User Interviews vs UserTesting

From $45 per participant (indicative, general population)

Quote on request

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

Annual contracts, historically in the tens of thousands. Priced by seats and study volume, not per session.

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

No free tier; demo and trial on request.

Widely used

User Interviews · since 2015

Category standard

UserTesting (Thoma Bravo) · since 2007

• 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.

• The deepest participant panel, including hard-to-reach professional segments.
• Sessions come back within hours, not days.
• Analysis tooling — transcripts, sentiment, clip creation — makes findings shareable.

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

• Expensive with a high minimum commitment; unaffordable for small teams.
• Panel participants are experienced testers, which can skew behaviour towards articulate narration.
• Annual contracts do not suit occasional research needs.

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

Enterprises running continuous research with dedicated researchers.