Koji vs User Evaluation (2026): Which AI Research Tool Wins?

TL;DR

The key difference between Koji and User Evaluation is where the work starts. User Evaluation is an AI analysis tool: you bring your own recordings, transcripts, and open-ended data, and it transcribes, organizes, and surfaces insights with sentiment, clips, and report generation. Koji is an end-to-end research platform: it actually runs the AI-moderated voice and text interviews, then codes and reports on them automatically — so you do not need a separate tool to collect the data in the first place.

If you already have a pile of interview recordings and just need to analyze them, User Evaluation (around $0–$99/month) is a capable, affordable analysis layer. If your real problem is getting high-quality customer conversations at scale — not just analyzing the few you managed to schedule — Koji replaces the recruiting, moderating, transcribing, and analysis steps in one workflow.

Koji vs User Evaluation at a glance

| | Koji | User Evaluation | |---|---|---| | What it does | Runs interviews and analyzes them | Analyzes data you already have | | Data collection | Built-in AI-moderated voice & text interviews | Bring your own (you record elsewhere) | | Moderation | AI runs every interview, 24/7 | None — you collect the conversations | | Analysis | Auto thematic coding + one-click report | Transcription, sentiment, clips, reports | | Structured quant | 6 question types built in | Analysis only | | Pricing | €79/month, credit-based | ~$0–$99/month | | Best for | Teams that need conversations and insight | Teams with existing recordings to analyze |

What is User Evaluation?

User Evaluation is an AI-powered qualitative analysis tool aimed at UX researchers. It uses AI to transcribe, store, organize, analyze, and make searchable your video and open-ended data, with features including sentiment analysis, clip creation, and report generation. Pricing is accessible — roughly $0 to $99/month depending on projects, seats, and transcription hours.

It is a solid fit for a specific situation: you have already collected the interviews — on Zoom, in person, or via another tool — and you want AI to help you make sense of them faster than manual coding would. In that "bring your own data" lane, it does its job well.

But that is also its ceiling. User Evaluation does not recruit participants, schedule sessions, or moderate conversations. The hardest, slowest, most expensive parts of research — getting enough good interviews and removing moderator bias — sit entirely outside the tool. You still need a way to run the interviews before User Evaluation has anything to analyze.

What is Koji?

Koji is an AI-native customer research platform that owns the entire pipeline from question to insight. You describe what you want to learn, and Koji''s AI consultant drafts the interview. You share a link, and respondents take an AI-moderated voice or text interview that adapts in real time, probing up to three follow-ups per question to reach the insight a static script would miss. Interviews run 24/7 with no scheduling and no human moderator — which means no moderator bias and no analyst sitting in every session.

When interviews complete, Koji automatically codes the transcripts, clusters near-duplicate themes into a clean codebook, attaches verbatim quotes, and generates a stakeholder-ready report in one click. It also supports six structured question types — open-ended, scale, single choice, multiple choice, ranking, and yes/no — so quantitative results and qualitative depth come from the same interview.

In other words, everything User Evaluation does on the analysis side, Koji also does — and Koji adds the part User Evaluation leaves to you: actually running the research.

The core difference: collect-and-analyze vs analyze-only

Think of research as four jobs: recruit, moderate, transcribe, analyze. User Evaluation covers the last two well. Koji covers all four.

This matters because the bottleneck in most research programs is not analysis — it is volume of good conversations. A team using User Evaluation is still limited by how many interviews a human can schedule and run; if that is five this month, AI analysis just makes those five faster to read. A team on Koji can have 50 AI-moderated interviews running in parallel this week, each probed consistently and coded automatically. AI thematic analysis is documented at roughly 28x faster than manual coding (about 20 minutes versus 567 minutes per study in a 2024 JMIR AI study) — and Koji applies that to interviews it also collected, so the speed gain compounds across the whole pipeline instead of just the last step.

Pricing

User Evaluation is inexpensive because it does less of the pipeline — roughly $0–$99/month, gated by projects, seats, and transcription hours. Koji''s pricing reflects that it also runs the interviews:

• Insights plan: €29/month (29 credits)
• Interviews plan: €79/month (79 credits)
• Overage: flat €1/credit
• Credit costs: text interview = 1 credit, voice interview = 3 credits (~€3), report refresh = 5 credits
• Quality gate: only conversations scoring 3+ on quality consume credits — you never pay for junk

Compare total cost honestly: with User Evaluation you also pay (in time and tools) to recruit and run every interview before analysis begins. With Koji, the interview, the transcription, the coding, and the report are one line item — usually about €3 per completed voice interview.

Where User Evaluation wins

If you have a large backlog of existing recordings from past studies, sales calls, or support sessions and you simply want to analyze those specific files, User Evaluation is a clean, low-cost analysis layer — and you may not need a platform that also collects data. Koji is optimized for running new AI-moderated studies, not for ingesting an arbitrary archive of legacy video, so for pure "analyze my existing files" use cases, a dedicated analysis tool can be the simpler pick.

The verdict

Choose User Evaluation if your only job is analyzing interviews you have already collected elsewhere, and you want an affordable AI layer to speed up coding and reporting.

Choose Koji if your real challenge is getting enough high-quality, unbiased customer conversations — and you would rather run, transcribe, code, and report on them in one platform than stitch together a recorder, a transcriber, and an analysis tool.

The teams winning at customer research in 2026 are not the ones who analyze five interviews faster. They are the ones talking to fifty customers a month without adding headcount. That is what Koji makes possible.

Try Koji free

Publish your first AI-moderated study in minutes — describe your goal, let Koji draft the interview, share the link, and watch themes and a full report assemble themselves. Start with Koji, or see how UX researchers scale with AI by moving from analyze-only tools to an end-to-end platform.