Short answer: Listen Labs and Koji both run AI-moderated customer interviews, but they are bought and used very differently. Listen Labs is an enterprise platform with a large recruiting network, sold through a demo and a guided pilot, and in September 2026 Salesforce signed a deal to acquire it. Koji is self-serve: you can start free, write one research question, and have an AI interviewer talking to your customers by voice, text or phone the same day, with participants, incentives and reports in the same place. Pick Listen Labs if you are an enterprise insights team that wants a managed panel at global scale and is comfortable with its future inside Salesforce. Pick Koji if you want to run research continuously with your own customers, on published prices.
What changed in 2026
Listen Labs had a big year. It raised a $69M Series B led by Ribbit Capital, with Sequoia Capital among its existing investors. Then on September 29, 2026, Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Listen Labs. Salesforce did not disclose a price (press reports put it around $2 billion, unconfirmed), said it plans to bring Listen Labs into Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud, and expects the deal to close in the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2027, subject to regulatory approval.
For a buyer, an acquisition is not a reason to panic, but it is a reason to ask questions. Roadmaps, packaging and pricing often change when a startup joins a large suite, and an independent research tool can become one feature of a bigger contract. If you are evaluating Listen Labs now, ask how it will be sold after closing, whether it will need other Salesforce products, and what happens to your data and pricing at renewal.
Koji has also changed a lot since this comparison was first written. In October 2026 it added a workspace-wide Participants directory with recruitment email, built-in participant incentives, and a setting that removes personal details from transcripts before analysis. Those launches close most of the gap between a self-serve interview tool and a full research platform.
Koji vs Listen Labs at a glance
| Listen Labs | Koji | |
|---|---|---|
| Status in October 2026 | Salesforce deal signed, closing expected in its fiscal Q4 2027 | Independent, self-serve |
| Interview formats | Video and voice | Voice, text and phone calls |
| Participants | Recruiting network Salesforce puts at 50M+ people | Your own list, a Participants directory, or panel recruitment |
| Languages | 120+, according to Salesforce | 30+ interview languages |
| Question style | Open-ended interviews with adaptive follow-ups | Open conversation plus six structured question types |
| How you buy | Demo and guided pilot | Self-serve, free to start |
Where Listen Labs is the stronger choice
Recruiting at global scale. Salesforce describes the Listen Labs network as reaching more than 50 million potential participants, with interviews possible in more than 120 languages. If your program is a large consumer study across many markets at once, that breadth matters, and Koji supports 30+ interview languages today, and each interview opens in the participant’s own language, picked from their browser settings and location among the languages you turned on.
Video. Listen Labs runs video interviews, which brand and creative teams use to see how people react. Koji interviews are voice, text or phone, with no video.
A managed, enterprise buying process. Listen Labs is built for procurement-led buying. Its own pricing guide says companies with 100 or more employees are directed to a guided pilot, and it describes a subscription with bundled credits spent per recruited participant at rates that vary by audience. If your company wants a pilot, a contract and an account team, that model fits.
Fit with Salesforce, after closing. If your company already runs on Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud, Listen Labs may end up wired into the systems your teams use every day. That is a plan, not a shipped product, so judge it on what exists when you buy.
Where Koji is the stronger choice
You can start today, on published prices. Koji starts free with 10 credits and no card. Paid plans are Insights at €29 a month with 29 credits and Interviews at €79 a month with 79 credits, with extra credits from €1 each and Enterprise on request. A text interview uses 1 credit and a voice interview 3. Listen Labs does not publish a price list. Its pricing guide puts per-interview pricing for most enterprise customers at $85 to $150, on top of platform access.
You only pay for interviews worth reading. Each Koji interview gets a quality score from 1 to 5, and only interviews scoring 3 or more use credits or enter the report. Low-effort responses cost nothing. See understanding quality scores.
Numbers and reasons in one conversation. Koji blends open conversation with six structured question types: open-ended, scale, single choice, multiple choice, ranking and yes or no. One study returns the share of people who picked an option and the reasons behind it, and choice options can be shuffled per participant to avoid order bias. Read the structured questions guide.
Your own customers, without a separate research ops tool. Koji keeps a workspace-wide Participants directory on paid plans. Import a CSV or add people one by one, group them into audiences, and email an audience a branded invitation or reminder from a study, with delivered, opened and started tracked per person. When you need people you do not have, panel recruitment lets you build an audience and see the cost on any plan, and launch on a paid plan.
Incentives built in. On every paid plan, set a reward from €10 to €500 per participant, approve or decline each one with the interview quality score beside it, and Koji emails a link to claim a gift card, a prepaid Visa card or a charity donation. See research participant incentives.
Privacy at the source. Turn on Remove personal details in a study, and Koji replaces names, email addresses, phone numbers, addresses and employers in each transcript with labels such as [NAME] when the interview finishes, before analysis. Read more in our guide to automatic PII redaction in user research.
Research from your AI assistant. Koji has an MCP connector for Claude and other assistants, so you can create studies and read results from a chat, plus a headless API on the Interviews and Enterprise plans to start interviews from your own product.
Why this decision matters more now
Demand for research keeps rising faster than research teams grow. In the Maze Future of User Research Report 2025, 55% of respondents said demand for user research had increased over the past year, and Maze reports that 58% of product teams already use AI to speed up research. Most of the new demand comes from product managers, founders and marketers who need answers between sprints, not from programs big enough to justify an enterprise pilot.
That is the real split between these two tools. Listen Labs is strongest when research is a large, planned program with a budget and a procurement process. Koji is strongest when research is a habit: a churn study this week, a pricing check next week, and onboarding interviews running all quarter.
Which should you pick?
Pick Listen Labs if you:
- Run large consumer studies across many countries and languages at once
- Need video interviews
- Want a managed pilot and an enterprise contract
- Already run on Salesforce and want research inside that stack after the deal closes
Pick Koji if you:
- Want to start this week without a sales process
- Mostly interview your own customers, users or prospects
- Need numbers and reasons from the same study
- Want participants, invitations, incentives and reports in one tool
- Need published prices and want to pay only for interviews that pass a quality bar
- Run research from Claude or another AI assistant
If you are already a Listen Labs customer
You do not need to decide anything before the deal closes. But your next renewal is a good moment to compare. Before you sign again, get these answers in writing:
Then run a side-by-side test. Take one discussion guide you already use, paste it into Koji, and let the brief assistant turn it into a study. Take the interview yourself in a free preview, then send it to a small group of your own customers and compare the depth of answers and the report.
The bottom line
Listen Labs is a strong enterprise platform with a huge recruiting network, video interviews and, soon, a home inside Salesforce. If that is what your program needs, it belongs on your shortlist, with careful questions about what changes after closing.
For most teams running customer research in 2026, Koji is the better fit: self-serve, published pricing, voice, text and phone interviews in 30+ languages, structured questions inside the conversation, and participants, incentives and privacy controls in the same place.
Try Koji free
Start a free Koji study with 10 credits and no card. Write one research question, let the AI draft the brief, and take the interview yourself in preview before you invite anyone. For more options, see our list of Listen Labs alternatives and the full Listen Labs pricing breakdown.
