Online Survey Tools: 7 solutions and what you need to know about them

When it comes to letting stakeholders take part in your research and innovation project, providing them with a voice might be the best thing to do. Online surveys are a great way to do so. On the one hand, they´ll help people to engage with the topic. On the other hand, they will also help you to receive valuable input and feedback from your specific target group.  

Multiple survey tools make it easy to collect feedback and manage data for project insights. Structured questions allow to gather your desired inputs of a specific product, service or experience to find out how your stakeholder group is reacting to it. Most survey tools come equipped with survey templates and sample questions, however, you will still have to take care of your basic questionnaire design. A useful guideline for that may be found here.  

We give you an overview of some of the most common survey tools, listing the pros and cons and thus making it easier for you to find the tool that fits your specific purpose. 

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey provides its users with 15 different types of survey questions, including likert scales and open questions. It´s well designed, easy to use and hence one of the most popular survey tools. The free version offers you up to 10 questions, 100 respondents and 13 question types. 

Even though the free version of SurveyMonkey provides templates, it does not allow you to export data. To use full functionality of the tool, you may upgrade to the paid version, which starts at $25 / month.

Google Forms

Google Forms is one of the best free survey tools on the market and enables you to put together surveys quickly and easily, with help of its convenient drag & drop interface. It allows you to create unlimited surveys, with unlimited questions and receive unlimited responses. 

The design of the surveys can be customised, matching it to the specific user-needs. Another plus of Google Forms is, that you can receive real-time response information and charts. The received collected data can then also be synched with other Google products. 

Surveyly

Surveyly allows to easily create, conduct and evaluate professional surveys online. It`s user-friendly design-editor with multilingual poll options offers great functionalities for beginners, whereas statistical analysis, graphical visualisation functionalities and extended import and export functionalities enable advanced users to get the most out of the result analysis. 

Survey Sparrow

This tool offers loads of customization functionalities that aim to make your survey more engaging by turning them into “pleasant conversations”. The friendly Conversational User Interface (CUI) resembles the respondent as a messaging app, while customization functionalities (like adding brand logos, colours or own CSS and survey templates) give your services an individual touch. 

The creators of Survey Sparrow were putting considerate effort into the responsive design of the tool, which makes it multi-device compatible and allows you to use it on laptops, smartphones and tablets alike. 

Alchemer 

Alchemer (formerly known as SurveyGizmo) is an easy-to-use survey tool, that comes with pretty good automation capabilities, such as sending notifications based on responses or piping answers to new questions. It provides a wide variety of question types and filtering options, however, pricing for the tool is rather steep. 

JotForm

The easy-to-use creative online form builder app JotForm offers decent analytics with a pleasant overall layout and design. You may use some powerful functionalities, such as generating leads, distributing surveys, collecting payments and more. Despite its great range of functionalities, users have to take limitations in customization options and a rather slack customer service into account. 

SoGo Survey

Quizzes, customer feedback or employee experience surveys – SoGo Survey covers all these areas and gives you the tools to create them for your specific project. It offers deep analytical reports, an intuitive UI as well as robust data security and – in case you need it – a responsive customer support. The free version comes, on the downside, with very limited functionalities, which is why you should consider to go for the pro-version straight away.