TL;DR: Recollective and Koji are both online qualitative research platforms, but they take opposite approaches to scale and moderation. Recollective is a human-led insight community platform — bulletin-board studies, diaries, live focus groups, and long-running communities, all moderated and analyzed by your team (with AI assists). Koji is AI-native — every interview is moderated by an AI that probes follow-ups automatically, so you can run 5 or 5,000 conversations with the same effort and get a report in hours. If you run long-term branded communities and want hands-on human moderation, Recollective is purpose-built for that. If you need fast, scalable, decision-ready answers without staffing a moderator for every session, choose Koji.
Quick answer: which should you choose?
- Choose Recollective if your core need is a managed, long-running insight community or multi-day qualitative study where human moderators guide discussion, and you have the research team (or an agency) to run and analyze it.
- Choose Koji if you need depth and speed — AI-moderated voice or chat interviews that scale to hundreds of participants instantly, auto-coded themes, and a one-click report — without the cost and calendar of human moderation.
What is Recollective?
Recollective is a well-regarded online qualitative research and insight community platform used by agencies and brands. It supports a broad mix of methods: insight communities, bulletin-board-style asynchronous studies, diaries and ethnography, concept and creative tests, UX and product feedback, and live video IDIs and focus groups. Recent versions layer in AI features such as "Ask AI" for rapid analysis, AI-moderated interviews, and automatic translations.
Recollective's strength is flexible, human-centered qualitative work at the project or community level — from quick three-day pop-up studies to communities that run for months or years. Its model assumes a research team (or agency partner) to design, moderate, and synthesize. That hands-on control is exactly what some studies need, and exactly what makes it heavier to operate.
What is Koji?
Koji is an AI-native customer research platform built around AI-moderated interviews. Instead of assigning a human moderator to each session, Koji's AI conducts every voice or chat conversation, asking adaptive follow-up questions in real time when an answer is vague or worth chasing. It then automatically codes responses into themes backed by verbatim quotes and generates a one-click report.
Because the moderation is automated, scale is effectively free: running 500 interviews takes the same effort as running 5, and they can all happen in parallel overnight. Koji also runs six structured question types (open-ended, scale, single choice, multiple choice, ranking, and yes/no) inside a single study, so you capture quantitative signal alongside the qualitative depth. See AI-moderated interviews and open-ended questions in AI interviews for how the probing works.
The core difference: human moderation vs AI moderation at scale
Both platforms produce rich qualitative data. The real question is how moderation scales.
With Recollective, depth comes from human moderators and peer interaction inside a community. That produces nuanced, contextual data — but every additional participant and every additional day adds moderation and analysis time. Qualitative research has always paid for depth with speed: traditional studies routinely take weeks from fieldwork to readout.
Koji breaks that trade-off. The AI moderator delivers consistent, probing conversations to everyone simultaneously, so depth no longer caps your sample size or your timeline. This matters because the market is moving Koji's way: the qualitative research market is projected to grow at roughly 7.2% CAGR through 2027, 57% of researchers report rising demand for qualitative work, and online IDIs and focus groups are now the most-used qual methods. AI moderation is how teams meet that demand without tripling headcount.
Feature comparison
| Recollective | Koji | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Online qual / insight community platform | AI-moderated customer research |
| Moderation | Human-led (with AI assists) | Fully AI-moderated |
| Scale economics | Cost/time grow with participants & duration | Flat — 5 or 5,000 with same effort |
| Speed to insight | Days to weeks | Hours |
| Voice interviews | Live video IDIs/focus groups (scheduled) | Async AI voice, on-demand 24/7 |
| Structured questions | Limited | 6 types in one study |
| Analysis | Ask AI + manual synthesis | Automatic thematic analysis, quote-grounded |
| Output | Community deliverables | One-click reports |
| Best for | Long-running branded communities | Fast, scalable discovery & validation |
| Starting price | Custom (project / license quote) | Free / €29 per month (Insights) |
Pricing: Recollective vs Koji
Recollective uses a quote-based model: pricing depends on project scope, number of participants, and the level of services or support your team needs, with both project and long-term license options. That flexibility suits managed engagements but means a sales conversation and, often, agency involvement.
Koji is transparent and self-serve: Free to start (10 credits), Insights at €29/month, Interviews at €79/month, and custom Enterprise. Its quality gate means only conversations scoring 3+ consume a credit, so low-effort responses never cost you. For most teams, Koji removes both the budget barrier and the staffing barrier to running real qualitative research.
When to use each
Use Recollective when the deliverable is genuinely a community or a moderated multi-day study — longitudinal engagement, peer-to-peer dynamics, or creative co-creation where a skilled human moderator adds irreplaceable value, and you have the team to run it.
Use Koji when you need answers fast and at scale: customer discovery, concept and message testing, churn and win/loss diagnosis, onboarding feedback, or always-on voice of customer. Koji is also the better fit for lean teams that cannot dedicate a moderator to every session but still want interview-grade depth. Many product teams now run continuous Koji studies and reserve community platforms for the rare project that truly needs one. Pair it with auto-generated research reports to go from fieldwork to readout the same day.
Migrating from Recollective to Koji
Moving from a community platform to Koji is usually a simplification, not a migration project. There is no SDK to install and no community to stand up: you write your research question (or let Koji draft the interview guide), choose voice or chat, and either share a link with your own audience or recruit a fresh one. Past Recollective studies translate cleanly — a concept test becomes a Koji study with a single-choice reaction question plus open-ended probing; a diary becomes a short recurring interview; a live IDI becomes an always-on AI conversation any participant can take 24/7. Because there is no per-session moderation to schedule, most teams run their first Koji study the same day they sign up and have a report before a traditional community would have finished recruiting.
The bottom line
Recollective is a capable, flexible platform for human-moderated online qualitative research and insight communities — a strong choice when human moderation and long-term community are the point. Koji is the AI-native alternative that delivers comparable depth without the moderator-per-session cost, scales instantly, and returns decision-ready reports in hours. For the large majority of commercial research, Koji gets you to insight 10x faster — and far cheaper.
Run interview-grade research at scale with Koji
You should not have to choose between qualitative depth and speed. Koji lets you launch an AI-moderated voice or chat study in minutes, interview hundreds of customers in parallel, and get a quote-grounded report the same day — no moderator scheduling, no research degree required. Start free with Koji and see how fast real qualitative insight can be.
