Cognito Forms vs. Google Forms vs. Pollfish

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

Despite its minor shortcomings, PollFish is still very good for startups that need to gauge their product idea's potential acceptance and customer demand, and also very useful for fine-tuning their branding, messaging, product features, and even pricing. This is so much better than traditional polling and surveying, which were more expensive and much slower in the past.

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

• Obtain people's opinions on a specific topic, both quantitatively and qualitatively, as it has option for open answers.
• Being able to segment my audience not only by country and state, but also by city and even socioeconomic level (something that is particularly difficult outside of the United States).
• Be able to insert videos in order to make quick creativity tests.
• Obtain quick results. Most of the times in only one day, even with specific segmentations.

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

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• 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 survey editor UI can be quite annoying. The way it scrolls back up to the top of the page whenever I click on a question to edit it makes it so that the page is constantly moving.
• Oftentimes I get an "oops an error occurred" message but it never actually explains what is going wrong.
• Customer support can sometimes take a long time to respond making it challenging when faced with a platform question or capability I am not familiar with.

Incentivized

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

For what it is and what it offers, I think it is very user friendly, intuitive and reactive. As long as you don't treat it as a powerful full service research tool and look at it more as the scrappy DIY option, it will actually exceed expectations.

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

Pollfish is the most cost effective and the quickest survey platform. However there are questions when it comes to the actual reliability of the results that are retrieved from Pollfish surveys. However, its speed makes it tough to use other platforms, even at a potential sacrifice of the quality of data.

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

• Drives a lot of traffic to our website when consumer insights pieces are put out
• Had one customer request a meeting based on seeing our consumer data leading to a $100,000+ close on an opportunity
• Drives our strategy for certain areas of our product development

Incentivized