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SurveyMonkey alternatives

Last reviewed . Reviewed every quarter.

SurveyMonkey alternatives, side by side

  • SurveyMonkey's Analyze with AI (Advantage plans and above), Qualtrics Assist, Typeform's Research Flow, Jotform's app in ChatGPT and Pulse all answer plain-language questions about results, and Alchemer's Iris takes requests in natural language and guides users to its features.
  • A SurveyMonkey Team plan needs at least three users, and an Alchemer team past three users moves from Professional or Full Access to a custom-priced Platform plan.
  • Qualtrics and Alchemer are survey platforms first, as SurveyMonkey is.

Why teams look for an alternative to SurveyMonkey

It has some major challenges that we have been facing from time immemorial. Delayed customer support response and uneffective offline use.

Capterra reviewer, director of design and research, retailCapterra reviewer, director of design and research, retail,

The reporting dashboards are so confusing.

Capterra reviewer, principal software engineerCapterra reviewer, principal software engineer,

Lastly, the interface sometimes drags when you're editing a long, complicated form.

Capterra reviewer, marketer, marketing and advertisingCapterra reviewer, marketer, marketing and advertising,

SurveyMonkey alternatives side by side

SurveyMonkey alternatives side by side
PulseTypeformQualtricsJotformAlchemer
AI-moderated interviewsYesYesNot checkedPartlyNot checked
Dynamic follow-up / probingYesYesYesPartlyYes
Languages (count/list)240+ languages, enabled on requestNot checked78 survey languages; others added as custom languagesNot checkedNot checked
Own panel (size)YesYesPartlyNot checkedNot checked
Theme / insight synthesisYesYesYesNot checkedYes
Free trial / free tierYesYesYesYesYes

The alternatives, one by one

Pulse

Best for Interview studies that recruit several customer groups at once

SurveyMonkey teams can hand their customer interviews to Pulse, the AI-moderated research platform, whose moderator follows each answer; every conversation then returns as a full transcript with the recording attached.

Strengths

  • Surveys alongside its interviews
  • A public API

Verdict SurveyMonkey's Audience responses and Qualtrics' panels are bought for surveys fielded on each vendor's own platform. Pulse also sells sample on its own, with no study attached, to a team that fields its research somewhere else.

Where another tool fits Survey work that has to meet HITRUST, which folds in HIPAA's requirements, is better placed with Qualtrics. Pulse's own ground is the customer interview, run for research and insights teams at large organizations.

Typeform

Best for Idea, messaging, pricing and churn studies

Typeform builds forms and surveys. Its Research Flow has built-in screening and quota management and handles participants' incentives itself, then scores sentiment and transcribes automatically, and its follow-up questions pick up tone and emotional nuance.

Strengths

  • Brand kit and branding removal from the Plus plan
  • HubSpot, Salesforce, Slack and Excel Online connections
  • A verified panel inside Research Flow

Verdict Research Flow runs AI-moderated studies from the vendor behind Typeform's forms, for a SurveyMonkey team adding conversations to its surveys. Pulse also runs AI-moderated interviews, and Jotform's Survey AI Agents hold surveys as a dialogue.

Pulse vs Typeform

Qualtrics

Best for Open-text sentiment scored sentence by sentence

Qualtrics runs a survey platform with 23 question types on paid plans, and Insights Explorer surfaces key themes and summaries. In May 2024, its 200+ panel partners gave it access to 35 million panelists.

Strengths

  • Certified to SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001
  • Vanity URLs that host surveys on your own domain
  • The Qualtrics v3 REST API

Keep in mind

  • Survey responses and video minutes are custom-priced beyond the self-serve tier

Verdict Interview and focus-group recordings made elsewhere can be uploaded to Qualtrics and transcribed there, beside the surveys a SurveyMonkey team brings across.

Pulse vs Qualtrics

Jotform

Best for Form work that runs on to e-signatures and payments

Jotform builds forms and online surveys, and its AI form generator drafts a form from a prompt. Report Builder generates reports from the submissions, and the submissions themselves can be exported as CSV, Excel and PDF files.

Strengths

  • Google Sheets and PayPal among 200+ integrations
  • HIPAA compliance features
  • Auto-delete for submissions

Keep in mind

  • Questions branch through conditional logic that shows or hides them

Verdict A free Jotform Starter account holds 5 forms and takes 100 submissions monthly, where SurveyMonkey's free Basic plan stops at 10 questions a survey. Typeform and Qualtrics have free plans too, and Pulse offers a free study.

Pulse vs Jotform

Alchemer

Best for Survey data checked for speeders and straightlining

Alchemer's survey platform counts 11,000+ customers in 80+ countries. Its surveys can be white-labeled and served from a private domain, and specialized audiences are reached through Alchemer's worldwide panel suppliers.

Strengths

  • Salesforce, HubSpot and Slack among 400+ integrations
  • AI tagging of themes and sentiment

Keep in mind

  • Single sign-on only on Platform plans

Verdict Alchemer can add an AI-generated follow-up question to an ordinary survey, where a SurveyMonkey survey moves on through skip logic (advanced logic comes with Premier). Typeform, Qualtrics and Jotform, through its Survey AI Agents, ask AI follow-ups too.

How we evaluated

We compared what each tool's own product, pricing and security pages state against the criteria below. Every fact in the table above links to the page it came from, with the date it was read.

  • Beyond the fixed question list. How much logic, branching and follow-up a tool offers once a survey needs more than set questions.
  • Buying or bringing respondents. Whether responses can be bought, your own list invited, or both, and how each is targeted.
  • Plans and seats. Which features sit on which plan, and how many users each plan allows.
  • Readable reporting. What happens to open-ended answers, and whether results reach decision makers in a form they can follow, the complaint in the second review above.

Which one to choose

  • If a full-service research team should run the whole study (SurveyMonkey's expert services run from survey design to fielding to reporting, though it is not a full-service research firm), choose Qualtrics or Alchemer. Qualtrics' Research Services count 28,000+ projects, and Alchemer's Research Solutions take on end-to-end projects or single research tasks.
  • If the forms your team builds should grow into an app, choose Jotform, whose range takes in apps as well as forms.
  • If a live moderator should watch each participant's screen during a session, choose Qualtrics, whose Moderated User Testing runs live remote sessions in which participants share their screen. Pulse runs human-moderated interviews as well.

What a SurveyMonkey team gains with Pulse

Kept out of AI training

SurveyMonkey trains its own AI models on de-identified customer data or synthetic data. Customer data in Pulse is never used to train AI models, a commitment Typeform also makes for its customers' data.

Video insights from interviews

SurveyMonkey's Thematic Analysis files open-ended answers under themes a team can filter by. On a Pulse interview held on video, video insights add the on-screen behavior and emotion that a transcript misses, next to what the participant said.

A moderator for 240+ languages

SurveyMonkey Audience supplies survey respondents around the world. Pulse recruits participants worldwide for interviews, and its AI moderator can speak with them in 240+ languages, enabled on request.

Pulse and SurveyMonkey

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