TL;DR: Askable is a recruitment-first research operations platform — its core strength is sourcing real participants (500,000+ verified across 50+ countries) and helping you run traditional moderated and unmoderated studies. Koji is an AI-native customer research platform that actually conducts the interview for you: AI-moderated voice and text interviews, six structured question types in a single study, automatic thematic analysis, and one-click reports starting at €29/month with 10 free credits. If your only bottleneck is finding participants, Askable helps. If your bottleneck is the time and expertise to run interviews and turn them into insight, Koji is the better choice in 2026.
Quick comparison: Koji vs Askable at a glance
| Feature | Koji | Askable |
|---|---|---|
| Category | AI-native customer research | Recruitment + research ops |
| Starting price | €29/month (Insights) · 10 free credits | Pay-per-participant (≈$20 unmoderated, ≈$80 moderated, ≈$100 in-person) |
| AI-moderated voice interviews | Yes — ElevenLabs-powered, adaptive probing | No — you or a moderator run the session |
| AI-moderated text interviews | Yes | No |
| Structured question types | 6 (open-ended, scale, single choice, multiple choice, ranking, yes/no) | Survey + task builder |
| Automatic thematic analysis | Yes, across every response | AI summaries (assist-level) |
| One-click reports | Yes | Manual synthesis + AI summaries |
| Participant panel | Bring-your-own + integrations | 500,000+ verified, 50+ countries |
| Best for | Founders, PMs, agencies, lean research teams | Teams whose #1 need is recruitment |
The core difference: recruiting interviews vs running them
Askable solves the front of the research funnel. Its panel of 500,000+ verified participants spans 50+ countries with a reported 97.8% show rate, and it can deliver decision-ready insights within roughly 48 hours. You get a drag-and-drop study builder, live video moderation, and methods such as card sorting, tree testing, surveys, and diary studies. AI mostly appears as summary assistance layered on top of data you have already collected.
But Askable still assumes you are the researcher. Someone has to write the discussion guide, moderate the live sessions (or design the unmoderated task), watch the recordings, and synthesize the themes. That is fine when you have a dedicated research team. It is a wall when you are a founder or PM doing research between everything else.
Koji removes that wall. Instead of handing you tools to run interviews, Koji is the interviewer. You describe what you want to learn, and Koji's customizable AI consultant builds the study, moderates AI voice or text interviews with adaptive follow-up probing, and then runs automatic thematic analysis to produce a one-click report. The work that takes a research team a week — moderating, transcribing, coding, and writing up — happens in hours.
Why this matters in 2026
The research tooling market is consolidating around automation. The user research software market is valued at roughly $2.41 billion in 2026 and is projected to reach $4.12 billion by 2035, and more than 78% of enterprises now run at least one user research platform inside their product lifecycle. At the same time, traditional data collection is breaking down: email survey response rates frequently dip below 5%, and even well-designed campaigns rarely clear 30% without incentives.
That is exactly the gap AI-moderated interviews fill. Conversational, spoken responses are roughly 3x longer than typed answers and achieve up to 70% higher completion than email or SMS surveys — because talking to an interviewer that listens and follows up feels like a conversation, not a chore. Askable can recruit the people. Koji turns each of those conversations into structured, analyzed insight automatically.
Pricing: pay-per-participant vs transparent subscription
Askable uses a usage-based model priced around $20 per unmoderated task, $80 per moderated interview, and $100 per in-person session, with participant recruitment bundled in. That is competitive when your headache is sourcing — you are effectively paying for vetted people who show up. But costs scale linearly with every study, and you are still paying separately, in time, for the moderation and analysis labor.
Koji's pricing is a transparent subscription: €29/month for Insights (29 credits) or €79/month for Interviews (79 credits), plus 10 free credits to start. A text interview costs 1 credit and a voice interview costs 3 credits, and Koji only charges for conversations that pass its quality gate (scoring 3+) — so junk responses do not burn your budget. For a founder validating a product or a PM running weekly discovery, Koji's all-in cost is dramatically lower because the moderation and synthesis are included, not extra.
Where Askable is genuinely the better pick
Askable wins when recruitment is the project: you need verified, incentivized participants in specific countries, fast, with a high show rate, and you already have researchers to run the sessions. Its panel breadth, in-person research support, and methods like tree testing and diary studies are real strengths that a pure AI-interview platform does not replicate. If you are a mature UX research org that mainly needs a reliable supply of the right humans, Askable is a strong recruitment engine.
For sourcing respondents you do not already have, you can bring those people into Koji too — Koji uses a bring-your-own-respondents model and links out to recruitment when you need fresh participants. See our guide to participant recruitment platforms and how to recruit user research participants for the full landscape.
Where Koji wins
- It runs the interview. AI-moderated voice and text interviews with adaptive probing replace the need to schedule and personally moderate every session.
- Six structured question types in one study. Mix open-ended, scale, single choice, multiple choice, ranking, and yes/no questions to get qualitative depth and quantitative structure in the same study. See survey question types.
- Automatic thematic analysis. Themes, quotes, and patterns surface across every transcript without manual coding.
- One-click reports. Go from raw conversations to a shareable report in hours, not weeks — read more on your research report.
- No moderator bias. Every participant gets the same calm, consistent, judgment-free interviewer.
- Voice depth at scale. Learn how spoken feedback outperforms static forms in our AI voice surveys guide.
The verdict
Askable and Koji are not really the same product. Askable is a recruitment and research-operations layer for teams that already have the people and process to run studies. Koji is an AI-native research engine that designs, moderates, and analyzes interviews end to end — built for founders, PMs, agencies, and lean research teams who need insight in hours without a research department.
If your blocker is "I cannot find participants," Askable is worth it. If your blocker is "I do not have time or expertise to run and analyze interviews," Koji gets you from question to insight 10x faster — and you can start free.
Try Koji free
Stop choosing between speed and depth. Start with Koji free — get 10 credits, spin up an AI-moderated study with six structured question types, and have an analyzed report in hours. From question to insight, no research expertise required.
