Recense vs Crunch.io

What stays the same

• Drag-and-drop tabulation. Build crosstabs by dragging variables; switch percentaging, weights, and bases inline.
• Survey-aware variables. Multiple-response, weights, missing-value handling, sig testing — all first-class.
• Shareable artifacts. Tables and dashboards that stakeholders can read without learning the tool.

What changes

• Independence. Recense is not owned by an MR agency. There is no parent-company conflict for agencies whose clients are testing the parent's products.
• Computation in your browser. Crunch's CrunchDB is impressive, but you're sending your data to it. Recense's tabulation engine runs locally via Rust and WebAssembly. Cloud features are opt-in and encrypted on your machine before upload.
• AI agents with full surface parity. Crunch's AI is search and summary on top of finished dashboards. Recense's agents operate the same canvas surfaces a human does — they build tables, derive variables, and write narrative directly in the workspace.
• Bring your own model. Use your Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or Fireworks key. The frontier model that matters for survey analysis next quarter is the one you can swap in next quarter.
• Transparent pricing. Tiers are public. No "request a quote" gate to find out the cost.
• Self-serve. Sign up, work. The default path is not a sales call.

Cost

Crunch.io's published pricing is "contact sales", with deployments in practice running into many thousands per seat per year for enterprise contracts. Recense Starter is £30 / month with full tabulation and BYOK AI; Pro is £90 / month for the full feature set. See the pricing page.

Migration

Bring SPSS .sav files directly. Crunch projects can be exported via the platform's own export paths and the underlying datasets re-imported into Recense. Custom Crunch Automation scripts don't port directly, but the equivalent derivations and table specs are buildable in the canvas — and the agent can take a script description and rebuild it on demand for most cases.

Where Crunch still wins

Crunch's "delivery" surface — embeddable CrunchBoxes, password- protected stakeholder dashboards at scale — is more developed today. If your job is largely about the last-mile distribution of finished tables to non-analyst stakeholders across a large organisation, that's a real consideration. Recense's canvas-as- report is a different shape of artifact and is better for the analysis itself than for one-to-many stakeholder consumption.