Short answer: Ethnio is a participant management tool. It finds people (through website and app intercepts, screener links and your own participant pool), schedules them and pays their incentives. Your team still runs the interviews and does the analysis. Koji covers the recruiting step and the rest of the study: screening, AI-moderated voice and text interviews, analysis and the report. If you already have researchers booked out with live sessions and only need a cleaner way to fill their calendars, Ethnio fits. If what limits your research is the time it takes to run and synthesise the sessions, Koji is the better choice in 2026.
Koji vs Ethnio at a glance
| Koji | Ethnio | |
|---|---|---|
| Core job | Run the whole study: recruit, screen, interview, analyse, report | Recruit, screen, schedule and pay participants |
| Who runs the interview | An AI interviewer, by voice, text or phone | Your researchers, on your video tool |
| Recruiting your own users | Interview link, embed, personal invite links from a CSV, phone calls | Web and app intercepts, screener links, participant pool |
| External panel | Built in, priced per interview in credits before launch | Not a panel; you bring the audience |
| Screening | Screening questions in the brief, applied on every entry route | Screener builder with quotas |
| Scheduling | Not needed: participants take the interview when it suits them | 1:1, group and multi-session scheduling |
| Incentives | Included in the panel price; you reward your own users yourself | Global payouts in many currencies |
| Analysis | Per-interview insights, themes, personas and a report with supporting quotes | Not included; use your own repository |
What Ethnio does well
Ethnio has been around for years and it is good at a narrow, important job: getting the right people into a research session without spreadsheets.
- Intercepts. Ethnio puts a screener in front of visitors on your website or inside your iOS and Android apps, with 30+ targeting variables, so you can catch people while they are using the product.
- Screeners. Screeners are shareable links you can send by email or post on social media, with quotas that close a screener once you have enough people.
- Scheduling. It handles 1:1, group and multi-session interviews across time zones, with calendar and video tool integrations.
- Incentives. Ethnio advertises incentive payments in any currency or country, with spending limits for governance.
- Pool. Its participant CRM can be filled by CSV or API, syncs with other CRMs through webhooks, and builds profiles from screener answers, incentive history and email engagement.
For a research operations team supporting several moderators, that is a real time saver. The one AI feature we found on Ethnio's own pages is translation of screeners, scheduling and incentive messages.
Where Ethnio stops
Ethnio ends where the conversation begins. Once a participant is booked, your researcher still has to show up, moderate, take notes, re-watch recordings and pull themes together. That is the expensive part of qualitative research, and it is why most teams run far fewer interviews than they would like.
Photo by Dylan Ferreira on Unsplash
Scheduled sessions also bring no-shows. MeasuringU reported an average no-show rate of about 5% across 24 moderated studies in 2024, and User Interviews' incentive research found B2C no-show rates of 8.2% even at $160 an hour. Every missed slot is a researcher's hour gone.
Ethnio also isn't a panel. If you need people who don't already use your product, you still need a separate recruiting supplier.
What Koji does differently
Koji is an AI-native research platform. You describe what you want to learn, the research assistant writes a brief with your questions, and an AI interviewer runs every conversation, asking follow-up questions as it goes. Analysis happens as interviews come in.
Recruiting, three ways. You can share an interview link or embed the interview in your product. On the Interviews and Enterprise plans you can import a CSV and give each person their own private invite link (see importing participants from a CSV and personalised interview links). Or you can recruit from Koji's research panel, which covers 154 country markets.
Panel recruitment without a second vendor. On the Panel recruit tab you describe the audience in plain language, add targeting and see the cost per interview in credits before you launch. Credits are held at launch and unused ones come back at the end. A soft launch fills part of the goal first so you can check quality before releasing the rest, and reported respondents are refunded when the report is accepted. Building an audience and seeing the price works on any plan; launching needs a paid plan. Details are in the panel recruitment guide.
Screening that applies everywhere. Screening questions live in the brief. You mark which answers qualify or rule someone out, and every participant answers them before the interview, whether they came from the panel, a link, an embed or an invite.
No calendar. Participants take the interview when it suits them, by voice or text, in 28 languages. There is nothing to schedule and no slot to miss.
Quality you don't pay for twice. Each interview gets a quality score from 1 to 5, and only interviews scoring 3 or more use credits or enter the report. Fraud is a real issue for any online sample: Pew Research Center found that 4% to 7% of respondents in opt-in online polls were bogus. Koji's scoring means low-effort answers don't reach your findings or your bill.
Depth from the conversation. In a field study of about 600 people, Xiao and colleagues (ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 2020) found that an AI chatbot asking open-ended questions got significantly more engagement and better quality answers than a standard online survey. Koji is built on the same idea, with follow-ups tuned to your brief.
How the workflows compare
With Ethnio, a typical study goes: build a screener, launch an intercept or send the link, review applicants, schedule sessions, moderate each one, pay incentives, then analyse recordings in a separate tool.
With Koji it goes like this:
- Ask your question. Type what you want to learn in one message and the assistant drafts the brief and questions.
- Set the guide. Mix open questions with structured ones, add screening questions and choose how deep follow-ups go.
- Preview for free. Take the interview yourself by text or voice. Previews never use credits or count as responses.
- Invite people. Share a link, import a CSV for personal links, or recruit from Koji's panel.
- AI runs the interviews. Participants talk or type in their own language, any time of day.
- Read the report. Findings, personas and recommendations, each linked to the quotes behind it.
Pricing
Ethnio. Ethnio's pricing page lists an Individual plan at $12 a month for one seat and a Pro plan priced per seat for teams of two to six, adding localisation, global incentives and centralised consent. Enterprise is quoted on request with a one-year minimum. Third-party listings show different, older tiers, so confirm current prices with Ethnio. Incentives and any external recruiting come on top.
Koji. Free gets 10 credits to try it. Insights is €29 a month with 29 credits, Interviews is €79 a month with 79 credits, and Enterprise is custom. A text interview uses 1 credit and a voice interview 3, with extra credits at €1. Panel interviews are priced in credits per interview, shown before you launch. Because the AI runs the sessions, there's no moderator time to add to the bill.
Which should you choose?
Choose Ethnio if you have a research team that wants to keep moderating every session live, you need in-product intercepts feeding a human-run schedule, and you already have analysis covered elsewhere.
Choose Koji if you want answers rather than a full calendar. It suits product managers, founders, small research teams and agencies who need dozens of interviews this week, from their own users or from a panel, with analysis already done.
Some teams use both: Ethnio for recruiting into live usability sessions, Koji for the discovery, churn and pricing interviews that never got scheduled.
Try Koji
Set up your first study in a few minutes: describe what you want to learn, add a screening question and send the link, or build a panel audience and see the price before you spend anything. Start free on Koji with 10 credits, and read the panel recruitment guide to see how recruiting works.
Sources: Ethnio product and pricing pages (ethn.io); Ethnio Help Center, Enterprise plan overview; MeasuringU, "What Is a Typical No-Show Rate for Moderated Studies?" (2024); User Interviews, UX Research Incentives Report; Pew Research Center, "Assessing the Risks to Online Polls From Bogus Respondents" (2020); Xiao et al., "Tell Me About Yourself", ACM TOCHI 27(3), 2020.
