The most popular web-based survey tool today is Survey Monkey. Over the past several years, it gained popularity rapidly on account of its simplicity, ease of use, and low cost. However, the very simplicity that has won Survey Monkey a loyal following has led many to criticize it for lacking the powerful research features required by business users. In this review we will take a look at the features and usability of Survey Monkey to see if the tool is appropriate for enterprise web survey deployment.
In fairness, some of the shortcomings of Survey Monkey have actually been improved upon fairly recently, and that speaks well for the tool that it is being actively improved. However, in the world of business it is insufficient to rely on a company to provide necessary features at some time in the future. We can only believe what is already available.
In the case of Survey Monkey, here are some of the features that you get:
- Question types – the different types of questions that can be used are sufficient for average use. All the basics are here, such as dropdown lists, checkboxes, formatted text fields, etc.
- Survey deployment options – you can deploy your tool with a simple html link, with a popup box on your web site, or by having invitations emailed to a list of recipients.
- Pretty good basic reporting features – you can view your results in a variety of basic visual graphs, and can also cross-tabulate results in order to compare and contrast different groups of respondents.
However, most advanced analysis will have to be conducted outside of Survey Monkey, in a real analytics package. The provided tools will be much too basic for most market research or program evaluation projects. Additionally, the ability to implement survey logic is a bit stunted in this tool. You can implement basic skip logic but that is not enough for more sophisticated research.
A major shortcoming of Survey Monkey is its extremely limited and old-fashioned survey creation tools. These tools do not appear to have been significantly updated in the last 5 years; they really feel antique in comparison to the more sophisticated web applications that we’ve all become used to using now. And this problem will prevent you from using Survey Monkey as a survey design tool. Someone will have to outline or write out the survey by hand before beginning, and then simply enter it all into Survey Monkey. We think this is inefficient, and ultimately harms you ability to make intuitive decisions about the way people will respond to your survey.
In conclusion, Survey Monkey is a very decent survey tool if you are creating a simple feedback survey or perhaps some kind of school project. But for serious business applications you’ll need something more modern, such as ActiveCampaign’s Survey Software. With that tool you have full drag and drop control over survey creation, and more well-developed reporting features as well. Fortunately, the cost of real enterprise-grade survey tools such as the ActiveCampaign ones is actually no greater than what you would pay for more simplistic tools from Survey Monkey.
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