For a more detailed, side-by-side breakdown of how Prolific compares to MTurk, check out our Prolific vs MTurk comparison page.

In a nutshell, this is how Prolific is different from MTurk and other crowdsourcing platforms:

Flexible prescreening

You can specify various prescreening filters prior to launching your study (e.g., nationality, first language, ethnicity, political affiliation, socio-economic status, etc.), so participants don't get screened out while taking part. You can also recruit a custom sample.

Participant naïveté

You can get unique participants each time (i.e., you can easily exclude people who have previously taken part) and you can filter by number of studies completed. Plus, we have algorithms in place to fairly allocate study spaces, which means that our pool doesn't suffer as much from non-naïveté (Chandler et al., 2015).

High quality

We have many mechanisms in place to ensure a high quality of our pool. If you want to learn more you can read about some of our data quality measures in our blog posts: Bots and data quality on crowdsourcing platforms and Why participants get banned.

We have also recently brought in a participant waitlist, which allows us to vet participants before they enter our pool, and therefore ensure that our participant pool is of the highest possible quality.

Ethical research practices

We protect and value our participant pool and enforce minimum payments that are consistent with research ethic’s guidelines, which means you have access to a large, motivated and diverse participant pool.

Low cost

While offering all of the above, we're very low-cost as compared to other services. We charge our platform fee on your total spend for transparency. Our fees are a 30% margin for industry customers and a 25% margin for academics and non-profits.

Participation of minors is prohibited

Our Terms and Conditions explicitly state that participants have to be at least 18 years old to take part in studies on Prolific.

Participants are not employees of Prolific

We do not consider our participants as our employees in any way; they simply volunteer for research projects and earn rewards, which is covered by UK tax law. To make sure that our participants don't turn into professional survey takers, we have a rate-limiting mechanism in place that distributes studies as evenly as possible across the entire participant pool.

Did you know?

In a 2022 paper published in Behavior Research Methods, it was found that Prolific provided the highest data quality overall compared to other crowdsourcing platforms.

Two independent scientific papers have also been published in 2017 and 2018, showing Prolific's advantages over MTurk and Crowdflower.

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