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:
Prolific alternatives for participants (workers)
This section compares Prolific’s alternatives based on criteria useful to its participants or workers.
Companies | Worker Ratings
(Out of 5)* | Number of
Reviews* | Payment
Schedule** |
|---|---|---|---|
Clickworker | 4.4 | 2454 | Weekly |
Prolific | 4.4 | 1816 | Weekly |
Appen | 1.3 | 257 | Weekly |
Amazon Mechanical Turk | 2 | 57 | Weekly |
* 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 companies’ signup and career pages 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 most relevant to buyers and customers.
* Data was gathered from leading review platforms.
The companies are ranked by the total number of reviews, except for the sponsored ones, which are linked at the top.
Prolific overview
Founded in 2014 and based in the UK, Prolific offers a range of 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 the pros and cons of Prolific, based on customer reviews on B2B platforms such as 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 be as popular with customers.
- Prolific’s crowd size is much smaller than that of alternatives like LXT or Appen. Here is a comparison of the crowds for all the companies mentioned in this article.
Prolific alternatives overview for customers
Here, we provide an overview of the three alternatives mentioned in this article.
LXT, the parent company of 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 LXT’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 LXT
- LXT 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.
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 than 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 incurring 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.
Operated by AWS, Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a popular name in the AI data services space and a suitable alternative to Prolific. MTurk also offers its services through a crowdsourcing marketplace.
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 an additional 20% 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 pool of workers 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 English speech or text data.
- While MTurk’s services are efficient, its Master qualification (5% more expensive than regular workers) does not offer higher-quality work.
Cem's work has been cited by leading global publications including Business Insider, Forbes, Washington Post, global firms like Deloitte, HPE and NGOs like World Economic Forum and supranational organizations like European Commission. You can see more reputable companies and resources that referenced AIMultiple.
Throughout his career, Cem served as a tech consultant, tech buyer and tech entrepreneur. He advised enterprises on their technology decisions at McKinsey & Company and Altman Solon for more than a decade. He also published a McKinsey report on digitalization.
He led technology strategy and procurement of a telco while reporting to the CEO. He has also led commercial growth of deep tech company Hypatos that reached a 7 digit annual recurring revenue and a 9 digit valuation from 0 within 2 years. Cem's work in Hypatos was covered by leading technology publications like TechCrunch and Business Insider.
Cem regularly speaks at international technology conferences. He graduated from Bogazici University as a computer engineer and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.
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