What is FluidSurveys (Discontinued)?

FluidSurveys was a survey and form building option. SurveyMonkey discontinued the product, it reached end of life (EOL) December 2017.

What are FluidSurveys (Discontinued)'s top competitors?

Clicktools and QuestionPro are common alternatives for FluidSurveys (Discontinued).

Who uses FluidSurveys (Discontinued)?

The most common users of FluidSurveys (Discontinued) are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).

FluidSurveys (Discontinued) Reviews & Ratings 2024

Operating Systems	Unspecified
Mobile Application	No

April 08, 2015

A good balanced product with some improvements needed to increase value-added

Verified User

Consultant in Professional Services

Management Consulting Company, 11-50 employees

Score 8 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it to conduct surveys with beneficiairies of international development project and programs we evaluate (we are an evaluation firm). We target many different types of respondents (i.e.: direct beneficiairies from the general population or institutional representatives from stakeholders involved). It is mainly used for surveys in the environemental and socio-economic departements of the firm (evaluation departments and not corporate developement ones). The idea is to collect impressions, opinions and views of the beneficiairies on the given projects or programs.

Pros and Cons

User-friendly. For the majority of the general and basic tools you can use with FluidSurveys to build surveys are simple to use and intuitive. When certain issues come up, the service is quick (chat room) and effective.
Anonymity: the software has the reputation of being safer in terms of safeguarding private information the respondents share by answering surveys (this is mainly due to the fact that the servers are in Canada). Thus, indirectly, they increase response rates.
Extensive possibilities: FluidSurveys offers a plethora of possibilities and options that really renders the experience interesting in terms of micro-managing each details of the surveys you are sending out there. When the invitation leaves by email, it is exactly how you want it.

Statistical information on invitations and reminders sent does not meet the quality standards of the other aspects of the software. It does not seperate the actual invitations from the reminders which creates a bias in terms of statistics. Thus, you have to calculate these yourself.
Although FluidSurveys is a Canadian company, all communications with clients and the website itself are in English. Having the website translated in French would be a great idea and eventually, follow-up after-sale communications could also be bilingual. However, the options of building the surveys in many languages is very appreciated.
When invitations are sent through the FluidSurveys software to institutional potential respondents, there is a high possibility that it will end up in these potential respondents spams (this is not the case with regular email addresses). Would it be possible for FluidSurveys representatives to "lobby" the recurrent institutional partners to have their IT sector accept invitations from FluidSurveys?

Likelihood to Recommend

I think FluidSurveys is appropriate for almost all scenarios. For now, the only time I used another product was when the survey I was managing was being done using tablets (such as Ipads or Samsung tablets) and I used ODK Collect. I think FluidSurveys now has the option of uploading the survey to a tablet and collect the data through it. However, I have not tried it. ODK Collect is an open source and free software compared to FluidSurveys. Thus, if the user wishes to use tablets, I might recommend using ODK Collect even if there is some learning to do in terms of coding your question in an Excel sheet for it to be "uploadable" to the ODK Collect "hub" (the server).

Return on Investment

The possibility of reaching many respondents in one shot.
The possibility of managing many surveys at once.
I would say the ROI is even (the value of the advantages are equal to the cost and not more) because it is quite expensive. Making sure you will use it a lot is important before buying the license or else other options can be of interest to you.

Alternatives Considered

ODK Collect,SurveyMonkey

Although I do not have much experience with Survey Monkey, the only two reasons why I choose FluidSurveys is that clients demand it (privacy and anonymity) and because managing multiple surveys at a time is easier.
As for ODK Collect, I think it is a valuable alternative to FluidSurveys if you have time to learn the coding (not very complicated). ODK is a little less user friendly and you cannot address small details as you can with FluidSurveys (e.g.: formatting).

Likelihood to Renew

It is hard to add reasons why I would renew the contract with FluidSurveys other than what has been said in the previous sections. It all adds up to the fact that my clients demand FluidSurveys (mostly the Canadian clients as the company is Canadian, some sort of protectionism) and because the "user-friendliness" of the software renders survey development and management more efficient.

Implementation Details / Implementation Partner

Implemented in-house

FluidSurveys (Discontinued)

SurveyMonkey

LimeSurvey

SurveyMonkey

LimeSurvey

Google Forms

Jotform

Typeform

Formstack Forms

Wufoo

Alchemer

Zoho Forms

AskNicely