TL;DR: Rally UXR and Koji are often shortlisted together, but they solve different halves of the research problem. Rally is a research CRM and ResearchOps platform: it manages participant relationships, recruiting, scheduling, consent, and incentives so enterprise teams can talk to their own users safely and at scale. It does not conduct or analyze the interviews themselves — you still need a moderator and an analysis tool. Koji is the opposite: it runs AI-moderated voice and chat interviews and synthesizes them automatically, with six structured question types and one-click reports. If your bottleneck is operational — herding participants, scheduling, and incentives across a big org — Rally is purpose-built. If your bottleneck is actually doing and analyzing interviews fast, Koji is the engine. Many teams use both.
Quick answer: which one should you pick?
- Choose Rally UXR if you are an enterprise team whose pain is operations: a sprawling participant database, scheduling conflicts, consent management, incentive payments, and research-engagement tracking across many studies and stakeholders.
- Choose Koji if your pain is throughput: you need to actually conduct interviews and get analyzed insights quickly, with AI moderation, structured + open-ended questions in one study, and automatic thematic analysis — without standing up a full ops department.
These are complementary more often than competing. The catch is that Rally stops where the interview begins, and Koji starts there. Understanding that boundary tells you which one — or both — you need.
What Rally UXR actually does
Rally UXR is "a User Research CRM that enables enterprise companies to talk to their own users at scale." Its strengths are operational and genuinely deep:
- Participant database at scale — store up to millions of participant records, with advanced filtering by custom attributes, survey results, research-engagement history, and demographics.
- Consent, comms, and cool-downs — welcome pages, consent forms, email templates, cool-down periods to prevent participant fatigue, and incentive payments, all in one place.
- Scheduling — calendar connections, buffer times, rescheduling rules, and Calendly/Zoom/Google Meet integration.
- Integrations — connects with around 14 tools including Slack, Gmail, Maze, Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, Typeform, UserTesting, UserZoom, Salesforce, Snowflake, and Tremendous.
Rally is built for enterprise B2B SaaS research and product teams that need to reduce the operational friction that slows research down. Its trade-off is that it is infrastructure, not an interviewer: Rally gets the right person scheduled, consented, and paid — but the conversation itself, and the analysis afterward, happen in other tools. Pricing is not published publicly and is oriented toward enterprise procurement.
What Koji actually does
Koji conducts and analyzes the research itself:
- AI-moderated voice and chat interviews that adapt in real time, asking the dynamic follow-up a static survey never would. See AI-moderated interviews and voice vs text interviews.
- Six structured question types — open-ended, scale, single-choice, multiple-choice, ranking, and yes/no — in one study, so you capture quantifiable signal and the qualitative "why." See open-ended and multiple-choice questions.
- Automatic thematic analysis — every transcript is auto-coded and themes clustered across all conversations. See AI auto-tagging and the thematic analysis guide.
- One-click reports + transcript chat — ask a question across 100 interviews and get a cited answer in seconds via chat with transcripts.
- Participants, either way - you do not need your own audience. If you have a list, a product, or a community, pull participants from your product and go live the same day, 24/7, with no moderator bias. If you do not, Koji recruits them for you: describe the audience and approve a live per-respondent quote in credits before launch.
- Participants directory and recruitment email: on paid plans, keep everyone you interview in one workspace list. 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. Insights includes 20 emails a month, Interviews 50 and Enterprise 1,000. See managing research participants.
- Participant incentives: 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 the participant a link to claim a gift card, a prepaid Visa card or a charity donation. See research participant incentives.
From research question to synthesized, auto-coded insight in hours — with no research expertise required.
Head-to-head comparison
| Capability | Rally UXR | Koji |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Research CRM / ResearchOps | AI interview + analysis platform |
| Conducts interviews | No (schedules them) | Yes (AI-moderated voice + chat) |
| Analyzes interviews | No | Automatic thematic analysis |
| Participant database / CRM | Yes (millions of records) | Participants directory with audiences, CSV import and panel recruitment |
| Scheduling | Yes (core strength) | Not needed: participants join when it suits them |
| Incentives | Yes, incentive payments built in | Built in on paid plans: gift card, prepaid Visa or charity donation |
| Structured question types | Via integrated survey tools | 6 types native in one study |
| Best fit | Enterprise research ops | Product, founders, CX, marketing |
| Pricing | Enterprise, not public | Free to start (10 credits); from €1 per qualified interview |
| Time to first insight | Depends on moderator + analysis tool | Hours, self-serve |
The real difference: ops vs. throughput
Rally optimizes the operations around interviews. Koji optimizes the interviews and analysis themselves. That distinction matters because, in 2026, the analysis step is where most teams lose time: transcribing and coding qualitative data traditionally takes four to seven hours of work per hour of interview audio, and establishing reliable coding schemes can take weeks. Rally does not touch that step — it hands you a scheduled, consented participant and a calendar invite. Koji eliminates it: the AI moderates the conversation and auto-codes the transcript the moment it ends.
This is also why the buying motion differs. Rally is a considered, enterprise purchase aimed at research-ops leaders managing many stakeholders. Koji is self-serve — per Maze's 2026 State of User Research, the share of organizations where research informs all levels of business strategy nearly tripled from 8% to 22% in a single year, and that surge is driven largely by non-researchers running their own studies. Koji is built for exactly that democratization: anyone can launch a rigorous AI-moderated study without a research-ops function behind them.
Where each one wins
Use Rally when you are an enterprise with a large, reusable participant pool and the operational pain is real — scheduling collisions, consent tracking, incentive payouts, and avoiding over-surveying the same users. Rally's cool-down periods and engagement history are genuinely valuable governance at that scale.
Reach for Koji when the job is to get answers: continuous discovery interviews, churn diagnosis, concept testing, or pricing research — run async, 24/7, with structured and open-ended questions in one study and automatic analysis on the back end. Koji also documents its approach to interview data privacy and security and to bias and hallucination mitigation.
Using Rally and Koji together
Because they cover different stages, the two compose cleanly. A large org can use Rally as the system of record for participants — filtering, consent, cool-downs, incentives — and use Koji as the instrument that actually conducts the AI-moderated interview and produces the analyzed report. Rally picks and prepares the right person; Koji runs the conversation and synthesizes the findings. You get enterprise ops governance and fast, AI-native insight without forcing one tool to do a job it was not built for.
For smaller or faster-moving teams, Koji often stands alone. Since October 2026 it keeps its own Participants directory with audiences and branded invitation and reminder emails, and it pays incentives on every paid plan, so the core jobs of a research CRM now sit next to the interviews. You can also recruit from your product and launch the same day. What Koji does not do yet is the governance Rally is known for: cool-down periods, research-engagement history across many teams, and deep integrations with tools such as Salesforce and Snowflake. Once your participant operations need that, Rally earns its place. And as research gets automated, Koji exposes its studies through an MCP server and API — so you can spin up interviews, pull transcripts, and generate reports directly from tools like Claude.
The bottom line
Rally UXR and Koji are not really rivals — they are two halves of modern research. Rally is the best-in-class CRM for managing participants at enterprise scale; it does not conduct or analyze interviews. Koji is the AI engine that conducts and analyzes them, with six structured question types and automatic thematic analysis, on transparent pricing any team can start free. If your bottleneck is ops, buy Rally. If your bottleneck is doing and analyzing the research, start with Koji — and pair them when you need both.
Ready to run real customer interviews? Start with Koji free — 10 credits, no credit card, your first AI-moderated study live in minutes. Write one research question, let the AI draft the brief, and take the interview yourself in preview before you invite anyone.
