Google Sheets vs. SurveyMonkey

Google Sheets is well suited in two main areas: is free to use and you don't need to buy a license to use it, comparing to the most direct competitors ; collaboration is in my opinion the best advantage, with multiple people working together and seeing others working in real time. It's less appropriate in low connectivity environments (offline capabilities)

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

• Collaborative planning : In the initial phase of project, Team leads and architects create a permission matrix along with the naming convention simultaneously, seeing who is editing / adding the details in real-time.
• Cost tracking : We use this tool to track cloud resource usage monthly costs, so that we can analyse it and send out comms for high cost based resources. By storing cost data here, it's easy for use to store data of last couple of years.
• Flexible documentation : For change logging of different scenarios we would need different / ad-hoc columns to be added on the fly, which makes using this tool much simpler then reputed third party tools.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Ease of use - I collaborate with a lot of folks on these and a lot of them have trouble using it.
• Would love more live features; for example, being able to have cells react to other inputs (checkboxes, etc) with reactive formatting
• More cross-usability with other Google products; it's hard to think of drawbacks honestly, this is a pretty seamless software.

Incentivized

• 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

I am not involved in the purchase/selection process, but my organization is a Google shop, and Sheets meets most of our spreadsheet needs and works seamlessly with our other tools. I don't anticipate our switching anytime soon.

Incentivized

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.

It can easily handle most uses and functions. It is only for very large datasets or advanced analysis that it either lacks the proper functions or performance begins to slow. Most employees who continue to use competitors' products do so out of preference, familiarity with the user interface, or other surface-level reasons.

Incentivized

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

Like most Google products, Google Sheets rarely has outages or slowness, and when it does, connection is always momentarily restored. I can't recall a time when I've been unable to access Google Sheets but able to access other sites just fine. That said, errors aren't uncommon when handling large data volume. You know what they say about using spreadsheets as databases, but sometimes it's just the most convenient option, especially for smaller or one-off projects, and not being able to store large amounts of data hampers our ability to move quickly with scrappy prototypes or full solutions. It would be great if we could better integrate our data manipulation (Apps Script) with big data in the sheet.

Incentivized

Again, Google Sheets is no exception to Google's general high speed and reliability, but load times can be slow for larger amounts of data. I've used Sheets with Zapier and have used the Python API, and speed has never been an issue.

Incentivized

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

I have never contacted Google Sheets support, but Google Sheets makes it very easy to report an issue or suggest a feature from Sheets itself (Help > Help Sheets improve), and I've had mostly good experiences with support for other Google products.

Incentivized

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

Implementation not required.

I have found that I can do almost everything I could have done in Microsoft Excel faster and easier in Google Sheets. We recommend Google Sheets in 99.9% of our use cases and feel it meets the needs of our workers very well. I am sure there are other spreadsheet creation programs out there, but because we are already in the Google environment, adopting Google Sheets in very easy.

Incentivized

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

I'm not involved with the purchase, but I assume everything goes smoothly and that the pricing structure is predictable and reasonable. We do not get surprise fees.

Incentivized

Google Sheets works very well with multiple users. It's convenient to see in real-time who is collaborating in a sheet, down to the specific cell that they're viewing/editing. Linking Sheets across departments is convenient with the IMPORTRANGE function.

Incentivized

• Don't need to pay for windows 365 license as it is free
• Has a positive impact since I am not cursing excel for annoying problems(I don't want the new Pivot table format, I want to use Classic and I don't want to expand/collapse arrows. "x$#%")
• [Haven't] looked at return on investment on work, but has "simplified" for basic and medium spreadsheets.

Incentivized

• 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