Alchemer vs. Lightning Tools Lightning Forms

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

Overall, there are many use cases for which Lightning Forms provides a slick, easy to develop and extremely useful solution. Request forms that need to be actioned and inspection forms are the scenarios that we have used them for so far, which have seen a lot of success. We have decided that other scenarios that are perhaps more sensitive, for instance forms that may contain special category data relating to our customers, are less appropriate given the permissions/licensing constraints of both SharePoint and Lightning Forms.

• 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

• Simple user interface - users of the forms intuitively aware of how/where to input information. This is in part due to being able to show or hide different questions or areas of the form, and making them required or not, based on previous answers.
• Low/simple code - building complex forms with automation and multiple dependencies or lookups is relatively easy once you get started. You have the power of JavaScript to use and do some quite clever things if you can get to grips with it - a lot of solutions are only a Google away.
• As it is based on SharePoint, it integrates perfectly with the rest of the M365 suite. Things like PowerAutomate enhance its functionality even further.

• 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

• The styling of the form can sometimes be slightly awkward to use depending on what you're looking to do. For instance, if I was looking to highlight fields that users have missed (left empty), I would need to set up a validation for that question and then set a style for that particular field for when it is invalid. When you have a large and complex form with lots of dependencies, this is awkward.
• Support for complex and niche issues is slightly lacking in my experience. I submitted a helpdesk ticket for help with a strange issue I couldn't figure out, which took several weeks to get a response to. Because it is niche, it's more difficult to find an answer by searching the internet. Luckily, knowing there is likely to always be a fix if you find the right place/use the right formula, I manage to resolve the issue with some trial and error.
• It is disappointing that Lightning Forms does not integrate with the MS Lists app. Having the ability to access the form through the list app would add in a lot of useful functionality, including a better experience for users when taking photos to add as attachments.

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

It is very user friendly both to me who is building the content (with little background knowledge of coding etc., other than what I have picked up from using products like PowerAutomate, PowerBI, a bit of html etc.) and to end users of varying levels of IT proficiency. This has been extremely important as we have used the forms to make relatively large process changes, and need to have our users on board and seeing that it is actually easier than it was before.

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

Some support has been okay, but in one instance of a fairly complex problem, the support team were not able to provide me with a fix within a few weeks, before I was able to find a workaround myself.

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

We were using Microsoft Forms, SharePoint Lists and PowerAutomate to attempt to do much of what we are currently doing. Functionality is very limited in comparison. The ability to make questions required based on previous answers was a massive improvement from normal SharePoint List forms and has greatly improved the quality of data. Also just the very visual display and customisation is much better.

• 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

• We changed the process by which site colleagues report repairs on behalf of customers. Instead of emailing them into a shared inbox, they now report them using a lightning form. We have seen a great improvement in the time taken for our team to log the repair issue from the time is arrives with them.
• We anticipate that streamlining our void property reletting process by using a SharePoint kanban board view with lightning forms (providing a single platform for all things void) will reduce avoidable days vacant and therefore reduce our void loss.