Have you ever taken a survey online and thought, “man, that was a great experience?” Yeah, me neither. Which makes my job of finding something that is worth using a bit difficult. I have a project coming up that is going to require a great web survey and I have yet to find one that I like enough without creating my own.
Maybe I am being a bit too picky? Maybe I have not been looking in the right places. I’d love for you to weigh in in the comments.
Here is what I am looking for in a good survey web tool:
- Conditional Forms If people say yes to something, something else appears. If they say no, they skip that section.
- WordPress Integration If I can put this into WordPress quickly, that will be a win.
- Great design. I do not need a terrible looking survey to make people not want to quickly take this survey…
- Powerful Database If all it does is export to Excel, then I am going to be limited in what I can do to manipulate the data to see what amazing results I have.
- Pages This survey is going to be 99+ questions and to have that all on one page will kill people wanting to use it. I need to have 20 questions per page and let them fill it out that way.
- Free Free is good but not a killer. I am willing to reasonably pay for a good web survey form builder.
- Auto-Reports Less work is better for me, but not a deal breaker.
With those qualifications in place, here are a couple that I want to share with you, but do not meet my needs:
- Wufoo
This is the most closely layed out style that I am wanting, yet I do not want to create a 100 question survey on one page and would instead rather have a 5 page, 20 question survey instead. - JotForm
Same issue as Wufoo but even less pretty. (Note: Jeremy Lokey noted that you can do paging) - Typeform
This is definitely the most beautiful of the designs, but is better for a 3-7 question survey and not the longer form. - PHPForm
Ugly, ugly, ugly! - SurveyMonkey
I dislike this whole service… bad customer support issues that are a turn off. - Google Docs
It is great that this is free, but these are so ugly and the database is an Excel sheet instead of a more flexible option… Not a viable option at all.
Options I have not yet tried out but hope to in the near future:
What experience have you had with online forms, both taking them and creating them? What have you found to be good products or experiences?
Lance Padgett says
Good roundup Jeremy, looking forward to future posts.
seventy8Productions says
Thanks! I appreciate it.
Dave Shrein says
Great summary. I use appnitro’s MachForms for many forms. It has everything you mentioned but I believe all it will currently do is export to excel. Best benefit is it is a one time purchase that you install and host on your web server. I love it.
seventy8Productions says
Thanks for the share. I will go check it out.
Diane says
Have you tried Survey Gizmo?
Jeremy Smith says
Have not…