Alida CXM vs. SurveyMonkey vs. Typeform

From my experience, I believe that Vision Critical offers the best software to manage an insights community. They are great to work with, and my opinion has only improved over time. However, that doesn't mean it is the best survey software overall. If someone simply needs to program and distribute surveys, this may or may not be the right solution. There are some other really great survey tools on the market that are competitively priced and offer very intuitive interfaces (like Qualtrics). If you are going to recruit people to answer surveys or provide feedback on an ongoing basis (re-contacting and engaging with the same people repeatedly), though, Vision Critical would be my #1 recommendation.

SurveyMonkey is well suited for external, professional, client-facing forms and complex question types. I've tried generating forms on HubSpot, and it's not nearly as intuitive or clean-looking, and not all question types are supported (e.g. Likert scales). For quick, internal forms that don't need to be as pretty or professional, I find that Google Forms is the quickest and easiest to pull together, especially since it has a single, universal respondent link. If I wanted to embed a link in a mass email, SurveyMonkey doesn't allow multiple respondents to use the same link on my plan.

Incentivized

Typeform is definitely a leader in the online survey space and that's for a reason. Between logic mapping and the ease of use for the end user, it's a solid app. The unfortunate thing, however, is the price tag--particularly considering the protection you receive from bots. Typeform only allows a certain number of responses at certain package levels, ie: the lowest level, you get a very limited number of responses but in order to receive more responses before your survey is locked, you must upgrade. This is what ultimately lead us to cancel with them. When you post a survey on Typeform, that survey is automatically posted publicly on their website--making it widely available to bots. Typeform offers no easy form of protection like a standardized captcha that you can add to the survey in order to filter bots out. Instead, there are several "work arounds" that they advise users to do that have very limited degrees of success. A quick online search shows that Typeform knows this is clearly an issue, yet they have yet to build in a bot-prevention feature. Since their plan prices vary by number of responses, it seems that they have no incentive to limit the amount of bots filling out surveys I believe. Ultimately, we canceled because, although the app is powerful, it just seemed like their business practices were unethical in my opinion.

• The team is helpful in creating complicated survey logic
• The team is accommodating in creating interfaces that suit our desired look
• The team keeps in regular contact in order to effectively manage our requests and goals

• Keeps identifiable information anonymous.
• Being able to close the survey at a set time without having to remember to do so.
• Takes the guess work out of response collecting.
• Makes it easy to categorize responses within the same survey. Being able to add tags to open-ended questions makes it easy for us to identify patterns in responses.
• An array of survey options and questions.
• An all around great product that meets multiple needs.
• Can have multiple collectors for the same survey to included manual input.

• The calculator tool allows you to use numerical formulas to create logic within your form for specific behavior.
• Compatible with modern web browsers for both building a form and publishing, allowing it to work and look good on any device.
• Integration with products like Zapier allow you to use it as part of a larger automation in your company.
• Visually pleasing designs with use of themes, images and video to match your branding.

• The functionality when creating a new questionnaire is rather clunky, particularly when there are a few conditional factors in the logical flow; being able to see those factors and how they apply with some sort of other logical layout would really help when creating a longer survey.
• There are quite a few steps that aren't intuitive when launching a survey, for instance all the various dates (launch date, reserve date, survey date, etc etc etc). If there were a description field if you hovered above labeled areas of sections that explained what this field was for that would really help
• It doesn't help either that the entire site is grey; it's a cold environment to be in for a long time, and the simple design makes it seem more clunky than it probably really is.

• I would like to have more customizable options for branding it to our hospital colors. Some survey options allow you to enter html color codes. SurveyMonkey allows you to change colors and you have to pick from selected options.
• Embedding the surveys into a webpage, like WordPress is not as seamless as other services.

Incentivized

• The pricing structure is a little steep, especially for the Pro+ plan. It would be nice if they had an a la carte option because there are some features we are paying for that we will never use.
• When creating forms, sometimes the cursor will inexplicably leave the field you are typing in and leave you with incomplete sentences.
• Even though we are paying for our use, we still have the Typeform branding on our forms, which I think should be removed once you upgrade from the basic plan.

Incentivized

Vision Critical often requires you to dump the data to a statistical program. I hate that step. You waste time, and improve the chance of data being lost, or changed.

Compared to other competitors in the market (including a few I've used internally), if you're looking for a survey application, this one does the job and it's quite inexpensive too. Considering the fact that it comes with a handy mobile application too (on iOS and Android), you also get flexibility thrown in the deal too.

We have had such success with Typeform, and it has been able to exceed our expectations for the range of products it offers

Incentivized

I think there is a ton of room to improve, in things as simple as aesthetics and other areas of logical flow when it comes to creating and then launching a survey, as well as providing descriptors for what each field is referencing. For instance, there are like 5 date fields to be filled out, but no button near them that says "this date will determine _________" and I am not about to go back into the training module, which was confusing enough to FIND, let alone work through to find just ONE answer.

It does everything a survey software should do, and it does it very well. I can't speak for how well it would work for a business that was surveying tens of thousands of people - but for a small business of 50 employees with a couple of thousand clients, it does everything it needs to do.

Incentivized

Typeform takes a little bit of getting used to. Compared to Google Forms there are a lot more parts to the software and customizing the form isn't as intuitive. I have also found that embedding it into one smaller section of a webpage seamlessly can be a little tricky. But everything can be figured out eventually and the analytics are very good.

Incentivized

still to many limitations for more complex surveys --skips, filtered questions, etc.

Absolutely fantastic support team. Willing to help you online through vast collection of how-to guides and resources, online via chatbox, or over the phone. Even though we were in different time zones, they were always available. Very helpful and knowledgeable

I've never had to contact the SurveyMonkey customer care team directly, but they have a pretty good library of help articles on their website. Everything from designing and executing your survey to account and billing questions. I never had a need for further support from Survey Monkey.

Incentivized

I haven't used the support portion of Typeform, as everything was quite easy to use. I have never encountered a situation where I did not know what to do or how to fix something myself. Typeform is very easy to adopt within any organization, no matter if you understand tech or not.

Incentivized

Implementation not required.

Vision Critical is more appealing visually but no where near as complex or robust. Vision Critical is also much more expensive though.

SurveyMonkey is easier to customize and provides much more in depth analytics. SurveyMonkey also provides better templates providing us with a better presentation to our employees. SurveyMonkey also comes with a more trustworthy platform that ensures confidentiality, which is incredibly important to our employees and means we're getting more reliable results from the surveys.

Incentivized

When looking for a feature rich & flexible / customizable solution, Typeform beats out everyone. However, for specific use cases (like NPS), AskNicely is a clear winner in terms of features, but is much too expensive. Typeform is also fun to use, especially compared to Wufoo which seems so out of date

Incentivized

• Our use of Vision Critical's software has allowed us to dramatically increase the amount of research that we do, at a much lower cost. Since there is no incremental cost for each survey we field, we can ask many questions we wouldn't have been able to otherwise.
• Our use of an insights community has also sped up the research process, allowing us to write, program, field and report on a survey within only a few days.
• Because of the two advantages listed above, we have been able to listen closer to our customers' opinions.

• The speed at which we can develop, program, execute and generate actual usable results provides significant value, particularly when we need fresh numbers to illustrate a point.
• The fact that we can execute a research project so quickly means that new research is always a primary option when we're developing campaigns. That's a huge value proposition.

Incentivized

• Typeform has helped guide our Customer Success, Product, and Marketing teams in strategizing how to engage with customers better, and it has also given us a quick and easy way to do so! By collecting feedback and being able to share it across internal teams, we can coordinate our efforts to build our customers a better tool.
• Typeform has proved to be an elegant solution to one of our earlier vexing problems (previous survey tools that looked annoying, had extremely limited branding options/were not customizable, and didn't integrate well with the rest of our tool set) while not breaking the bank for us - it's a very reasonable price point and does WAY more than the previous tools we were paying just as much for.

Incentivized