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
PaidFree tier available
Free tierWhat 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Maze has withdrawn public pricing — its pricing page is now a feature-comparison table where every paid tier resolves to a form, so the Starter figures quoted by third-party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
Platforms
Fits teams
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.