Google Forms Review, Pricing & Features

What is Google Forms?

Google Forms is a beginner-friendly survey software tool with over 46,000 customers. It offers tools for survey creation and distribution, response management, workflow automation, and reporting. Overall, we recommend Google Forms to those who need a free solution and only need to create basic surveys.

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Google Forms Review Summary

Google was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Today, Google has over 140,000 employees and is based in Mountainview, California.

Google Forms, later introduced in 2008, is a survey software tool that helps users create and distribute surveys, manage their responses, take advantage of workflow automations, and create data reports. Overall, Google Forms’ features are basic.

When it comes to pricing, Google Forms ranks at the top because it is entirely free and belongs in Google’s application suite. However, this also means that there are no upgrade packages and Google Forms is WYSIWYG.

Overall, Google Forms is a basic, user-friendly survey software platform. We recommend it to beginners of survey software and those who do not need robust data analytics and reporting tools.

Google Forms Features

In our review, we will walk through the features offered by Google Forms. We’ll discuss Google Forms’s usability and customer support and describe the major benefits and drawbacks of the software. We’ll also show real images of the software to give you an idea of what it’s like to use the tool.

Survey Creation

The most important component of survey software is its survey creator. This feature determines whether or not you can create the surveys you need. Overall, Google Forms’ survey creation feature is easy to use and simpler when compared to its competitors.

Question Creator

The order of your questions and the formats your question can appear in can greatly impact how effective your survey is at capturing a responder’s information. For example, a question that requires a written answer should not be formatted as multiple choice. Overall, Google Forms’ question builder is easy to use and offers a wide range of question types.

googleforms-question-creator

Google Forms lets you drag & drop questions around to easily reorder them. The platform also offers question types like written, checkbox, dropdown, file upload, and linear scale.

Google Forms also lets you randomize the order of answer options within a question and make questions mandatory to answer. These features help ensure objectivity in response choices and make sure you obtain the information you need.

Survey Flow

How your survey is formatted can have a big impact on how a respondent flows through your survey, including whether or not they finish your survey. Google Forms offers a wide range of easy-to-use survey flow tools that enhance a respondent’s experience.

googleforms-survey-flow

Google Forms lets you choose how many questions can appear per page, which allows you to determine which questions you want your respondents to focus on. It also lets you arrange questions based on branch logic. Branch logic helps respondents only answer questions that are relevant to them, which makes them more inclined to finish the survey.

googleforms-survey-flow1

In addition, Google Forms lets you include a progress bar, skip and back button, and the ability to save and finish your survey later. These features make your survey more flexible and allow people to finish at their own speed.

Design & Customization

The way you design and customize your surveys allows you to affect your respondents on a brand level. Overall, Google Forms’ design and survey customization features are limited.

googleforms-design-customization

Google Forms lets you include your logo, change the theme color, and adjust the font of your survey. However, you are unable to adjust the sizing and positioning of your logo, and you are limited to four different font styles for your survey and button text.

Quiz

Online surveys are often used to create an online quiz. Google Forms’ quiz features are basic, but sufficient. The platform lets you set points for answers, predetermine the correct answer or answers, and lets you give feedback based on correct and incorrect answers.

googleforms-quiz

Survey Distribution

Once you’ve finished creating your survey, you need to be able to distribute it. Google Forms offers links, email, and code as methods of distribution. These features are basic in Google Forms.

Link

Google Forms lets you share your survey through a link. This platform also gives you the option to shorten said link.

googleforms-link

Email

You can also choose to email your survey to participants. Google Forms lets you include a subject and message and choose whether the form is in the actual email.

googleforms-email

However, a disadvantage of this feature is that you have to add email contacts one by one if you want to send your survey to multiple people. The only way you can send your survey to an entire contact list is if you create the contact group ahead of time in Gmail.

Code

Google Forms gives you the option to embed your survey’s HTML code into a third-party website. It also allows you to adjust the height and width of said code.

Google Forms Code

Response Management

Once you’ve distributed your survey and your recipients have responded, you need to be able to manage the responses you’ve received. For this matter, Google Forms’ response management features are basic.

Quotas

Being able to set a response quota eliminates the possibility for irrelevant or "spam" responses. Google Forms lets you limit the number of responses a respondent can input and allow multiple responses.

A disadvantage, though, is you cannot customize the number of limited responses. You can either limit it to one or have it be unlimited.

Workflow Automation

Workflow automations are essential if you create and manage a large number of surveys. They can eliminate repetitive manual tasks, which gives you more time to focus on examining the responses you’ve received. Overall, Google Forms’ automations are limited.

Respondents

Google Forms offers two types of automations when it comes to respondents. This includes collecting email addresses and sending a respondent a copy of their answers.

Google Forms Respondents

As shown above, a disadvantage of these features is you can only activate whether these automations are active or not. You cannot customize them further to better suit your survey needs.

Notifications

Google Forms lets you send notifications to yourself that alert you when someone has completed your survey. This feature is useful because you do not have to waste time manually checking whether your survey has been completed.

Reporting

Once you’ve received your responses, you’ll want to view your data in an organized and conclusive manner. Therefore, it’s important to have a diverse and highly customizable reporting tool because how your data is presented can greatly impact the message it is portraying.

Overall, Google Forms’ reporting tool is very limited in terms of data visualization customization.

Summary Reports

Google Forms offers a summary report feature that displays data about the total number of responses, and responses per question. As shown below, Google Forms also displays data in terms of bar and pie chart percentages.

Google Forms Reporting

A major disadvantage of Google Forms’ reporting feature is that you cannot choose how a question’s data is displayed. For example, linear scale questions are displayed as bar graph percentages, and there is no option to change this visualization into another format. This means you would have to rely on Google’s algorithm to determine how to best display your data.

Data Export

If you need to share your data with others, then you’ll need to export it into a shareable format. An advantage of Google Forms is you can export your data directly into Google Sheets. You can also import your data into a PDF or CSV.

Google Forms Integrations

Google Forms lets you integrate with other applications to expand its functionality. For example, you can integrate Google Forms with Google Sheets, so you can record your responses in Sheets. We’ve listed below some of the integrations Google Forms offers:

  • Zapier
  • Salesforce
  • HubSpot
  • Zoom
  • Google Drive
  • Mailchimp

Customer Support

Overall, we found Google Forms’ customer support to be slightly above average. Google offers a wide range of customer support channels and is available 24/7.

Google Forms’ articles are robust and contain great readability. They take advantage of titles, bolded terms, and numbered and bulleted lists. They also include dropdown tabs to better separate information and include customer service articles that are specified for different devices like Android and iPhone.

Customer Support ChannelsSupport tickets, [email protected], 1-800-419-0157
Customer Support Availability24/7
Other Support ResourcesKnowledge Base, FAQs, Community Forum
Platform Update NotificationsYes
Application Status PageYes

Is It Right For You?

Overall, Google Forms is a beginner-friendly survey software solution. Its features are basic but reliable, especially for those who do not need to make complex surveys. We also recommend it to those who need a free survey software platform.

Amy Yang

Amy Yang is a Junior Research Analyst at SoftwarePundit, where she conducts in-depth analyses on software markets and products. Amy has expertise in content production and managing digital and social platforms. She has a Bachelor of Science in Communication & Media, and a Minor in Web Programming and Applications from NYU. You can connect with Amy on LinkedIn.

Amy is an expert in several software categories including:

  • Course creation software
  • Electronic signature software
  • Social media software
  • Website builder software

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