Persona vs Strella: which AI research platform is right for your team?
For years, the hardest part of customer research wasn't analysis, it was logistics. Scheduling interviews, chasing participants, transcribing hours of conversation. AI interview platforms promised to fix that, and largely have. But as the category matures, a more interesting question has emerged: not whether AI can run an interview, but whether it can run the right one.
Key feature comparison
Voice call, chat, and video. Participants choose the format that suits them, including a phone-call style option with no camera required.
AI-moderated text and video interviews, with the option to switch to human moderation.
Embeds directly into your product via a code snippet — interviews fire inside cancellation flows, onboarding screens, or any product moment.
Standalone platform, participants leave your product to take part.
Post-interview AI verification against criteria you define. Completion, relevance, camera compliance with billing tied only to responses that pass.
No post-interview quality verification published.
Dedicated AI tool trained on cancellation conversations probes beyond surface-level reasons and can make personalised save offers mid-interview.
General-purpose AI interviewer — no specialisation for retention or win-back workflows.
Fully customisable with your brand assets, participants experience your product identity, not a third-party tool.
Platform appearance is not customisable.
Knowledge hub retains your brand voice, product context, and past research, every new study starts informed.
Integrates with existing research — upload past calls and query prior studies alongside new ones.
Ask any question about your data and receive a direct answer alongside the specific video clips that support it.
Chat interface that generates video highlight reels from your interviews.
AI-first.
Available — switch between AI and human moderation.
50+
46+
Why teams choose Persona
In-product interview deployment
The best time to interview a user is in the moment, when they're cancelling, onboarding, or hitting friction. Persona embeds directly into your product via a code snippet, so the conversation happens in context, not days later on a third-party platform.
Voice, chat, and video modalities
Persona offers voice call, chat, and video. The voice format — designed to feel like a natural phone call, consistently drives higher completion, particularly in B2B and mobile contexts where turning on a camera is a barrier.
Cancellation and retention intelligence
When someone says "too expensive," Persona's cancellation-focused AI probes further — what they expected to pay, what would have changed their mind, and whether an offer mid-conversation could save them. It's the difference between logging a reason and acting on it.
Quality-gated billing
Persona runs post-interview AI checks against your own criteria and only charges for responses that pass. At scale, that changes the economics of research significantly.
Centralised company knowledge
Persona's knowledge hub carries your brand voice, product context, and prior research into every new study. Discussion guides start with information. Reports don't read like they were written for a stranger.
Conversational results interface
Beyond reports and reels, ask any question about your data in plain English and get a direct answer with the supporting video clips attached.
Which platform is right for your team?
Choose Persona if you...
- Want interviews embedded inside your product rather than hosted on a third-party platform
- Need voice call interviews alongside chat and video
- Run churn and retention research and want an AI purpose-built for those conversations
- Want the interviewer to reflect your brand, not the platform's
- Want to only pay for responses that meet your own quality criteria
- Want to pull a specific video clip when sharing a finding, not a generated summary of what was said
Strella may be a fit if you...
- Need human moderation as an option alongside AI
- Run research that doesn't need to connect to your product or user lifecycle
What our customers say
94% of our B2B users chose Persona's AI interview over a human call. AI-moderated interviews feel inevitable.
Misha Cornes
User Researcher, Otter.ai
There's so much value in being able to run research at the convenience of users' availability — without back-and-forth scheduling.
Boyu
Product Leader, Odyssey
See Persona in action
Book a 30-minute demo and run your first 50 voice interviews free.
