MTurk is closing permanently. It’s time for a better alternative.
Trusted by thousands of organizations
MTurk will close permanently after September 30th. Even before this announcement, in head-to-head testing against MTurk, Prolific produced significantly higher data quality on every measure — attention, honesty, comprehension, and reliability. And so did Qualtrics, Dynata, and CloudResearch, too. (Source).
Use all of Prolific's 300+ pre-set filters at no extra cost. Only participants with specialist jobs or skills cost more. On MTurk, each additional screener added to your bill.
Get more accurate national conclusions on Prolific using our representative sample feature. Our algorithm will distribute your survey across sex, age, ethnicity, political affiliation and region within either the US or UK.
Built for multi-part and longitudinal studies, Prolific makes it easy to re-recruit the same participants over time. No manual tracing required. If you wanted to re-recruit participants on MTurk, you were on your own.
Part of high-quality research is following universal ethical standards. Unlike MTurk and other platforms, Prolific sets a minimum hourly reward of $8.00 or £6.00 for all participants.
Prolific is designed by researchers for researchers. That's why set up is so quick and easy – think 15 minutes, not hours. Our support team comes with extensive training too.
Prolific protects researcher and participant privacy. Our research rules and anonymous in-app messaging system help you chat freely and safely about your studies.
MTurk didn't list how many active participants they had, and is now closing permanently. Prolific has 300k+ active participants.
Prolific is built to put researchers in control. Recruit participants when you need them and collect data at 10x the speed of traditional research methods.
The average study takes 2 hours to complete on Prolific, and MTurk was speedy too, but data quality was questionable. Completion time depends mainly on your audience and study length.
Both platforms are affordable, but upfront pricing doesn't tell the whole story.
Prolific's minimum reward is $8.00/hour plus a 43% platform fee (or 33% for academics/non-profits), with free audience filtering included.
MTurk started at $0.01/task plus a 20% service fee (or 40% for 10+ assignments), before the added costs of prescreening.
When you factor in paying to replace poor quality participants on MTurk, costs begin to spiral. In another head-to-head comparison against platforms, Douglas et al. (2023) found Prolific had the lowest cost per quality respondent, with high-quality participants costing nearly twice as much on MTurk. (Source).
Prolific is trusted by dozens of frontier AI labs like Google, Ai2, Hugging Face and more. Common AI use cases for Prolific include evaluation and verification, alignment and preference data, post-training, data annotation and more. MTurk also covered many AI use cases broadly, but their customer list speaks to the trust top labs have in them.
Frequently asked questions
Yes. As of July 30, 2026, MTurk closed to new customers only. However, on September 30th, MTurk will close it's doors for good.
If you already have an MTurk requester account, you are still able to use the site through September 30th. Afterwards, you can leverage this guide for information on running your studies with Prolific.
Getting started is easy, with most new researchers up and running in about 15 minutes. Here's how it works:
1. Create an account at prolific.com — no contract or subscription required.
2. Bring your survey link — Prolific works with Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, Gorilla, Typeform, or any other tool you're already using. If setting up AI evaluation tasks, you can also use Prolific’s AI Task Builder.
3. Set your audience criteria using Prolific's 300+ demographic screeners — all included free, unlike MTurk where each additional screener adds to your bill.
4. Set your reward — Prolific's minimum is $8.00/hour or £6.00/hour, so you won't need to reverse-engineer a fair per-task rate the way MTurk's per-HIT pricing requires.
5. Publish and collect responses — with quality control built in throughout, not bolted on afterward.
"I started off using Amazon Web Services (AWS) Mechanical Turk, but I was having major issues with data quality from workers there, so I moved to using Prolific. The difference is night and day. The data quality is pretty much perfect. Also, the UI and system design are miles better, and you can filter workers by lots of different factors. “ Tom Liptrot, AI Consultant
“We found much higher accuracy in attention tasks on Prolific compared to MTurk. In terms of objective performance and in terms of self reports, participants on Prolific are more attentive compared to participants on MTurk.” Dr Derek A. Albert, University of Waterloo
