Compare SurveyMonkey with Google Forms

Compare SurveyMonkey with Google Forms.

When considering which online tool to use to create surveys and collect responses, both SurveyMonkey and Google Forms have useful features. Both offer free and paid versions and similar methods for collaborating and collecting survey data.

However, there are several important differences between the two. The complexity of the survey you want to create, as well as your budget and design skills, will determine which survey tool to choose.

How Much Do SurveyMonkey and Google Forms Cost?

While SurveyMonkey offers some features for free, if the price is your main consideration, Google Forms is the clear winner. Like many Google apps, Google Forms offers all of its features to users for free. You can create as many forms as you like without limiting the number of responses you can receive, view, and save.

The SurveyMonkey Basic Plan is free. With this outline, you can create a survey with up to ten elements, including questions, images, and descriptive text. While there is no limit to the number of responses you can collect, starting January 1, 2021, you will only be able to see a maximum of forty responses per survey.

Depending on when you created your SurveyMonkey account, you can currently see up to 100 baseline survey responses but will drop to forty in January 2021.

SurveyMonkey offers paid plans for both personal and business users. Personal plans range from $ 32 to $ 99 per month. Business plans start at $ 25 per user per month with a minimum of three users.

If you can’t predict how many responses you’ll get, you can always start with a basic plan and upgrade to one of SurveyMonkey’s paid plans if needed.

The update will allow you to view and save all responses. Surveys that received more than your plan’s response rate are listed on the My Polls page.

How Easy Is It to Get Started?

Google Forms beats SurveyMonkey when it comes to ease of getting started. Visit forms.google.com and choose to create a new blank form or start with a template in their template gallery.

Likewise, in SurveyMonkey, you can create a new survey from scratch, copy a previous survey, or start from a template.

SurveyMonkey offers many more templates than Google Forms in a wider range of categories including academic, business, customer reviews, education, and events, among others.

However, some SurveyMonkey templates are not free and you cannot filter templates by price, so you might find the perfect template only to find that you have to pay for it.

If you don’t want to start from scratch, it is worth exploring the templates for each platform before you decide which tool to use.

Which Has Better Features?

Common features such as the ability to ask for answers and reorder questions are available in both Google Forms and SurveyMonkey. Plus, no matter which tool you choose, you can customize the look of the survey by uploading a logo and choosing colors and fonts.

Question types

Google Forms and SurveyMonkey offer different types of questions. In Google Forms, you can choose from the following options: Short Answer, Paragraph, Multiple Choice, Checkboxes, Dropdown, File Upload, Linear Zoom, Multiple Choice Grid, Checkbox Grid, Date Picker, and Time Picker.

SurveyMonkey offers the same question types as Google Forms, plus others: grading matrix/scale, rating, multiple text boxes, and contact information.

Paid SurveyMonkey users can also create heatmap questions and A / B tests that randomly display different versions of a question, image, or text and let you specify what percentage of respondents will see each version.

Skip logic

The degree to which you can control the skipping logic (sometimes called â€œbranching logicâ€ or â€œconditional logicâ€) may be the most important factor when choosing between Google Forms and SurveyMonkey.

Skipping logic is the process of sending respondents to different parts of a survey based on how they answer a particular question or after completing a section or question page.

The logic for skipping in Google Forms is simple and straightforward. For each possible answer to the question, you can specify which section of the survey the respondent should be directed to next, or you can send the respondent directly to the end of the survey to submit the form.

Likewise, when respondents complete a section, you can send them to another section or to the end of the survey.

Skip logic for specific questions is where SurveyMonkey is best, but you’ll need a paid account to access this feature. Depending on the respondent’s answer to the question, you can not only send it to another page/section of the survey but also send it to a specific question on that page.

As you would expect, when respondents fill out a section of a survey in SurveyMonkey, you can submit them to a different section or to the end of the survey, just like in Google Forms.

SurveyMonkey beats Google Forms when it comes to granular control over your survey skip logic.

Collecting responses

Both tools offer a similar answer to collectors. You can email your survey, embed it on a website, or share a link. SurveyMonkey offers several other collectors such as the mobile SDK and kiosk survey, but as you might have guessed, only for paid users.

Cooperation

Do you need other people to collaborate on your survey? Google Forms makes it easy to work with other editors. You can invite specific people to edit your form. You can also create a link that works for everyone, or a link that is only accessible to editors you designate.

SurveyMonkey offers similar collaboration methods, but again, only for paid users. Baseline users can share the preview link with others, who can then add comments to the survey.

Whatâ€™s the Verdict: SurveyMonkey or Google Forms?

If your survey needs are complex and don’t mind paying for the service, SurveyMonkey has a feature-rich package that will probably meet all of your needs.

If you don’t mind some of the restrictions, please use Google Forms. Learn everything you need to know in our video, How to Take a Survey: Using Google Forms. Or you might be interested in reading about the Top 10 Google Forms Templates, How to Set Up Response Validation in Google Forms, or How to Embed Google Forms in Your Website.

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