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Helm Express vs Pollfish
Pollfish, a Prodege company, is a self-serve survey platform: you build a questionnaire and real people from Prodege's rewards communities and a network of apps and websites answer it, paid per response. Helm Express asks simulated twins of a US place. They answer different questions well.
As of September 2026, from each company’s public site and documentation.
| Pollfish | Helm Express | |
|---|---|---|
| Who answers | Real people, rewarded for taking part, drawn from Prodege's loyalty and rewards communities and from a network of apps and websites. | In a reading, simulated twins of a place’s residents or businesses; no real person is contacted for a reading. Interviews and short studies with the public and credential-checked experts are run by arrangement, labelled as real people and kept separate. |
| Where | Many countries. Targeting by country, state, city and zip code, plus demographics, interests, political affiliation, purchase and app behaviour, and devices, with quotas and custom screening questions. | Any of 12,759 US places — cities, counties, metros and states — with a neighbourhood map for most of them. US only. |
| Questions you can ask | A full questionnaire: single and multiple choice, open text, scales, rankings, matrices, NPS, A/B tests, conjoint, MaxDiff and price-sensitivity questions, AI-moderated conversational questions, with branching and images, video or audio. | Yes/no, a pick among up to 12 options, or a belief question; an A/B of two messages or two pieces of news; an interview with up to five twins from a reading. |
| What comes back | Real responses in a live dashboard, crosstabs with significance tests, exports (SPSS, Excel, CSV, PDF) and an AI-written report. | Which way the place leans, breakdowns by group and neighbourhood, and an interval and a read-quality grade on every poll result. |
| How you start | Self-serve and free to build; you pay per response when you launch (published from $0.95 a response, minimum 100 responses, per its FAQ at pollfish.com/about-us). Full-service projects are published from $5k per project and enterprise packages from a $10k annual commitment; both are quoted. | Book a call, or sign in. Planning a question and previewing its cost come before anything runs. |
| Best when | You need real people's answers to a full questionnaire, with detailed targeting and standard research methods, and you are ready to pay for each response. | You need a fast, low-cost direction on a local question, with its cost shown before it runs — which way the simulated place leans, and among whom — before spending on real fieldwork. |
Choose Pollfish when
You need answers from real people, including their own words in open-ended questions.
You need standard research methods (conjoint, MaxDiff, price sensitivity, NPS) run with real respondents.
You want to target by interests, purchase or app behaviour, or run the same survey in several countries.
Choose Helm Express when
Your question is about one specific US place or a neighbourhood within it, and you want breakdowns on a map.
You want to see the businesses of a place, not only its residents.
You want a direction and an interval without recruiting anyone, before deciding whether paid fieldwork is worth it.
What we say about Pollfish is taken from its own public site and documentation. Check the current version at pollfish.com, and tell us if anything here is out of date.
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