SurveyMonkey or LimeSurvey

Both SurveyMonkey and LimeSurvey offer a free $0 plan. For LimeSurvey, hit “Pricing”, and you can immediately find the Free plan option. LimeSurvey’s Free plan provides 25 responses/month and 10 MB upload storage. For SurveyMonkey, hitting the “Plans & Pricing” won’t show you the Free plan option. Then you press “Personal Plans”, you still won’t find the Free plan. You might wonder, do they offer a Free plan? Scroll download, click “See all plan features”, now you can finally see the Free $0 plan. SurveyMonkey’s Free plan provides ten questions per survey and 40 responses per survey.

Most Free plans would only give you a taste of the basic features. So, you can tell things are working. Of course, you can always use something better than a free plan. On average, you would need to pay over a thousand dollars a year for a complete feature account. Suppose, for whatever reason, you want to host your survey site with your resources, or you don’t want to store your data with a 3rd party. In that case, you might consider self-hosting your survey site.

LimeSurvey has such an option for you. You can download LimeSurvey for free and install your survey website. Like WordPress, you first set up a database, a database user, then run the install script. It takes quite a while to download the software; it’s probably a few times bigger than WordPress.

Configuration is quite intuitive and user-friendly; I can set up my test survey within a few minutes. It only consists of 2 multiple-choice questions. There are tons of features, but at first sight, I notice that it has IP check, SPSS export; both are working perfectly. So, if you are looking for a SurveyMonkey alternative and wouldn’t mind installing your survey software, the open-source LimeSurvey would be an excellent solution for you.