Powerful, But The Price May Double
March 03, 2019

Powerful, But The Price May Double

Robert Muenchen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Research Suite

Overall Satisfaction with Qualtrics

Qualtrics is used for almost every type of survey across all the campuses of The University of Tennessee. The only exception to that is the 360-degree performance reviews, for which they charge an additional fee. Most of the surveys are for academic research, but we also do administrative ones such as student opinions, faculty senate voting, etc.
  • It has many features, about as many as QuestionPro, slightly more than SurveyGizmo, and *many* more than SurveyMonkey.
  • It's probably the fastest when logging into the design tool. Actually, taking surveys is fast in all the ones we've tried.
  • It has one unique feature: the ability to keep someone from moving forward in a survey until a certain amount of time passes. That's not needed very often but if you want to ensure that someone has really studied, say, an advertisement before answering, that'll do it.
  • It's complex, so it takes longer to master than, say, SurveyMonkey
  • I'd like to see the company treat their customers fairly. Their common approach is to sell it to you at a huge discount, then wait until it's obvious that changing vendors would be very expensive. Then they raise the price sharply, often doubling it. Then they try to pressure you into a multi-year contract. It sounds like a crazy way to treat customers, but we weren't the only one. Search these archives to see how many customers have complained that they got the same treatment: EDUCAUSE CIO Community Group Listserv and the EDUCAUSE IT Procurement and Supplier Management Community Group Listserv. Our team works with round 30 research software vendors and this is extremely rare behavior.
  • Qualtrics has had a very negative financial impact. We have had to rush to find an alternative after they more than doubled their price. We were one of the lucky ones since we read about their tactics months before our contract ran out. Others didn't find out until the invoice arrived, leaving them no time at all to find an alternative. Now we're using QuestionPro, which is a very similar product at one eighth the cost, but it's still costing us to move all the surveys.
QuestionPro and Qualtrics are very similar powerful products, perhaps because the QuestionPro founders split off from Qualtrics. Both have feature sets that are slightly better than SurveyGizmo and much more extensive than SurveyMonkey. Only REDCap has significantly more power, including longitudinal surveys and full database features that none of the others have. REDCap is also free, but it's also quite a bit harder to use than any of the others. Still, compared to how hard things like SAS or MATLAB are, REDCap is trivially easy. Survey creators just expect the products to be easy.
It's well suited to a wide range of survey tasks. Just be aware that whatever your price is now, it's likely to increase sharply in the future.