Online services to recruit research participants

Top 5 online services to recruit user research participants in 2021

UX Guide
January 31, 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

Userbrain - best value in user testing services
Userbrain - best value in user testing services

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.

View Userbrain

G2
(1)
Capterra
(57)

Respondent

Respondent - service with the simplest pricing
Respondent - service with the simplest pricing

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.

View Respondent

G2
(53)

User Interviews

User Interviews - get setup and recruit quickly
User Interviews - get setup and recruit quickly

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.

View User Interviews

G2
(49)
Capterra
(19)

Ethnio

Ethnio - research participant recruiting, scheduling, and incentive payments
Ethnio - research participant recruiting, scheduling, and incentive payments

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.

View Ethnio

Capterra
(19)

UserZoom Go

UserZoom Go - for enterprise needs
UserZoom Go - for enterprise needs

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.

View UserZoom Go

G2
(17)

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.


author image
Akshay Anand
Founder @ UserBit