The short answer
Respondent is a good recruiting platform. If you are running research across several countries, or your study is in an English-speaking market, use Respondent — we are not a substitute for it and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.
The contradiction
Respondent's public panel browser lists Japan, showing 3.7K participants and $42K paid to them. Respondent's help-centre article on which countries you can recruit in lists twenty primary markets — Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, France, Germany, Italy, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Kenya, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States — and then a longer A–Z list. Japan appears in neither.
Both pages were live on the verification date above. We are not going to tell you which one is right; we do not know. What we can tell you is what to do about it: ask them directly, before you commit to a study, and get the answer in writing. "Can I recruit 15 Japanese-speaking consumers living in Japan, and how long will that take?" is a fair question and their sales team can answer it. If a platform's own documentation is inconsistent about a market, that market is probably not one it is built around — which is not a criticism, just a thing worth knowing before you plan a quarter around it.
Prices, side by side
| torima.in Global | Respondent | |
|---|---|---|
| Platform fee | $49 per completed session | $40 per session (B2C), $80 (B2B), pay-as-you-go |
| Volume pricing | None. Same price at 5 sessions as at 50. | $28 / $56 with an annual commitment of $500k+ |
| Participant incentive | Separate, and you choose it: $14, $21, $34 (¥2,000–¥5,000 to the participant) | Separate. You set and fund it. |
| What the fee buys | Recruiting, AI moderation in Japanese, translation, per-session summary, cross-session report | Recruiting. An AI moderator is included free in every plan. |
| Minimum | 5 sessions | None stated |
| Payment | Card, self-serve | Card, self-serve (Enterprise is sales-led) |
| Markets | Japan only | 150+ claimed; panels named for US, UK, Canada, Germany, France, Australia |
Two things to be straight about.
Respondent's headline fee is lower than ours, and it includes an AI moderator. $40 versus $49. If their moderator works in Japanese — which their documentation does not say either way — then for a Japanese study Respondent would be the cheaper option on platform fee. We are not going to construct a comparison that hides this.
Respondent's incentive guidance is built for the US market. They suggest around $90 per session for a broad general-population remote study. The Japanese norm for a 30-minute online consumer interview is ¥2,000–¥3,500, which is roughly $13–$22. If you apply US incentive guidance in Japan you will overpay by three to four times and, more importantly, you will attract exactly the wrong respondents. Our recruiting guide has the full benchmark table.
The difference that actually matters
It is not price. It is the language a panel was recruited in.
Respondent's sign-up, screeners and support are in English. So are User Interviews' and Prolific's. That is entirely reasonable for a global platform. But it has a consequence in Japan that is easy to miss: the people who complete an English sign-up flow in Japan are people who are comfortable operating in English, and in Japan that is a small and unrepresentative group. EF's 2025 English Proficiency Index places Japan 96th out of 123 countries and regions, in the "very low proficiency" band, after eleven consecutive years of decline.
So a panel of 3.7K Japanese participants recruited entirely in English is not a random 3.7K Japanese people. We do not know exactly who they are — nobody publishes panel composition, and we are not going to characterise them for you — but we do know how they were selected, and so do you now.
torima.in's panel is recruited the other way round. Members find us in Japanese, register in Japanese, apply in Japanese, take part in Japanese and get paid in yen, through the domestic torima.in marketplace we have run since 2020. The English is on the buyer's side only. That is the whole design, and it is the only thing on this page we would ask you to weigh heavily.
Where each one is the right choice
Use Respondent when
- Your study covers several countries and you want one vendor, one invoice, one workflow
- You are recruiting in the US, UK, Canada, Germany, France or Australia — markets they name and clearly serve
- You want to moderate the session yourself, live, and you have someone who can do it in the participant's language
- You need B2B and professional audiences at scale
- You already use them and it works
Use torima.in when
- Japan is the study, not one cell of a multi-market grid
- You need mainstream Japanese consumers, and you cannot verify who is in a panel recruited in English
- Nobody on your team speaks Japanese
- You want the deliverable in English without hiring a translator
- The 16-hour time difference makes live scheduling impractical, and asynchronous is genuinely fine for your question
Use neither when
You need someone to watch a participant use a prototype, or a live moderator who can change direction mid-session, on a high-stakes decision. That is agency work, in either country.
What torima.in cannot do that Respondent can
Said plainly, because you will find out anyway:
- One country. We do Japan. Respondent does 150+.
- No live sessions. Our interviews are asynchronous text chat. No video, no scheduling, no watching.
- No B2B depth. We are a consumer panel. Narrow professional audiences are the ones we most often cannot fill, and you will see the estimate before you pay.
- No recontact. Participants reach you as a study-scoped ID. No follow-ups, no diary studies, no longitudinal panel.
- No customers to point at. torima.in Global Research is new. We have run a Japanese-language research marketplace since 2020, but this English service has no case studies, and we are not going to invent any.
What it costs, both ways
A concrete study: ten 30-minute interviews with Japanese consumers.
Respondent: 10 × $40 = $400 in platform fees, plus incentives. At the Japanese norm (¥3,000 ≈ $19) that is $190, so $590 — assuming you can recruit in Japan at all, and assuming their AI moderator handles Japanese. If it does not, add a bilingual moderator or a translator.
torima.in: 10 × ($49 + $21) = $700, everything included, with an English summary of each session and a report across all ten.
If Respondent can recruit your audience in Japan and moderate them in Japanese, they are cheaper. If either of those is not true, the comparison is not close, because the missing pieces cost far more than the difference to buy separately.
The other comparisons
- torima.in vs User Interviews — they do support Japan, and they publish the panel counts.
- torima.in vs Prolific — much cheaper than us, and better for quantitative work.