Maze vs Prolific

Free tier available

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

Maze has withdrawn public pricing — its pricing page is now a feature-comparison table where every paid tier resolves to a form, so the Starter figures quoted by third-party sites are not verifiable. Panel recruitment is billed separately from the platform 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 plan with a limited number of studies and responses per month.

No subscription; pay per participant.

Widely used

Maze · since 2018

Widely used

Prolific · since 2014

• Test a Figma prototype with real users before building anything.
• Quantitative metrics make results defensible in a product review.
• Usable free tier for evaluation and small studies.

• Notably better data quality than generic survey panels.
• Fine-grained prescreening across hundreds of demographic attributes.
• No subscription — pay only for what you run.

• Unmoderated only — you cannot ask a follow-up question.
• Prototype testing measures a happy path, not the messy reality of a live product.
• Bring-your-own-participants works well; the built-in panel is smaller than UserTesting's.

• 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.

Product and design teams validating flows early and often.

Survey-based and quantitative studies where data quality matters and budget is limited.