Software > Utilities & Free Software

Free and Low Cost Online Survey Tools

By Lasa Information Systems Team

Need to survey your organisation's stakeholders? This article looks at some free and low cost tools for setting up web based surveys.

Online survey tools provide an easy way of quickly building surveys and viewing reports.  These tools can easily scale up from basic free versions to more expensive packages with heavyweight analysis tools.

Prices and features correct at time of writing.

SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey offers a free basic version for very small and informal surveys, but this version can only collect 100 responses per survey. The Pro version at £13/ month or £133/ year allows for more survey responses, your own branding of the survey, downloads of reports or data to another application to do more serious analysis.  Whilst its standard survey interfaces are screen reader accessible, the administration interface is not.

Zoomerang
Zoomerang offers a limited free package similar to SurveyMonkey.  Non-profits can sign up for the advanced package of unlimited surveys, questions and respondents for £233/year.  Whilst Zoomerang’s survey building tools are not always intuitive, it offers more extensive reporting with a flexible cross-tabulation report tool that allows survey administrators to see the data relationships across any set of questions.  Zoomerang does not meet current web accessibility standards.

SurveyGizmo
SurveyGizmo is the most web accessible of the survey packages we reviewed.  Its free version supports 250 responses per month with a range of more advanced packages from £13/month to £106/month.  SurveyGizmo has a tool for integrating survey functionality into websites, blogs and other applications, including integration with Salesforce.com.

PollDaddy
PollDaddy’s free version offers 10 questions and 100 survey responses per survey, with more advanced versions costing between £13/month and £66 /month. Although its survey features are more limited compared to others, PollDaddy can be easily embedded into external websites.

LimeSurvey
LimeSurvey (formerly PHPSurveyor) is a free and open source survey package with an advanced range of tools for full customisation, support for 49 different languages, piping, skip logic, a library of available survey questions, and blast emailing.  Although LimeSurvey is free, be prepared to bear the costs of your own web hosting, and time it takes to install, configure, customise and support this product by a developer with knowledge of PHP/ MySQL.

Moodle
Moodle is a powerful open source course management software package primarily targeted at schools and universities.  The survey tools are geared for gathering feedback from learners to assess teaching methods - several verified survey tools are provided for this purpose.  Moodle may be appropriate for those running training programs or schools, who are seeking an all-in-one website, course and survey management solution for their programs.  The package is free to download, but will require substantial technical knowledge to install, configure, customise and support. 

Others worth checking out:

• EZQuestionnaire  - provides help setting up and running surveys and a questionnaire library of pre-fab survey types, for a fee.  Also offers a free basic package.
• FeedbackFarm - hosted, completely free, limited question types and analysis tools
• QuestionPro – hosted surveys geared toward enterprise and advertisers with sophisticated analysis packages. Limited free accounts for non-profits.
• Web Accessibility Centre – reviews web accessibility of online and hosted survey tools.