Top 5 online services to recruit user research participants in 2021
When you want to base your decisions on good qualitative data, there's no substitute for active research methods like user interviews or testing. While UserBit provides you with everything you need to manage your participants, interviews and more, finding research participants is still one of the most challenging stage of the research process.
But fear not, for we have tightened our belts and put together a list of the most reliable services that will help you recruit research participants online.
If you're familiar with UserBit, you know how important value is for us. Making UX and product research affordable is one of our main goals. So we wanted to start the list by highlighting a service that we think provides great value.
Userbrain
Price
$29 per user test (pay as you go), $19 per month per user test (on subscription).
Overview
If your usecase mainly consists of finding participants for and conducting user tests, then you might want to check out Userbrain. Compared to some of the popular services (Userlytics, etc) you pay ~1/10th of the price. Each test comprises of a 5-15 min video recording of a real person testing out your prototype or website. Their app allows for annotation, comments, etc on top of the recorded session as well.
Respondent
Price
50% of incentives offered to participants.
Overview
Respondent is popular because they've embraced specializing in one aspect of user research — recruitment. They cater specifically to businesses and focus on finding participants amongst working professionals. Respondent also offers a dashboard for participant management.
Respondent has one of the simplest pricing plans — they charge 50% of whatever incentive you offer to the participants.
User Interviews
Price
$40 / session - pay as you go, $300 / month - 15 sessions per month
Overview
Like Respondent, User Interviews offers both recruitment and ability to manage participants via its Research Hub product.
User Interviews focuses on speed of recruitment and offers a variety of products to expedite the recruitment proccess including automating scheduling and incentives.
Ethnio
Price
$79 / month - 500 responses per month across 5 projects (Response is anytime a participant fills out a screener)
Overview
Ethnio is another popular research recruiting service but their pricing model is based on number of responses received rather than number of participants.
In terms of participant management, Ethnio offers a pretty robust set of features. Researchers can manage participants, projects (screeners), incentives and scheduling all from their app.
UserZoom Go
Price
$500 / month - 40 studies per year + $15 per participant (unmoderated recruiting) + $150 per participant (moderated recruiting).
Phew! So clearly UserZoom (previously Validately) wants to target enterprise customers. $500 is pretty much their cheapest plan that includes the option of moderated recruiting.
Overview
UserZoom Go's value metric seems to lean towards the analysis and reporting side of things rather than recruiting. It allows you to create video clips, taking notes, analysis charts and so on.
Hope this list is helpful for when you need the convenience of finding external research participants online. Remember though, no matter how you source your participants you can always manage them and their qualitative data on UserBit.
With UserBit, you can not only manage participants and interviews, but also analyze survey data, notes, media and leverage a host of tools to make your research workflow a breeze.
