Prolific vs Dovetail

From $6 per participant (indicative, plus platform fee)

From $29 per user/month (indicative)

You set the incentive with a fair-pay minimum, plus a percentage service fee. Far cheaper than moderated-research platforms.

Priced per contributor; viewers are often cheaper or free depending on plan.

No subscription; pay per participant.

Free plan for individuals with limited projects.

Widely used

Prolific · since 2014

Established

Dovetail · since 2017

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

• Turns scattered research into a searchable organisational asset.
• Automatic transcription and AI-assisted theme detection save real analysis hours.
• Good at making findings visible to people who did not attend the sessions.

• 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.

• It stores and analyses research; it does not recruit or run sessions.
• Value depends entirely on discipline — an untagged repository is a folder.
• Costs scale with the number of contributors.

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

Organisations running enough research that findings get lost.