Hosted surveys?

January 6, 2011 8:11 AM

Best free or paid hosted survey service?

I need to add surveys to a client's site. Their IT department is a nightmare, so I'd rather avoid actually implementing an onsite solution.
What good hosted survey services are there? Branding, both visual and URL, is a dealbreaker.
Free is nice, but a good paid service is better than a free so-so one.

posted by signal to Computers & Internet (14 answers total)

Mrs. Clinging has been using Survey Monkey for some work she's doing at our church and she likes it quite a bit. They have various levels of free and paid services. I don't know much about it, but from what I've seen it works well and the people involved with this project have all been pleased with setup, use, and results that have been provided by this service.
posted by Clinging to the Wreckage at 8:28 AM on January 6, 2011

I've used Survey Monkey for years and have been pretty happy with it.
posted by MuffinMan at 8:31 AM on January 6, 2011

I haven't used Survey Monkey myself, but it seems to be the de facto standard among PhD students doing online surveys for their theses. I've taken a couple of surveys hosted there, and they worked well from a participant's perspective.
posted by metaBugs at 8:45 AM on January 6, 2011

Use Google Docs spreadsheet and forms to handle it for you? It's not the most robust thing, but it's decent.
posted by deezil at 9:13 AM on January 6, 2011

Yea, google docs for the win. I cannot STAND surveymonkey for anything remotely professional.
posted by TomMelee at 9:16 AM on January 6, 2011

I'm a fan of Survs. Definitely professional looking and has various tiers of service.
posted by jourman2 at 9:31 AM on January 6, 2011

Google Survey is what I'm using for my dissertation - it does everything from pleasant looking survey design through to creating a spreadsheet to import into SPSS and making lovely pie charts for illustrative purposes.
posted by ozgirlabroad at 9:43 AM on January 6, 2011

another vote for Surveymonkey
we use it at work and the people who write and administer the surveys love it
posted by caddis at 10:02 AM on January 6, 2011

We use Survey Monkey for our 5,000 employee food service company. To survey employees and guests.

Very very quick to assemble a survey.
posted by UMDirector at 10:30 AM on January 6, 2011

SurveyMonkey! I have been using it since it started. I has gone a bit corporate lately, which doesn't make me happy, but still very good and easy to use.
posted by wandering_not_lost at 11:53 AM on January 6, 2011

I'm really pleased with limequery for price and competence. SurveyMonkey doesn't work well for me in professional settings, as previously mentioned.
posted by arnicae at 12:11 PM on January 6, 2011

Another vote for SurveyMonkey here. Use it all the time, and it's great.
posted by jbickers at 12:29 PM on January 6, 2011

I would tentatively vote against PollDaddy. I just checked their site and it looks like they have cleaned it up from when I checked it out a few years ago.

But just an FYI, they used to have a lot of site design elements that, while technically SFW, I wouldn't personally consider to be very professional. I recall several images of a girl in pigtails licking a big lollipop in a salacious, "Barely Legal" fashion.

I suppose they meant it to be edgy and hip. But as a staunch feminist, let's just say that is not how it struck me at the time.

If you're thinking about using them, check out their site carefully first. You'll want to make sure your clients aren't going to log in to check their poll results only to encounter an upskirt reference or something.
posted by ErikaB at 1:03 PM on January 6, 2011

I have no experience using any of these services, but I haven't seen Wufoo mentioned yet.
posted by The Lurkers Support Me in Email at 12:44 PM on January 7, 2011