If you decide to recruit via Outset, you will be recruiting participants through our panel partners Prolific and User Interviews. We do not run our own panel, but instead we connect with these two panels via API to create a convenient (optional) source of participant recruitment.
Here’s a quick guide to help you understand the differences between these two panels across key dimensions, along with when these panels may not be the right fit.
What type of participant recruitment do Prolific and User Interviews do?
Prolific and User Interviews can both provide sourcing for high-quality qualitative interviews. Here's a bit more info on where these two panels focus on and differ -
1. Participant Type
Prolific provides access to general population participants, ideal for studies focused on everyday consumer behavior. Participants can be pre-filtered using demographic and behavioral data.
geared toward B2C research
💡Tip: Use their participant count checker to explore their pool!
User Interviews supports a broader range of participant types, including both general consumers and niche professional roles, like product managers, marketers, engineers, or healthcare professionals.
supports both B2B and B2C research
2. Geographic Coverage
Prolific
Prolific has good global reach with strong coverage in the US and UK, and is growing presence in the APAC region.
Strong presence (≥ 5000 participants) | Some presence (≥ 1000 participants) | Limited presence (< 1000 participants) |
United States, United Kingdom, South Africa, Canada, Germany | Australia, Portugal, Poland, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Netherlands, France, Ireland, Greece | Hungary, Chile, New Zealand, Sweden, Belgium, Australia, Israel, Japan, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Estonia, India, Norway, Finland |
User Interviews
User Interviews recruits in the core markets of US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Australia, South Africa, and India. These markets all have 30K+ participants, with the US having over 4M participants.
They've recently expanded to new countries, including Brazil, Pakistan, Spain, Netherlands, Mexico, Poland, Portugal, New Zealand, Italy, and Ireland. See more in their 2025 panel report. These markets all have >10K participants, and are available for recruitment through Outset by request (please contact our team for more info).
Reminder that geography may influence feasibility for niche audiences—especially for B2B roles in emerging markets.
3. Cost Per Participant
💡 Tip: Prolific charges a small screen-out fee for each disqualified participant, so if you have a smaller incidence rate, your total cost will increase.
Here’s an in-depth discussion on pricing for both panels: How much will it cost to recruit participants through Outset?
4. Participant Quality and Fraud Prevention
Both Prolific and User Interviews have strong systems in place to help improve participant quality and prevent fraud.
Prolific
Uses prescreening and demographic filters completed directly by participants.
Offers transparent metrics like approval rate and time to complete, helping researchers assess data quality.
Has built-in attention checks, IP validation, and response speed monitoring.
Read more about Prolific’s fraud prevention here.
User Interviews
Applies an AI-driven matching algorithm using 400M+ data points to pair participants with studies.
Calculates a fraud score at sign-up and recalculates it with every application.
Uses automated checks to catch duplicate identities, suspicious occupation patterns, and copy/pasted screener responses.
Includes advanced project-level protections for high-risk studies
Less than 0.3% of interviews are flagged fraudulent
For more on how to set up screeners that deter low-quality responses & fraud, check out our guide on fraud prevention best practices here.
When might these panels not be the right fit?
While Outset's integrated panel partners - Prolific and User Interviews - are a great for many research needs, there are some situations where they may not be the best fit. This typically happens when your study requires very niche participants or strict quotas that lead to very low incidence rates.
Read more here: Planning ahead for recruiting hard-to-reach audiences