Why do you need survey software? Well, the right question should be: why would anyone not need it. Online surveys are the best tool to collect feedback from customers and employees and conduct market research. And only thanks to this feedback and real changes based on it You and your company can move forward – make profits, get more customers, stand ahead of competition.
We really know what we are talking about – the website you are currently on, Startquestion, is a survey tool who helps you get, analyse and report feedback from whoever you want in the most simple and intuitive way, even without expert knowledge. But this article is not about us. We are fully aware that there are many great online survey software around and, as a specialist in this topic, we would like to present to you the best 5 of them. Let’s start.
1. Google Forms – free survey software for everyone
Trust us, Google Forms is on this list not only because it’s free online survey tool. Of course it is indeed it’s biggest advantage, but except that what we appreciate the most in this tool is its functionality and simplicity.
Google Forms is web-based software that allows both individuals and businesses to conduct customizable research in the online survey form. Among the most useful features of this survey tool we can mention:
- 9 types of questions
- Simple survey creation
- Few different design patterns
- Mobile surveys
- Question branching
- Survey via link (url customization)
- Survey via e-mail
- Limited possibility of third party integrations
This survey platform offers their users a variety of ways to get technical support during the process of creating the survey and analysing the results, like: Email/Help Desk, FAQs/Forum, Knowledge Base, phone support or 24/7 chat.
There is one factor which individuals and companies who create surveys are really interested in. We are talking about ready to use, user friendly survey templates. Free survey platform provides its users with 17 pre-made templates, both for individual users like: Party Invite or for some business purposes like: Time Off Request. However, as you will read below, you will notice that the templates created by Google aren’t as advanced and ready to use in business cases, as they are in the other (paid)online survey software.
2. SurveyMonkey
If You have some budget for online surveys and are looking for more professional survey software You should definitely check SurveyMonkey. It’s a good Google Forms alternative dedicated to creating CX, HR, marketing and IT surveys for both professionals and individuals who wants to get feedback from customers, employees, or users.
SurveyMonkey has both Free Trial and Free Version, which however has very limited possibilities. Users can create and send a survey with up to 10 questions and collect as many responses as they want, but with view-only access to 40 responses per survey.
SurveyMonkey is a online survey tool that users appreciate primarily for a wide range of functions, the most important of which, in our opinion, are:
- Customizable forms
- 21 types of questions,
- Features for survey data analysis
- Sending questionnaires via email
- Sending surveys via link (URL customization)
- Mobile survey
- Multi-Language forms
- Offline Response Collection
- Question Branching
- Question Library
- Reporting
- Skip logic / Display logic
- Trend analysis
- Third party integrations (Slack, Microsoft Teams, Facebook Workplace, Google Drive, Salesforce, another CRMs and more)
SurveyMonkey makes the creation of the survey as easy as possible thanks to over 250 ready to use survey templates. Users can find many templates in different categories like: Customers, Education, Employees, Events, Healthcare, Market Research and Nonprofit. The most popular examples of surveys are, among others: Product testing, Employee Engagement, Event feedback, Net promoter Score (NPS), Education demographics or Customer Service feedback.
This survey software provides its users with support by chat, email, Help Desk, knowledge base on the website and phone support. Users can get to know the online survey tool also during video training and webinars.
3. Typeform
Typeform is user friendly SurveyMonkey alternative which is distinguished primarily by the modern appearance of the surveys and forms that can be created there. This survey software is designed especially for large enterprises, design enthusiasts, NGOs, market research companies and freelancers. Typeform offers both free online survey tool during a trial period and free limited version, where users can add up to 10 questions per survey and collect 10 responses per month.
Typeform has all the basic features that allow its users to create surveys for both individual customers and companies. The most popular of them are:
- Customizable forms
- Tools for data analysis
- Distribution via e-mail
- Distribution via link
- Feedback management platform
- Live results tracking
- Mobile survey
- 19 Question Types (for example matrix nad drag and drop questions)
- Process/Workflow automation
- Question branching
- Reporting
- Analytic online survey tools
- Third party integrations (Typeform integrates with over 500 apps like Mailchimp, Google Sheets,Salesforce, Slack or Zapier)
Typeform is a good SurveyMonkey alternative also when it comes to the ready to use survey templates. Users can choose from different survey categories such as Customer Feedback (customer satisfaction surveys, customer support forms), Employee Feedback (Employee satisfaction surveys), Evaluation surveys, Healthcare surveys, Feedback surveys, Market research or School (education) surveys. Typeform provides also Quizzes, Lead Generation, Remote Working and polls examples.
This SurveyMonkey and Qualtrics alternative also offers their customers a variety of contact, for example via help desk, e-mail, chat or articles on Forum and in Knowledge Base.
4. Jotform
Jotform is a survey tool which helps companies, nonprofit, healthcare and educational organisations collect and manage feedback. It’s often described as a Typeform alternative, because it’s even easier to use and basic plans in both of these survey tools are available at the same price. Jotform has both free trial and free plan, which allows users to use 100 MB available space, create maximum 5 surveys per month and get 1000 monthly survey views.
There are some functionalities and features most appreciated by Jotforms users:
- More than 15 types of questions
- Conversion of survey to PDF
- Customizable branding
- Digital signature
- Survey encryption
- Full text search
- Mobile survey
- Distribution via link
- Distribution via e-mail
- Offline response collection
- Workflow automation
- Question branching
The other advantage of Jotform online survey software is giving the users easy access to over 1300 (!) ready to use survey templates. Users can choose examples from many different categories, such as templates for business, for example: Employee Surveys or Satisfactions surveys, and templates for personal use like Relationship Surveys or Wedding forms. Jotforms also provides its users with many quiz and polls templates.
You can contact JotForm support by email, chat, phone or looking for answers for your questions in Help Desk or in the FAQ section in User Guide.
5. Qualtrics
Qualtrics is often described as a SurveyMonkey alternative. Those two survey tools indeed have a lot in common. As all online survey software described above, Qualtrics is the user friendly, easy to use web-based tool which was made to conduct survey research, evaluations and other data collection activities. Qualtrics is described as the perfect tool for organizations of any size who want to conduct customer, employees, market, brand or marketing research.
If you think about some advanced features You need to create a survey… Qualtrics probably has it. This survey software gives their users many options and advanced possibilities both while creating, analysing and reporting survey results. Here we list some of the most popular features:
- Alerts and notifications
- Audience targeting (target audience)
- Benchmarking
- Data analysis tools
- Survey data collection
- Data import/export
- Funnel Analysis
- Heatmaps
- Third party integrations (Typeform integrates with over 500 apps like Mailchimp, Google Sheets, Salesforce, Slack or Zapier)
- Media Analytics
- Survey via link and email (url customization)
- Mobile survey
- Multi-language surveys
- Offline response collection
- Question branching
- Question library
- Reporting & statistics
- Social media monitoring
The users can seek help and advice from Qualtrics specialists with email, chat, by phone or they can look for answers by themselves in Help Desk or in the FAQ section in User Guide.
What in our opinion is the biggest advantage of Qualtrics is a very wide choice of ready to use, professional survey templates from every type of core research experiences, such as Brand Experience, Customer Feedback, Customer Experience, Employee Experience, Experience Management and Product Experience. Companies each size and budget can find there ready to use examples of Customer and Employee Satisfaction surveys,
To summarize – online survey software comparison straight from Capterra
Capterra is a very useful free online marketplace vendor where You can find and compare to each other technology vendors within the software industry, also in the field of online surveys and research. Apart from information about particular companies and tools, Capterra lets us compare the chosen survey software with each other. Below we present a comparison between all paid survey software we presented above. We hope it will make your choice even easier:
Image credit: Capterra
No matter which online survey software You choose, please choose some!
Our battle to show people how important it is listening to customers and employees’ voices lasts longer than we even remember. There are always ways to improve business products or services, especially that using online surveys getting feedback can be realy cheap and easy!
So no matter if You choose Startquestion or any of the online survey tools we presented above, we really hope that you will start to get feedback from people who are having a big impact on your success. And that you will start to do it right now. We wish You good luck and if you have some questions or need some advice – feel free to contact us.
