Prolific vs Great Question

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

From $129 per seat/month (self-serve; $1,290/year annually)

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.

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.

No subscription; pay per participant.

Free trial rather than a lasting free plan.

Widely used

Prolific · since 2014

Emerging

Great Question · since 2020

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

• 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.

• 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.

• Breadth means individual modules are less deep than specialists.
• Smaller vendor than the enterprise incumbents.
• Own-customer recruiting needs clean CRM data to work.

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

Research-ops teams consolidating a fragmented toolchain.