Looking for a web service for creating surveys with robust feature set

January 10, 2023 9:49 AM

I was building a "Daily Report Survey" using Alchemer/Surveygizmo for a very large construction project that was supposed to keep track of productivity, labor hours, and other data from field teams. But it's starting to fall short... Are there any competitors with very customizable question types, recurring responses, and personalized links?

I was very hopeful around their "recurring response" feature which would pre-populate a survey based on the previous days entry if you used a personalized link. Unfortunately, it isn't as helpful I was hoping. It only allowed one pre-populated response per day at best and if a day was missed, you lose out entirely on that saved data and must start fresh. This really sucks when you have several pages of questions and tables to fill out.

posted by gzimmer to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

It sounds like what you want it more of a data entry form rather than a survey. If I’m right on that, none of the major survey packages (surveygizmo, qualtrics) will work. I’ve run into this limitation in my professional life for years so I know from experience that surveys don’t work for this.

What I’ve done in the past is either have a fully customized solution developed or use a low/no code solution like SharePoint Lists/Power Apps or Mendix. The first option is great but very expensive and time consuming. The second option can also work depending on how sophisticated you need to get, however, you’ll still potentially need to pay for the solution and ‘code’ it. My experience was that Power Apps was fairly easy to learn if you have experience building surveys.

The final solution would be to just use Excel and build a simple entry form. This is not a great option but is likely the cheapest and fastest option out there, which is the reason why people end up using Excel even when it’s far from the best solution.
posted by scantee at 1:27 PM on January 10, 2023