SurveyMonkey Review 2024 – Great Reputation, BUT…

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Fully Featured Form Builder with a Free Version

SurveyMonkey is one of the most popular online form builders, with over 6,700 businesses using it to power their market research and plot customer satisfaction. It’s available in more than 15 languages, including German, French, Korean, and Japanese, and it’s easy to use. SurveyMonkey doesn’t skimp on the features, giving you a huge array of tools for data analysis, pre-designed forms, and 13 question types.

Choose from individual and team plans – or choose the free basic plan for access to some of SurveyMonkey’s features. You don’t need to provide credit card details for the free plan, so it’s worth giving it a try.

But is SurveyMonkey really right for you? Let’s take a look.

Templates You Can Customize with Preset Styles and More

SurveyMonkey has an extensive array of templates, covering everything from market research to fun quizzes. Each template comes pre-populated with questions written by experts (although you can, of course, replace these with your own questions).

What makes SurveyMonkey’s templates stand out, however, is the sheer number of customization options once you’ve chosen your template. You can change the colors, layout, and background yourself – or pick one of the 15+ themes to automatically apply stylish backgrounds and colors to your form.

There are 180+ templates available on paid plans, but you only have access to 40 short survey templates on the free plan. Your customization options are also limited on the free plan.

There are 13 template categories in total, including customer feedback, demographics, market research, political, and just for fun, and you can filter by category.

An Ever-Increasing Bundle of Powerful Tools

One thing’s for sure, SurveyMonkey is not short on features – and new features are frequently introduced to give you the best means of collecting and analyzing data for your business.

SurveyMonkey easily integrates with e-commerce platforms like Shopify, social media tools like Hootsuite, and email marketing services like Mailchimp – plus there’s Zapier integration to connect SurveyMonkey with hundreds of apps and automations. For example, you could set up an automation in Zapier that creates a new entry for customer information in Google Sheets every time you receive a form submission.

When you’re designing your forms, you can use tools such as Image Choice (to get feedback on images or products) or Net Promoter Score (to see how likely customers are to recommend you to friends), and select from a massive bank of expertly written questions.

Keep in mind that the free version of SurveyMonkey is pretty limited, and you won’t have access to many of the features (such as logic, custom question banks, and payment features).

SurveyMonkey Genius

With this tool, built using AI (artificial intelligence) and based on insights from survey experts, you can improve the efficiency of your market research or other data collection. The Genius AI system can even help you choose the right question type (e.g. multiple choice, text field).

SurveyMonkey Genius has other great features, too, including a tool that gives your survey a score and tells you how you could improve it, a feature that can estimate how successful your survey will be, and a tool that helps you to write the perfect answer choices for scale-type questions.

Custom Question Bank

If you work as part of a team using SurveyMonkey for research, you’ll love the custom question bank feature. This tool makes your team more efficient by having questions – that you’ve written – available for other team members to use in survey creation. You can be sure that the language and style of your surveys will be consistent, and it will save valuable time, too.

QR Survey Codes

If you work face to face with customers, getting them to complete online surveys can be a challenge. Survey Monkey has introduced a Share a QR Code feature that makes it effortless for your customers to access your survey. You can put a QR code on flyers and other marketing materials, or even add it to an invoice or shipping note to get valuable customer feedback.

Lots of Ways to Get Started with SurveyMonkey

With three different ways to build your form, SurveyMonkey is easy to use, but not the easiest I’ve come across – the sheer number of options available complicates the process. With SurveyMonkey, you can choose to build from scratch, use a pre-designed template, or let the Genius AI build your form for you.

Build It for Me

Naturally, the Genius AI option is the simplest of them all, and you only have to answer a few questions (who do you want to survey, what’s your survey goal, choose a survey type) before you’re presented with your form.

Builder Tooltips

Although getting started with your new survey is really simple, if you want to customize your questions, add new questions, or explore the logic features, the interface becomes a bit more complex.

There’s an almost dizzying array of options to choose from in the builder, and this is where the builder tooltips feature really helps. When you hover over a block in the builder, the tooltip box will pop up, explaining what the block is and how to use it in your survey.

Drag and Drop

Creating your online form from scratch rather than using a template is made easier by SurveyMonkey’s drag-and-drop survey design interface. You pick a block in the Builder tools, drag it onto your survey, and edit the details.

The editor is intuitive – and the tooltips definitely help – but building from scratch can be overwhelming. If you’re a beginner, I’d recommend opting for the AI-built or template-based options. You can easily add more questions or text boxes later, if you choose.

With phone support, there’s no number to call – SurveyMonkey asks you to fill in a form with your question or problem, and they will call you back. However, phone support is only available from 3 to 8 p.m. EST Monday through Friday. Outside those hours, you’re limited to email.

There is, however, a decent help center. The articles are divided into categories, including account issues, building a survey, emailing survey invitations, getting responses, analyzing results, and managing or copying surveys.

Although SurveyMonkey’s support is supposed to be 24/7 via email, response times can be slow during weekends – I waited almost 24 hours for a response.

The free Basic plan puts lots of limitations on your SurveyMonkey account. On this plan you get:

• Unlimited surveys
• Maximum of 10 questions per survey
• View up to 100 responses per survey
• A maximum of three distribution methods (e.g. email, weblink, social media) per survey
• 40 short survey templates

The Standard (individual) plan offers a monthly payment option and comes with relatively higher fees when compared to the Advantage plan. The Advantage plan, on the other hand, provides additional features and allows unlimited responses. However, it is billed annually. The Standard plan imposes a response limit of 1000 and does not support payment acceptance.

Automatic billing can cause problems, however – some customers have reported that monthly fees continue to be taken out of their bank for months after they canceled.