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testcritic

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 tier

From $8 per participant/hour minimum incentive, plus platform fee

Paid

What 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

Codeless
Codeless

Platforms

Web
Web

Fits teams

StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

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.