The Gist

The Gist will be a regular series at FreshSpectrum.com providing brief overviews of potentially useful applications for researchers, evaluators, and academics. Note: I am not an affiliate and have not accepted money for reviewing any application.

Link: http://www.surveygizmo.com

What is it?

SurveyGizmo is a web-based survey application.

How much?

Five pricing levels. Free, $19/mo (Personal), $49/mo (Pro), $159/mo (Enterprise), $599/mo (Dedicated). There are some pretty big differences in pricing levels. The free account is basically a trial version with a pretty high “for free” 250/month response limit. The personal account is similar in price and features to competitors Survey Monkey and Zoomerang. The “most popular” pro account unlocks most of the application’s advanced survey features. Finally the enterprise and dedicated accounts give you multiple user accounts and much higher monthly response limits. SurveyGizmo also offers some specials including a Free Student Account and Non-Profit discounts.

For a complete breakout checkout here:
http://www.surveygizmo.com/survey-features/?c=pro&p=personal#content

The Good

SurveyGizmo is a newer web service (founded in 2006) compared to its most familiar competitors which were founded in the late 90s but it brings features most researchers are accustomed to seeing only in software packages that hide their pricing behind sales teams. Some of these features include advanced skip logic, branching, pre-loaded data, piping, and password protected survey logins. With no contracts and multiple pricing levels you can easily graduate up to a more sophisticated account when needed.

The Bad

There is no unlimited monthly response option in any of SurveyGizmo’s main payment plans. You have to upgrade to at least the enterprise account to gain access to a few features you may want including SPSS export capability, secure links, or private domain linking.

The Gist

SurveyGizmo is a solid web survey program that competes well with a range of products from simple web survey programs like Survey Monkey and Zoomerang to more advanced packages like Confirmit and VOXCO. For anyone looking for an affordable no contract web survey tool but not wanting to give up the advanced feature sets that come with more expensive packages, SurveyGizmo is worth a try.

The Gist will be a regular series at FreshSpectrum.com providing brief overviews of potentially useful applications for researchers, evaluators, and academics.

Link: http://www.surveymonkey.com

What is it?

Survey Monkey is your run of the mill web survey application.

How much?

Three pricing levels. Free, $19.95/month, $200/year. The stripped down free version only allows up to 10 questions and 100 responses per survey. For most researchers this is nothing more than a demo. The only difference between monthly and annual subscriptions is the response cap. Monthly = 1,000 responses/month across all surveys, Annual = unlimited. An incentive to switch up to Annual beyond the slightly lower per month cost.

The Good

Survey Monkey is a known quantity. It has all the basic question types, skip-logic, and validation. It is easy to use and has been around long enough to work through some of the bugs you might find with other web survey tools. The pdf feature is handy. You can now easily create customizable survey monkey short links for all of your surveys.

The Bad

Survey Monkey, like many other web-based survey tools, does not allow for advanced skip logic, page conditions, pre-loaded data, question piping, conditional response filtering, or any of the other more advanced questionnaire programming features. You cannot create the same big clunky table questions you are used to creating on paper surveys (note: they really don’t work well online anyway). Anyone who takes a Survey Monkey survey will know it as the program does not allow for the use of custom domains.

The Gist

If you’re looking for a solid web survey program at an affordable price you won’t go wrong with Survey Monkey. Keep in mind that advanced logic and complicated questions do not make better surveys. Sometimes working with a simple set of rules can make the instrument easier for the respondent while reducing the chance of programming error.