I’ve never had any issues collecting superior quality data compared to other recruiting platforms
Brent Pitchford
Graduate Student
The academic-first participant pool. Verified identities, live face-authentication before every study, and a Participant Authenticity Score† on every session.
† The full Participant Authenticity Score launches in August 2026; identity verification and per-study face-authentication have been live since 2018.
I’ve never had any issues collecting superior quality data compared to other recruiting platforms
Brent Pitchford
Graduate Student
I’ve now used Testable Minds for studies across several years and I am impressed by the data quality.
Rob McIntosh
Senior Lecturer
The process for resolving disputes is excellent and fair for both researchers and participants.
Jennifer Murphy
Senior Lecturer
Simple and versatile, there is no need to spend hours in the lab to collect large samples.
Alejandro J. Estudillo
Senior Lecturer
Bots, LLM-written answers and click-farms quietly corrupt online data. We fuse dozens of real-time signals into one score per session — the Participant Authenticity Score (PAS)† — so you decide with evidence, not hope.
Government photo ID, face-matched to a live selfie — and a live face-authentication before every study confirms the same human is present.
A sub-30-second pre-study scan hard-blocks known automation and pool-banned fingerprints before the participant reaches your study.
Datacenter and VPN origins, TLS fingerprints, and headless or automation markers — tiered into hard-stop versus suspicious.
Typing rhythm, pointer motion, paste and focus provenance: text that appears without genuine keystrokes is treated as injected, not typed.
Timing versus reading time, cross-participant similarity, free-text canaries — and optional session audio, the hardest signal to fake.
No single check decides. Everything converges on one server-side score with three action bands — include, review, exclude — and you set the strictness. We don’t quote a “100% detection” figure; nobody honestly can.
Prolific was founded as Prolific Academic — today its growth engine is AI-lab data work, and academia is the discounted tier. On Testable Minds, your study is the main event: human-reviewed before launch, matched to a curated pool, disputes handled by us.
Participant earnings are capped so you sample more naive participants, not professional survey-takers.
| For researchers | Testable Minds | Prolific | CloudResearch Connect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary focus | 99% ACADEMICAcademic research is the business, not a discount tier. | AI-FIRSTFounded as “Prolific Academic”; growth now driven by commercial AI data work. | MIXEDAcademic roots (TurkPrime); AI-training and market-research lines alongside. |
| Humanity assurance | PAS, EVERY SESSIONVerified ID + live face-authentication before each study + behavioural telemetry, fused into a per-session authenticity score. | CHECKS + REFUNDAuthenticity checks; the “100% Human Guarantee” is a refund policy, not a per-session score. | SENTRYContinuous behavioural vetting; identity checked once via Stripe. |
| In-study telemetry | FULL, NATIVEBuilt on Testable: every keystroke, paste, focus change and DOM write recorded — replayable, re-scorable. | NONERedirect-bound: sees the entry and exit, not what happens inside your study. | NONESame redirect boundary. |
| Platform fee | 10–30%30/25/20% by plan; departmental licenses from 10%. | 33–43%33.3% academic · 42.8% corporate. | 25–40%25% academic · 40% standard. |
| Participant pay floors | $8 / $12Enforced; $12/hour for identity-verified participants. | $8£6/$8 enforced; £9/$12 recommended. | $6$7.50 recommended. |
| Dispute handling | WE HANDLE ITPlatform-managed, humans on both sides. You only ever deal with us. | SELF-SERVEResearcher applies policy; participant disputes via chatbot. | SELF-SERVEResearcher decides; participant recourse limited. |
| Pool & speed | CURATEDSmaller pool, earnings capped at $600/year (a non-professional sample); common demographics field in hours to days. | 200K+Large pool, fast fielding, 300+ prescreeners. | FASTEST (US)Hundreds of US completes per hour. |
Competitor figures from their public pricing and help pages and Sacra’s Prolific profile, verified July 2026.
Our Verified Minds go through advanced identity verification by human and machine. Before each experiment their identity is reconfirmed, so we can guarantee basic demographic details such as age, sex, and nationality.
Our participants join because they want to help advance the field of science through their participation. Through earning limits and fair rates we ensure that participants and researchers’ motivations are aligned.
Unlike other platforms, we handle all participant disputes. You only need to communicate with us, although you have the option to directly message your participants through our platform.
Recruit participants for any browser-based survey or experiment. There are additional synergies with studies built in Testable that make collecting data for your research easier than ever.
Use our built-in filtering tool to only target your ideal participants for your studies. If the characteristic you are looking for is not covered, don’t worry: You can build your own short screener surveys to select for any trait.
You only need to pay for data that you approve. Most of our researchers do not reject any participants, but if you find the occasional bad apple, you can reject their result and help us maintain the high quality of our pool.
Take control of your study timing with advanced scheduling. Choose when your experiment goes into field and during what times of day it should run. You can also account for the local time zone of your participants.
Create your own panels of participants based on previous studies. Use this for longitudinal studies or to easily draw on a subsection of participants with specific characteristics that you curated.
Both pay floors are platform-enforced — no study can pay below them. Fair pay is how you get attentive, honest data.
You pay your participants
Regular participants
Minimum fee: $8/hour
Verified Minds
Minimum fee: $12/hour
You pay us
Individual Testable accounts
Commission of participant fees
Basic: 30%, Plus: 25%, Pro: 20%
Departmental group license for Testable
Commission as low as 10% of participant fees
$15
Commission fees (30%)
$4.50
Total
$19.50
The minimum project fee is $20.
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