Alchemer vs. Google Forms vs. QuestionPro

SurveyGizmo works extremely well as a platform for receiving survey responses. As a survey/business analytics tool, the platform offers extensive options for customization and deployment of professional questionnaires. Our team has found SurveyGizmo to be extremely well suited for the modern administrative employee. Surveys are relatively easy to create, deploy, and manage responses in real time. Furthermore, monitoring / managing the results enables businesses to provide any necessary follow-up based on key results. Our team spends quite a bit of time testing out survey tools and have found SurveyGizmo to be a solid option for the needs of our team. Furthermore, we have recommended the platform to other departments within our organization that have uniquely different skillsets from our own. Overall, we see SurveyGizmo as a tool that can be used across most organizational teams if implemented with the specific user-experience in mind.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

QuestionPro is great for forced-choice and Likert-scale data, and it easily turns raw data into readable statistics. The simple interface lacks attractiveness but is easy to learn and use, even for members outside the digital age. QuestionPro is less effective for qualitative data and short answer responses in large quantities. Reporting and analytic features leave this information in the bulky design, clogging the report and preventing cohesive presentation of the data.

Incentivized

• Attaching images! Survey Gizmo makes attaching images from surveys a breeze. I've tried other popular survey tools and it can be difficult for users to submit images as part of their survey (e.g. some only allow 1 picture per question, whereas Survey Gizmo allows a range for you to select from)
• Easy and intuitive survey building.
• Pretty good out-of-the-box survey analysis.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Before choosing QuestionPro, we evaluated it and Qualtrics, SurveyGizmo, and SurveyMonkey. A committee tested each of 141 key features on all four products. QuestionPro did well in the comparison and we have ended up using even more features that we tested. The summary of that work can be found here: https://oit.utk.edu/research/documentation/qualtrics-to-questionpro/.
• The way it handles anonymous surveys is particularly good. With most products, you have to remember to check the "anonymous" box to prevent it from saving email addresses or other identifiable data. But if you forget to do so, you can't tell by taking the survey. Question pro uses "Respondent Anonymity Assurance" that must be turned on by the company (a quick request from the chat window will suffice) and then it can never be turned off. This activates a link that appears on the bottom left-hand of each survey page. Clicking it takes the survey participant to a company page which assures them that the anonymous feature is indeed turned on.
• It has a very nice combination of great power and ease of use.
• The support we have received from the company has been excellent. Our team has worked with around 30 research software vendors for over 35 years and this company stands out as being extremely responsive to our needs. We told them we needed a migration tool to help us move from Qualtrics to QuestionPro and they created one in just a few weeks. They've added or improved a number of other features for us, at no charge.

• Duplicate protection needs improvement. Anyone who would like to start a survey and finish at a later time is unable to which limits total survey responses.
• Password protection option can be a challenge when uploading spreadsheets with pre-populated data.
• Logic and piping options for questions can be difficult when designing more complicated and in-depth surveys, which requires a lot of testing.
• Follow-up surveys do not provide an option for survey takers to review their previous survey responses, which may provide less accurate data when comparing individuals across multiple surveys.
• Would like the option to link surveys together in order to more easily track data from individuals across multiple surveys and save previous survey data.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The current user interface for designing and editing questions is truly awful. A big step backwards from earlier user interfaces which were great.
• Customer support is not very helpful.
• Results of survey are not exported in a way that is easy to translate into R data frame.

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

Incentivized

It's a fine product, but it's also a very competitive field, so it wouldn't take much to knock QuestionPro from top tier status. I would like to see more functionality in all programs, so whichever program does that first is likely to get my money in the next round of budgeting.

The feature sets, agility, and flexibility remain approachable and incredibly powerful. Support is also very responsive and top notch. Overall, with a bit of basic foundational skills, there are seemingly an unlimited number of use cases for which Alchemer can be leveraged.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

QuestionPro is very easy to use. There are lots of question types and drag and drop functionality. There are lots of ways that make the platform easy to use

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Every once in awhile, it is necessary to solicit support. On those occasions, support is extremely responsive and supportive. It has been my experience that [if] they can't walk you through the desired endpoint, they will take a look at your build and remedy for you.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

They offer email, chat, and phone support. I have used the chat support several times. Response time was fast, but the rep did not always have the answer. Inquiries are answered quickly and thoroughly.

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.

Incentivized

Try every feature and test take your surveys multiple times, running through different scenarios.

I liked the interface for SurveyGizmo much more than Qualtrics. You knew a question was adjusted in SurveyGizmo and wouldn't change, but with Qualtric's interface, you had to refresh the account several times sometimes to ensure the question would work appropriately. Also, with SG, there were a lot of easier capabilities, such as changing missing values in bulk, required questions in bulk, etc.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

First of all, QuestionPro has powerful futures when we compare it with others. I am not sure but somehow interface of the product is always important for some more than its functionality. QuestionPro has many features, functionality and has a great interface. It is easy to use and a software that is easy to understand.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• It has always delivered on all our business objectives. I think that the reason why it's a bit [more] expensive than other providers.
• It has helped us to optimize resources especially man hours involved in survey design.
• It has been a valuable partner in almost all [of] our uses.

Incentivized

• High positive impact and return of investment; easy to use and seamlessly integrated with current Google Drive and Suite
• Ability to create surveys on demand and quickly, saving time and energy
• Easy to train others in using Google Forms so that there is not a bottleneck of knowledge

Incentivized

• QuestionPro is being used to automate surveys that were previously done by hand. We would not have been able to do this without the anonymous tracking feature. It has cut turnaround of reports by more than half.
• This is of course more efficient, but this could be expected of any software that automates a survey for you.