A Review of Online Survey Software: Which One is Best for You?

Since I’m forever harping about finding out what’s important to your customer when they are buying what you’re selling, I’ve decided to go over a few on-line survey tools and help you figure out which one might be best for you and your customers.

Finding the right online survey tool is sort of like finding the right house; each one has features and benefits – just not all in the same software.  So, it’s wise to prepare yourself to make tradeoffs, because you will have to. (Unless you have a bottomless pocket book).

How to begin

1. Figure out what you NEED, then what you WANT, and finally what would be nice to have.  As a self-proclaimed gadget-geek it’s easy for me to get wrapped up in cool features that I will never use.  Don’t get caught in that trap.  Make a list of exactly what you need then want – in that order. A good way to do this is to imagine that a little elf delivered your data in exactly the way you wanted it.  Now, what does that look like.  Write it down. 
2. Prioritize your needs and wants.  Remember, chances are you will get some combination of these, so you want to make sure that you are clear on what you cannot live without, versus what you can come up with after a little tweaking.  This can mean hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of difference – so take ther time to do that.  If you don’t, yoiu’ll be confused by the features.
3. Ask some marketing types and see what they say.  Referrals are terrific and if you know some marketing types that get involved in doing survey work (like me) you can ask them.  Chances are, they’ve tried a few and had some practical experience they can share.

Here are my favorites and why

After looking at what seemed like hundreds of online survey tools – SurveyMonkey is  my overall favorite.  This is what I consider to be the best bang for the buck – especially if you don’t need any fancy schmancy statistics girations.  If you aren’t going to get more than 100 responses on your survey, the FREE option is a good one.  But for just $20 per month, you can do a lot.  For 90% of the survey work that you’re going to do – this will do the trick.  They’ve even improved the design templates, so that your survey will look and feel professional.  The reports are very nice and ideal for gathering simple feeback.  They also have sample surveys and templates to use, so you don’t even have to wrack your brain in trying to figure out the questions.  Just a great choice for the money.

Zoomerang is a step above SurveyMonkey. It’s a little more expensive ($600 per year), but it also has a terrific library of existing surveys to choose from.  The analytics are about the same as surveymonkey. One thing zoomerang has that I like, is the ability to ask a rating question and then they include a text box option for the open-ended response.  I really like that.  But, I’m not willing to pay more for it.  Zoomerang also has a nice feature to recruit panels and target respondents.  So, if that feature is important to you – this is the best deal for the money. The layouts are professional and they even offer "consulting" services to help you along the process (that’s extra, of course).

  QuestionPro is the online software I use most often.  I won’t kid you, it’s not as pretty or as user-friendly as SurveyMonkey and Zoomerang.  QuestionPro is more academic and more "techy."  This is the best value for the money if you DON’T own SPSS and don’t want to BUY or get TRAINED in SPSS, but you want to get all the benefits and look like some kind of stat star.  The biggest benefit of this software to me is the analysis and the reporting.  If you’re a fan of the Net Promoter Score made famous by Fred Reicheld, then this is God’s gift.  If you want your reports downloaded in PowerPoint – no problem.  If you want to do Conjoint Analysis, but don’t have $20K to spend on consultants and statisticians – this is your baby.  The other cool thing that QuestionPro does is integrate with Salesforce.com, which I also use.  For $15 per month, you get better reports and more functionality than SurveyMonkey, just not as simple to use.

So that completes our tour and my recommemdations.  I’d love to hear what you think.