Free Big Five personality tests, compared

Which Big Five tests are free to take?

More than most people expect. The Big Five is a published model rather than a product, so several of the best instruments for measuring it were written by researchers and released for others to use. What varies between the free options is length, the detail they report, and whether anybody has written anything to help you read the result.

Two things in that table are worth reading twice. The research instruments are free because they were published, not because they are trimmed versions of something better. And the difference between a 10-item test and a 120-item test is how much the result can carry, not merely how long it takes.

What do the research instruments give you?

The BFI-2 is a 60-item inventory that measures the five domains and, beneath each, three facets, fifteen in all. It was developed and validated across three studies against both self-reports and peer reports, and its facet scales were included because they add predictive power beyond the domain scores (Soto & John, 2017). It is available at no cost for research and educational use, which is why it turns up in so many studies and in so many implementations on other people's websites.

The IPIP-NEO comes from a different tradition. The International Personality Item Pool is a large bank of personality items put into the public domain so that anyone could build and publish scales without a licence (Goldberg et al., 2006). From that pool, a 120-item inventory was developed to measure all 30 facets with four items each, reaching acceptable reliability in two large internet samples, converging with the NEO PI-R and with ratings by acquaintances, and reproducing the NEO PI-R factor structure closely (Johnson, 2014). A 300-item version measures the same facets with more items each.

Both are usually met through a website that has implemented the items. The instrument is the published part; the norms, the wording of the report and the handling of your answers belong to whoever built the page, and those are the parts to check. What free usually means on a personality test works through the arrangements you are likely to meet.

Are the very short free tests good enough?

The ten-item TIPI is the honest example, because its authors were explicit about the trade. They describe the very brief measures as somewhat inferior to standard multi-item instruments, adequate on convergence with longer Big Five measures and on retest reliability, and recommend them where the realistic alternative is measuring nothing at all (Gosling et al., 2003). That fits a study with two minutes of survey time left, rather than a person trying to understand themselves.

The wider evidence points the same way. Very abbreviated measures, and single-item measures above all, lead researchers to substantially underestimate how much personality traits matter for behaviour, and to overstate the importance of whatever new construct is being compared with them (Credé et al., 2012). Slightly longer measures recover much of that at little cost in respondent time. The result looks the same on the screen either way, which is the problem: a percentile from ten questions is printed in the same font as a percentile from a hundred. If a free test reports five numbers from ten questions, read it as a rough sketch, and if it reports thirty facets from ten questions, it is not measuring thirty things.

Which free Big Five test should you choose?

It depends on what you plan to do with the result, and on how many minutes you are willing to spend. Four recommendations cover almost everybody.

• You want the most detail for nothing. Take the IPIP-NEO-120: thirty facets, four items each, about fifteen minutes, and a published development paper you can read (Johnson, 2014). Take the 300-item version if you want each facet measured more thoroughly.
• You want something short but still serious. Take the BFI-2. Sixty items, five domains, fifteen facets, and a validation history against peer reports as well as self-reports (Soto & John, 2017).
• You want the result explained rather than listed. Free research instruments return scores and leave the reading to you. If a percentile table is hard to act on, choose something that writes the result up, and check what the written part costs before you start answering.
• You have two minutes and no more. Use a ten-item measure knowingly, as a rough position on five dimensions, and build nothing on the facet level, because there is not one (Gosling et al., 2003).

Whichever you pick, a percentile is only as meaningful as the sample it is compared with, and free tests often norm against whoever happened to visit the site. An honest report names its reference sample and says plainly when its norms are still provisional. How to read your personality test scores covers what to do with the numbers, and the Big Five facets explains the level beneath the five.

What does free usually not include?

• Written interpretation. Nobody is paid to write a page about the band you landed in, so most free reports give you a chart, a number and a line of description. The reading is yours to do.
• Norms you can check. The published instruments document their structure and properties in the peer-reviewed record (Soto & John, 2017; Johnson, 2014), but the percentile you see on a given website depends on that website's sample, which is often undescribed.
• A promise about your answers. A free test still has costs behind it, so the privacy policy is the document that tells you what pays for it. It is worth a minute before you spend fifteen.

What free does include, on the better instruments, is the measurement itself. A price tag is not itself a reason to expect better domain scores than a well-implemented IPIP-NEO or BFI-2, though how closely public-domain scales match commercial inventories has not been settled. Our own comparison with those two instruments is at Wellington vs the BFI-2 and IPIP-NEO.

How does Wellington's free Snapshot compare?

Wellington is a science-based personality assessment from Therabot Labs LLC. It measures personality as continuous traits, built on the Big Five and HEXACO models, and writes the results back as a personal report rather than a type.

The Snapshot is free: 60 questions and about 7 minutes, ten statements for each of 6 dimensions, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Openness to Experience and Honesty-Humility, so it covers the Big Five plus the sixth factor the five-factor instruments do not carry. The first ten questions are answered before anything is asked of you. After question ten you sign in with an email address, so your answers are saved, a half-finished sitting can be picked up on another device, and your results have somewhere to be shown. There is no card at any point in the free tier.

Each statement is rated from "Very inaccurate" to "Very accurate", reverse-keyed items are flipped, and each dimension is the average of its statements, reported as a percentile against the reference sample, in one of three bands: Quiet below the 30th percentile, Balanced to the 70th, High above. The bands and the Portrait names exist to make the result easier to talk about; the percentile is the measurement, and it is always shown alongside. Our norms are provisional while the norming sample is completed, and the report says so. The written trait pages are a $0.99 add-on: unlock the Portrait Report and every trait has three pages, one per band, written in advance by our writing and psychology team, so your answers choose which one you read. That written page is the part free research instruments do not have, and it is the real reason to add it on top of the free Snapshot as well as the IPIP-NEO. Wellington is a wellness tool for reflection, not a medical or psychological diagnosis, and it does not replace care from a qualified professional. It is not designed for hiring, and you can export or delete your data at any time.

What costs money is depth. The Wellington Membership, $4.99 a month, adds the Portrait, 336 further questions across 4 chapters, to reach 90 traits including every Big Five facet and all 24 character strengths, and carries the report toward all 255 traits across eight domains. The methodology shows how the writing works before you pay for any of it.

Questions people ask

What is the best free Big Five personality test?

For depth, the IPIP-NEO-120: it measures all thirty facets of the five-factor model with four items each and reproduces the NEO PI-R factor structure closely (Johnson, 2014), and its items are public domain (Goldberg et al., 2006). For a shorter sitting, the BFI-2 gives five domains and fifteen facets in sixty items (Soto & John, 2017). Both return scores rather than a written report.

Are free Big Five tests accurate?

The published ones are serious measures, built and validated by the same methods as commercial instruments, though how closely the two match has not been settled. Accuracy depends far more on how many questions are asked per trait than on price. The weak point of a free test is usually its reference sample, since percentiles often come from whoever visited the site rather than a representative group.

How many questions should a free Big Five test ask?

Enough that each trait rests on several statements rather than one or two. Sixty items across five domains is comfortable; a hundred and twenty is what facet-level reporting takes. Very short measures understate how much traits matter and inflate the apparent importance of rival explanations (Credé et al., 2012), and the printed result gives no sign that it happened.

Is a paid Big Five test better than a free one?

Not automatically, and not because of the price. What paid tests sell is interpretation, breadth beyond the Big Five, and a report someone wrote. Those can be worth paying for if a table of percentiles is not what you wanted. If you only want the numbers, the free research instruments are the better value.