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testcritic

User Interviews 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 $49 per session (pay-as-you-go; $41 and $36 on annual commitments)

Paid

Free tier available

Free tier

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

Per-participant recruiting fee plus the incentive you choose. Specialist B2B professionals cost considerably more.

Maze has withdrawn public pricing — its pricing page is now a feature-comparison table where every paid tier resolves to a form, so the Starter figures quoted by third-party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

Free to manage your own participants; recruitment is pay-per-participant.

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

Widely used

User Interviews · since 2015

Widely used

Maze · since 2018

Strengths

  • Solves recruiting, which is the actual bottleneck in most research programmes.
  • Handles incentive payment and scheduling logistics, saving substantial coordinator time.
  • Works with whatever session tooling you already use.
  • 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

  • No testing or analysis features — it is recruitment only.
  • Panel is strongest in North America.
  • Costs mount quickly for specialist B2B roles.
  • 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

Teams whose research is blocked on finding and paying the right participants.

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.