Prolific vs Survicate

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

From $114 per month (annual billing, Growth)

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.

Billed on monthly survey responses, so the cost rises exactly when a survey is working. Seats and integration count are gated by tier as well, which is what usually forces the upgrade rather than the response cap.

No subscription; pay per participant.

10-day trial, no card. No permanently free tier.

Widely used

Prolific · since 2014

Established

Survicate · since 2015

• 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 survey, every channel — web, in-product, email, mobile and link — with the answers pooled rather than siloed per tool.
• Event-triggered in-product surveys catch people at the moment the behaviour happened.
• CRM and support integrations attach responses to a real customer record instead of an anonymous id.

• 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.

• Priced by responses, which penalises the surveys that get answered.
• It collects opinions, not observed behaviour; pair it with replay or analytics rather than reading it alone.
• Survey fatigue is a real cost to your product, and nothing in the tool stops you over-asking.

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

Product teams that want the 'why' behind an analytics drop-off without commissioning a research study.