Minds and Candor both build synthetic participants, often called synthetic users, from evidence rather than from a bare prompt. They put that evidence to different use. Minds asks a reusable audience at once and reads the spread of answers. Candor interviews a small audience one person at a time and reports why they think what they think.
| Dimension | Minds | Candor |
|---|---|---|
| What it's for | Market research for brand, agency and insights teams: concept and message tests, surveys, segment comparisons and interviews | Interview research on a problem, a concept or a price, before or alongside research with real customers |
| What it's built from | Your brief, files and links, plus web research and public social-media signals, turned into demographic, behavioral and attitudinal distributions | Your uploaded research first, then web research. Personality traits come from published population data for the participant's region and occupation. |
| Size | Audiences sized for each study. Its published survey test used 301 Minds, and a benchmark group can reach 1,000. | Up to 24 participants per audience, built for each study |
| Reuse | Audiences are reusable across studies, and a marketplace offers ready-made ones | Participants belong to one study and remember every interview within it |
| How you ask questions | Interviews, questionnaires and eleven built-in methods, including MaxDiff, conjoint and Van Westendorp, plus attention heatmaps. Which methods you get depends on your plan | One-to-one interviews, run by you or by Candor's automated interviewer, followed by a written report |
| Checking against real people | Reports a 93.99% match to a published UK survey, and can check an Audience against surveys you choose | Candor hasn't yet published a test of its output against real people |
| Connecting other tools | A public API, a connector for AI assistants, Google Sheets and Looker Studio | No public API. You work in the Candor app. |
| Pricing | Free plan. Individual: $59 a month. Team: $99 per seat a month. Enterprise: on request. | Free: $0 a month, $10 per automated interview. Standard: $75 a month, $7 per automated interview. Interviews you run yourself are free. |
Minds facts come from getminds.ai, its about page, methodology page and pricing page, checked on September 26, 2026. If a row is out of date when you read this, tell us and we’ll fix it.
The difference is the shape of the research, not where the evidence comes from. Both products start from a description of your audience, add your own files and research the web before any participant exists. Neither is a copy of a real person.
Minds turns that evidence into distributions of age, habits and attitudes, then builds an audience of Minds to fill them. You put one question to the whole audience and read the result as a chart: how many picked each option, how each segment differs, and what people said in their own words. Audiences are kept and reused across studies.
Candor builds up to 24 participants for one study and interviews them one at a time. Each interview follows up on what the participant says, and each participant remembers every earlier interview in the study. The output is a written report on how that kind of customer reasons about your problem, and why.
So the two answer different questions. Minds suits “how does this audience split on my options?” Candor suits “why does this kind of customer think this way, and what would change their mind?”
Published checks against real surveys. Minds reports that 301 Minds answered a UK Food Standards Agency youth survey with 93.99% similarity to the published results. It also says Minds matched held-back interview answers 68% more closely than standard AI prompting. You can run the same kind of check on your own Audience against a published or uploaded survey. Its methodology page is candid that no single figure holds for every audience and question.
Many research methods in one place. Beyond interviews and questionnaires, Minds runs eleven built-in methods, including MaxDiff, TURF, Kano, conjoint and two pricing methods, Van Westendorp and Gabor-Granger. It adds attention heatmaps for websites, videos and images, and studies that rerun on a schedule. Which methods you can use depends on your plan.
Audiences you keep. An Audience built once can be reused for the next study and compared segment by segment. A marketplace offers ready-made Audiences, including ones built with research partners such as SINUS-Institut.
It fits into other tools. Minds has a public API, a connector for AI assistants, a Google Sheets add-on and a Looker Studio connector. Its home page shows logos including Accenture, Deloitte, Stripe and Canva. Candor has no public API, and if an established client list is part of your procurement case, Minds has one and we don’t yet.
Candor gathers evidence about your audience before anyone exists to interview: your own research first, then web research. It groups the audience from that evidence and builds each participant from it. Personality traits are drawn from published population data for the participant’s region and occupation.
The details about who a participant is, how they behave, what they believe and how they talk each carry a label. Personality and bias scores don’t. Grounded means there’s something you can check behind it. Derived means it follows from the evidence without a source stating it outright. Assumed means Candor filled it in and says so.
Then the interviews start. You can run them yourself, free, or let Candor’s automated interviewer run them. Participants carry what they said in one interview into the next, so you can come back with a sharper question. When the interviews are done, Candor writes the report. How it works walks through the full process, and why we don’t build digital twins of real people explains one of the choices behind it.
Minds has published a test against real survey answers. Candor hasn’t yet published a test of its output against real human answers, and we make no accuracy claim for it. With at most 24 participants, a Candor audience is also too small to read as percentages. If your decision rests on how many people prefer option A, Minds is built for that question and Candor isn’t.
What Candor gives you in return is depth on each person. A participant is interviewed at length, pushed on what they say and held to what they said before, and most details of their profile show what they rest on. That suits early questions where you don’t yet know the options to count.
The pricing models differ too. Minds charges a monthly subscription, per seat on Team. Candor has a free plan and charges per automated interview. On the Free plan, a team that runs one study a quarter pays for that study’s interviews and nothing in between. The pricing page has the details.
Choose by the question you need answered: how an audience splits, or why a customer thinks the way they do.
This comparison is one of several. See Candor vs Synthetic Users for another synthetic research platform, Candor vs Brox for digital twins of real people, Traditional vs synthetic user research for survey research with real people, or the full comparison hub. For an overview of the category, see what is synthetic user research, and for interview research on a price, see price testing.
Yes, for interview research. Both build participants from evidence rather than from a bare prompt, so teams weigh one against the other. They suit different questions, though. Minds runs surveys, concept tests and built-in methods such as MaxDiff and conjoint, putting each question to a whole audience at once, which suits questions about how an audience splits. Candor runs one-to-one interviews with up to 24 participants per audience and writes up how that kind of customer reasons and why. If you need percentages and method readouts, Minds fits. If you need the reasons behind a problem, a concept or a price, Candor fits.
Both publish prices and both have a free plan. Minds charges by subscription: Individual is $59 a month and Team is $99 per seat a month, with Enterprise priced on request. Minds says Individual and Team can be cancelled at any time. Candor charges per interview. The Free plan is $0 a month with $10 automated interviews. Standard is $75 a month with $7 automated interviews. Interviews you run yourself are free on both plans. A 24-participant study on Standard costs $243 in its first month, monthly fee included. Which costs less depends on how much research you run and how many people need a seat.
Minds has published figures and Candor hasn't, so only Minds can point to a test. Minds reports that 301 Minds answered a UK Food Standards Agency youth survey with 93.99% similarity to the published results. It also lets you check an Audience against published or uploaded surveys. Its methodology page says it makes no single accuracy claim for every audience and question. Candor hasn't yet published a test of its output against real human answers. Its participants aren't built to match survey percentages. Candor aims to show how a type of customer reasons, with most profile details labeled by what they rest on. Treat its findings as a map of what to test with real customers next.
Yes. Minds lists in-depth interviews with a single Mind among its study types, alongside questionnaires, concept and message tests, and group discussions. The difference is where each product puts its weight. Minds is built around asking an audience at once and reading the spread of answers. Candor is built around the interview itself: an automated interviewer that asks follow-up questions, participants who remember every earlier interview in the study, and a written report at the end. You can also run the interviews yourself, free.
Yes, with both. Minds builds Audiences from a description plus files or links you attach, alongside web research and public social-media signals. It says what you supply stays in each Mind's own knowledge base and that web enrichment can be switched off. Candor treats your uploaded research, such as interview transcripts, survey exports and CRM notes, as its strongest evidence. It pulls findings about a type of customer out of those files and builds participants from the findings, not from any one person in them. You can remove names and identifiers before you upload, and the research still works as evidence.
Start with a free project, or walk through Candor with us first.