Item: SurveyMonkey
Rating: 1
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Having used SurveyMonkey many years ago, it was my go to tool for a recent survey to members of a not for profit sports club that I captain.

Pros and Cons

Reasonably easy to setup a survey with answers provided using various mechanisms
Good reporting on survey results

Deceptive business practices
"Free basic" version is promoted on site but details on limitations difficult to find
Very expensive and not suitable for the likes of a community sports club wanting to do a one off survey of members.

Return on Investment

Negative impact on a small not for profit attempting to use the "free" service for a small, one-off survey after finding the limitations that SurveyMonkey are not up front about.

For quick simple stuff, I would use the tools available to me in so many other products today, rather than going to SurveyMonkey. For larger survey projects across organizations or external to your company then it is worth a look based on the features available, however I will be avoiding SurveyMonkey as my experience with them leads me to question their ethics.

Key Insights

Do you think SurveyMonkey delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with SurveyMonkey's feature set?

Yes

Did SurveyMonkey live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of SurveyMonkey go as expected?

Would you buy SurveyMonkey again?

Usability

Quite intuitive and easy to use for an IT professional. I think there are definite improvements that could be made to support novice users however.

Support Rating

Didn't need or use support.

Likelihood to Recommend

For small organizations and community not-for profits, I would suggest SurveyMonkey is not at all suitable. It is expensive, and be very careful about investing any of your time in the "free" version which is essentially a trap.

SurveyMonkey may be suited to larger corporations who frequently produce surveys, however there are many other accessible and competing options available these days that make a dedicated survey site like SurveyMonkey far less relevant.

If you are thinking of using the free service, think twice. Using the free version you will find you can create your survey with all sorts of components, but then having invested the time, when you go to publish it you will be met with a payment request for the "premium" features you have used in your form. Once you manage to publish a form with only free features, you will then be solicited for paid enhancements for result analysis. Next you will find that your survey has a limit of 40 responses, and any extra results will be withheld unless you upgrade to a paid plan (which is billed annually), or you can pay an exorbitant amount for a 1 month membership. Our club would have been happy to pay a small fee for our one off, small survey, but Survey Monkey does not appear to be interested in this market space with their current structure. I also take issue with their deceptive approach to their "free" offering and will now avoid them in my professional capacity as well.

"Free" with major catches. Look elsewhere for one-off or occasional use.

Overall Satisfaction with SurveyMonkey