Comparison
Put them next to each other
All 13 assessments on the same axes. Pick up to four and the table builds itself from the same records the reviews are written from.
Pick up to four
3 of 4 selected
| Attribute | BFI-2 Big Five Inventory-2 | MBTI Myers-Briggs Type Indicator | 16Personalities NERIS Type Explorer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Evidence grade | Strong evidence | Limited evidence | Limited evidence |
| Usefulness | 4/5 usefulness | 3/5 usefulness | 4/5 usefulness |
| Category | Research instrument | Popular test | Popular test |
| Cost | Free | $59.95 to $99.95 | Free, with paid add-on reports |
| Time | 8-12 min | 15-25 min | 10-15 min |
| Items | 60 | 93 | 60 |
| Output | continuous traits | discrete types | discrete types |
| Dimensions | 5 | 4 | 5 |
| Publisher | Colby Personality Lab | The Myers-Briggs Company | NERIS Analytics Limited |
| Published | 2017 | 1998 | 2011 |
| Sources cited | 4 | 5 | 5 |
| Main strength | Fifteen validated facets from sixty items, which is an unusually good resolution-per-minute ratio. | A genuinely useful shared vocabulary. Telling a colleague you need processing time before a decision is easier when both of you have a word for it. | Free, fast, no account, and no dark patterns before you see your result. |
| Main limitation | Four items per facet is thin. Treat facet scores as suggestive and domain scores as solid, not the other way round. | Retake it in a month and there is a meaningful chance you will be told you are someone else, which is disqualifying for anything consequential. | It is routinely mistaken for the official MBTI, including by employers. It is not affiliated with the Myers-Briggs Company in any way, and the publisher states it has deliberately not incorporated Jungian cognitive functions. |
| Verdict | The best value in personality assessment. Ten minutes, no cost, no account, and a facet structure that was validated in the peer-reviewed literature rather than asserted in a marketing page. Start here. Read the full review | Worth doing once, in a room with other people, for the vocabulary. Not worth using to pick a career, screen a candidate, or explain a relationship. If what drew you to it was the promise of understanding yourself accurately, the Big Five will do that better and for nothing. Read the full review | The best free entry point to personality testing, provided you read the percentage bars rather than the four letters and remember it is not the MBTI. As a paid product it is harder to justify, since the free result is the good part. Read the full review |
Evidence grades run strong evidence, moderate evidence, limited evidence, weak evidence. Usefulness is scored independently of evidence, so a fun instrument is never made to look validated by averaging the two.