Maze vs UserTesting: Maze pricing, UserTesting pricing and the $99 plan US buyers are never shown

Because you are almost certainly in a country Maze excludes from it.

Maze's pricing page is built from a content payload that carries, for each plan, an excludedCountries field. Free and Enterprise have that field empty. Starter does not. Its exclusion list is long and it is specific: GB, CA, US, and then every EU and EEA member state, plus Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, the Crown Dependencies, the Balkans, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Russia, Turkey, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

We did not want to publish that on the strength of a field name, so we checked it the other way as well. Rendering maze.co/pricing in a headless browser from an excluded country produces a page with two plans on it, Free and Enterprise, and the string $99 does not appear anywhere in the resulting markup. The Starter card is not collapsed or greyed out. It is simply not there.

The practical consequence for a US buyer is significant, and it is the opposite of what the comparison articles say. Search for Maze pricing and you will find page after page telling small US teams that Maze starts at $99 a month and is the affordable option against UserTesting. Follow that advice from a US connection and the pricing page offers you Free or a sales conversation. The affordable middle tier those articles are recommending is not on sale to you.

We are describing what Maze's own data and its own rendered page do, not why. Vendors restrict self-serve tiers by geography for ordinary reasons: tax handling, payment processing, support hours, or a deliberate decision to route larger markets through sales. Maze does not explain the restriction anywhere we could find, so the honest thing to say is that the restriction is real and the reason is not published. If you are in the US and you want Starter, that is a question for their sales team rather than an assumption to budget against.

UserTesting does not publish a price at any tier, and unlike most vendors that hold pricing back, it does publish enough structure that you can at least understand what you are being quoted on.

There are three editions. Advanced is described as being for teams ready to leverage human insights, and it includes the global panel across more than sixty countries, unmoderated tests, moderated Live Conversation, AI-generated insight summaries, sentiment analysis, transcripts, unlimited workspaces, advanced demographic filters and screeners, and SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR and HIPAA compliance. Ultimate adds the AI layer: AI-generated test creation, AI-powered analysis, smart tags, Insights Hub with AI-powered Insight Discovery, card sorting and tree testing, custom audience management, secure prototype hosting and approval flows. Ultimate+ adds the custom insights services, premium onboarding, insights strategy and delivery, custom audience sourcing, and Premier Support+ with a dedicated consultant.

All three say Request pricing.

The part worth understanding before a sales call is that the edition is only half of the decision. Crossed against it is a separate choice of plan model. Test-based Consumption means you pay on test usage across the team, scale flexibly with research demand, and get unlimited users across the enterprise with no per-seat charges. Team-based Unlimited means unlimited tests within a defined enterprise scope, at a predictable price, built for rolling research out across teams and geographies.

So the meter is tests, not seats, and which meter you are on changes what you can use. The UserTesting for Figma plugin is included automatically on Team-based Unlimited plans and is an add-on on the others. Flexible roles is currently available on Test-based plans and listed as coming soon for Team-based Unlimited. Ultimate+ bundles the Team-based Unlimited plan in.

Third-party procurement and review sites publish UserTesting contract figures ranging from roughly twelve thousand dollars a year to well over one hundred and eighty thousand. We have not verified any of them and neither has UserTesting. The spread is the useful signal: when reported prices vary by more than a factor of ten, there is no list price to find, only a negotiation.

For a small team outside the excluded countries, yes, and it is not close. Ninety-nine dollars a month against an enterprise contract is a different order of spending, and Maze Free is more product than UserTesting gives away, because UserTesting gives away nothing.

For a US team the honest answer is that the question cannot be settled from public information, and most articles that answer it confidently are comparing a US UserTesting quote against a Maze price US buyers are not offered.

Here is what a US buyer can actually compare. Maze Free is one study a month with five seats and pay-per-use panel credits. That costs nothing and you can start today. UserTesting has no equivalent. Above that line, both vendors are quote-only for you, and the two quotes will not be for the same thing: Maze Enterprise prices custom study quantities with unlimited seats, while UserTesting prices either test consumption or an unlimited-test scope, in both cases with a large recruited panel and, at Ultimate+, a services team attached.

There is a fair case for both approaches to pricing, and it is worth stating. Quote-only pricing lets a vendor shape a package around your actual research volume, and plenty of buyers do better that way than they would off a rate card, particularly at low volume where a published tier would overcharge them. What it costs you is time, comparability, and the ability to put a number in a budget before you have sat through two demos.

What is not defensible is the state of the published advice. A US product lead reading the current top results for Maze pricing will come away believing they can put ninety-nine dollars a month on a purchase order. They cannot.

Start with what kind of question you are trying to answer, because these tools are good at different halves of research.

Choose Maze if your work is unmoderated and design-led. Testing a prototype before you build it, checking whether a new navigation makes sense, running a card sort, putting a survey in front of users: Maze is built for that, it is fast, and the free tier lets you prove the value before anyone signs anything. A designer can run a study in an afternoon without a researcher. The constraint to plan around is volume, because outside Enterprise you get one study a month.

Choose UserTesting if you need people you do not have and conversations you cannot run yourself. The panel across sixty-plus countries, moderated Live Conversation, screening on advanced demographics, and at Ultimate+ a services team that will scope and deliver the research for you, are what the money buys. If your organization needs research across several teams and geographies with compliance requirements attached, this is the category that answers it, and the Team-based Unlimited model exists precisely so that a rollout does not get rationed by a test budget.

A few practical tiebreakers. If you need moderated interviews, Maze puts them on Enterprise, so the cheap Maze you read about will not do it. If you need a recruited panel regularly, compare Maze's pay-per-use credits against UserTesting's included panel carefully, because that is where a Maze bill grows in a way the plan price does not show. If procurement needs a number this quarter, neither vendor will give you one without a call, so start both conversations at once.

And if the real problem is that you already know something is wrong and want to know why, before you go recruit strangers to find out, that is a different job. Your existing customers have already told you, in support tickets, cancellation reasons, reviews and survey free text. Research on a sample of twelve people is how you explore a specific flow in depth. Reading what all of your customers already said is how you work out which problem to research first. That second job is what UserInsight is being built for, it is not something you can buy today, and we are not going to interrupt a vendor comparison to sell it to you.

Six questions. Each one exists because it is a place where a real invoice diverges from what the website implies.

Ask Maze directly whether Starter is available to you, in writing. If you are in the US, the UK, Canada or the EU, the pricing page will not offer it, and you want the answer on the record rather than inferred from a page that renders differently by country.

Ask what a study means when it is metered. Maze's paid entry tier and its free tier both allow one study a month, so the definition of a study, and what happens when you need a second one in the same month, decides whether the tier is usable.

Ask what panel credits cost and how they are consumed. On Maze Free and Starter the panel is pay-per-use, which means the plan price is not the bill. Get a per-participant figure and a worked example for the study size you actually run.

Ask UserTesting which plan model the quote assumes, not just which edition. Test-based Consumption and Team-based Unlimited price completely differently and unlock different features, and a quote that names only the edition is incomplete.

Ask both vendors which features in your evaluation are add-ons. At UserTesting the Figma plugin is an add-on outside Team-based Unlimited and the Insights Hub is listed as an add-on on Advanced. At Maze, moderated interviews and the AI features sit on Enterprise. Confirm nothing you were shown in the demo is billed separately.

Ask what happens at renewal, in the same document as year one. Quote-only pricing makes year two the expensive year, because the vendor knows by then how much you depend on the tool and you have no rate card to argue from. Get renewal terms written down before you sign year one, not after.