Top 8 participant recruitment tools to source, screen, and save your ideal testers

You need a pool of testers who align with your ideal user base standing by, ready to give feedback on your design.

Enter participant recruitment tools: they give you access to testers, let you filter and screen the best ones, and even help you host and manage your sessions.

Let’s find out more. ⤵️

The biggest perk of participant recruitment tools is that it plugs you into a network of vetted testers, fast-tracking recruitment, and saving you resources.

Some other participant recruitment platform benefits include:

You may have noticed that these benefits are relatively broad. That’s because there are so many types of participant recruitment tools. Some fit into neat categories. Others cross boundaries or are more comprehensive.

‘Participant recruitment tools’ is a broad term, and tools can apply to a range of platforms with different features. Here are the four main types you’ll encounter, along with their pros and cons.

A dedicated panel management tool’s main feature is providing and maintaining a participant database, making it easy to recruit, manage, and track participants for your UX research studies.

They also usually include filters like location and demographics, helping you find ideal participants based on your criteria.

Some UX research tools include added-on panel management features. These comprehensive platforms that let you:

They don’t just streamline your recruitment, but bring your full UX research process and participant recruitment under one roof. They help you find the testers, give you a place to test them, and help you extract the results.

A CRM for UX research recruitment? Yep, it exists. With some out-of-the-box thinking, you can repurpose email and CRM platforms as recruitment tools (or even find purpose-built ones, like Maze Reach). After sending out your recruitment outreach messages, simply track open rates and engagement, and manage your participant list within the tool.

Let’s face it: tools can be expensive, and not every UX team has the resources. That’s why a makeshift approach can be the right method.

For example, participant recruitment methods like social media can help you filter through participants, while communities can give you access to professionals of a certain niche. Google Surveys help you quickly screen potential candidates, while Calendly will help you schedule and book UX research sessions.

There are plenty of participant recruitment tools out there—the market is rife with platforms for businesses big and small, and each tool comes with advantages and fallbacks.

So we scoured the market to find the best participant recruitment tools out there. Read on for our top picks, including the type of tool, pricing information, and their best use cases.

Tool type: UX research tool with added-on tester panel and participant management features (+ a purpose-built CRM)

Best for: Businesses that need a comprehensive UX research solution with integrated participant recruitment and management

Maze is the leading UX research platform that empowers businesses to get game-changing insights. Along with a comprehensive suite of UX research methods and sophisticated UX reporting capabilities, Maze provides two dedicated solutions for supporting user research participant recruitment.

With Maze Panel, you can access a diverse pool of 3+ million pre-screened testers across 130+ and use over 400 filters to recruit the ideal participants. Maze Reach lets you create and manage your database, send screeners, and track participation to build an engaged community of testers.

Both Panel and Reach integrate with Maze’s range of moderated and unmoderated UX research methods, making it easy to recruit participants, design, deploy, and analyze your studies all on one platform.

Maze has a free-forever plan, and its Starter plan begins at just $99 per month.

Tool type: Dedicated panel management tool

Best for: Businesses that want access to a broad and diverse participant pool, but don’t need research capabilities

Respondent is a participant recruitment platform with a pool of 300 million participants from approximately 150 countries worldwide. It includes a range of targeting methods, including demographic, behavioral, and professional filters, helping researchers identify their ideal participants.

Respondent offers pay-as-you-go pricing based on your specific needs. For example, if you need to conduct moderated sessions for 25 B2B professional participants, you’ll pay a total of $3,250. Or you can choose their basic plan with an upfront annual commitment of $2,160.

Tool type: Dedicated panel management tool

Best for: UX teams that rely on qualitative UX insights

User Interviews is a user research tool designed to make conducting user interviews faster and easier for UX teams. It offers access to a pool of over 4 million study participants, screening, and scheduling for an end-to-end, seamless recruitment process.

Besides a recruitment database, User Interviews also offers a research hub where researchers can manage their participant base and automate the entire process.

User Interviews splits pricing by its Research and Recruit Hub offerings. While their Research Hub pricing isn’t publicly available, the main plans for the Recruit Hub include:

Tool type: UX research tool with added-on tester panel

Best for: UX research teams with a big budget for recruitment

dscout is a UX research platform specializing in qualitative UX research methods like user interviews and diary studies. However, it also gives researchers access to a moderately-sized research panel and database, complete with a range of filters for finding niche participants. Their broad offering streamlines UX research from participant selection to scheduling, conducting, and analyzing studies.

dscout offers three pricing plans: Researcher, Team, and Enterprise. They don’t share their pricing publicly, but a Reddit user has reported the Enterprise plan starts at $75K/year.

Tool type: CRM/email tool

Best for: Teams that need to manage a large number of participants simultaneously

Rally is a participant recruitment platform designed to help teams manage every step of the recruitment process—from participant selection to study launch. It also features a CRM that automates recruitment based on participant profiles, data points from screeners, surveys, and incentive history, making it easier to target ideal candidates. With their in-depth dashboards, research teams can review engagement rates on UX research studies published over time.

Rally does not disclose their pricing publicly, but they do offer a 14-day free trial.

Tool type: CRM/email tool

Best for: Businesses that want to automate incentive management

Ethnio is a UX research CRM that lets you create screeners and intercept people on your website or app for usability testing, surveys, and interviews. With a range of customizable filters and advanced logic screener options, UX research teams can vet participants, then tag, segment, and organize them across multiple studies.

Ethnio’s plans start at $15 per month with a 14-day free trial.

Tool type: UX research tool with added-on tester panel

Best for: Enterprise research teams that need one tool for UX research studies

Great Question is a UXR software that provides researchers with a participant panel of 3 million vetted testers, UX research methods, and a range of tools for data collection and insight analysis. Designed for enterprises, Great Question offers multiple scheduling tools and incentive management to streamline your studies through the platform.

Great Question has a Free plan and a Team plan at $35 per user/month.

Tool type: DIY research recruitment methods

Best for: Teams on a tight budget

While many platforms can certainly aid greatly in the participant recruitment process on their own, they aren’t the only way to streamline your process. If you’re on a tight budget, you can use a combination of free tools.

For example, LinkedIn lets you filter down potential participants, SurveyMonkey can help you screen them, and Calendly can help you book a Zoom session for methods like usability testing and user interviews.

LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey, Calendly, and Zoom all offer free plans!

With so many tools to choose from, it can be difficult to settle on the perfect fit for your business. Here are some of the most important factors to consider when choosing the right platform.

Consider who will use your product, your ICP, and the ideal participants for your study. Look for tools that offer ample filtering options, including location, demographics, and profession. This lets you niche down for testers while giving you access to a diverse range of potential participants.

If you’re going with a panel instead of a complete UXR tool, consider if it can integrate with your existing tech stack. Otherwise, you’re facing silos and a slower, scattered UX workflow as you bounce from one tool to the next.

For example, let’s say you find five participants on your recruitment tool. Once you screen them, you should be able to automatically send invites for your usability tests on your other platform, without manually switching tools. Ensuring everything is integrated makes your research operations more efficient and less resource-intensive.

If you’re using multiple platforms for your UX research, you know how confusing and expensive paying for them can be. Some participant recruitment tools have pay-as-you-go options, while others offer price-per-seat plans.

To avoid hidden and additional charges, always reach out to the provider to get an estimate. Their level of transparency will indicate whether you’ll run into payment surprises that your Finance team won’t be pleased about.

Make sure your chosen tool complies with data privacy laws. Platforms need written consent before they can collect data from testers. Participants should also have the option to request deleting their data in compliance with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Failure to meet these laws can lead to hefty fines, reputational damage, and loss of participant trust—the last things you need from a participant recruitment tool. When looking for estimates, be sure to ask about their compliance with data regulatory laws and guidelines.

The right tool can make all the difference in your participant recruitment process. While some tools offer specialized panels for finding, managing, and scheduling studies or CRMs, others are comprehensive recruitment and research tools, letting you design, deploy, and analyze your studies all from one place.

Maze is the leading user research platform that empowers businesses to get game-changing user insights, at the speed of product development. Recruit participants with Panel, manage them with Reach, conduct unmoderated and moderated tests, and analyze data results—you can do it all with Maze.

Recruiting research participants doesn’t need to be hard. With Maze, you can recruit the right participants, fast.