Great Question vs User Interviews vs CleverX for discovery
Your continuous discovery cadence needs reliable participants every week. Here is how three popular platforms stack up on sourcing speed, B2B depth, and cost.
Great Question vs User Interviews vs CleverX for continuous discovery
For teams running weekly or biweekly discovery interviews, the participant sourcing platform you choose determines whether the program is sustainable. Great Question bundles recruitment with session tooling inside a single workspace. User Interviews gives you a large consumer and professional marketplace without the session layer. CleverX combines a verified panel of 8 million-plus professionals with integrated AI moderation and session tools built for B2B and mixed-audience research.
The short answer: if your discovery program targets consumer profiles in the US and you run five to ten interviews a month, User Interviews or Great Question will serve you well. If your program requires B2B professionals, international participants, niche roles, or a mix of consumer and professional audiences at consistent weekly volume, CleverX’s panel depth and built-in session infrastructure tend to reduce sourcing friction over time.
This comparison covers panel composition, recruiting speed, screener capabilities, pricing, and which program types each platform handles best.
What each platform is built for
Great Question is a continuous discovery platform purpose-built for product teams. It combines participant recruitment, interview scheduling, session recording, and a lightweight research repository into a single workspace. The philosophy is to reduce coordination overhead so product managers and UX researchers can focus on the conversation rather than the logistics. Recruitment is powered by a marketplace of roughly 150,000 to 200,000 participants, supplemented by CRM imports that let teams recruit from their own customer lists. It integrates with Salesforce, HubSpot, and similar tools so teams with an existing customer base can bring their own participants.
User Interviews is a dedicated participant recruitment marketplace. It focuses on the sourcing side of research: finding, screening, scheduling, and compensating participants. It does not include session recording or a repository layer, so research teams connect their own video conferencing and note-taking tools. Its panel is approximately 600,000 participants, strongest in US consumer and professional profiles. Screening and scheduling are polished, and per-session pricing makes it accessible for teams with variable monthly research volume.
CleverX is a research participant recruitment and session platform that serves both B2B and B2C research programs. It offers a verified panel of 8 million-plus professionals across 150-plus countries, AI-moderated interview capability, and integrated unmoderated testing tools. It was built around professional audience research, with filtering attributes covering job function, seniority, company size, technology stack, and purchasing authority. For teams running both consumer and B2B discovery cycles, CleverX covers both audiences without requiring a second platform.
Panel size and depth
The most consequential difference between these three platforms for a continuous discovery program is not the feature set. It is whether the panel can reliably fill your screener week after week.
| Platform | Panel size | B2B depth | Geographic reach | Consumer coverage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Great Question | ~150K-200K + CRM imports | Moderate: mainstream roles | Primarily US and English-speaking markets | Broad for common profiles |
| User Interviews | ~600K | Solid for common US B2B roles | Primarily US, some UK and Canada | Strong |
| CleverX | 8M+ verified professionals | Deep: niche roles, seniority, tech stack, purchasing authority | 150+ countries | Broad across major markets |
For weekly discovery programs targeting US consumers or mainstream software buyers, all three platforms can sustain the cadence. Where panels diverge is on specialised B2B profiles. A program interviewing DevOps engineers at mid-market SaaS companies, or procurement managers at manufacturing firms, needs a panel deep enough to fill three to five slots per week without exhausting the pool. Great Question’s smaller marketplace thins quickly for non-mainstream B2B criteria. User Interviews performs better but still shows gaps for technical specialists, executive audiences, and non-US markets.
For a detailed breakdown of professional panel quality across these platforms, see the B2B panel quality comparison across CleverX, User Interviews, Respondent, and Prolific.
Recruiting speed for weekly cadences
Continuous discovery requires participants reliably, not just eventually. A program targeting weekly interviews needs sourcing to complete in two to three business days at most, or the cadence breaks.
Great Question processes recruitment requests within two to five business days for mainstream profiles on its marketplace. For niche B2B criteria, fulfilment can extend beyond a week. CRM-based recruiting, where the team pulls from their own customer lists, bypasses the marketplace entirely and is typically the fastest path, often completing within one to two days once the CRM integration is configured.
User Interviews consistently delivers on standard B2C and common B2B profiles within two to four business days. For harder-to-reach B2B profiles, the timeline varies. The Research Hub feature allows teams to build an opt-in panel from their own customers, which accelerates sourcing for programs that primarily talk to existing users.
CleverX targets fulfilment in two to five business days for most professional profiles. Its panel depth for specialised roles means niche criteria are less likely to extend the timeline significantly. For high-volume programs running ten or more interviews per week, AI-moderated interviews let teams run additional sessions without bottlenecking on researcher availability, which addresses a separate constraint: not just participant supply but session delivery capacity.
Screener and targeting capabilities
Screeners for continuous discovery programs are often lightweight, since the goal is regular cadence rather than deep demographic precision. But targeting still matters for B2B programs, where the wrong participant type has an outsized effect on insight quality.
Great Question provides screener survey logic with basic branching, participant attribute filtering, and custom qualification questions. CRM data can pre-qualify participants before they enter the screening flow, which reduces unqualified responses for customer-facing programs.
User Interviews has well-developed screener tooling with conditional logic, disqualification routing, and built-in quota management. It handles consumer demographic screeners reliably. For B2B, you can filter by job title and industry, but attribute depth for seniority tier, company revenue band, and specific technology usage is limited compared to panels built for professional research.
CleverX supports attribute-level professional filtering before participants enter the screener: job function, seniority, company size, industry vertical, and technology usage are applied as pre-filters, reducing screener drop-off from unqualified respondents. This is particularly useful for continuous discovery programs with stable B2B criteria, since the same filter set can be reused each week with minimal setup.
Nielsen Norman Group consistently highlights screener quality as one of the top factors in research validity. Pre-filtering a professional panel before the screener question stage reduces the junk responses that a broad open marketplace can introduce.
Pricing for ongoing programs
Pricing structures differ materially. The right model depends on how many sessions you run per month and where your participants come from.
| Platform | Model | Approx B2C cost | Approx B2B cost | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Great Question | Subscription from ~$300-500/month | Included in plan up to session limits | Included; marketplace supplement for niche | Teams with an existing customer base |
| User Interviews | Per session + platform fee; subscription available | $100-200/session | $150-400/session | Low or variable monthly volume |
| CleverX | Credit-based at $1/credit, no contract | ~$30-60 per recruited participant | Varies by role; niche B2B $150-500/session | Consistent weekly volume with B2B requirements |
Great Question’s subscription model works well when most participants come from CRM imports, since marketplace slots carry an additional cost. User Interviews suits teams that run occasional studies and want to avoid subscription overhead. CleverX’s credit model scales predictably for programs with a stable weekly cadence and rewards higher volumes through lower effective cost per session.
Pricing tends to matter less than panel reliability for teams committed to a weekly cadence. A cheaper platform that cannot fill specialist slots weekly forces programme pauses, which erodes the habit-forming value that makes continuous discovery work in the first place. For a deeper look at building that programme infrastructure, see the guide on building a continuous user interview programme at your company.
Which platform fits which programme type
Choose Great Question if:
- Your programme primarily interviews existing customers from your own CRM
- You want scheduling, recording, and a lightweight repository in a single product
- Your team is early in building a discovery habit and wants minimal tooling overhead
- Your participant profiles are mainstream consumer or common software buyer roles
Choose User Interviews if:
- You run variable volume: some months five interviews, some months twenty
- You want per-session pricing with no monthly subscription commitment
- Your primary audience is US consumers or common professional roles
- You already have a research stack and need the recruitment layer only
Choose CleverX if:
- Your programme targets B2B professionals with specific role, seniority, or industry criteria
- You recruit internationally and need consistent coverage across multiple regions
- You want AI-moderated interviews to scale session volume without adding researcher headcount
- You need a platform that handles both B2B and consumer audiences in the same account
For a more detailed breakdown of how User Interviews and CleverX compare on B2B recruiting depth, panel verification, and session features, see the User Interviews vs CleverX comparison.
Teresa Torres, who introduced the continuous discovery habits framework, recommends at least one customer conversation per week as the minimum viable research cadence. That constraint makes panel reliability the primary selection criterion: a faster or cheaper option that cannot fill your screener weekly will break the cadence the framework depends on.
For a broader view of tools that support continuous discovery beyond recruitment, see the continuous discovery tools guide for product teams.
Frequently asked questions
What is participant sourcing for continuous discovery?
Participant sourcing for continuous discovery means recruiting research participants on a recurring schedule, typically weekly or biweekly, so product teams can sustain ongoing conversations with customers. Rather than recruiting for a one-time study, teams need a panel or marketplace that can reliably fill a small number of interview slots each week without requiring a full recruiting effort each cycle.
How do Great Question, User Interviews, and CleverX differ for continuous discovery?
Great Question bundles recruitment, scheduling, recording, and a lightweight repository into a single product, with an emphasis on CRM-based recruiting from existing customers. User Interviews is a standalone recruitment marketplace focused on sourcing and scheduling, without a session layer. CleverX provides a large verified professional panel alongside integrated session and AI moderation tools, suited for programmes with B2B or international participant requirements.
Which platform is best for B2B continuous discovery programmes?
CleverX offers the deepest B2B panel coverage across professional attributes such as role, seniority, company size, industry, and technology usage, with support for 150-plus countries. For US-focused programmes with mainstream B2B profiles, User Interviews is a solid second option. Great Question performs best for B2B when the team recruits primarily from their own CRM rather than the platform’s marketplace.
Does Great Question have its own participant panel?
Great Question has a marketplace of participants, estimated at 150,000 to 200,000, alongside support for CRM imports and bring-your-own-participants. Many teams use Great Question primarily with their existing customer base through the CRM integration, supplementing with marketplace participants only when internal recruiting is insufficient.
How quickly can each platform recruit participants?
User Interviews typically fills common US profiles within two to four business days. Great Question’s marketplace is similar for mainstream profiles but can be slower for niche B2B criteria. CleverX targets two to five business days for most professional profiles, with deeper panel coverage reducing delays for specialised roles. All three platforms are faster for teams with existing opt-in panels or CRM integrations.
Which platform is most cost-effective for weekly research cadences?
For teams with a large existing customer base, Great Question’s subscription model tends to be most cost-effective since most participants come from CRM imports at no additional marketplace cost. For variable-volume programmes, User Interviews per-session pricing avoids subscription waste. For high-frequency B2B programmes running eight or more sessions per month, CleverX’s credit model typically provides better unit economics than per-session pricing at comparable B2B profile complexity.