Userlytics vs Prolific

From $30 per session (volume/annual rates; platform access from $699/month)

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

Two shapes. Buy sessions project-by-project with no subscription (5-session minimum), or take a self-recruitment subscription — Premium $699/month for 5 seats and 50 participants, Advanced from $999/month for 10 seats and unlimited self-recruited participants. Panel sessions go as low as $30 on the Enterprise plan. The per-session option suits intermittent research; the subscriptions only pay off with steady volume.

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.

Free trial with a small number of sessions.

No subscription; pay per participant.

Established

Userlytics · since 2009

Widely used

Prolific · since 2014

• Pay-as-you-go avoids an annual commitment for occasional studies.
• Both moderated and unmoderated in one platform.
• Genuinely international panel including many non-English markets.

• Notably better data quality than generic survey panels.
• Fine-grained prescreening across hundreds of demographic attributes.
• No subscription — pay only for what you run.

• Interface is less polished than the market leaders.
• Analysis tooling is basic compared to UserTesting.
• Panel quality varies by market.

• 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.

Teams that research a few times a quarter and cannot justify an annual platform contract.

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