Sawtooth Lighthouse Studio vs. SurveyMonkey

Anyone wanting to design and analyze advanced studies, particularly those that incorporate discrete choice modeling (such as MaxDiff and / or Conjoint) should be using Sawtooth Lighthouse Studio. The capabilities and flexibility offered by this platform for these choices is far beyond any other platform I am aware of. It is less appropriate where you need the survey tool to 'play well with others.' Two examples: 1) pulling in live data streams so they can be cleaned and visualized. 2) Integrating into any service where an API call is appropriate such as adding / removing people from a mailing list, incentive management tool, or qualitative community tool.

Incentivized

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

• Powerful programming capabilities
• Advanced analysis
• Fantastic customer and technical support
• Good documentation

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.

• They could focus on integrating API type functionality
• I would love if the data came out labeled
• I am not a fan of the 'limited' time a study can stay up. This causes issues with longitudinal studies.

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

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 is incredibly powerful, very rhobust and has fantastic support. The only reasons I'm not giving it a higher rating are 1) There is a very steep learning curve when it comes to designing more complex studies. 2) It is difficult to get Sawtooth Lighthouse Studio to 'talk' to other systems as the Perl upon which it is built is not really designed to work with API calls, etc.

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

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

I cannot explain how great the support team is. They are prompt and very thorough in their responses.

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.

While QuestioPro has the capability to build surveys and even do some advanced analysis, it is less powerful (and less intuitive) than Sawtooth Lighthouse Studio. It cannot handle studies with the complexity we are used to designing. The CMNTY Platform was initially sold to us as a combined Quant / Qual platform, but we found very quickly that the quant side of it is extremely limited.

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

• Our business is survey data so we rely heavily on sawtooth
• The advanced design and analytics are incredibly useful
• Negative - I wish it would work natively with API calls

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