Likelihood to Recommend Google Forms works really well when you need to quickly gather information and store it in a standardized format. It also works well if your organization is already using other Google products.
If you don't use other Google products, another service may be a better fit for you. Additionally, if you need your forms to be highly customized for marketing purposes, for example, you might have an easier time with other tools.
That being said, Google Forms is well supported and is highly flexible and would likely work well for many companies.
Read full review Hotjar is good for a first pass at understanding user sentiment or locating potential usability issues. There are features such as "rage clicked" which shows recordings or instances when a user rage clicked or had an issue with your site. Hotjar has also been helpful to launch intercept surveys on mobile, desktop, and app, which not all competitor software allow. Hotjar recordings are fun to watch. "Watching Hotjar like Netflix" is a favorite pastime at work.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Heat mapping is great on Hotjar. It is a good place to start when you are looking at the UX & CRO on your website. You can see the % of people clicking on elements on a page, how far they scroll, and mouse movements. Hotjar is great for session recordings. These record the mouse movements, clicks, pages and scrolls of a user in video format. You can watch these to investigate what works well on a site and identify potential roadblocks and bugs. Hotjar is great as it ensures that users details are anonymous; for instance, if you are watching a session recording, you cannot see what a user types in a form field, as Hotjar blanks this out. Hotjar has a poll function, so you can have polls on your website. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Hotjar is primarily used for web-based experiences. Not that easy to use on mobile apps. I'd love to see Hotjar integrated with Google Analytics for an even deeper view. Hotjar is primarily used by smaller organizations...pricing can get steep quickly for larger organizations. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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
Read full review Even though the heat maps and user recordings were useful, our website was significantly slowed down after we installed Hotjar, so much so, that it took over a minute for our blog to load. The data that we gathered was not worth the length that it took our website to load.
Read full review Usability Google Forms is a very intuitive and easy to use tool, it is not necessary to have a complex knowledge to create advanced forms, it is enough with the functions and aids that the tool offers for the creation of these, even children and students can do it, also the way to export the data is really simple, simply an incredible tool.
Read full review So easy and simple to use! Straightforward anyone in the team is able to easily go in and set up anything in Hotjar. The UI is really simple. Whenever you give feedback to Hotjar they continously take on board the feedback and improve the tool.
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review Support Rating Google has a support team but it isn't the most helpful with Forms. I find most of my answers by searching online and watching tutorial videos. I would recommend utilizing online resources before contacting their live support team for help. Just make sure that they are recent videos or directions. Google is constantly updating their interfaces so it is easy for things to get out of date
Read full review Hotjar is a SaaS-based company, and as such has a good support service. Users can quickly submit support tickets through Hotjar's online portal. Enterprise customers get access to additional support members and have SLAs to support their larger, more complex needs. Overall, Hotjar is extremely reliable and I've never had to reach out to customer support.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We have also used
FormAssembly , which is far more advanced with security, analytics, and functionality, but is also more expensive and takes a greater resource investment to train others to use. While
FormAssembly can provide a lot more features, and is definitely the better choice for more complex surveys, forms, and applications, Google Forms is a very approachable and easy to use platform. We would recommend Google Forms for smaller businesses with simpler processes, and everyday use for any organization.
Read full review HotJar was selected for a few reasons:
Video Capture - HotJars video capture of user sessions is nothing short of amazing. It is so useful (not to mention cool) to see, in real time, how users interact with our software. It makes our jobs so much easier and more enjoyable to get this type of d User Surveys - The ease and flexibility of surveys we can make available on our website are an awesome tool to get additional data. Simple implementation - Adding a very small amount of code to our website gives us the ability to use all of HotJars features without having to touch our code again. Read full review Scalability 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.
Read full review Return on Investment It's difficult to track ROI since Google Forms is used less formally [The] positive impact is the actionable results we receive from surveys [The] impact is highly dependent on how well the questions are asked, and how seriously the survey is taken by employees Read full review We have fixed many issues, for example, checkout usability problems with the video recording feature. You can catch bugs and get an overall idea of how a particular page is working. Polls have helped us pair intent with the video sessions, so we can understand better why certain users answered different things. You get greedy and try to ask everything but that won't work. Keep it simple and it will give you small but important insights. Read full review ScreenShots