Labvanced vs Gorilla

Part of Labvanced's platform comparisons.

Labvanced and Gorilla are both no-code platforms for behavioral research. They support many of the same experimental paradigms but differ in the range of measurement technologies, hardware integrations, and deployment options they offer. Gorilla's webcam eye tracking uses the open-source WebGazer library; Labvanced adds peer-reviewed webcam eye tracking, emotion detection, and remote heart rate (rPPG) natively, plus EEG and Lab Streaming Layer (LSL) hardware integration through its desktop app. Both platforms remove the coding barrier. Only one removes the hardware barrier.

At a Glance

Where Gorilla Is Strong

Gorilla's platform paper, Anwyl-Irvine et al. (2020), "Gorilla in our midst: An online behavioral experiment builder," published in Behavior Research Methods, documented adoption across 5,000+ users and 400+ academic institutions at the time of publication. Three of the paper's five authors are members of Gorilla's development team at Cauldron Science, including founder and CEO Jo K. Evershed. That peer-reviewed citation gives researchers a ready-made methods-section reference, and it is a genuine reason labs choose Gorilla: a supervisor or department that has already adopted it, or a paper that already cites it, lowers the switching cost to zero for the next researcher in that group.

Like Labvanced, Gorilla also integrates directly with Prolific for participant recruitment, which removes a recruitment-workflow step for researchers already using that panel. Its multiplayer tool ships with ready-to-clone templates, including the Dictator Game and Ultimatum Game, so common paradigms can be running with a same-day setup. And its token-based pricing has no subscription floor: a small pilot study can be run for the cost of a handful of tokens, which is a lower barrier to entry than a subscription for a researcher who only needs to test a paradigm once.

Where Labvanced Differs

Gorilla's webcam eye tracking runs on WebGazer, an open-source library available to any developer, not a Gorilla-specific measurement pipeline. Labvanced's webcam eye tracking is peer-reviewed against a hardware benchmark, reaching 1.3° center-screen accuracy with a Pearson correlation above 0.9 against the EyeLink 1000, lower for free-viewing and smooth-pursuit tasks (Kaduk et al., 2024, Behavior Research Methods). Facial and eye processing run entirely client-side, so no raw video ever leaves the participant's device.

Gorilla has no equivalent for emotion detection: the capability is simply not part of its feature set. Labvanced runs it natively from the same webcam session used for eye tracking, with accuracy above 90% averaged across emotions, though accuracy varies between individual emotions. That same session can also capture remote heart rate, expected to be within 1 to 3% of actual heart rate; a comparison study against gold-standard medical devices is still ongoing.

The two platforms also part ways on group studies. Gorilla's Multiplayer tool supports up to 8 players per task. Labvanced's multi-user infrastructure adds lobby management, role assignment, and group formation on top of its WebSocket-based synchronization.

Deployment is the other structural difference. Gorilla runs in the browser only. Labvanced runs the same visually built study on web, on a native desktop app with EEG/LSL hardware integration for in-lab sessions, and on native iOS/Android apps for offline field collection. Labvanced's timing is grounded in peer-reviewed methods for precise JavaScript display timing (Lukács & Gartus, 2022, Behavior Research Methods). And where Gorilla bills per participant token, Labvanced uses flat, tier-based subscriptions, which makes cost predictable regardless of how many participants a study ultimately recruits.

Choose Which Fits Your Study

If your study is a standard single-participant cognitive or survey-style paradigm, and your lab already has Gorilla tokens or an existing subscription, Gorilla's approach is a clean fit; there is no meaningful usability gap between the two platforms for that kind of design, and switching cost is a real cost, not just an inconvenience.

Labvanced's advantage becomes clearer as a study moves beyond a standard browser-based paradigm. While both platforms handle common experimental designs well, Labvanced is built to support studies that demand additional measurement capabilities, more sophisticated experimental designs, or broader deployment options. As research requirements become more complex, those differences become increasingly meaningful and this is where Labvanced stands as a better choice.

Migration Note

Migrating a study typically involves recreating the experiment in the Labvanced editor. For researchers or labs moving existing paradigms, Labvanced also offers the study building service that can assist with rebuilding experiments.

FAQ

Last Reviewed

Last reviewed: 2026-07-08

Competitor features, pricing, and platform capabilities on this page were verified against Gorilla's official documentation and pricing pages as of this date. Peer-reviewed research citations are referenced inline throughout.