UserTesting vs User Interviews

Quote on request

From $45 per participant (indicative, general population)

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

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

No free tier; demo and trial on request.

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

Category standard

UserTesting (Thoma Bravo) · since 2007

Widely used

User Interviews · since 2015

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

Enterprises running continuous research with dedicated researchers.

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