Alternative Platforms

There are many other platforms released by academics for doing online experiments. Here are a list of the ones we know that are currently active.

The main differentiation of TurkServer is relative to the platforms and frameworks below is its focus on facilitating and instrumenting real-time and synchronous interaction. But we’ve kept the software simple, and you’ll find features such as the live experimenter console and one-way mirror useful even for single-user experiments.

• Breadboard focuses on network and cooperation experiments.
• CogniLab is a paid service for launching online experiments, no coding required.
• NodeGame is (also) a Javascript library for real-time experiments.
• oTree is a Django (Python) based framework focusing on economic games.
• PsiTurk is a Python-based framework for building and sharing experiments, originating in the psychology community.
• Volunteer Science is a hosted platform that maintains their own volunteer panel.

Unless using volunteer participants, all of the aforementioned software frameworks run on crowdsourcing platforms:

• Amazon Mechanical Turk has been around the longest and is currently the most widely used.
• Prolific Academic is a recently launched framework focusing on academic research.
• See this Quora question for other crowdsourcing systems that may supplement or replace Mechanical Turk in the future.