Free online survey provider recommendations?

[Marcomguy]

Can you recommend a free online survey provider other than Survey Monkey? Our survey will have 9-10 questions and we expect more than 100 responses, which means we can't use Survey Monkey's free service.

I Googled and found sites like kwiksurveys and esurveypro, but wondering if anyone has had experience with other survey providers.

Thanks!

[vangogh]

I saw your subject line and was going to recommend Survey Monkey. If you expect more than 100 responses why not go for a month of one of their plans? I also found Constant Contact (http://www.constantcontact.com/online-surveys/index.jsp). They have a 60 day free trial.

[Marcomguy]

Given how this survey will be rolled out, it might take a couple of weeks to get it to all respondents. We'd have to subscribe for more than a month to give time for all the responses to come in. If we have a follow-up survey, we'd need to keep the subscription going longer. For these and a couple of other reasons, we didn't want to go the paid subscription route.

I had looked into CC as well. Their free trial comes with restrictions on number of questions and responses. Hopefully, one of these other services will fit the bill.

[vangogh]

Even if you had to pay a couple or three months, it's not all that expensive. I would think the information you'd be getting back is worth more than the $50 or so it might cost. Most of these companies are in business and need to make some money. I'm not sure you're going to find something that lets you do everything you want for free. Maybe you could join a couple with the limited number of replies and send the survey from one company to some people and the survey from another company to a different set of people.

Another option is just to build this yourself. The survey itself is just an html form. Set up a table in a database and have all the form data sent to it when someone submits the form.

[Marcomguy]

Ah, thanks for the idea of building the survey in-house. That might be an option if all else fails. The reason I'm looking for a free option is not that I'm cheap, but that there are other things going on with this project that make it convenient to use a free service.

Would like to know if anyone has had experience with other online survey providers. Thanks.

[Harold Mansfield]

Ah, thanks for the idea of building the survey in-house. That might be an option if all else fails. The reason I'm looking for a free option is not that I'm cheap, but that there are other things going on with this project that make it convenient to use a free service.

Would like to know if anyone has had experience with other online survey providers. Thanks.

I'm going to go with what VG suggested and say that you run the survey yourself and track your own results how you need to. After all a survey is just a form and 100 responses is not a lot to keep up with.

Jotforms offers free accounts up to (I think) 1k reposes per month and they have quick survey tools in the form builder:
JotForm · Form Builder (http://www.jotform.com/)

You could also use Adobe Forms Central. It's free up to 50 responses, and pretty cheap monthly after that:
https://www.acrobat.com/formscentral/en/templates/create-online-surveys.html

If you have a need for complete forms and PDF creation the forms builder comes included with Adobe Acrobat.

[Marcomguy]

Thanks! I will check these out.

[multiplexed]

I'm a bit skeptical about surveys. If I see a survey hit my inbox from some company I've done business with, but the survey is from some third party, I sit there wondering if I should fill it out or not. Is it spammer or evil doer trying to verify my email address, or gather more info about me? Am I going to end up with a mailbox (email or PO Box) full of spam or junk mail? There are survey scams, right? So, it annoys me when I see survey from some third party that I don't recognize. For example, Acer sent me a survey via a third party. I didn't recognize the third party surveyor's domain, so I junked the email.


we expect more than 100 responses

9-10 questions

That's not a gigantic amount. Especially if comes in over several days.

Do you have a website? Install PHPList (with your web host's throttling rules enabled), or use whatever mailing list software your web host has, to send out survey requests. Then just use PHPSurveyor. This is an outstanding, open source, surveying software. 9 to 10 questions should be nice and easy to create.

That would be the cheapest way. Plus, you own the software, data, etc., so you can keep the results, and keep the survey alive as long as you want. You can do as many surveys as you want, for as long as you want, how you want, without constantly worrying about how much it costs, or having to depend on some third party that may not be around 5 years later. And, the survey would be sent from "you", not some unrecognizable third party.

[Brian Altenhofel]

Do you have a website? Install PHPList (with your web host's throttling rules enabled), or use whatever mailing list software your web host has, to send out survey requests. Then just use PHPSurveyor. This is an outstanding, open source, surveying software. 9 to 10 questions should be nice and easy to create.

That would be the cheapest way. Plus, you own the software, data, etc., so you can keep the results, and keep the survey alive as long as you want. You can do as many surveys as you want, for as long as you want, how you want, without constantly worrying about how much it costs, or having to depend on some third party that may not be around 5 years later. And, the survey would be sent from "you", not some unrecognizable third party.

Keep in mind that part of what you're paying for with a paid service is for someone else (such as SurveyMonkey) to deal with ensuring that the survey is deliverable. Many IP blocks used by hosting providers are blacklisted because of spam, while most paid services work with ISPs to either get their IP blocks whitelisted or removed from blacklists as expediently as possible. Many also have plans that allow white labels.

[bjay99]

An alternative to PHPList is creating a simple Google Doc Survey :-)