Ease of use both for you and your respondents are the most important aspects for any survey software, but they are not the only considerations. In many cases, if you are only looking at ease, you may find several survey-creation sites will work for you. To narrow the choices, ask yourself these questions:
Is Design Important to You?
Every survey design service we evaluated had design features to arrange your survey questions and tweak the layout. However, others offer additional tools to make your surveys visually appealing and are designed to promote your brand.
Typeform impressed us with its survey-design tools. In addition, it provided extra instruction on the best practices for designing a survey. We found the clean design and additional icons for rating things especially appealing, as they allow you to add a fun and personal touch to your surveys. Meanwhile, SurveyGizmo offers customizable templates in all its paid plans and customizable URLs for its higher-priced plans. This gives you many ways to brand the survey to promote your company in look and in SEO.
Are Extra Analytics Worth More to You?
Each service on the lineup provides survey tools that track responses and evaluate the data from your surveys. If you are looking for especially in-depth information and additional ways to utilize this data, then some services provide more amped-up analytical tools than others do. SurveyMonkey, for example, offers filtering and cross-tabbing that lets you narrow in on the information that most matters to you. You can also customize the reports for presentations or collaborations.
Does Your Industry Have Special Needs?
Some industries have unique aspects that influence their software needs. For example, if you are in the health care industry, you need a survey maker that is HIPAA compliant. Typeform's basic package is HIPAA compliant, and other software providers, such as Survey Monkey and Survey Gizmo, offer HIPAA-compliant packages above their basic offerings. If you run a non-profit, SurveyMoz provides discounted services. Zoho, however, offers a wide range of business programs and applications, which gives them an edge over other online survey tools that cater to individuals or groups rather than companies.
What Are the Most Important Features for Survey Makers?
Prices for these plans range from about $20 to $50 per month, but all of them offer a free trial or basic services with the main tools you need to make professional and useful surveys. To provide the fairest comparison between survey tools, we evaluated each application using the basic professional plan each offered.
The two keys to successful surveys are how easy it is for you to create the survey and how easy it is for your customers or target audience to take it. For your audience especially, ease of use must take into account how well the survey works on a mobile device. Certainly, each company included tutorials and help and support for their services, but you want something that you can handle right off the bat, so we tested how well they worked for someone new to the service as well as for survey takers in general.
We conducted our comparisons of survey tools with an eye for applications most helpful for small businesses. Using the trial version, we evaluated its layout and looked for things that would make the platform easy to learn and user friendly. For example, are the icons easily identifiable? Is it apparent where to go to begin to build a survey and distribute surveys to users? How easy is it to create or change a survey? We found that the best survey builders allow you to quickly edit questions and rearrange the order of your survey without many additional steps. One survey-creation site that did this exceptionally well was Typeform.
