Top 3 Prolific Alternatives Compared in 2025

Prolific is a popular AI data collection service that offers a crowdsourcing platform for AI data seekers. Our research identified some drawbacks of working with Prolific from the perspectives of its customers and workers. If you’re exploring alternatives to Prolific, you can compare:

1. Prolific alternatives for participants (workers)
2. Prolific alternatives for buyers (customers)

Prolific alternatives for participants (workers)

This section compares Prolific’s alternatives based on useful criteria for its participants or workers.

* Based on data from Trustpilot, since it mostly has reviews from workers.

** Based on information gathered from analysis of worker reviews.

• The companies are ranked based on the total number of reviews.
• The table was created using publicly available and verifiable data
• The links in the table can be used to access the signup and career pages of the companies for workers.

Prolific alternatives for buyers (customers) 

If you are a buyer of AI data services and wish to compare Prolific’s alternatives, here is a table summarizing the data relevant for buyers or customers.

* Data was gathered from leading review platforms.

• The companies are ranked based on the total number of reviews, apart from the sponsored ones, which are linked at the top.
• A company is considered to follow a code of conduct if it has a code of conduct page on its website.
• The table was created using publicly available and verifiable data.

Prolific overview

Founded in 2014 and based in the UK, Prolific offers various services through its crowdsourcing platform. The company claims to leverage a global network of contributors to offer services in 2 broad domains:

• AI training and evaluation
• Academic research

Services offered by Prolific

Here is a list of Prolific’s offerings, as claimed on the website:

• Human-generated datasets for AI training
• AI/ML model evaluation via Prolific’s network of contributors.
• Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF)
• Conduct academic & AI research & surveys
• Crowd size 130K+

Pros and cons of Prolific

This section highlights some of the pros and cons of Prolific identified from analyzing customer reviews on B2B platforms like G2, Trustradius, and Capterra.

• We’ve found that while some research customers praise Prolific for its effective customer support, they often encounter challenges with the platform’s inability to set customized quotas based on geographic and demographic parameters.
• Most reviews of Prolific focus on its research-related services, suggesting that its AI services may not enjoy widespread popularity among its customers.
• Prolific crowd size is much smaller than that of its alternatives like Clickworker or Appen. Here is a comparison of the crowd size of all the companies mentioned in this article.

Figure 1. Crowd size comparison of Prolific and its alternatives

Prolific alternatives overview for customers

Here, we provide an overview of the three alternatives mentioned in this article.

Clickworker

Best for enterprises with its large crowd & reliable performance

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Founded in 2005, Clickworker is a good alternative to Prolific since it also offers its services through a crowdsourcing platform. The company leverages its global network of over 6 million workers to complete AI projects through micro-tasking.

Here is a list of Clickworker’s data solutions:

• AI training datasets collected and generated by humans
• Image and video datasets in different formats and specifications.
• Speech and audio datasets in multiple languages and dialects.
• Text datasets in different formats
• Data annotation as a service
• Research/survey data collection
• Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF)

Pros and cons of Clickworker

• Clickworker claims to have the largest network of participants among its competitors.
• The company focuses mainly on data collection and dataset preparation for training AI models.
• Its crowd is considered reliable by previous users.
• It has a better screening process for its participants.
• It covers fewer languages than competitors like Appen.

Appen

Oldest crowd data provider

Founded in 1996 and based in Australia, Appen is another suitable alternative to Prolific. Appen also uses a crowdsourcing model to provide various services in the AI data space. 

Its offerings include:

• Data collection & generation of different data types (image, video, text, audio, speech)
• Data annotation
• Data validation

Pros and cons Appen

• Appen claims to have a larger crowd size as compared to Prolific and Amazon Mechanical Turk.
• Despite Appen’s popularity, recent news has highlighted that the company’s performance is declining. Appen is also losing customers and is going through financial losses.
• A customer states that while Appen’s platform is easy to use, it is not well equipped with servers, and projects can face server crashes.

Amazon Mechanical Turk

Best for self-service

Operated under AWS, Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a popular name in the AI data services domain and a suitable alternative for Prolific. MTurk also offers its services through a marketplace operated on a crowdsourcing platform.

Here is a list of its offerings:

• AI data collection and generation of different data types
• Data annotation and labeling
• Market research & surveys
• Academic research

MTurk pricing

• The workers’ pay is determined by the clients for each assignment.
• MTurk charges 20% on the worker’s pay and 20% extra on tasks with 10 or more assignments.
• MTurk charges an extra 5% off the pay for workers with a Master’s qualification.
• A free trial is not offered.

You can also read our separate article on MTurk alternatives.

MTurk pros and cons

• MTurk has a larger crowd than Prolific.
• Customers identified that most workers on MTurk’s platform are not fluent English speakers. This can cause issues for clients who require human-generated speech or text data in English.

• While MTurk’s services are efficient, its Master qualification (5% more expensive than regular workers) workers do not offer higher quality work.

FAQs about Prolific data collection services