TL;DR: Cint is the world's largest programmatic sample marketplace — an exchange that connects your survey to hundreds of millions of respondents through 800+ integrated suppliers and 600+ exclusive panels, billed by the completed interview. It solves one problem brilliantly: getting people to take your survey. Koji solves the other half — and arguably the harder half: actually running a good interview and analyzing what people said. Koji is an AI-native research platform with AI-moderated voice and text interviews, six structured question types, and automatic thematic analysis that produces a one-click report in hours. Cint gives you respondents; Koji gives you insight. If you already have an audience — your own customers, users, or community — Koji replaces both the survey tool and the analyst, and you may not need a sample marketplace at all.
Cint vs Koji at a glance
| Cint | Koji | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Programmatic sample marketplace | AI-native research platform |
| What it provides | Respondents (supply) | The interview + the analysis |
| You still need | A survey tool + an analyst | Just your questions |
| Method | Whatever survey you bring | AI-moderated interviews + structured Qs |
| Analysis | Not included | Automatic thematic analysis + reports |
| Pricing | Per complete (rate card or dynamic) | Transparent per-conversation credits |
| Best for | Buying representative sample at scale | Understanding your existing audience deeply |
What is Cint?
The Cint Exchange describes itself as the world's largest programmatic research marketplace, connecting researchers, agencies, and brands to a pool of hundreds of millions of people. Its job is matching: connecting your study "to the right people, at the right time, for the right price." Under the hood, Cint aggregates supply from more than 800 integrated suppliers and 600+ exclusive panels, and supports both rate-card and dynamic (programmatic) pricing. Billing is monthly, based on the total volume of completes you run — regardless of target group or project status. The most sophisticated buyers use Cint's APIs to automate per-interview pricing based on survey conditions, time-in-field, and budget.
Here's the critical thing to understand: Cint is infrastructure, not a research tool. It is a supply layer. You bring the questionnaire (built in your own survey platform), Cint routes respondents to it, and you bring the analysis (done by you, your team, or an agency). Cint is exceptional at the sourcing problem. It does nothing to help you write better questions, moderate the conversation, or interpret the answers.
What is Koji?
Koji attacks the parts of research that Cint deliberately leaves to you — the asking and the analyzing — and automates them with AI.
- AI-moderated voice and text interviews. Instead of a flat questionnaire, Koji's AI interviewer holds a real two-way conversation: it asks your questions, hears the answer, and probes follow-ups in real time — surfacing the why a static survey never reaches. See AI interviews vs surveys.
- Six structured question types.
open_ended,scale,single_choice,multiple_choice,ranking, andyes_no— quantitative structure plus qualitative depth in the same study, because the AI probes on top of every structured answer. - Automatic thematic analysis. Transcripts are coded into themes and clustered into a per-question codebook across every respondent — automatically. No manual tagging, no analyst backlog.
- One-click reports with quotes grounded in the source transcript.
Because the interview is conversational and AI-moderated, it also sidesteps a structural weakness of marketplace-sourced surveys: fatigue and abandonment. Completion rates fall sharply once a survey runs past 7–8 minutes — anywhere from a 5% to 20% drop — and a study that drops from 10 to 40 questions can see completion fall from roughly 89% to 79%. When you pay per complete, every abandon is wasted money. A conversation that adapts to the respondent holds attention far better than a 40-question grid. (More: survey data quality guide.)
Where Cint wins
Cint is the right layer when:
- You don't have your own audience and need to reach a representative or hard-to-find population.
- You're running large-scale quantitative studies and need thousands of completes fast.
- You want programmatic, API-driven sourcing integrated into an existing research-ops pipeline.
- You already own a survey platform and analysis workflow and only need supply.
This is real, defensible value — and the broader market reflects it. Online and mobile quantitative research accounts for roughly 35% of worldwide market research revenue, versus just 6% for online qualitative. The quant-at-scale machine is big, and Cint is plumbing for it.
Where Koji wins
Koji is the better choice when:
- You already have an audience — customers, trial users, churned accounts, a community — and want depth from them, not strangers.
- You need the qualitative "why," not just incidence and counts.
- You want analysis included, not a separate cost center. The AI-based research services market was worth $7.97B in 2025 and is projected to reach $35.42B by 2035 (a 16.1% CAGR) — growth driven overwhelmingly by automating the analysis layer Cint doesn't touch.
- You want a research screener and a moderated conversation in one place. Build your qualification logic with research screener questions, then let the AI take qualified respondents straight into the interview.
- You want to start today, self-serve, without negotiating supplier rates.
Pricing: per-complete supply vs per-conversation insight
Cint bills monthly on completes — a pure supply cost that sits on top of whatever you pay for survey software and analysis. Koji folds the asking and analyzing into one transparent, self-serve price: a free tier (10 credits), then Insights at €29/mo and Interviews at €79/mo, with per-conversation credits (text = 1, voice = 3) and a quality gate so only substantive conversations are billed. If you're bringing your own audience, Koji is often the entire cost of the study.
Which should you choose?
Different layers, different jobs. If your bottleneck is reaching strangers at scale for quant, Cint is purpose-built — and you can route that sample into a Koji interview if you want depth on top. But if your bottleneck is understanding the customers you already have — quickly, with the analysis done for you — Koji is the AI-native platform that replaces the survey tool, the moderator, and the analyst in a single workflow.
A typical Koji workflow (no marketplace required)
Say you run product at a B2B SaaS company and 30 accounts churned last quarter. With a sample marketplace you would be sourcing strangers; with Koji you talk to the people who actually left. Drop your churned-account emails into a Koji study, set a short brief — what triggered the cancellation, what nearly kept them, what they switched to — and let the AI interviewer run voice or text conversations on each respondent's schedule. It probes every answer: when someone says "too expensive," the AI asks what they compared it against and what would have justified the price. Within a day you have 20+ completed interviews, automatically coded into themes like "missing integration," "onboarding friction," and "champion left," each backed by verbatim quotes. No separate survey tool, no panel invoice, no analyst queue — just the report. That is the workflow a supply-only model like Cint cannot deliver on its own, because sourcing respondents was never the part that made research slow. The slow parts were writing good questions, moderating the conversation, and analyzing the answers — and those are exactly what Koji automates. See customer discovery interviews at scale for the full pattern.
Start with Koji
Stop paying separately for the survey, the sample, and the analyst. Create a free Koji account, point the AI interviewer at your own audience, and get a thematic report from real conversations in hours — no marketplace contract, no manual coding, no research degree required.
