Prolific provides a managed participant recruitment platform designed for researchers who need high-quality, representative, or targeted samples for online studies. Researchers can define demographic and screening criteria to reach specific participant groups from a pool of pre-screened, ethically compensated participants. The platform supports survey and experiment hosting via integrations with external tools, or researchers can link their own study URLs. Prolific enforces minimum pay standards for participants and provides attention and data-quality checks to help researchers obtain reliable responses. It is used across academic institutions, market research firms, and UX research teams. The platform offers a cost calculator to estimate study costs based on number of participants, estimated completion time, and reward per participant. Prolific also provides managed research services for organizations that need end-to-end study support. Data collection can be monitored in real time, and researchers can approve or reject submissions based on quality criteria.
Target audience and deployment
- Solo / Freelancer
- Startup
- SMB
- Mid-market
- Enterprise
- Cloud
Key features
Use cases
- Recruit participants for academic research studies
- Conduct UX and product research at scale
- Run market research surveys with targeted audiences
- Validate AI and machine learning datasets
- Perform longitudinal studies with repeat participants
Best for
- Academic researchers who need to recruit vetted, ethically compensated study participants quickly
- UX researchers who need to gather targeted user feedback at scale
- Market researchers who need representative consumer samples for survey studies
- Data scientists who need human-annotated data for AI and ML model development
Integrations
Other
Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, Gorilla, jsPsych, Typeform