TL;DR: Dynata is the world's largest first-party data platform — a panel of 62M+ consumers and business professionals built for buying sample at scale and activating it for media targeting. Koji is an AI-native customer research platform that designs, moderates, and analyzes the research itself: AI-moderated voice and text interviews, six structured question types, and automatic thematic analysis that turns raw conversations into a one-click report in hours. They sit at different layers of the research stack. If you need to field a large quantitative survey to a representative consumer panel, Dynata's reach is hard to beat. If you need to understand why customers behave the way they do — and you want answers this afternoon, not in three weeks — Koji is the modern choice. And Koji works with whatever audience you already have: your customer list, a shared link, or sample you buy elsewhere.
Dynata vs Koji at a glance
| Dynata | Koji | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | First-party data panel + survey + activation | AI-native customer research platform |
| Core strength | Massive representative sample (62M+ members) | AI-moderated interviews + automatic analysis |
| Research method | Mostly quantitative surveys | Qualitative depth at quantitative scale |
| Moderation | Unmoderated surveys | AI moderator probes every answer |
| Analysis | Dashboards + managed services | Automatic thematic analysis, one-click report |
| Speed to insight | Days to weeks (fielding + analysis) | Hours |
| Pricing | Custom quote, opaque | Transparent, self-serve, free tier |
| Best for | Large-scale brand/market quant studies | Understanding the why behind behavior |
What is Dynata?
Dynata bills itself as the world's largest first-party data platform for insights, activation, and measurement, with global reach across more than 62 million consumers and business professionals. Its suite spans panel data, survey tools, reporting and visualization, media measurement, and audience activation — meaning you can field a study and then re-target the same validated audiences across digital, social, and programmatic channels. In 2020 Dynata launched a QualityScore model that evaluates respondent behavior in real time to flag fraud and inattentiveness, and as of June 2025 extended that fraud-detection layer to third-party survey programming tools.
Dynata operates both as self-service software and as a fully managed research services provider. That breadth is its biggest advantage — and its biggest friction. Pricing is quote-based and not transparent, so it is difficult to estimate cost without a formal sales process. Reviewers consistently praise the panel's quality and breadth but report performance lags loading surveys, fiddly skip-logic workflows, and recurring frustration with survey disqualifications and payment issues.
Dynata is, fundamentally, a sample and activation business. It is excellent at putting your questionnaire in front of a representative crowd. It is not designed to write better questions for you, moderate the conversation, or interpret open-ended answers automatically — that work still falls to you or to a managed-services bill.
What is Koji?
Koji is an AI-native customer research platform built around a different premise: the bottleneck in modern research isn't access to respondents — it's the time and expertise it takes to run a good interview and analyze what people actually said. Koji closes that gap end to end.
- AI-moderated voice and text interviews. Koji's AI interviewer conducts natural, two-way conversations — asking your questions, then probing follow-ups in real time the way a skilled researcher would. No moderator scheduling, no moderator bias.
- Six structured question types. Koji combines survey-grade structure with interview-grade depth:
open_ended,scale,single_choice,multiple_choice,ranking, andyes_no. You get countable, chartable data and the open-ended "why" behind every number, because the AI probes on top of each structured question. See the structured questions guide. - Automatic thematic analysis. Every transcript is coded automatically into descriptive and in-vivo themes, then clustered into a per-question codebook across all respondents — the manual coding work that normally takes analysts days. Learn how it works in the thematic analysis guide.
- One-click reports. From question to insight in hours, not weeks — with quotes grounded in the original transcript.
Why does the moderation matter so much? Because the open-ended answers — the ones that explain behavior — are exactly the ones respondents skip in static surveys. Pew Research found open-ended survey questions carry an average item-nonresponse rate around 18%, versus just 1–2% for closed-ended ones. A static panel survey collects the easy boxes and loses the story. Koji's AI moderator keeps people talking, so the depth survives. (More on this in AI interviews vs surveys.)
Where Dynata wins
Be honest about the trade-off. Dynata is the right tool when:
- You need large, representative B2C sample across many markets and demographics.
- Your study is fundamentally quantitative — incidence, market sizing, brand tracking at national scale.
- You want to activate survey audiences for media targeting afterward.
- You have budget for managed services and a multi-week timeline.
The global market research industry was worth roughly $150 billion in 2025, and a large slice of that spend exists precisely because representative panels like Dynata's are expensive to build and operate. That reach is real value.
Where Koji wins
Koji is the better choice when the question is why, not just how many:
- Qualitative depth at scale. Run 20, 50, or 200 AI-moderated interviews in parallel and get the nuance of a one-on-one conversation without the calendar.
- Speed. Insights in hours. 83% of market research professionals planned to invest in AI for research in 2025, and 47% already use AI regularly — largely to collapse exactly this timeline.
- No analysis backlog. Automatic thematic analysis and one-click reports mean you don't pay a managed-services line item to make sense of open ends.
- Transparent, self-serve pricing — no formal quote, no six-figure floor.
- Bring your own audience. Share a link, email your customer list, or embed the interview. You're not locked into one panel.
Pricing: transparent vs quote-only
Dynata pricing is custom and opaque — you request a quote tailored to scope. Koji is the opposite: a free tier with 10 credits, then Insights at €29/mo and Interviews at €79/mo, with credits priced per conversation (text = 1 credit, voice = 3). A quality gate means only substantive conversations consume credits. For most teams, a full Koji study costs a fraction of a single managed-panel engagement — and you can start today without talking to sales.
Which should you choose?
It's not strictly either/or. The smartest modern stack often pairs them: buy representative sample from a panel like Dynata when you truly need national quant — then run the depth interviews in Koji to understand the motivations behind the numbers. But for the majority of product, UX, and growth teams who need to understand customers continuously and act this week, Koji replaces the slow, expensive parts of the legacy model with an AI-native workflow that asks, listens, probes, and analyzes on its own.
Start with Koji
You don't need a panel contract or a research degree to understand your customers. Create a free Koji account, point the AI interviewer at your own audience, and get a thematic report from real conversations in hours. From question to insight, 10x faster — no moderator bias, no analysis backlog, no quote required.
