Google Forms vs. LiftIgniter Real-time Personalization Platform vs. Survicate

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

LiftIgniter is well suited for:

• Media companies without the resources to develop their own content recommendations systems.
• eCommerce companies who want to get product recommendations live onsite quickly.

LiftIgniter is less appropriate:

• Organizations with a shallow content set onsite.

Survicate is well suited for very basic intercept polls and is less suited for more complex surveying tasks (e.g., anything more than basic skip-logic or surveying niche cohorts) and longitudinal surveying (e.g., comparing responses from the same or similar cohorts year over year).

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

• It does a good job recommending content that is related to the current story a user is on.
• It does a good job not recommending content the user has already viewed.
• It does a good job being a recommendation engine for disparate sites with related content.

• IMO, the strengths of feedback lite is what it is called for - 'lite"... it is basic, simple, and easy to set up and use.
• Especially should be mention that it is easy to set up, and you can have it working in less than a few hours.
• Reliable - I don't remember even one "problem" or an issue we experienced with it.

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

• Manually controlling certain undesired results is not straight forward and seems to often result in a lower CTR or conversion rates.
• The LI Dashboard has limited features.

• In my opinion, inconsistent and visually unappealing survey visuals (e.g., NPS and cSAT questions look completely different from each other, creating a disjointed visual experience)
• Poor customer service (in my experience, issue resolution can take weeks)
• Lack of clarity around API & other technical capabilities requiring engineering assistance
• Very limited maximum response limit per month

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 use Survicate for now, over 7 years, and the tool is being constantly improved. New features and products has been introduced over the years. The team listens to our feedback we sometimes share, and improve the product based on that. We really appreciate being supported by the Customer Success, all the insights and help we got from them. And even though they introduced many new features over the years, the tool still remained super easy to use, even from new employees that join our team

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

It's rare to use products that offer wide range of features, and yet are really ease to use. Over the years, the product has changed a lot, they introduced numerous new features, but the product remained really simple to use. We know it, because new employees who join our team, have no problem in starting to use Survicate on their own, without and dedicated training. The UI is really clear.

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.

Incentivized

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

We had a lot of issues during implementation that required help from Survicate's engineers. In my experience, it took us over 4 weeks to be fully up and running due to lag times in communication.

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

Setup was simple. One-time installation for our website and inside the product. We used Google Tag Manager to implement Survicate. So within 2 hours, we were able to run surveys, and also all attributes and events were passed to Survicate, so that we were able to use them to trigger surveys

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

It's the best. Our only other option was rolling out our own and LiftIgniter was easier to implement and performed better for related content.

Considering the simplicity of the need, and the cost of such solution (~600$/yr), I don't think there was very deep research for any alternatives. The main alternative was embedding a feedback tool "organically" into our site, that option was taken off the table, for strategic considerations.

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

• 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

• Increased time on site
• Decreased bounce rate
• 5-15% CTR for users which saw recommendations

• We had a business need - to collect feedback on our support knowledge base content. Feedback Lite fulfills this need, with simple, easy to use, solution.

Incentivized