Best Survey Software in 2026

SurveyMonkey is the best-known general-purpose online survey tool and describes itself as the world's most popular survey software, providing answers to more than 20 million questions every day. Its parent, Momentive Global, was taken private by a consortium led by Symphony Technology Group in an all-cash deal of approximately US$1.5 billion completed on 31 May 2023; the company is headquartered in San Mateo, California, and says it serves more than 330,000 organisations.

The product covers the full cycle of building, sending and analysing surveys, with templates, logic, AI-assisted analysis and thematic analysis of open-text answers on team plans. Higher tiers add white-label branding, block randomisation, multilingual surveys and cross-tabs. SurveyMonkey also sells respondent access through SurveyMonkey Audience, priced separately, which lets buyers run market research without their own panel.

Its main limitations are pricing structure and tier gating. The free Basic plan limits surveys to 10 questions and caps viewable responses, team plans require a three-seat minimum, and responses above the plan allowance are charged individually.

Qualtrics is the leading enterprise vendor in experience management (XM), a category that combines surveys with dashboards, text analytics and operational data across customer experience, employee experience and market research. It is co-headquartered in Provo, Utah and Seattle and says more than 19,000 organisations use it.

Ownership has changed twice in recent years. SAP owned a majority stake until 28 June 2023, when Silver Lake and CPP Investments completed the acquisition of all outstanding shares at US$18.15 per share in cash and Qualtrics left public markets. On 18 May 2026 Qualtrics completed the US$6.75 billion acquisition of Press Ganey Forsta, which it describes as the standard for healthcare experience measurement, used by more than 41,000 healthcare facilities.

Qualtrics publishes no prices. Its pricing page lists products by area, including CX Foundational and role-specific CX, EX and market research products, and says customer experience is priced by interactions, employee experience by employee count, and research by interactions such as survey responses and video feedback minutes, with AI and platform technology available to an unlimited number of users. The breadth that suits large programmes also makes it heavier to deploy than self-serve tools.

Typeform is a form and survey builder known for its conversational format, which shows respondents one question at a time with full-screen layouts. The company was founded in 2012, describes itself as remote-first, and reports more than 250 employees and over 150,000 business customers.

The product is used for lead generation, customer feedback, quizzes and recruiting as much as for classic surveys. All paid plans include unlimited typeforms, AI form creation, conditional logic, webhooks and integrations. The Plus plan removes Typeform branding and adds a custom subdomain, while Business adds drop-off rates and conversion tracking. Specialised plans include Talent, with video questions and answers and multi-language support, and Growth Flow, which adds response enrichment, Smart Insights, a Salesforce integration and email and SMS follow-ups.

Typeform's limitation for survey work is response-based pricing: the Basic plan allows 100 responses a month, which is low for customer surveys. The pricing page also showed inconsistent figures between plan cards and the comparison table when consulted, so buyers should confirm prices at checkout.

Jotform was started in 2006 by Aytekin Tank, who remains chief executive, and opened its San Francisco headquarters in 2014; it also lists offices in Sydney, London, Vancouver, Ankara, Izmir and Istanbul. It reports more than 40 million users.

Jotform is primarily an online form builder, but its survey features, templates, conditional logic and reporting make it a common choice for surveys, especially when the same team also collects payments, signatures or applications. Plans are differentiated by limits on active forms, monthly submissions, form views, storage and payment submissions rather than by feature gating, so even the free Starter plan includes the core builder. Gold adds HIPAA features and custom domains, and Enterprise adds multiple users, single sign-on, data residency and dedicated support.

The trade-off is that Bronze, Silver and Gold are single-user plans, so collaborative teams must move to Enterprise, and its analysis tools are lighter than those of survey-specialist platforms. Education and nonprofit organisations get 50% off the self-serve tiers.

Google Forms is Google's survey, quiz and form tool, listed among the applications included in Google Workspace. Users start from a blank form or a template, choose from several question types, arrange them by drag and drop, and add branching so later questions depend on earlier answers. Results appear as automatically generated charts in real time and can be exported to Google Sheets for further analysis or shared with colleagues.

Its appeal is integration and ubiquity. Organisations already on Workspace do not need another contract, and responses flow directly into Sheets, where formulas, pivot tables and Looker Studio can be applied. Google says files are encrypted in transit and at rest, and respondents signed in with a Google Account have progress saved as a draft for 30 days.

Limitations are the flip side of simplicity. Branding options are restricted to colours, images and fonts, there is no built-in statistical analysis, panel, quota management or advanced question types such as MaxDiff, and distribution is limited to links, email, social sharing and embedding. It suits internal surveys, event sign-ups and classroom quizzes better than formal research.

Microsoft Forms is Microsoft's tool for creating surveys, quizzes and polls. Respondents can answer from almost any web browser or mobile device, and form owners can watch results arrive, use built-in analytics and export responses to Excel.

Microsoft says Forms is available to Office 365 Education customers, Microsoft 365 Apps for business customers and anyone with a Microsoft account such as Hotmail, Live or Outlook.com. Forms supports multiple question types and branching logic, sections, themes and images or videos in headers and questions. Its main strength is integration with the rest of the Microsoft stack: forms can be embedded in Sway, OneNote, PowerPoint and Teams, or placed on SharePoint pages through the Microsoft Forms web part, and shared as reusable templates.

Like Google Forms, it is optimised for quick internal surveys, polls in meetings and classroom quizzes rather than research. Advanced logic, panel sourcing, quotas and text analytics are absent, and Microsoft notes that Forms is not a replacement for InfoPath for complex business forms.

Alchemer is a survey and feedback platform headquartered in Louisville, Colorado. The privately owned company changed its name from SurveyGizmo on 10 October 2020, saying the former name did not convey the importance of its product, and existing SurveyGizmo URLs continued to work after the change.

Alchemer sits between self-serve tools and enterprise XM suites. Its self-serve plans offer unlimited surveys with annual response allowances of 75,000 to 125,000, and the higher tiers add custom templates and branding, expanded logic, scripting, advanced research question types and advanced statistical analysis. The Platform (Business) tier adds omnichannel collection, system integrations, open-text analysis, single sign-on and a dedicated customer success manager. Data centres are offered in the US, Canada, the EU and Australia, and the company says it is listed in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Voice of the Customer.

Alchemer's per-user pricing is high compared with general tools, and Professional and Full Access are capped at three users, which pushes larger teams to the quote-based Platform tier.

QuestionPro is a Seattle-based survey and research company founded in 2005. Its site reports more than 5.3 million users, 10 billion questions answered and eight regional data centres, and lists compliance with CCPA, GDPR, ISO 27001 and HIPAA.

The company sells survey software alongside a Research Suite, customer experience and employee experience products, with communities offered as a solution. Its free Essentials plan allows 200 responses per survey and 30 question types; the Advanced plan raises that to 25,000 responses a year and 38 question types and adds branding; Team Edition adds collaboration, regional data centres and a dedicated account manager; and Research Suite adds security, communities, audience, qualitative tools and services with 52 question types.

QuestionPro's pricing is unusual in that the Advanced plan is priced higher per user than Team Edition, which requires five or more users. Customer and employee experience products are sold on request rather than with published prices.

SurveySparrow launched in 2017 and is led by founder and chief executive Shihab Muhammed. The operating entity, SurveySparrow Inc., gives a San Francisco address, and the company reports more than 100,000 customers in 149 countries.

The platform centres on chat-style conversational surveys and recurring customer experience programmes. Plans scale from Basic, with email distribution, partial responses, display and skip logic and Slack integration, to Starter with survey embedding in email and translation, and Business with custom branding, advanced question types, workflows, webhooks and respondent location tracking. Enterprise adds CSS customisation, auto-translation into more than 130 languages, key driver analysis, custom dashboard widgets, optional HIPAA compliance and a Power BI integration.

Plan prices did not load on the pricing page when it was consulted, so this list does not state them. The page did show quarterly or yearly billing, extra users at $49 per user per month, and a 14-day trial with no card required. The free plan is small, and the pricing page gave conflicting figures for its response allowance.

Zoho Survey is the survey application within Zoho's suite of business software, which also includes Zoho CRM, Desk and Campaigns. It is aimed at small and mid-sized businesses and educators who want inexpensive surveys connected to their existing Zoho data.

Plans run from Free through Basic, Plus, Pro and Enterprise. The free plan allows one user, 10 questions and 100 responses per survey, with unlimited surveys and collectors but no skip logic, custom reports or quotas. Paid plans remove the question limit and raise response allowances; on annual billing, Plus, Pro and Enterprise list unlimited responses, and Enterprise includes three users. Email distribution limits rise from 2,000 a day on Basic to 30,000 on Enterprise. Skip logic, quotas, white-label surveys and SSO sit on higher tiers.

Zoho offers the Plus plan free to students and 50% off for educators. Exact paid prices were not shown on the pricing or comparison pages when consulted, and the two pages listed different monthly response figures, so buyers should confirm in their own region.

LimeSurvey is an open-source survey application maintained by LimeSurvey GmbH, which lists Hamburg, Germany, in its footer. It is offered in two ways: the self-hosted Community Edition, where data stays on the user's or hosting provider's server, and LimeSurvey Cloud, a hosted service sold in monthly or annual plans.

The software has long been popular with universities, public bodies and researchers who need full control over where survey data is stored, and its open code base allows custom question types, themes and plugins. Cloud plans are differentiated by response allowance, number of administrators and upload storage; if a Cloud subscription lapses, the account falls back to the free package and collected responses remain accessible.

The trade-off for self-hosting is operational: the user is responsible for installation, updates, backups and security. The administration interface is also more technical than those of design-led tools such as Typeform. Cloud pricing is published in euros.

Tally is a document-style form builder in which users type questions as if writing a text document. Its free plan sets no fixed limit on forms or submissions within fair-use guidelines, which makes it a common choice for startups, students and individual creators running surveys.

Even free users get payments, signatures, file uploads up to 10 MB per file, conditional logic and calculations, answer piping, password protection, closing forms by date or submission count, more than 45 languages with right-to-left support, and integrations with Google Sheets, Notion, Airtable, Zapier, Make and webhooks. The Pro plan removes Tally branding and adds custom domains, unlimited team members, partial submissions, custom CSS, drop-off analytics and Google Analytics and Meta Pixel tracking. Business adds automatic submission deletion for data retention, respondent email verification and 90-day version history.

Tally is a form tool rather than a research platform: it lacks panel access, quota management and advanced statistical reporting, so survey analysis typically happens in the connected spreadsheet or database.

Formbricks is an open-source survey and experience-management platform. Its Community Edition is released under the AGPLv3 licence and is free to self-host on the user's own servers and database, with surveys on every channel, an API, webhooks and community support.

The commercial Experience Suite is sold as a self-hosted annual licence and adds unified feedback, AI analysis, dashboards, workflows and owner alerts, single sign-on, roles, audit logs, human support with a service-level agreement and a deployment success plan. A managed version, run by Formbricks in the customer's AWS, Azure or GCP account or in a Formbricks cloud in the EU or Saudi Arabia, was marked as coming soon when consulted.

Formbricks does not publish a price list; quotes depend on annual responses collected, number of workspaces and contract term of one to three years, and every plan includes unlimited seats. If a self-hosted customer exceeds its volume, the software keeps running and overage is settled at renewal. The model suits organisations that want Qualtrics-style feedback programmes with data kept in their own infrastructure, but it requires in-house hosting capacity.