If you are thinking about conducting a web based survey, chances are that your first impulse will be to use Survey Monkey. The popularity of this tool has skyrocketed on account of some very successful marketing campaigns. It has also helped that the survey software is very simple to use.

However, there are also some basic problems with Survey Monkey. The first is price: the $20/month price tag is a little more costly than casual users will be comfortable with, while the software itself is a little underpowered for the needs of business users. Therefore Survey Monkey occupies a kind of a grey area where it is an okay solution for majority of people but not an ideal fit for anyone.

Here is a rundown of features provided by this web based survey tool:

  • A wide array of question types. Questions can be in the form of format-enforced text boxes, checkboxes, dropdown lists, and even answer matrices. However, there does not appear to be any file upload answer type, which many business users will miss.
  • Basic reporting features. Users can choose from an assortment of visual graph types to represent their data, and we were impressed to see that a cross-tabulation feature has been added. However, reporting is still too basic for serious analysis. Data can be exported for analysis in another program, and this is fortunate because it will generally have to be.
  • Basic survey logic. Survey Monkey provides the ability to skip certain questions based on the answers to previous questions. This is a good start, but more advanced online survey tools in the same price range (such as ActiveCampaign’s “Survey Software” suite) provide a lot more powerful branching features.
  • On-page survey design. Survey Monkey’s offerings here are extremely weak. There is no ability to drag and drop questions or pages to reposition them, and the interface for designing new questions is kludgy. We much prefer the ActiveCampaign tool’s interface.

Our conclusion is that you could do worse than Survey Monkey. But, for the price they’re asking, you could also do quite a bit better.

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