Cognito Forms vs. Google Forms vs. Workday Peakon Employee Voice

It's excellent for small sets of forms, from simple to highly complex It's not good at scale. With over 170 forms now, we desperately need some way to manage and maintain shared content once Cognito does not help. Their approach is that you can copy a working form (great) and modify it to create the next one. That's how we've got so many forms...

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

Peakon is a great solution whether you are thinking of pulsing your employees weekly, monthly, or even yearly. The solution provides great dashboards, easy reporting, on the fly segmentation creation, and ways to really dive deep into your people data. I think it's a bit expensive for very early-stage companies, so I would love to see them create a startup/early-stage version or pricing because it has become an invaluable tool for any size company.

Incentivized

• New Hire Form - It announces the new hire and provides direction to several departments on their needs, computer, phone, security level, etc.
• Terminations - We use it to shut off security, badges, computers, track phone, electronics, etc.
• Temp Form - It provides an avenue to enter them into our payroll system for tracking hours, also, for the start and end dates.

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

• Peakon looks beautiful and feels very light, which is comforting when you're (potentially) giving negative feedback and feel anxious. The emails are friendly and the survey is super clean.
• The surveys are very easy to navigate. You can answer as many or as few questions as you like, skipping forward and backward, and choosing to provide comments when you want. It's low pressure and feels flexible.
• The HR department is able to respond to your comments. You can then have a back and forth conversation while remaining anonymous. This really helps employees further explain and contextualize their survey comments without identifying themselves personally.

Incentivized

• It isnt the most user friendly if you have someone who isnt experienced
• Learning curve is pretty high
• Should be easier to customise the formatting

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 only major issue is the integrations factor. I wish there was more integrations work from HRMS core systems or even other dashboard solutions.

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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

We have been using Cognito Forms for over 5 years. We find it very easy use and it is part of the programs we use on a daily basis.

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

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.

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Very friendly and helpful, but typically takes at least one day to respond. However, when they do respond they dive right into the specific form I ask about and tell me exactly how to fix what I need help with

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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

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

I have not used any other programs like Cognito Forms. I have been with my company for almost two years. I very much like the ease of this system and its capabilities. I like knowing everyone is using the same thing. I do not foresee us making any changes to our current use of Cognito Forms.

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

SurveyMonkey is a great survey tool that also allows responders to stay anonymous, but I think Peakon is more effective for corporate feedback. It offers more reports and analytics specifically for HR and feels more professional. We often use SurveyMonkey for more lighthearted surveys (e.g., what to eat for team lunch) while keeping Peakon for employee feedback.

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

• We've been able to get away from Word and pdf forms and build a functionality that is conditional on form content
• The speed of getting a good-enough version up and running to meet an immediate business need is outstanding
• The cost of improving a set of almost good-enough forms or propagating a change in business rules is depressing

• 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

• When we moved to WFH due to COVID, we use Peakon a regular basis to understand what employees are thinking. We lost the serendipity of talking to people during chance encounters in the office, Peakon has replaced those conversations.
• We saw an incredible year in spite of COVID, while there are so many internal and external factors contributing to that success, we can see that having engaged and happy employees has an impact on our business. We also see what happens when they are not engaged or happy.

Incentivized