Short answer: Askable bundles a participant panel with research tools and sells credits that include the incentive. The right alternative depends on what you want instead. For a big consumer and B2B panel, User Interviews. For senior B2B professionals, Respondent. For fast, cheap academic-style samples, Prolific. For quick unmoderated tests with a panel, Lyssna. For managing your own customers as a panel, Great Question or Ethnio. And if you want recruitment, AI-moderated interviews and the report in one place, on published prices, try Koji.
Why recruitment is the part teams shop around for
Recruiting is still the slowest step in most studies. In User Interviews' State of User Research 2025, 54% of researchers said time to recruit was a struggle, down from 61% the year before. People also fail to turn up: MeasuringU recommends planning for about 10% no-shows in moderated studies, and cites User Interviews data across 14,000 studies showing 9%. Meanwhile demand keeps climbing: 66% of respondents in Maze's Future of User Research Report 2026 said demand for research had grown.
Photo by Centre for Ageing Better on Unsplash
So the platform you pick for recruitment shapes how many studies you can run. That is why teams compare Askable with the alternatives below.
What Askable offers
Askable combines a participant panel with tools for moderated, unmoderated and in-person sessions, surveys and an AI Moderator that runs interviews on its own in more than 15 languages. It says its panel has millions of verified participants across more than 50 countries, with active local recruitment concentrated in the US, the UK, Australia and New Zealand.
Pricing works in credits: one credit buys one participant, and the incentive is included in the credit price. Its Australian site lists pay-as-you-go credits at $159 each, with discounts on packs, and credits last 12 months. Plans with more tools are quoted through sales.
Teams look elsewhere when they need a different panel, want to interview their own customers without paying a per-participant credit, or want the interviews moderated without booking sessions.
Askable alternatives at a glance
| Tool | What it is | How you pay | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Koji | AI interviews, recruitment and reports in one | Monthly credits per interview | Interviews without scheduling |
| User Interviews | Recruitment marketplace and panel CRM | Per session, incentives on top | Large consumer and B2B panel |
| Respondent | Recruitment marketplace for professionals | Per session, incentives on top | Senior B2B participants |
| Prolific | Online participant pool | Service fee on participant pay | Fast academic-style studies |
| Lyssna | Unmoderated testing with a panel | Monthly plan, panel by test length | Quick design and usability tests |
| Great Question | Research ops and customer panel CRM | Per seat, panel by credit | Managing your own customer panel |
| Ethnio | Intercept recruiting from your site or app | Monthly plan | Recruiting your live users |
1. Koji: recruit and interview in one place
Most recruitment tools stop when the participant arrives. Then someone still has to run the session, take notes and write it up. Koji does the whole loop: an AI interviewer runs every conversation by voice, text or phone, asks follow-ups, and turns the interviews into a report where each finding links to its quotes.
Ways to get participants:
- Koji's research panel. On paid plans, build an audience from the Panel recruit tab and see the cost before you launch. A soft launch fields about 10% of the goal first so you can check the interviews. See panel recruitment.
- Your own customers. Keep a workspace-wide Participants directory, import a CSV, group people into audiences and email them a branded invitation with a personal link. See managing research participants.
- A plain link. Share it anywhere, with screening questions that turn away people who do not qualify.
Incentives are built in on paid plans: set an amount from €10 to €500 per participant, approve each reward next to the interview's quality score, and Koji emails the participant a link to claim a gift card, prepaid Visa card or charity donation.
Pricing: you start free with 10 credits. Insights is €29 a month with 29 credits, Interviews is €79 a month with 79 credits, and Enterprise is priced on request. A text interview uses 1 credit and a voice interview 3, and only interviews with a quality score of 3 or more use credits.
Good to know: Koji does not run in-person sessions or unmoderated prototype tests.
2. User Interviews: the big general panel
User Interviews is a recruitment marketplace with a panel of more than 6 million participants, plus Research Hub for managing your own. UserTesting bought it in January 2026, and the parent company was renamed Auros in September. User Interviews says the product stays standalone and its pricing is unchanged.
Pricing: pay per session, with incentives billed separately. UXtweak's pricing review puts pay-as-you-go at $49 per consumer session and $98 per B2B session.
Pick it if you need a wide pool of consumers and professionals and will run the sessions yourself.
3. Respondent: professionals and decision makers
Respondent focuses on B2B and professional participants and says its pool has about 4 million people. You pay a fee per completed session on top of the incentive you set.
Pick it if your studies need IT buyers, finance leads or other hard-to-reach professionals.
4. Prolific: fast samples with fair pay rules
Prolific is an online pool used heavily in academic research and AI training, with more than 200,000 active participants across 43 countries. It enforces a minimum pay of £6 or $8 an hour and recommends £9 or $12. Its service fee is 42.8% of participant pay for companies and 33.3% for academic and non-profit accounts.
Pick it if you run surveys or short tasks with large general samples and want results within hours.
5. Lyssna: quick tests with a built-in panel
Lyssna, formerly UsabilityHub, is a self-serve tool for surveys, first-click, preference and usability tests, plus interviews. Its research panel has more than 690,000 participants in 124 countries, priced at $1 per minute of test length. Plans start at $89 a month, or $75 a month billed annually.
Pick it if most of your research is short unmoderated design tests.
6. Great Question: your customers as a panel
Great Question is a research operations platform: a CRM for your own participants, scheduling, incentives, research methods and a repository. Self-serve costs $129 per seat per month, observer seats are free, and an integrated panel is available on pay-as-you-go credits.
Pick it if you mostly research your own customers and need a system to manage who was contacted, when and with what reward.
7. Ethnio: intercept your live users
Ethnio recruits people while they are on your website or app, with screeners, scheduling and panel management. It has no public participant pool. Capterra lists plans from about $79 a month, with native app intercepts on Enterprise.
Pick it if you want to talk to people right after they do something in your product.
How to choose a recruitment setup
Before you compare prices, answer these about your own research:
- How many interviews you need a month, and who moderates each one
- Whether you mostly talk to your own customers or to outside participants
- Whether you need B2B professionals, and what each one costs to recruit
- Who pays incentives, in which countries, and what fees apply
- How no-shows and fraudulent participants are replaced or refunded
- Where notes, recordings and themes live once sessions end
- How many seats you need, and who only needs to view results
- What happens to your participant data if you switch tools
The first question decides most of it. If someone on your team has to moderate every session, a panel only moves the bottleneck from recruiting to scheduling. That is where an AI interviewer changes the maths: participants answer when it suits them, no-shows stop costing you a moderator hour, and the report is ready when the last interview finishes.
Run your next study on Koji
Pick the study you would normally recruit 10 participants for. Start free on Koji, preview the interview yourself, then send it to your customers or recruit from the panel. You get the interviews, the incentives and the report in one place.
