User Interviews vs Respondent (2026): Which Recruiting Marketplace Wins?
TL;DR: Choose User Interviews if you want the largest panel (~6 million participants), strong consumer coverage, and a research-ops platform with a Hub for managing your own recruited panel. Choose Respondent if you need B2B and professional audiences, higher incentive payouts to reach hard-to-find roles, and simpler pay-as-you-go pricing ($40/session, or $34/session in a 63-session bundle). But both tools stop the moment a participant is booked — you still have to schedule, moderate, transcribe, and analyze every conversation yourself. Koji handles that other half: its AI moderates the interview and themes the results into a report automatically. Koji starts free, then €29/month.
User Interviews vs Respondent at a glance
| User Interviews | Respondent | |
|---|---|---|
| Panel size | ~6M participants | ~4M participants |
| Audience strength | Broad consumer coverage | B2B / professional, hard-to-reach roles |
| Pricing | Pay-as-you-go credits + subscriptions; higher per-session, recruit limits | PAYG $40/session; 63-session bundle at $34/session (15% off) |
| Own-panel tooling | Yes — Hub + Recruit + insight capture | Limited — primarily a recruiting panel |
| Add-ons | Doc signing, double screening, SSO priced separately | Doc signing (Basic+), SSO (Advanced) |
| Participant quality | Large, verified pool | 4.9/5 average participant rating |
| Shared gap | Recruits people; you run the study | Recruits people; you run the study |
User Interviews: the research-ops recruiting platform
User Interviews is the broadest recruiting engine on the market, with a panel of roughly 6 million participants and standout consumer reach. But it is more than a panel — it is a research-ops platform. Its Recruit product taps the marketplace, its Hub lets you build and manage your own panel of customers, and its insight-capture tooling helps you keep track of who you have talked to.
Pricing is a mix of pay-as-you-go credits and subscriptions. The per-session cost tends to run higher than Respondent's, and pay-as-you-go carries recruiting-volume limits. Common add-ons — document signing, double screening, and SSO/SAML — are priced separately (each in the several-hundred-to-$1,200/year range), so the "real" price depends heavily on which features you switch on.
Where User Interviews stops: it recruits and schedules — full stop. The instant a participant is booked, the slow work is back in your court: run the session live, take notes, transcribe, code, and synthesize. The panel is also more concentrated in fewer countries, which matters for international studies.
Respondent: the B2B and professional panel
Respondent specializes where recruiting is hardest: B2B and professional audiences. Its panel of roughly 4 million participants skews toward vetted professionals and decision-makers, and it pairs that with higher incentive payouts to attract genuinely hard-to-reach roles (think CFOs, DevOps leads, or specialist clinicians). Participant quality is a selling point — Respondent reports an average participant rating of 4.9/5.
Pricing is refreshingly transparent for this category: $40 per session pay-as-you-go, or a 63-session bundle at $34/session (a 15% discount), with no per-seat fees. Document signing is included in Basic and Advanced subscriptions, and SSO comes with Advanced.
Where Respondent stops: same wall as User Interviews. It is a participant panel — built to recruit and verify people, not to run or analyze the research. Once the professional you fought to book shows up, moderating and synthesizing that expensive conversation is entirely on you. Its own-panel management tooling is also lighter than User Interviews' Hub.
The problem both tools share: recruiting is only half the job
Here is the trap. Both platforms sell you the front of the funnel — finding and booking a human. That is genuinely valuable; recruiting is a real pain. In User Interviews' own State of User Research data, 61% of researchers said the time it takes to find participants was a struggle in 2024, up from 45% the year before. And reaching people is hard: response rates run just 3–8% for cold outreach and 10–20% even to your own user base.
But solving recruiting does nothing for the back of the funnel. After the booking you still:
- Schedule around time zones and reschedule the inevitable no-shows.
- Moderate every session live — one researcher, one participant, in real time.
- Transcribe and code hours of recordings.
- Synthesize it all into something a stakeholder will actually read.
That back half is where research time actually goes — and neither User Interviews nor Respondent touches it. You have paid $40+ a session to start the hard part.
Koji: recruit less, and let AI run the other half
Koji flips the economics. Because Koji's AI moderates the interview, you do not need a researcher in every session — the AI runs unlimited conversations in parallel, 24/7, each with adaptive real-time follow-ups that dig into the why like a skilled interviewer. Then it themes every response into a one-click report automatically. Two consequences:
- You need fewer recruited participants. When each conversation is deeper and analysis is instant, you extract more signal per person — so the panel bill (whether User Interviews or Respondent) shrinks.
- The back half disappears. No live moderating, no manual transcription, no hand-coding. Thematic analysis runs the moment interviews finish.
And Koji plays nicely with the panels you already use. Recruit your hard-to-reach B2B roles on Respondent or your consumers on User Interviews, then send them a Koji link — the AI interviews them on their own schedule, killing the scheduling and no-show tax. Set up screener questions to qualify them, dial in incentive strategies, and capture both numbers and narrative with Koji's six structured question types (open-ended, scale, single-choice, multiple-choice, ranking, yes/no) — see the structured questions guide.
The real cost per insight
It is tempting to compare these tools on sticker price alone — Respondent's $40 (or $34 bundled) per session versus User Interviews' higher per-session rate. But per-session cost is the wrong denominator. The number that matters is cost per insight, and that is set by the whole workflow, not just recruiting.
Consider a 30-participant study. On either panel you pay to recruit all 30, then a researcher spends roughly 30–45 minutes moderating each session, plus hours transcribing and coding afterward — easily a full week of skilled time before a single insight reaches a stakeholder. The panel invoice is often the smaller line item.
Now route those same 30 participants through Koji. The AI moderates all 30 in parallel on their own schedule, so there is no live-session bottleneck and no scheduling tax, and thematic analysis is done the moment the last interview finishes. Because each conversation goes deeper, many teams reach saturation with fewer than 30 — cutting the panel bill too. Same recruiting source, a fraction of the cost per insight.
Which should you choose?
- Choose User Interviews if you need the biggest, most consumer-heavy panel and want research-ops tooling (Hub) to manage your own participants over time.
- Choose Respondent if you need B2B/professional participants, transparent per-session pricing, and higher incentives for hard-to-reach roles.
- Choose Koji if recruiting is only part of your problem — you also want to run and analyze the research automatically. Use a panel to source people, then let Koji's AI moderate and theme every conversation. For the wider landscape, see our guide to participant recruitment platforms and how to recruit user research participants.
The bottom line
User Interviews and Respondent are both excellent at what they do — filling your calendar with real, verified humans. But a booked participant is a starting line, not a finish line. In 2026, the fastest teams recruit fewer, higher-value participants and let AI moderate and synthesize the rest — turning "from question to insight in hours, not weeks" from a slogan into a workflow.
Ready to stop paying per session to start the hard part? Start free with Koji, bring participants from any panel, and let AI run and analyze your interviews end to end.
