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testcritic

Respondent vs Maze

Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.

Entry price

From $40 per B2C session at pay-as-you-go, plus the incentive you set

Paid

Free tier available

Free tier

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

Session fees are $40 B2C and $80 B2B at pay-as-you-go, falling about 30% on a large annual commitment, with a further discount for unmoderated studies. You are only charged for completed sessions — no-shows and screen-outs are free. Incentives are separate and you fund them: $100-$400 per professional B2B participant is normal, on top of the session 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Maze has withdrawn public pricing — its pricing page is now a feature-comparison table where every paid tier resolves to a form, so the Starter figures quoted by third-party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.

Free tier

No subscription required; pay per completed session.

Free plan with a limited number of studies and responses per month.

Open source

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

Codeless
Codeless

Platforms

Web
WebiOSAndroid

Fits teams

StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Established

Respondent · since 2016

Widely used

Maze · since 2018

Strengths

  • Reaches professional segments that general panels simply do not contain.
  • Verification meaningfully reduces participants misrepresenting their role.
  • No subscription commitment.
  • 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.

Limitations

  • Expensive per participant once incentives are included.
  • Recruitment only, no research tooling.
  • Some fraudulent participation persists despite verification.
  • 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.

Best for

B2B product teams that need to talk to specific professional roles.

Product and design teams validating flows early and often.

All of these integrate with: Slack.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.