The best Simile alternative depends on how you want to work: Minds if you want self-serve Studies with published prices and validation against real surveys, Aaru or Electric Twin if you want another enterprise simulation run by the vendor, Artificial Societies for stakeholder networks, Evidenza for managed B2B research, and Expected Parrot if you want an open-source toolkit. Prices and published accuracy figures below were checked on vendor pages on October 3, 2026 (as of October 2026, prices change). Minds is our product; we list it first where it fits and say where it does not.
Simile trains a foundation model of human behaviour on large proprietary studies and behavioural data, and attaches a confidence estimate to each result (source). It raised over $200 million at a $2 billion post-money valuation and names CVS Health, Wealthfront, Deloitte and Gallup as customers (source); Banco Itaú and Suntory appear in testimonials on its homepage (source). It does not publish prices. For a head-to-head, see Minds vs Simile.
We checked each vendor's official pricing or FAQ page on October 7, 2026. Prices change, so follow the source link for current terms.
| Vendor | Published price | How you buy | Source |
|---|
| Minds | Pay as you go €0.12 / $0.12 per response; Pro €199 / $199 per seat per month; Enterprise custom | Self-serve sign-up; Enterprise by contract | getminds.ai/pricing |
| Simile | No public pricing | Request form | simile.com |
| Synthetic Users | From $12,500 a year: Launch $12,500, Growth $25,000, Scale $48,000; Enterprise on request | Annual research-token plans with unlimited seats | syntheticusers.com/pricing |
| Evidenza | No public pricing; a custom proposal per project | Managed service; self-service is on a waitlist | evidenza.ai/faqs |
| Aaru | No public pricing | Contact form, then a sales conversation | aaru.com |
| Electric Twin | No public pricing; a licence fee set by the audiences and seats you need, with unlimited queries | Scoped on a first call | electrictwin.com/faq |
| Artificial Societies | No public pricing; the pricing page leads to a demo booking | Demo booking | societies.ai/pricing |
Test it on your own audience. Describe the customers you research today and Minds builds a reusable Audience from that description; you can put questions, concepts and questionnaires to it with Pay as you go.
We rebuild your Simile audience for free. Send us your audience or persona definition from Simile, such as segment descriptions, screener criteria, persona documents or the questionnaire you last ran, and we rebuild it in Minds for free. Request the free rebuild and mention Simile in your message.
Before you rely on the rebuilt Audience, rerun one question you already answered with Simile or with real customers and compare the answers. Synthetic results are directional, and Audience Validation scores an Audience against real survey data so you can see how far to trust it.
| If you need… | Pick | Why |
|---|
| Self-serve synthetic research with published prices | Minds | Pay as you go at $0.12/response, Pro $199/user/month; qualitative and quantitative Studies; validation against real surveys |
| Population answer shares with large published validation | Aaru | 2,993 questions from 186 studies in its September 2026 study |
| A synthetic copy of your own survey audience | Electric Twin | Holdout evaluation on your data before go-live |
| How opinion spreads in a network | Artificial Societies | Connected persona networks, 86% distribution accuracy on its own benchmark |
| B2B executive research, done for you | Evidenza | Managed, results within 72 hours |
| Synthetic answers inside an existing Qualtrics programme | Qualtrics Edge Audiences | Synthetic responses flagged next to human panels |
| Open-source, programmable simulations | Expected Parrot | Free MIT-licensed EDSL library; bring your own model keys |
| Tool | Best for | Access | Starting price | Published accuracy / validation |
|---|
| Minds | Self-serve qual and quant synthetic research | Self-serve | Pay as you go ($0.12/response); Pro $199/user/month | Per-Audience validation scores against real surveys; no single headline number |
| Aaru | Enterprise population simulation | Sales-led | Not published (source) | Pearson 0.970 across answer shares (source) |
| Electric Twin | Synthetic copy of your survey audience | Demo-led | Not published (source) | 92% NDAM vs a 94% human retest ceiling (source) |
| Artificial Societies | Stakeholder and opinion networks | Demo-led | Not published (source) | 86% distribution accuracy across 1,000 surveys (source) |
| Evidenza | Managed B2B research | Managed | Not published (source) | 88% similarity score across 100+ tests (source) |
| Qualtrics Edge Audiences | Synthetic beside human panels | Sales-led | Credits via sales (source) | 0.07 SD average deviation on 8 Likert items (source) |
| Synthetic Users | Synthetic interviews for product teams | Annual plans | From $12,500/year (source) | 85% to 92% theme parity (source) |
| Expected Parrot | Open-source survey simulation | Self-serve, code | Free and open source (source) | Not published |
1. Minds
Best for: insights, marketing and product teams that want to run behaviour and attitude research themselves, on monthly plans.
Minds is the end-to-end platform for commercial synthetic research. You build an Audience of Minds (AI personas) grounded in public sources and your research inputs, then run Studies with open-ended, single choice, multiselect and scale questions plus eleven deterministic methods such as MaxDiff, NPS, TURF, Kano and conjoint. Stimuli include copy, images, video, landing pages and Figma inputs where enabled, and you can compare Audiences side by side in one Study.
Pricing: Pay as you go at $0.12 per synthetic response (or €0.12 including VAT), or Pro $199 per seat per month for 5,000 responses per seat per month, pooled across the team. Enterprise contracts are custom.
Published accuracy or validation: instead of one headline figure, Minds runs Audience Validation: it compares an Audience with real published surveys or survey files you upload and reports, per survey, a score out of 100 with a 95% range, the source and its population, plus every question it skipped and why.
Watch out for: Minds simulates the Audiences you define, not individual real people from interviews; results are directional. Validation needs at least 10 ready Minds and 8 fitting survey questions.
2. Aaru
Best for: enterprises that want the vendor to simulate a population for pricing, product or communications decisions.
Aaru builds simulated agent populations grounded in behaviour and outcome data and works with partners such as EY on research replications.
Pricing: not published; sales-led (source).
Published accuracy or validation: a September 2026 study of 2,993 questions from 186 studies reports a mean absolute error of 3.53 points before sampling adjustment and a Pearson correlation of 0.970 across answer shares (source); a blinded EY replication tracked 53 questions at a median Spearman correlation of 0.90 (source).
Watch out for: vendor-published, not peer-reviewed. See Aaru alternatives.
3. Electric Twin
Best for: enterprises with their own survey data that want a synthetic audience built from it.
Electric Twin builds synthetic audiences from a customer's surveys and runs a holdout evaluation on that data before go-live.
Pricing: not published; demo-led.
Published accuracy or validation: 92% on its NDAM distribution measure against a 94% human test-retest ceiling, from 50k+ evaluations (source).
Watch out for: depends on the depth of your seed data. See Minds vs Electric Twin.
4. Artificial Societies
Best for: communications and public affairs teams asking how opinion spreads through a network.
Artificial Societies connects personas grounded in real individuals' public data into networks of 12 to 3,500 personas.
Pricing: not published; demo-led.
Published accuracy or validation: 86% distribution accuracy across 1,000 real-world surveys, against a 91% human self-replication ceiling (source).
Watch out for: built for questions where influence between people matters; for independent segment answers, check the fit on a pilot.
5. Evidenza
Best for: B2B marketing teams researching executives, delivered as a managed service.
Evidenza surveys and interviews thousands of synthetic copies of target customers and delivers a go-to-market plan.
Pricing: not published.
Published accuracy or validation: an 88% similarity score across 100+ head-to-head tests; the metric is not defined (source).
Watch out for: managed delivery. See Minds vs Evidenza.
6. Qualtrics Edge Audiences
Best for: Qualtrics customers wanting synthetic responses alongside human panels.
Synthetic panels from a model fine-tuned on Qualtrics survey data, currently for the US general population in English.
Pricing: credits through an Account Executive; price not published (source).
Published accuracy or validation: 0.07 SD average deviation from human means on eight Likert questions, against 0.87 SD for GPT (source).
Watch out for: one published benchmark; US-only synthetic panel.
7. Synthetic Users
Best for: product teams running early synthetic interviews.
Synthetic Users runs AI-participant interviews and writes insight reports.
Pricing: from $12,500 a year (source).
Published accuracy or validation: 85% to 92% synthetic-organic parity on themes, from comparison studies the vendor describes as independent (source).
Watch out for: qualitative focus. See Synthetic Users alternatives.
8. Expected Parrot
Best for: researchers and technical teams who want programmable, reproducible survey simulations across many language models.
Expected Parrot publishes EDSL, an open-source Python library under the MIT licence, and a hosted platform for running agent surveys and experiments with caching (source).
Pricing: EDSL is free; hosted runs use your own model keys or Expected Parrot credits, and accounts include free credits (source).
Published accuracy or validation: not published; the project cautions that agent responses reflect statistical patterns, not the actual opinions of any group.
Watch out for: requires Python skills, and you own the validation.
Aaru and Simile are both enterprise simulation companies, and both are sold through sales conversations without public prices. Aaru publishes aggregate validation against published surveys and focuses on population answer shares for decisions such as pricing and strategic communications. Simile builds on research that simulated 1,000 interviewed people individually, trains a behaviour model on proprietary studies, and reports a predicted confidence for each result (source). Simile says it can simulate an individual or a population and returns distributions (source). If you need population shares with a large published benchmark, start with Aaru; if you need simulations grounded in interview research with confidence estimates, start with Simile.
Minds fits teams that want to own the research workflow with prepaid Pay as you go, Pro subscriptions or custom Enterprise contracts rather than commission an enterprise simulation. Against Simile, Minds offers published prices, Pay as you go flexibility, Audiences you define and reuse, qualitative and quantitative Studies with deterministic methods, and Audience Validation on your own survey files. Simile goes further on behaviour simulation backed by a large research programme; Minds does not build agents from two-hour interviews with real people and does not publish one accuracy number.
Simile is the right choice for a large organisation that wants simulations of customers, employees or citizens, of individuals or whole populations, with a confidence estimate on every answer and a vendor team behind it. Its research lineage is unusually strong: in Generative Agent Simulations of 1,000 People, agents grounded in two-hour interviews reproduced General Social Survey answers at 83% to 86% of participants' own two-week retest consistency, against 74% for agents given demographics only (source). Simile says it runs over 7,000 evaluations against real humans every week (source).
- Do you need a vendor-run behaviour simulation, population answer shares, or Audience-level research you run yourself?
- Is a published price or monthly plan a requirement?
- What does the vendor's accuracy figure measure, and on which population?
- Can you test the tool on a past survey of your own before signing?
- Do you need qualitative reasons, quantitative methods, or both?
- Who on your team will design studies and check the results?
We compared each alternative on access, published accuracy evidence and what it measures, pricing transparency, audience source and workflow. Every price and accuracy figure links to the vendor page or paper we fetched on October 3, 2026; "not published" means we could not find it. Vendor metrics differ, so do not compare the numbers directly. No vendor paid for placement. Minds is our product.
Simulated answers point in a direction; they do not settle a question. Before a final launch decision, a representative estimate, a sensory product test, a regulated claim or a behaviour metric such as conversion, collect human or in-market evidence, and be cautious with audiences that leave little public data.
Minds' own limits: no recruited humans, no measured gaze, directional output only. Audience Validation needs a fitting published or own survey and a paid plan, and research responses require a purchased balance under Pay as you go or Pro.
