Koji vs Userlytics: AI-Moderated Customer Interviews vs Usability Testing (2026)
Koji and Userlytics both help you understand users — but they answer completely different research questions. Here's how to choose the right tool for your team in 2026.
Koji Team
April 22, 2026
Koji vs Userlytics: AI-Moderated Customer Interviews vs Usability Testing (2026)
When teams search for user research tools, Koji and Userlytics can both surface on the shortlist. Both use AI to accelerate insight. Both help teams understand users. But they're built for fundamentally different research questions — and understanding that difference will save you from buying the wrong tool.
The bottom line: Userlytics is a usability testing platform built for evaluating interfaces, prototypes, and specific UI flows. Koji is an AI-moderated interview platform built for discovering customer needs, motivations, pain points, and opinions at scale.
Put simply: Userlytics answers "Can users do this?" Koji answers "Why do users want this — and what would make them love it?"
What Is Userlytics?
Userlytics is a full-featured usability testing platform that specializes in recording participants as they interact with websites, apps, and prototypes. Researchers define tasks, set up screener surveys to recruit the right participants, and then review video recordings of users attempting those tasks.
Key capabilities include:
- Moderated and unmoderated testing — live sessions with a researcher or async task-based recordings
- Card sorting and tree testing — evaluating information architecture and navigation
- Prototype testing — integrations with Figma, InVision, and other design tools
- AI-generated session summaries — automated highlights from video recordings
- ULX Score benchmarking — a proprietary tool measuring multiple UX dimensions simultaneously
- Global panel access — 2M+ participants across diverse demographics and geographies
Pricing: Userlytics self-service plans start around $199/month for basic unmoderated testing. Panel participants cost $19/session for unmoderated testing and $138/session for moderated sessions with a Userlytics-recruited panelist. Enterprise unlimited plans run approximately $69,000/year.
What Is Koji?
Koji is an AI-native customer research platform that runs conversational interviews — no prototype required, no screen recording needed. You define your research questions using one of Koji's 6 structured question types, set up your study, and Koji's AI moderator conducts adaptive conversations with participants asynchronously.
The AI probes for depth, follows up on vague answers, and adapts based on what participants say — delivering the intelligence of a skilled human moderator without scheduling constraints, cost overhead, or availability limits.
Key capabilities include:
- AI-moderated voice interviews — natural conversation via ElevenLabs voice synthesis, no human moderator needed
- AI-moderated text interviews — chat-based interviews with interactive widgets for quantitative responses
- 6 structured question types: open_ended, scale, single_choice, multiple_choice, ranking, yes_no
- Automatic thematic analysis — patterns and themes across all participants, generated instantly
- One-click reports — publishable directly to stakeholders with charts, quotes, and summaries
- Embed + API access — integrate research into your product, CRM, or existing workflows
Pricing: Koji's Insights plan is €29/month for 29 credits. The Interviews plan is €79/month for 79 credits, with 1 voice interview costing 3 credits (~€3) and 1 text interview costing 1 credit (~€1). New users get 10 free starter credits on the free tier.
The Core Difference: Evaluative vs. Generative Research
The fundamental distinction between Userlytics and Koji maps to two foundational categories of user research:
Evaluative research (Userlytics' strength): You have something to test — a prototype, a live UI, a specific feature flow. You want to know if users can complete tasks, where they get confused, and what frustrates them during specific interactions.
Generative research (Koji's strength): You're discovering what users need, what problems they face, what motivates their decisions, and what they'd want from a product. There's nothing to show — just questions to ask and stories to surface.
Both types of research matter. But they serve different stages of the product cycle — and they require entirely different tools.
Feature Comparison
Research Capability
| Feature | Koji | Userlytics | |---|---|---| | Conversational customer interviews | ✅ AI-moderated | ❌ Not core use case | | Voice interviews | ✅ | ❌ | | Prototype / screen recording | ❌ | ✅ | | Card sorting / tree testing | ❌ | ✅ | | Structured question types (6) | ✅ | Limited (task-based) | | Async participant flow | ✅ | ✅ | | Moderated live sessions | ❌ (AI moderates) | ✅ | | Panel recruitment | ✅ Built-in | ✅ 2M+ panel |
Analysis
| Feature | Koji | Userlytics | |---|---|---| | AI thematic analysis across sessions | ✅ Full synthesis | Limited | | Session highlight reels | ❌ | ✅ | | Automatic report generation | ✅ One-click | Limited | | Quantitative aggregation | ✅ Structured Qs | ✅ Task completion rates | | Cross-interview pattern detection | ✅ | Limited | | Benchmarking score | ❌ | ✅ ULX Score |
Pricing at Scale (20 sessions/month)
| | Koji | Userlytics | |---|---|---| | Platform cost | €79/month | ~$199–699/month | | Cost per voice session | ~€3 (3 credits) | $138/participant (moderated panel) | | Cost per text/async session | ~€1 (1 credit) | $19/participant (unmoderated panel) | | AI analysis included | ✅ | Limited | | Report generation | ✅ One-click | Manual | | Free tier | ✅ 10 credits | ❌ |
When Userlytics Is the Right Choice
You're testing a specific prototype or UI. Userlytics' screen recording and task-based testing directly captures how real users navigate your interface — how they hesitate at form fields, where they click first, and when they abandon a flow. This observational data is irreplaceable for UI/UX work.
You need card sorting or tree testing. For information architecture decisions — how to organize navigation, what to label features, how to structure a menu — Userlytics' dedicated IA research tools are the purpose-built instrument.
You need visual evidence for stakeholders. Highlight reels of confused users navigating your product can be more persuasive in a product review meeting than quotes or charts. Userlytics' video evidence format is built for this.
You're doing competitive UX benchmarking. Userlytics' ULX Score provides standardized benchmarking data that lets you track UX quality across product versions or compare against competitor products.
When Koji Is the Right Choice
You're doing discovery research. Before you've built anything — or when you're deciding what to build next — you need to understand customers' problems, motivations, and decision criteria. No prototype test can reveal what customers value when they don't yet have something to react to. Koji's AI interviews go there.
You need research at scale fast. Usability testing with 15 participants takes weeks when sessions must be scheduled and moderated. Koji can run 50+ simultaneous AI-moderated interviews in a single day — each one adaptive, probing, and analytically synthesized by morning.
You don't have a dedicated research team. Userlytics' moderated sessions still require someone to plan tasks, moderate sessions, and synthesize hours of recordings. Koji's AI handles all of this, making professional-grade customer research accessible to PMs, founders, and CS managers with no formal research background.
You want quantitative + qualitative in one study. Koji's structured question types let you include rating questions, single-choice options, and ranking exercises alongside open-ended AI probing — generating reports with both distribution charts and thematic narrative. Userlytics' task completion metrics don't capture attitudinal or motivational data.
You're running continuous discovery. Teresa Torres' continuous discovery framework recommends weekly customer conversations. Koji's async AI moderation makes this feasible at scale without adding research headcount.
A Practical Example: PLG Team Diagnosing Low Conversion
A product-led growth team is investigating why trial-to-paid conversion is stuck at 12%.
Using Userlytics: They set up a usability test of the onboarding flow, recruit 15 participants from the panel, and review recordings of users trying to complete key setup tasks. They identify 3 UX friction points in the setup wizard, fix them, and conversion improves to 14%. Useful — but it doesn't reveal whether users are seeing enough value to pay.
Using Koji: They launch an AI-moderated interview study targeting 50 trial users who did not convert. The AI asks about the problem they were trying to solve, whether Koji addressed it, what made them hesitant to upgrade, and what would have changed their decision. Analysis surfaces that 62% of non-converters didn't discover a core value feature — an onboarding communication and positioning problem, not a UI problem.
Both tools generated value. Koji's insight drove a larger strategic intervention. The right research question determined which tool was right.
The Verdict
Userlytics and Koji are complementary tools, not direct competitors. The strongest research teams use both: Userlytics for evaluating specific interfaces and prototypes, Koji for generative customer discovery and continuous insight at scale.
If you can only choose one:
- Choose Userlytics if your primary research need is testing existing interfaces and prototypes with screen recording
- Choose Koji if your primary research need is understanding customers — their problems, motivations, language, and decisions
For most product teams, startups, and growth-focused companies in 2026, the more urgent gap is generative insight. You can improve a confusing UI with heuristic evaluation or a designer's instinct. You cannot discover what customers actually need without talking to them — and Koji makes that conversation happen at scale, automatically, at a fraction of the traditional cost.
Try Koji Free
Koji gives you 10 free credits to run your first AI-moderated customer interviews — no credit card required. See how AI moderation compares to traditional user research methods.
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