What is SurveyMonkey?
SurveyMonkey is the best-known online survey tool — used by everyone from solo consultants to multinationals. The brand recognition can make it look like a default choice, but the real question is whether its strengths fit what you actually need to do. Here's an honest review of what SurveyMonkey is, what it's good at, where users report friction, and where the cheaper or pricier alternatives win.
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SurveyMonkey is online survey software that helps you to create and run professional online surveys. It is very powerful and a well known online application.
As a leading survey and feedback management solution it enables users to collect, interpret, and analyse data to drive growth and innovation. It offers a user-friendly interface, customizable templates, and AI-powered tools to create, launch, and analyse surveys easily.
Why Would You Use It?
Surveys are important to collect feedback, opinions, criticism and suggestions from the general public and customers.
In the past surveys were normally printed and passed on to people to complete. With the introduction of online surveys collecting feedback became very easy as the manual element of the collation process was eliminated.
There are a number of competitors in the online survey space but SurveyMonkey is perhaps the best known and most widely used. SurveyMonkey is on par with the industry standards, but adds a lot of other features that makes collection and analysis of data extremely simple.
Who Uses SurveyMonkey?
SurveyMonkey is popular among a diverse range of users, including:
- Small to medium-sized businesses conducting market research or gathering customer feedback
- Educational institutions and non-profits collecting data for research or evaluation purposes
- Individuals using surveys for personal projects or events
- Marketing and customer experience professionals looking to track and improve customer satisfaction
What do Users Think of SurveyMonkey?
The most common pros mentioned in reviews are:
- User-friendly interface and easy to set up surveys
- Wide range of customization options for questions and survey design
- Robust reporting and analytics capabilities
- Integration with other tools like Salesforce and Google Analytics
The most common cons mentioned in reviews are:
- Limited features in the free version, and paid plans can be expensive for some users
- Some limitations in survey design and logic, particularly for more complex surveys
- Occasional technical glitches or difficulties with data export
- Limited customer support options, especially for free users
Features
SurveyMonkey presents all the tools necessary for you to create strong, professional surveys easily.
The exact feature is dependent on which of the four pricing plans you choose. However, if you’re just starting up with online survey tools and you are trying to figure out the best one, you can opt for the free pricing plan that gives you access to the basic tools needed to create great surveys.
Design Options
The basic plan allows you to have only 10 questions per survey with a maximum of 100 responses per survey (you can have unlimited questions and responses per survey in the premium plans).
Using the web interface, you can choose from 31 survey templates (or 51 in premium) and 15 types of questions.
The questions you can add to your survey span three categories – close-ended, open-ended, and descriptive.
You can have single answer, multiple choice with multiple answers, rating scale, and 3 matrix type questions in the close-ended category. Single textbox, multiple textboxes, essay box, numerical textboxes, demographic details, and date/time box options can be chosen from the open-ended questions. This is more than sufficient to create high-quality professional surveys for your users.
The tool also allows you to set answer choice randomization, present a survey completion bar, add auto numbered pages, provide options to make questions require answers to proceed and control data input by validation (users cannot enter text in a numbers only box).
Premium plans also give you more customization options like adding a custom “Thank You” page and generating a printable PDF version.
Collection and Analysis
Without proper collection and analysis functionality survey software is worthless. SurveyMonkey performs well on both counts.
The survey can be administered/sent to users via a number of ways – e-mail, web link, Facebook, embed link on web page, link via Twitter, and website pop-ups. Enhanced security is possible with premium plans.
Analysis happens in real time.
Results are viewed as respondents complete their surveys. However, if you would like to download and keep a copy of the survey and the results, an upgrade to premium will be necessary. A premium account gives you access to multiple custom reports, response download, custom chart creation and download functionality, and options to share responses.
The basic plan has all the features you need, including 24×7 customer support. It’s fast, easy to use, and reliable. You can always try, and only upgrade when the need arises.
