Prolific vs Lyssna

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

From $166 per month (Growth, billed 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.

Growth buys 5 in-depth studies a month, 5 seats and unlimited self-recruited responses. Panel responses are purchased separately per participant, typically a low single-digit dollar amount for general audiences.

No subscription; pay per participant.

Free plan: unlimited quick studies, 3 seats and 15 self-recruited responses.

Widely used

Prolific · since 2014

Established

Lyssna · since 2011

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

• Extremely fast — a first-click test can be designed, run and answered inside an hour.
• Cheap enough to use for routine design decisions rather than special projects.
• Simple test types that non-researchers can run correctly.

• 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.

• Narrow: it answers specific comparative questions, not exploratory ones.
• No moderated sessions.
• Panel is general-population; niche B2B audiences are hard to reach.

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

Design teams that want quick evidence for everyday interface decisions.