Mech Turk Alternatives

Prices and facts checked on each company's own website and in AWS documentation on 24 October 2026.

Amazon Mechanical Turk closed permanently on 30 September 2026, and no single service replaces all of it. The right alternative depends on what you ran there. For ongoing business and AI data work, such as data entry, document extraction, moderation, transcription and AI output review, a managed team like Deepen AI Services does the work and checks it for you. Research panels such as Prolific and CloudResearch Connect supply participants for surveys and studies, and crowd marketplaces such as clickworker and Microworkers let you post and check microtasks yourself.

Deepen AI Services replaces the anonymous crowd with a named, trained team. You send your HIT instructions and examples. The team is trained on them, works inside your tools or your Ground Truth and A2I workforce, and a team lead checks the work before it reaches you. Deepen AI has run trained data teams since 2017 and has more than 200 programs in production.

See how a move from Mechanical Turk works, or get a plan for your tasks.

Prolific is the alternative most often recommended to researchers who used MTurk to find participants. It lists more than 300,000 active participants in over 40 countries, with the strongest coverage in the US, the UK and Europe.

CloudResearch built tools for researchers on MTurk for years, and Connect is its own participant platform. Participants are in the US and 18 or older.

clickworker, now part of LXT, offers a self-service marketplace for standard tasks and a managed service for custom projects. It describes its crowd as millions of people in 136 countries.

Microworkers is the closest to MTurk's self-serve model. You build a campaign from a template, add verification questions and review the submissions. Its homepage cites more than 4.9 million workers worldwide.

Toloka now focuses on training and evaluation data for AI agents and LLMs: agent demonstrations, preference data, red-teaming and expert work. Its site points businesses to a conversation with its experts and shows no prices.

Both run large, sales-led programs for AI training data. Appen cites coverage of more than 500 locales, and Scale AI asks you to book an intro call to get started. Neither publishes prices. They're built for large, long-running AI data programs rather than the short batches many teams ran on MTurk.

CloudFactory offers managed teams for AI data. It starts with a free analysis of a sample of your data, then sends a proposal. There's no public rate card: pricing is built on annual spend commitments with custom rates.

If your pipeline sent work to MTurk through SageMaker Ground Truth or Amazon A2I, only the MTurk worker type is gone. Existing AWS customers can keep both services and point their jobs at a private workforce, such as your staff or a vendor's team, or at a vendor from AWS Marketplace. AWS says both services are no longer open to new customers and won't get new features.

The Ground Truth and A2I migration guide covers each step. Deepen AI's team can join your private workforce, so your task templates, S3 data and code stay as they are.

Platform fees are only part of the price. On MTurk you paid a 20% fee on rewards, 40% for tasks with 10 or more assignments, plus your own time writing qualification tests and rejecting poor work. Compare alternatives on the cost of each accepted result, not the fee alone.

An example: if one person copies 120 receipts an hour, $5 an hour works out to about 4 cents a receipt, with the checking already done. On a self-serve platform, add the hours your own team spends reviewing and re-running rejected work.

For every date and deadline, see the MTurk shutdown FAQ.