than generic survey panels.
- Fine-grained prescreening across hundreds of demographic attributes.
- No subscription — pay only for what you run.
Limitations
- Breadth means individual modules are less deep than specialists.
- Smaller vendor than the enterprise incumbents.
- Own-customer recruiting needs clean CRM data to work.
- Recruitment only; you supply the study and the tooling.
- Skewed towards students and younger, online-native participants.
- Not suited to recruiting senior enterprise decision-makers.
Best for
Research-ops teams consolidating a fragmented toolchain.
Survey-based and quantitative studies where data quality matters and budget is limited.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.