ActivTrak is a cloud-native workforce intelligence platform that transforms work activity data into actionable insights for employee monitoring, productivity and performance management, and workforce planning capabilities. Deployment enables organizations to start collecting data in minutes.
$0
per year (maximum of 3 users)
Google Forms
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Google Forms is an app for creating forms and surveys, and is part of Google Apps for Work. The product focuses on ease of use; the interface is similar to a document editor, with drop down lists of options and drag and drop question re-ordering. Users can embed images and video into surveys. Users can also program the question flow with custom logic. Google sends users basic summaries of the survey results automatically, or users can export the raw survey results data and analyze it via…
It's well-suited for offices with a mid- to large-sized employee base. I often review ActivTrak first before going to the employee with performance questions. We have 35+ people, and it is hard to keep track of them without a regularly updated performance tracking system. I do think that a small office might be offended by the tracking.
Google Forms is great for simple surveys, such as quick polls, but any logic beyond conditional pages is not supported. Google Forms is best used when the survey participants have and are permitted to use a Google Account to fill out the form; we ran into issues with hospital IT departments. I don't believe there's a better free tool out there than Google Forms, though.
Providing the data to managers to see if there is anything to double click into. If an employee is underperforming and ActivTrak gives us data that shows bandwidth issues, we can address that with the employee quickly
Live results: When a user completes the form the results are added instantly.
Easy to create: Google Forms has a simple interface that allows for a wide range of question types. Google will even try to guess the question type based on the question (but this can be overridden).
Answers export to Google Sheets: It is easy to have each response to your form add a row to a Google Sheet, allowing for further analysis or processing.
Ability to automatically collect email addresses within a domain: If you have a form that has been shared with users in your domain, you can set it to automatically collect the users' email addresses without them needing to type it in. Makes checking whether all students have completed the form easy.
A more detailed explanation is required when updating specific titles within the system. For instance, total time has recently become "screen time". An email notification of this change and its implications would have gone a long way.
Easier to read the Activity Log in reporting. Sometimes, when downloading large amounts of reports, it can be cumbersome and challenging to navigate through them.
Sometimes finding the output -- a Google Sheet with all responses-- is a little difficult. It's also sometimes confusing to figure out how to get back into the Google Form Survey itself.
As always, sharing among an institutional Google account and your personal Google account can be frustrating. You have to make a copy and can't share across the two different accounts very easily.
I will definitely renew my use of Google Forms because I really like the ease of use and the number of tools that Google forms provide. I also love that I can administer a test in real-time and get results in a timely manner
ActivTrak is a great product that just keeps growing. Having used it for quite some time, we have been able to see ActivTrak grow and evolve as a product. The ActivTrak webinars are also helpful to get to know and learn the product. ActivTrak really just works with little effort needed after the initial installation
Overall ease of use for staff, volunteers, and adult learners, and easy to get reports and to share reports via Sheets. As a free tool, it does more than expected. Easy to change the look and brand it to your organization, or just make it more fun, depending on what you want to use it for.
In the years I've used GoogleForms I've never ran into any issues with the reliability or availability. Google is a gigantic company with essentially limitless resources which makes it very easy to trust that I will continue to be able to enjoy the same reliability I've come to know and expect from GoogleForms
One of the things that comes as a benefit of the lack to create complex logic branching and truly custom design is that there isn't lot of room to bog down the software. GoogleForms has always loaded just as fast as my internet service and device would allow it. I'm not sure about front end integrations or integrations into the form itself, as I've never explored it, but on the backend, I've never had any issues with integrations channeling from GoogleForms from the GoogleForms's end of things.
Support is always fast and the agents are ready at all times to help when an issue arises, if the tier 1 agent isn't able to provide a solution to the issue they're asked about they quickly escalate the issue to tier 2 or 3 to ensure that the appropriate support is given to the issue at hand to have it quickly solved. No issue we've had so far has taken more than two days to be solved.
We haven't used much official support for Google Forms. However, because it is so widely used, there are a ton of articles and guides available online to help administrators of varying technical abilities to work through problems that arise. Additionally, Google provides an official support forum where there are discussions with other users as well as Google developers that can help address issues if needed.
Google Forms doesn't really require "implementation": simply log into GDrive and create a survey! You can configure settings per survey to, for example, automatically write responses to a GSheet.
I am unsure, to be honest. I have not had much exposure to different productivity software. I lucked out by using Active Trak first. I do not feel the need to investigate or review other productivity software. I would recommend ActiveTrak to other companies, users, or those searching for productivity software.
Although both platforms offer similar functionalities, Google Form has a personal advantage and it is the impeccable integration with the different applications of the Google suite, this allows to make use of all of them in a transparent way, which in the work environment allows to perform work efficiently and without affecting the quality of it.
GoogleForms lacks the ability for complex logic branching and the ability to truly design it in a custom manner. It's pretty obvious when you land on a GoogleForm that it is in fact a GoogleForm. This rating solely reflects the lack of flexibility which in turn makes it something that wouldn't usually be scaled. That being said, if needing to scale a simple solution, GoogleForms would be up for the job.
Real-time productivity metrics and detailed workforce analytics have allowed us to better understand our workforce and make adjustments for better productivity.
Because we were able to curb bad habits, team behavior is at an optimal level.
Since our productivity level has gone up, the return on our investment in staffing has risen.
