{"site":{"name":"Koji","description":"AI-native customer research platform that helps teams conduct, analyze, and synthesize customer interviews at scale.","url":"https://www.koji.so","contentTypes":["blog","documentation"],"lastUpdated":"2026-05-04T17:41:44.883Z"},"content":[{"type":"blog","id":"4d1db8ad-f83a-4a88-b8ba-81558173cf4c","slug":"koji-vs-strella-2026","title":"Koji vs Strella: The Real Comparison of AI-Moderated Research Platforms (2026)","url":"https://www.koji.so/blog/koji-vs-strella-2026","summary":"Strella is an enterprise AI-moderated interview platform with seat-based pricing and $1.6M ARR. Koji is the AI-native alternative for founders, PMs, and small teams: transparent €29/mo pricing, six structured question types in one study, customizable AI consultant, and quality-gated billing.","content":"# Koji vs Strella: The Real Comparison of AI-Moderated Research Platforms (2026)\n\n**TL;DR:** Strella and Koji both run AI-moderated customer interviews, but they target very different teams. Strella is enterprise-focused with seat-based pricing and a synthesis-first workflow ($1.6M ARR with 150% net dollar retention reported by Bessemer in 2025). Koji is the AI-native research platform built for founders, PMs, agencies, and small research teams who need transparent pricing (€29/month), six structured question types in one study, and a customizable AI consultant that scaffolds the entire research process. If you are not running an enterprise research org, Koji is the better fit.\n\n## Quick comparison: Koji vs Strella at a glance\n\n| Feature | Koji | Strella |\n|---|---|---|\n| Starting price | €29/month (Insights plan) | Custom enterprise pricing, no public tier |\n| Free tier | Yes, 10 free credits at signup | No |\n| Pricing model | Credit-based (1 credit/text, 3/voice) | Seat-based |\n| AI-moderated voice interviews | Yes, ElevenLabs-powered | Yes |\n| AI-moderated text interviews | Yes | Yes |\n| Structured question types | 6 (open, scale, single choice, multi choice, ranking, yes/no) | Primarily open-ended |\n| Customizable AI consultant | Yes, persona-tunable to your domain | Limited |\n| Recruitment panel | Bring-your-own + integrations | Built-in 3M+ panel |\n| Quality-gated billing | Yes, only conversations scoring 3+ count | No |\n| One-click insight reports | Yes | Yes (highlight reels) |\n| Best for | Founders, PMs, agencies, small research teams | Enterprise research orgs |\n\n## What is Strella?\n\nStrella is an AI-powered customer research platform founded in 2023 that uses AI to run in-depth interviews and generate insights in hours instead of weeks. According to Bessemer Venture Partners, Strella hit $1.6M ARR in its first year of monetization and posted over 150% net dollar retention on its first cohort of renewals — best-in-class numbers that reflect strong adoption inside customer-obsessed enterprises like Amazon, Duolingo, and Chobani.\n\nStrella centers on three workflows:\n\n1. **AI-moderated interviews** — text-first conversations that can escalate to video when deeper exploration is needed, with multilingual support and 24/7 availability\n2. **Automatic theme synthesis** — pattern clustering across conversations, typically surfacing 2 to 4 levels of follow-up themes\n3. **Highlight reels** — auto-generated video clips designed for stakeholder communication\n\nStrella also bundles a global participant panel of over three million individuals through a partnership with User Interviews, which makes recruitment frictionless inside the platform.\n\n## What is Koji?\n\nKoji is an AI-native customer research platform that lets anyone — founder, PM, marketer, agency strategist — design a study, run AI-moderated interviews at scale, and turn the responses into a publishable insight report in a single workflow. It is built around the idea that customer research should not require a research degree, a vendor procurement cycle, or a six-figure contract.\n\nKoji's differentiators:\n\n- **Voice interviews powered by ElevenLabs** that sound natural and adaptively probe like a senior interviewer would\n- **Six structured question types in one study**: open-ended, scale, single choice, multiple choice, ranking, and yes/no — so you can mix qualitative depth with quantitative rigor without running a separate survey\n- **Custom AI consultants** you can persona-tune to your industry, brand voice, and research goals\n- **Quality-gated credits** that only count interviews scoring 3 or higher on the quality rubric — drop-offs and spam responses do not consume credits\n- **Transparent pricing** starting at €29/month for the Insights plan and €79/month for the Interviews plan, with €1 flat overage and no procurement required\n\n## Where Koji and Strella differ\n\n### 1. Pricing transparency\n\nStrella does not publish pricing publicly. According to public coverage of its go-to-market, Strella deliberately chose seat-based pricing to eliminate per-project budget approval inside large research organizations. That is a great fit for an enterprise research lead who already has buy-in, but it is a barrier for solo founders or product teams who need to start small and prove value before scaling.\n\nKoji publishes everything: €29/month for 29 credits on Insights, €79/month for 79 credits on Interviews, €1 flat overage, and a one-time grant of 10 free credits when you sign up. You can run your first AI-moderated interview without a sales call.\n\n### 2. Who the product is built for\n\nStrella is optimized for research professionals who already do qualitative work and want to scale it. Its synthesis layer assumes you know how to write a discussion guide, structure probes, and interpret thematic clusters. The seat-based pricing reinforces this — the platform pays off most when many trained researchers use it constantly.\n\nKoji is built for the much larger market of teams who do not have a researcher: founders validating a product idea, PMs running discovery sprints, marketers pressure-testing a value proposition, agencies serving SMB clients. The AI consultant scaffolds the entire process — from question generation to interview moderation to insight reporting — so even a first-time researcher can publish a defensible study.\n\n### 3. Question structure\n\nStrella's interviews are predominantly open-ended with AI follow-ups (typically 2 to 4 levels deep). That is powerful for qualitative depth but limiting if you also need quantitative comparability across respondents.\n\nKoji supports six structured question types in the same study, so a single interview can ask:\n\n- \"On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us?\" (scale)\n- \"Rank these four features by importance\" (ranking)\n- \"Tell me about the last time you switched tools\" (open-ended with adaptive voice probing)\n- \"Which of these three plans would you buy?\" (single choice)\n\nThe result is a chartable report alongside qualitative depth, all in one interview. For most product teams that means one tool replaces both their survey platform (Typeform, SurveyMonkey) and their interview tool.\n\n### 4. Recruitment\n\nStrella's built-in 3M+ panel is a real advantage for B2C research at enterprise scale, especially when you need hundreds of interviews fast. Koji takes a bring-your-own-respondents approach, which is ideal for B2B research where your customer list is the panel, and for founders who want to interview their actual users rather than a paid sample. Koji also integrates with major participant providers when you need to source new respondents.\n\n### 5. Billing fairness\n\nStrella charges per seat regardless of how much you use the platform. Koji uses a credit model with a quality gate: a credit is only consumed when the conversation scores 3 or higher on the response-quality rubric. If a participant drops off after one question or sends spam, you do not pay. This matters most for teams running studies with cold panels where drop-off rates are real.\n\n## When to choose Strella\n\n- You are an enterprise research team with budget for seat-based licenses\n- You need a built-in B2C participant panel to reach hundreds of respondents per study\n- You already have research infrastructure and want a fast synthesis layer on top\n- Your stakeholder communication relies heavily on highlight reels\n\n## When to choose Koji\n\n- You are a founder, PM, marketer, or agency without a dedicated researcher\n- You want transparent pricing and the ability to start under €30/month\n- You need a mix of qualitative and quantitative data in one study (six question types)\n- You are researching your own users (B2B SaaS, customer base, beta list)\n- You want a customizable AI consultant tuned to your industry\n- You want billing tied to quality, not seat count\n\n## The bigger picture: AI-moderated research in 2026\n\nThe AI agents market is projected to reach $10.91 billion in 2026, growing at a 45.8% CAGR through 2030. AI-moderated research is one of the highest-velocity sub-categories inside that market because it directly compresses what used to be a 6-to-8 week qualitative cycle into 24 to 48 hours.\n\nStrella has built an excellent enterprise product for that shift. Koji has built an AI-native research platform that finally puts senior-quality interviews and insight reports in the hands of the 99% of teams who cannot justify an enterprise contract. For most product, growth, and founder teams in 2026, that distinction is decisive.\n\n## Get started with Koji\n\nSign up for free and use your 10 starter credits to run your first AI-moderated interview study. No credit card required.\n\n- [Read the docs on AI-moderated interviews](/docs/ai-moderated-interviews)\n- [How to run an AI customer interview](/docs/how-to-run-ai-customer-interview)\n- [See how Koji compares to Outset](/docs/koji-vs-outset)\n- [Browse all comparisons](/blog?category=Research)\n\n[Try Koji free →](https://www.koji.so/signup)","category":"Research","lastModified":"2026-05-04T03:19:44.804547+00:00","metaTitle":"Koji vs Strella 2026: Honest AI Interview Platform Comparison","metaDescription":"Strella vs Koji compared on pricing, question types, recruitment, and accessibility. See why Koji is the better fit for founders, PMs, and small research teams in 2026.","keywords":["koji vs strella","strella alternative","ai moderated interviews","ai customer research platforms","strella pricing","best ai interview tools 2026"],"aiSummary":"Strella is an enterprise AI-moderated interview platform with seat-based pricing and $1.6M ARR. Koji is the AI-native alternative for founders, PMs, and small teams: transparent €29/mo pricing, six structured question types in one study, customizable AI consultant, and quality-gated billing.","aiKeywords":["koji vs strella","strella alternative","ai-moderated interviews","enterprise vs accessible research tools","ai consultant","structured questions","voice interviews"],"aiContentType":"comparison","faqItems":[{"answer":"Yes. Koji starts at €29/month for the Insights plan with 10 free starter credits, while Strella does not publish public pricing and uses seat-based enterprise contracts. For founders, PMs, and small research teams, Koji is dramatically more accessible.","question":"Is Koji cheaper than Strella?"},{"answer":"Strella is built for enterprise research professionals and emphasizes a synthesis-first workflow with seat-based pricing. Koji is built for founders, PMs, and agencies who need an end-to-end AI research workflow with transparent pricing, six structured question types in one study, and a customizable AI consultant.","question":"What is the main difference between Koji and Strella?"},{"answer":"Yes. Koji supports AI-moderated voice interviews powered by ElevenLabs, with adaptive probing. It also supports text-mode AI interviews and lets you mix six question types — open-ended, scale, single choice, multiple choice, ranking, and yes/no — in the same study.","question":"Does Koji support voice interviews like Strella?"},{"answer":"Koji uses a bring-your-own-respondents model and integrates with major participant providers when you need to source new respondents. Strella bundles a 3M+ B2C panel through a User Interviews partnership.","question":"Does Koji have a built-in participant panel?"},{"answer":"Pick Strella if you are an enterprise research team with budget for seat-based licenses, need a built-in B2C participant panel for hundreds of interviews per study, and your stakeholder communication relies on highlight reels. For most other teams in 2026, Koji is the better fit.","question":"When should I pick Strella over Koji?"}],"relatedTopics":["ai-moderated-interviews","koji-vs-outset","koji-vs-listen-labs-2026","best-ai-customer-interview-tools-2026","ai-moderated-interview-platforms-2026"]}],"pagination":{"total":1,"returned":1,"offset":0}}