Hi Atar, 

I'm the co-founder of Prolific so this will be a bias answer. I'll try to encourage some of our researchers to get in touch here to get more impartial responses.  Though our cost might be higher it is only because we enforce minimum payments (our commission is currently flexible so up to 100% of rewards go to participants). You can run a no-risk 10GBP study if you register here: https://prolificacademic.co.uk/rr?ref=5ZFZ276D to try out the platform if you'd like. Let me know if you have any questions about how the platform works!

Below are a few testimonials from researchers who have used our platform:

"I have used Prolific to carry out a number of different pilot studies with small samples of 10-12 people. The service is wonderful, quick, and reliable, and I have been very happy with it. [I will] collect my final data soon and that sample would be much larger (around 200 people)."

Arunima Sarin

MSc Research Methods in Psychology

University College London

"Prolific Academic is a good alternative to Amazon Mechanical Turk. I have successfully run experiments through the platform and have received a lot of tech support when was needed. I am happy to have used the platform and will do so again in the near future."

Panagiotis Papaeconomou

PhD student, Goldsmiths University of London

"I had a really good experience, the interface is simple and usable and quick. I will definitely recommend it to people, and will use it in future studies."

Dr Michael Gilead

Postdoctoral Scholar, Columbia University

How nice of you to answer Phelim. Q&A are meant to be subjective opinions anyway and so are biased. I found Academic Prolific to be an incredible idea. Congratulations for that. Thanks to Atar for asking the question and allow me to discover it. I will find some time to try it out fully . I was surprised that it did not allow me to register with my academic mail (and I don't like to use facebook account) though.

Another alternative would be Crowdflower, which I have used a few times to collect data. I collected 200 responses on a 30min questionnaire in less than 12 hours for a payment of 1 US Dollar, which seems cheap to me. An participants were even happy with the payment (4.2 out of 5 stars).

Crowd flower requires a script you need to copy+paste in there to make sure participants actually complete the questionnaire before being paid and I'm happy to provide that. Let me know if you have further questions on how to collect data using Crowdflower.

Hello all,

I have recently completed running my study on Prolific and thought to circle back to you with my personal experience.

I found the platform to be very easy to work with, simple and straightforward. This goes for:

1. Inputting the required information from the researcher's end (e.g., URL, description, restrictions on subject pool, participant fees and flexible commission) 

2. Reviewing the study status while still live (i.e., number of participants completing the study, average time spent on study)

3. Reviewing submissions and paying participants 

Importantly, I have received superb support from the Prolific team. Response time was minimal (usually within an hour) and my questions/needs were always fully answered.

Since I haven't used MTURK prior to this, I won't be able to compare the two, but I do highly recommend trying out the Prolific platform if you're looking for an MTURK alternative or are interested in trying out a new platform.

Attached is a link to a short youtube demo I checked out before running my study. The video also includes a short comparison to MTURK.

I hope this was helpful!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOlJCN7VnGQ

I have conducted my first mini-survey experiments (it was rather a pilot experiment), via Prolific Academic. I have to say, it worked splendidly. It was incredibly fast, and efficient! The payment system, although at first I was confused about, is very easy and straightforward. Overall I am very happy about Prolific Academic and will soon conduct my full experiments with them. I especially like the way you can easily pre-screen the respondents, i.e. you can choose the adequate age group, sex, political affiliation, etc. I hope my comment helps. 

I used it for all the data collection for my thesis and I absolutely loved it, data collection was so fast and the quality of the data was amazing, I had very few missing values, I got 185 participants within 2 days.... and it was so cheap, so happy with it, I would recommend it to anyone.

Has anyone used both MTurk and Prolific who wouldn't mind sharing the major differences between both platforms?

Does anyone know if there is actually a contact phone number for Prolific? Or Email address? Do they really just have a ticketing system?

I am wondering about the sample profile at Prolific? Where do the most participants come from? If I want a representative sample from EU, where do I see the number of pool of participants from this region? Thank you

Would I be able to filter on job (hotel manager) to be a respondent?