Most online survey panel companies claim to have massive panels with millions of respondents, promising quick, high-quality data for your user research.
However, having access to a big database doesn't mean you'll get the best people for your survey.
Broad panels often mean poor targeting, higher fraud rates, and ineffective screening—or just slow delivery of the right participants. That usually leads to an irrelevant panel and lower-quality survey data.
Many researchers can avoid these issues by knowing what to look for in a survey panel provider—and choosing one that fits their research needs.
Below, we’ll walk through:
- Key factors to consider when choosing a survey panel company to ensure high-quality data and a smoother research process.
- The top 7 online survey panel companies.
Ready to recruit highly targeted participants? Book a demo with User Interviews and get started with our online survey panel.
How to choose the right survey panel company
With so many online survey panel providers out there, picking the right one can be a challenge. Below, we highlight the key criteria to help you zero in on the best fit.
Consider panel quality and targeting
Survey panel companies recruit and manage panelists to complete surveys or participate in similar research studies. Many of these panels are huge, with some ranging between 50 and 100 million participants.
The problem is that these panels can be low-quality and lack precise targeting capabilities, which results in poor or useless responses.
For example, a survey targeting new parents might inadvertently include respondents who don’t have children. This can happen because some panels rely on generic recruitment pools with minimal screening, allowing unqualified participants without verifying their eligibility. Plus, they don’t allow you to set strict filters for who should be included in your study.
Additionally, these panels tend to offer rudimentary screening tools. If you're unable to accurately screen survey respondents, you're more likely to include unqualified individuals. This can skew your survey results, providing you with unusable data.
To determine if a panel is high-quality, you should ask a few questions:
- Is the panel proprietary or non-proprietary? A proprietary panel is owned and managed by the research company, giving them direct oversight to maintain quality. Non-proprietary panels pull participants from multiple sources and are publicly available—meaning less oversight and less control over who’s in the panel.
- Who is in the panel audience? Examine the panel's recruitment methodologies and composition to evaluate whether it suits your research. Does it include consumers or business professionals? What are the geographic and demographic criteria (age, gender, income)? Good panels provide detailed audience stats so you know exactly who’s in the panel and how they’re sourced.
Check out User Interview's research panel reports for audience insights, stats, and info on how they build and manage their panel.
- Does the panel take steps to prevent fraud? Fraudulent participants—such as bots or dishonest respondents—undermine research integrity and compromise results. To avoid this, ask what steps the company takes to protect against fraud, including:
- Do they conduct regular checks to detect and prevent fraud?
- What participant info do they use to verify identities?
- If fraud slips through, can you report it?
Researchers are more likely to avoid issues with panel quality and fraud when they work with companies that rigorously vet and verify participants to ensure reliable, accurate data.
Learn how User Interviews implements fraud prevention and detection measures to ensure high-quality participants.
Look for panels that quickly deliver participants for your surveys
Larger market research firms and research recruiting agencies tend to take much longer to deliver participants for your surveys. Typically, research agencies recruit in around two weeks.
Not only does it take longer, but the costs are also much higher compared to alternatives such as a dedicated research recruiting platform that manages its own panel.
Check how quickly they deliver verified respondents who match your criteria. Ideally, your panel company should be able to deliver the first set of qualified participants within a day.
However, once you receive participants, you’ll need to approve them for the study, then guide them through each step until the survey is complete. Without a tracking system, this process has to be done manually, making it time-consuming and error-prone—especially in large-scale surveys with hundreds or even thousands of respondents.
Fortunately, platforms like User Interviews offer real-time participant tracking and intuitive dashboards showing participant status at every stage: approved, started, and completed. A panel that’s fast and simple keeps your research project on track, so you can focus on insights, not logistics.
Learn more about how to build a research panel.
Top 7 online survey panel companies
Below, we explore seven of the best online survey panels for user research, focusing on their key features, pricing, and overall panel quality.
1. User Interviews
User Interviews is a user research recruiting platform that helps researchers find high-quality participants for their studies.
The platform offers various tools and features to handle the entire recruiting process, including:
- Access to an extensive database of millions of verified panelists, ensuring a diverse, high-quality pool of participants tailored to your research needs.
- Advanced participant targeting and search filters, allowing for precise selection of respondents based on demographics, behaviors, and more. This includes niche participants for more specific surveys and research studies.
- Customizable screener survey templates and premium screening tools, which rigorously vet participants to ensure they meet your specific criteria.
- Automated fraud protection to detect bots or bad actors and block them from joining your panel.
- Incentive management tools, which help to attract and retain engaged participants and ensure they’re both reliable and motivated during the study.
- Panel management for teams who need to build and maintain their own participant database, including a participant CRM, opt-in forms, and more.
Below are the benefits of using User Interviews as your survey panel provider:
Access an extensive database of quality panelists
User Interviews provides a proprietary panel of 6 million qualified participants. In total, the panel has supported one million sessions and processed $41+ million in incentives while maintaining a fraud rate of less than 0.3%.
All recruitment is handled directly by User Interviews with no reliance on third-party sourcing for panelists. To ensure participant quality and protect researchers, the fraud detection model analyzes more than 50 unique signals across the entire participant lifecycle (plus enrichment from third-party data sources) and is frequently retrained to reflect current fraud patterns.
All participant profiles include rich data—name, job title, and profile photos. Panel members can add extra email and social media verification (Facebook, LinkedIn), so researchers secure real humans, not bots or fakes, for their surveys.
Deterring fraud is a top priority for User Interviews, cutting fraudulent sessions with measures like automated checks for digital identity overlaps, re-verification of profile details, and a sophisticated model for flagging suspicious activity.
On top of that, researchers can leave reviews based on the participant’s activity during the study. If a participant shows up late or lacks engagement in your survey, you’ll be able to leave feedback ratings highlighting what they did well and where they fell short.
This allows you to review a participant’s past project activity before choosing them for your survey. All of these measures ensure the User Interviews panel contains high-quality participants that advance your survey research.
Set strict targeting parameters to reach your ideal participant
Survey panel companies that offer broad databases tend to provide poor results for B2B and B2C researchers who need precise targeting filters for potential participants.
User Interviews’ Recruit offers 20+ precise targeting filters—demographics (age, gender, income), psychographics (interests, lifestyle), behaviors (weekly online shoppers), and geographics (specific cities or countries).
The advanced matching algorithm ensures high accuracy, delivering the first verified participants in a median of one hour.
For niche needs, like B2B executives or specific consumer segments like active home buyers, User Interview’s operations team helps source tailored matches, achieving 98% positive session feedback.
Here are all the advanced targeting options available when creating projects on User Interviews:
Location
- Country
- State
- City
Demographics
- Age
- Children
- Disabilities
- English language proficiency (speaking)
- Gender
- Health insurance type(s)
- Home ownership
- Household income (USD)
- Level of education
- Living situation
- Marital status
- Neighborhood type
- Other language(s) spoken fluently
- Pets owned
- Race/Ethnicity
Professional
- Employment status
- Gig or contract occupation(s)
- Military service status
Advanced Professional (B2B Projects)
- Company size
- Industry
- Seniority
- Small business owner
- Type of income
- Work setting
- Skills
- Job titles
Products and Services
- Digital design/prototyping tools
- Food delivery services
- Health and wellness apps/platforms
- Online banking/financial management tools
- Online learning/educational platforms
- Online marketplace platforms
- Online streaming services
- Online travel booking services
- Productivity/project management software
- Smart home and gaming devices
- Social networking platforms
- Traditional banks
- Vehicles currently owned or leased
Technical
- Assistive technologies and custom settings
- Browsers
- Computer operating system
- Computer with a webcam
- Smartphone operating system
- Tablet operating system
You can also add custom study requirements. For example, if you’re recruiting small business owners, you can say, “I need 50% in retail and 50% in tech, with at least 2 years’ experience.” User Interviews’ project coordinators then fine-tune recruitment to hit those exact quotas.
Once you launch a project, changes can still be made, such as your screen questions, incentives, or the total number of participants. This allows you to test various settings, wait and see what works (or doesn’t), and make adjustments as needed.
Create custom screeners to further qualify respondents
Ineffective screening can lead to the recruitment of unqualified participants in your research study, emphasizing the importance of a well-crafted screener survey.
Most survey panel providers don’t offer the proper screening tools needed to filter out unqualified participants. Instead of providing robust, customizable screener surveys and advanced targeting filters to thoroughly vet candidates, they simply provide you with a list of respondents who match your pre-defined criteria.
In some cases, you'll get lucky and your panel will all fit into your target audience. However, that's not always the case, and it's more likely that you end up with unqualified or fraudulent responses that leave your research ineffective.
User Interviews makes it easy to build precise, effective screeners with a drag-and-drop survey builder. Screeners can include skip logic and various types of questions like:
- Pick-one
- Pick-any
- Multi-select
- Short-answer
- Long-answer
- Video-response
- Grid (matrix)
For longer questions, you can bulk paste answers instead of typing them one by one. Plus, any new screener can be saved as a template so you won’t have to rebuild the same one from scratch.
The platform also includes additional advanced screening survey features, including:
- Premium Screening (double screening): Verify screener-qualified participants via email, phone, or video response to confirm details or expertise, catching discrepancies before they join.
- Automatic participant qualification: Auto-approve 100% matches to your screener and targeting, speeding up scheduling for straightforward projects.
- Video screening: Prompt qualified participants to submit a 90-second video answering a custom question that instantly reveals their qualifications, enthusiasm, and fit for the project.
Tip: Keep screeners to 10 questions or fewer to ensure respondents are high-quality.
Automate incentives and payments processing
If you want to achieve above-average response rates and only attract high-quality participation, you'll need to offer enticing incentives that are worth the time investment for panelists.
Otherwise, they'll lack motivation for the study, miss scheduled sessions, and disengage from the research process.
Not only does User Interviews help you automate this step, but you can use their research incentive calculator to determine how much you should offer your survey panel.
After you’ve determined an incentive amount, the platform takes care of the rest. You can choose from over 1,000 incentive types—like Amazon gift cards, cash, or donations—across 200+ countries. They support multiple currencies, including USD, EUR, AUD, CAD, and GBP for Recruit projects.
You can automatically distribute incentives so participants get paid faster. While there is a manual disruption option, the number of supported payment methods is much smaller, and you'll add a lot of extra work while risking delays and poor engagement.
After a study is complete, User Interviews allows you to set up automated, branded thank you emails to keep your panel engaged and connected for future studies. This also helps with gathering feedback to see what changes you could make in the future to provide a better experience for your study participants.
Bonus: Already have a panel? Use Research Hub to manage and scale it
If you already have customers or a previously built research panel, you can sync it with User Interviews to manage your panel in one place.
The research recruitment platform includes Research Hub, which is a suite of various tools for creating, managing, and scaling a survey panel of your existing customers or users.
It works for all types of studies, including surveys, moderated interviews, unmoderated tests, and longitudinal studies. You can segment participants by custom attributes, track participation history, automate invite rules, and ensure the right people get invited at the right time.
Within Research Hub, there are two primary tools: Workflow and CRM.
- Workflow is how you'll handle all session invites, screening, scheduling, and incentive management.
- CRM is how you can build your data-rich panel, add segmentation for users, govern who joins your studies, etc.
If you want to rely on Hub to continue growing your survey panel, you have full access to various opt-in forms, CSV uploads, and data integrations that can be implemented across your organization to reach existing and new users.
Managing the panel is simple: Hub tracks participation, so you know exactly who joins each study, their screener answers, total incentives earned, and more. All of these criteria can be reviewed by adjusting your panel participant filters to review qualified profiles.
After you launch a project with Hub, you can continue to invite new participants or make edits as you go.
Want to stop spending money on panels and build your own? Book a demo today to learn more about User Interviews' Research Hub.
2. Cint
Cint is a global research technology company that connects brands and researchers to over 335 million survey respondents across 130+ countries.
The Cint Exchange connects buyers and sellers while offering various targeting options, including general population and more niche segments. Pricing is project-based, varying by survey length, sample size, and audience specifics.
3. Qualtrics
Qualtrics is an experience management platform with various research tools for creating, distributing, and analyzing surveys. Qualtrics Online Sample is the platform's survey panel that provides access to targeted respondents for market research.
Additionally, the platform provides customizable survey templates, real-time analytics dashboards, and self-service API integrations. Pricing plans are billed annually, varying by survey length, panel size, and number of responses.
4. PickFu
PickFu is a self-serve consumer research platform that delivers rapid feedback from a global panel of 15 million+ respondents for surveys and polls. It’s ideal for businesses needing quick, actionable consumer insights on product concepts, branding, or new pricing strategies.
Surveys can be customized to flexible poll formats, including head-to-head, ranked, and open-ended questions. There are 90+ targeting traits for precise audience segmentation. Pricing is response-based, meaning you'll pay per respondent. Exact costs vary by demographic targeting, sample size, and support priority.
5. InnovateMR
InnovateMR is an audience sampling and market research company that provides survey responses from B2B, B2C, and healthcare audiences. The panel includes 650M+ respondents across 198 countries.
Users have the option to handle panelist sourcing manually using the DIY platform or choose to work directly with InnovateMR team members. Pricing for an InnovateMR expert research partner is project-based, with custom plans only.
6. SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey is an online survey platform with various features, including SurveyMonkey Audience, for research recruiting. This online market research solution offers access to 50+ million global respondents for surveys and studies.
The integrated platform supports advanced segmentation and customizable survey tools. Pricing varies by plan, but users can create a free account or begin getting feedback by paying per survey response.
7. Respondent
Respondent is a research platform connecting businesses with verified professionals and consumers for surveys, interviews, and focus groups. Pricing is based on completed sessions, with custom plans available for high volume recruitment needs.
Get your first online survey panel participants in hours with User Interviews
User Interviews solves many of the issues most researchers face when working with online survey panel companies. The platform is the fastest, most reliable way to recruit high-quality survey participants, with a median time to your first matched respondent of just one hour.
With a proprietary panel of 6 million participants, you can find the highly targeted individuals your research needs without the hassle of unreliable data or slow delivery.
Want to build your survey panel of targeted participants? Book a demo with User Interviews today.
