What is Prolific used for?

Prolific is an online platform for recruiting verified participants for research studies and for gathering human feedback to evaluate and train AI. It is a good fit for academics recruiting participants for experiments, AI teams collecting preference data and product teams running quick surveys.

How much does Prolific cost?

Prolific is a paid product with no free plan. No subscription: platform use is pay as you go, with participant rewards you set plus a platform fee (usually 42.8% for corporate, 33.3% for academic or non-profit customers). Managed services are quoted on request.

Is Prolific open source?

No. Prolific is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. In the Forms & Surveys category, open-source options include LimeSurvey, Formbricks and HeyForm.

What are some alternatives to Prolific?

Prolific competes with Cint, Pollfish and Toluna.

Prolific: features, pricing and alternatives

About Prolific

Prolific connects people who run studies with a pool of online participants who are paid for their time. Researchers use it to recruit verified respondents for surveys and experiments, and AI teams use it to collect human feedback and ratings.

For AI work, the vendor describes gathering human judgments from representative groups of people, used for preference tuning, safety evaluations and benchmarks. For academic and commercial researchers, it offers quick access to verified participants. A separate path lets individuals sign up to take paid studies on a flexible schedule.

Prolific is a commercial hosted marketplace rather than software you run yourself. Sign-up is free, and the cost of studies is published on its pricing page. It suits university researchers, market researchers and machine learning teams that need human data quickly.

Key features

Verified participant recruitment
Human feedback for AI evaluation
Participant payments handled by the platform
Study targeting by participant traits
Fast turnaround on study responses

Good fit for

→Academics recruiting participants for experiments
→AI teams collecting preference data
→Product teams running quick surveys

Tags: participant-recruitment; research; human-data; ai-evaluation; surveys; panel; marketplace

Prolific: questions and answers

What is Prolific used for?: Prolific is an online platform for recruiting verified participants for research studies and for gathering human feedback to evaluate and train AI. It is a good fit for academics recruiting participants for experiments, AI teams collecting preference data and product teams running quick surveys.
How much does Prolific cost?: Prolific is a paid product with no free plan. No subscription: platform use is pay as you go, with participant rewards you set plus a platform fee (usually 42.8% for corporate, 33.3% for academic or non-profit customers). Managed services are quoted on request.
Is Prolific open source?: No. Prolific is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. In the Forms & Surveys category, open-source options include LimeSurvey, Formbricks and HeyForm.
What are some alternatives to Prolific?: Prolific competes with Cint, Pollfish and Toluna.