Prolific vs Dovetail

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

Free tier available

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.

Dovetail now publishes only the free tier and an Enterprise 'contact sales' option — the paid middle tiers carry no list price, so budget from a quote. Historically priced per contributor, with viewers cheaper or free.

No subscription; pay per participant.

Free plan for individuals with limited projects.

Widely used

Prolific · since 2014

Established

Dovetail · since 2017

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

• Turns scattered research into a searchable organisational asset.
• Automatic transcription and AI-assisted theme detection save real analysis hours.
• Good at making findings visible to people who did not attend the sessions.

• 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.

• It stores and analyses research; it does not recruit or run sessions.
• Value depends entirely on discipline — an untagged repository is a folder.
• Costs scale with the number of contributors.

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

Organisations running enough research that findings get lost.