Wellington vs the BFI-2 and IPIP-NEO

What are the BFI-2 and the IPIP-NEO?

Both are Big Five inventories written by academic researchers and published in peer-reviewed journals, and both can be used without paying for them. They are the instruments a psychology department would reach for, and they are the honest baseline any paid personality product should be measured against.

• The BFI-2. The Big Five Inventory-2 is a 60-item questionnaire that scores the five domains and, beneath them, 15 facets, three per domain. Its development paper reports the reliability of the scales, their structure, and evidence that the facets predict outcomes the domain scores alone do not (Soto & John, 2017). Shorter forms exist for studies with no room for 60 items, and the instrument is available at no cost for research and educational use.
• The IPIP-NEO. The International Personality Item Pool is a large collection of personality items placed in the public domain so that anyone can build and publish scales from them without a licence (Goldberg et al., 2006). The IPIP-NEO is a set of scales built from that pool to measure the five domains and 30 narrower facets. A 120-item version was developed as a shorter alternative to the 300-item original, with acceptable reliability for all 30 facets and a factor structure closely matching the NEO PI-R (Johnson, 2014), and free online versions return a percentile report for every domain and facet.

If your question is where to get trustworthy Big Five scores for nothing, that question is already answered, and it was answered by researchers rather than by a marketing department.

How strong is the evidence behind them?

As strong as it gets in this field. Both measure the Big Five, the structure that came out of decades of lexical research and survived repeated attempts to replace it (Goldberg, 1993). Both report their psychometric properties openly in the published record, which means their reliability and their factor structure can be checked by anyone rather than taken on trust.

The IPIP has a further advantage that is easy to underrate. Because the items are in the public domain, the scales can be reused, translated, shortened and rebuilt freely, and a great deal of research has done exactly that. Decades of accumulated use is a kind of evidence that no new instrument can buy.

Their limits are the ordinary limits of self-report. They are questionnaires about yourself, so they are sensitive to mood and self-presentation, and their norms come from whoever happened to take them. The free online IPIP-NEO report, in particular, compares you with the people who found their way to that website, which is a large sample but not a representative one.

What does Wellington add?

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 free Snapshot asks 60 questions, takes about 7 minutes and scores 6 broad dimensions: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Openness to Experience and Honesty-Humility. Wellington's item bank is written in the same public-domain tradition these instruments come from (Goldberg et al., 2006), and each trait's methods note names the published scales it is modelled on. The measurement idea is not different. What is different is what happens after the score.

• A written page for every band. Each trait has three pages, one for the Quiet band, one for Balanced, one for High, written in advance by the writing and psychology team. Your answers choose which page you read. A free inventory usually returns a number and a sentence; the reading is left to you.
• A sixth dimension. Honesty-Humility, from the HEXACO model, a sixth factor that lexical studies in several languages support (Ashton & Lee, 2007) and that Five-Factor Model instruments capture only partly (Ashton, Lee & de Vries, 2014). Neither the BFI-2 nor the IPIP-NEO measures it, because neither is trying to.
• Character strengths. The Wellington Membership scores all 24 strengths from the standard classification (Peterson & Seligman, 2004) and draws a constellation from the pattern. That is a different literature from the Big Five, and it is where most of the practical suggestions come from.
• Scope. 51 facets beneath the six dimensions and 90 traits with the membership, then a short weekly module that carries the report toward 255 traits across eight domains over 104 weeks, with retests in year two.
• A price. The Snapshot is free and needs an email address so your answers are saved and your results can be shown. The Wellington Membership is $4.99 a month, cancel any time. Wellington is a wellness tool for reflection, not a medical or psychological diagnosis, and it does not replace care from a qualified professional.

Which should you take?

If you want accurate Big Five numbers and you are comfortable interpreting them yourself, take the IPIP-NEO 120 or the BFI-2 and stop there. Nothing paid will give you materially better domain scores, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

If what you actually want is to understand what the numbers mean for your life, the gap between a facet table and a report you can read is the gap Wellington is built in. The free Snapshot covers the same six dimensions in 60 questions with a band and a percentile for each, which is enough to tell whether the writing is worth anything to you before any money changes hands.

A reasonable route is to take both. The scores should broadly agree, since they measure the same traits from related item pools. Where they disagree, the likeliest causes are the reference sample each uses and the day you took them, which is itself a useful lesson about how precise a personality score is.

Side by side

Wellington scores each trait from several statements on a 5-point accuracy scale and places it against a reference sample. Those norms are provisional while the norming sample is completed, and the methods page says so plainly, in the same spirit as the published instruments it is compared with here. 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. None of the three is designed for hiring or selection, and Wellington users can export and delete their data at any time.

Questions people ask

Should I just take the IPIP-NEO?

If you want free, detailed Big Five facet scores and you are happy reading a table of percentiles, yes. It is a genuinely good instrument with public-domain items and decades of research behind it. Take the free Wellington Snapshot as well if you want a sixth dimension and writing that explains what your band means.

Is the BFI-2 free?

It is available at no cost for research and educational use from its authors, which is why it appears in so many studies. That is a licence for research rather than a consumer product, so what you will usually meet online is a site that has implemented the items, with its own report and its own norms.

Does Wellington use IPIP items?

Wellington's bank is written in the same public-domain tradition, and every trait's methods note names the published scales it is modelled on, such as the public-domain versions of the established facet scales. Each trait is measured with several statements rather than one, and the Snapshot uses 60 of them across the 6 dimensions.

Is a longer test more accurate?

Up to a point. Reliability rises as you add items per trait, then flattens, which is why the Snapshot uses ten statements per dimension rather than two and why the Portrait adds 336 more to reach the facets and strengths. Beyond that, extra length buys breadth, not precision.