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Helm Express vs Prolific
Prolific connects researchers and AI teams with a pool of real, ID-checked participants who take the studies and tasks you link, 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.
| Prolific | Helm Express | |
|---|---|---|
| Who answers | Real people from Prolific's own participant pool, identity-checked, paid for each study they complete. It also offers AI taskers and domain experts. | 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 | Participants in dozens of countries, strongest in the US, the UK and Europe. Filters go down to country and, in the US, state of residence. Representative samples for the US and UK only. | 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 | Anything your own survey, experiment or annotation tool can hold, linked by URL, in text, image, audio or video. It also supports follow-up studies with the same participants. | 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 participants' responses, collected in the tool you link, plus a download of their filter answers. Through the API or MCP, results come back as JSON. | 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 pay as you go, with no subscription. You pay a participant reward you set, plus a published platform fee. There is also an API, an MCP server, and managed services quoted per project. | 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 or judgments, such as for a study, a concept test, or preference and evaluation data for AI models, and you can target by country, US state and self-reported traits. | 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 Prolific when
You need real human responses, for example for academic research you will publish or preference and evaluation data for AI models.
You already have a survey, experiment or annotation task built and want real participants to take it.
You want to screen on personal traits such as occupation, languages or expertise, or re-contact the same people over time.
Choose Helm Express when
Your question is about one specific US city, county or metro, or a neighbourhood within it, rather than a country or state.
You want a direction without building a questionnaire or recruiting anyone, before deciding whether real fieldwork is worth it.
You want breakdowns by group and neighbourhood on a map, or a read of a place's businesses.
What we say about Prolific is taken from its own public site and documentation. Check the current version at prolific.com, and tell us if anything here is out of date.
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