SurveyMonkey Review, Pricing & Features

What is SurveyMonkey?

SurveyMonkey is a robust survey software solution with 17 million customers. It offers tools for creating and distributing surveys, managing responses, workflow automation, and reporting. Overall, SurveyMonkey is best for those that prefer an all-in-one platform with a wide range of survey distribution methods.

Table of Contents

• What is SurveyMonkey?
• SurveyMonkey Review Summary
• SurveyMonkey Pricing & Cost
• SurveyMonkey Features
  • Survey Creation
  • Survey Distribution
  • Response Management
  • Workflow Automation
  • Reporting
  • Integrations
• Mobile
• SurveyMonkey Customer Support
• Is SurveyMonkey Right For You?

SurveyMonkey Review Summary

SurveyMonkey was founded in 1999 by Ryan Finley and Chris Finley. Its mission is to power the curious so they can shape what's next. Today, SurveyMonkey has over 750 employees and is based in San Mateo, California.

SurveyMonkey is a survey software tool that helps users with survey creation and distribution, response management, workflow automations, and data report creation. Overall, SurveyMonkey’s features are robust.

In terms of pricing, SurveyMonkey ranks towards the middle. The software solution offers a wide range of personal and business plans. Its most affordable personal plan costs $16 per month and its most affordable business plan costs $25 per month. Its most affordable business plan costs $25 per month and its most expensive business plan costs $75 per month.

Overall, SurveyMonkey is a well-rounded, feature-rich survey software solution. We recommend it to those who need or prefer an all-in-one platform.

SurveyMonkey Pricing & Cost

SurveyMonkey pricing ranges from $16 to $119 per month depending on if you purchase a personal or a business plan. Unfortunately, SurveyMonkey does not offer an annual discount or a free trial period.

SurveyMonkey Features

In our review, we will walk through the features offered by SurveyMonkey. We’ll discuss SurveyMonkey’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, SurveyMonkey’ survey creation feature is easy to use and simpler when compared to its competitors.

Question Creator

Questions are the backbone of any survey. Therefore, the types of questions, and the order of them can greatly affect the effectiveness at capturing a respondent’s information. For example, some questions are better formatted as written answers and some are better as multiple choice. Overall, SurveyMonkey’s question builder is robust, but can be intimidating to use at first.

SurveyMonkey lets you drag & drop questions, which makes it easier to reorder them. The solution also offers a wide variety of question types like multiple choice, checkboxes, dropdown, and written answers. Survey Monkey also offers advanced question types like star rating, matrix scaling, payment, and A/B testing.

SurveyMonkey also lets you randomize the order of your pages and questions. An advantage of SurveyMonkey is that it also offers a question bank that includes question examples for different categories like demographics, HR, and customer feedback. This tool is a time-saver for those who do not want to write their own questions.

Survey Flow

The way your survey is formatted can have a big impact on whether or not a respondent will finish your survey. Overall, SurveyMonkey offers a wide range of survey flow tools.

SurveyMonkey lets you format questions by only revealing them one at a time, all revealed at once, and even in a chat format where it seems like a bot is asking you the questions. It also lets you determine how many questions appear per page, and include a progress bar, previous and next button, and save and finish capability.

SurveyMonkey also lets you apply simple and advanced branch logic to your surveys. Simple logic includes question and page skips. Advanced branching logic includes rules that disqualify those who do not answer in a way that is relevant to your survey’s goals, or even hide a page depending on a respondent’s email address.

Design & Customization

The way you design and customize your surveys allows you to affect your respondents on a brand level. Overall, SurveyMonkey’ design and survey customization features are slightly above average, but limited in terms of being able to fully custom brand your survey.

SurveyMonkey lets you include your logo, change the font for your questions, answers, and title of your survey, change the background color, adjust the layout of your pages, and choose whether or not to show the SurveyMonkey logo.

SurveyMonkey also offers pre-built themes that you can use to quickly design your surveys. This feature is advantageous because you can set an automatic theme for your survey and easily provide consistency.

Quiz

SurveyMonkey lets you convert your online surveys into quizzes. SurveyMonkey’s quiz features are robust. You can set the number points for each answer, predetermine the right answer or answers, display quiz results at the end, and show the correct answers against incorrect answers.

SurveyMonkey also lets you include an "other" answer box. This is where respondents can write in an answer that is not listed. You can also validate these answers by making sure they are a certain length, and include certain information like a date or email address. Providing this option helps ensure that you are receiving a respondent’s most accurate opinion.

Survey Distribution

After you’ve finished creating your survey, the next step would be to distribute it. Overall, SurveyMonkey offers a wide range of robust survey distribution channels.

Link

You can share your survey through a link. SurveyMonkey offers different customization options for link sharing.

You can customize the actual link of your survey, so that it can be more appropriate to your business’s branding. You can also edit the image and text that display when you post your link, and have SurveyMonkey automatically generate new links for the same survey.

Email

SurveyMonkey also lets you email your survey to participants. This survey distribution method in SurveyMonkey is well-rounded.

SurveyMonkey lets you manually insert the emails you want to send your survey to or import a list of contacts from somewhere else like an Excel spreadsheet. You can also edit the subject and body and insert custom data that can pull specific information about a contact like a first name.

An advantage of SurveyMonkey’s email distribution method is that you can track who responds to your email. You can also send reminders to respondents who have not filled out your survey yet.

Code

SurveyMonkey also gives you the option to embed your survey into your website using code. You can either insert it directly into a website page, or in a popup.

You can also adjust how your embedded survey appears by customizing its headline, the width and height of your survey, the message describing your survey, and your survey’s buttons.

Text Message

SurveyMonkey also lets you distribute your survey through text message. This is ideal for contacts who primarily use their mobile device.

SurveyMonkey lets you individually add recipients phone numbers or include a contact group to send your survey to. You can also track responses to your texts, including sent and bounced messages and how many surveys sent through text were fully or partially completed.

Response Management

After you’ve distributed your survey and received responses, you need to manage said responses. Overall, SurveyMonkey’s response management tools are basic.

Quotas

It’s important that the responses you receive are relevant to what you need your survey for. SurveyMonkey lets you set a quota for how many responses you receive. This can range from one response to in theory an infinite number of responses

With this tool, you can eliminate the possibility of "spam" responses. If you decide to allow for multiple responses, this allows respondents to provide the most updated information, which means your survey results could be more accurate to what you need.

Response Editing

SurveyMonkey lets you choose whether or not respondents can edit their responses after they’ve submitted their survey. An advantage of this feature is that this gives a respondent a chance to provide a more accurate response to questions.

Workflow Automation

Workflow automations are important if you create and manage a larger number of surveys. They eliminate repetitive tasks, which gives you more time to analyze your surveys’ responses. Overall, SurveyMonkey offers a wide range of workflow automation tools.

Respondents

SurveyMonkey offers three kinds of automations in relation to respondents. This includes one for collecting email addresses, another for sending your respondents a copy of their responses, and another for sending respondents to a custom endpage when they finish your survey.

When it comes to customizing the endpage of your survey, there are several options you can choose. This includes making the survey start over, closing the window when someone submits their results, redirecting them to a new URL, or to a default webpage.

Notifications

SurveyMonkey lets you send notifications to yourself as well as your respondents. This includes sending notifications to respondents to finish your survey, and sending yourself notifications when your survey has been completed. These notification features are useful because they help you stay on top of your responses.

Reporting

After you’ve received all of your responses, you’ll want to analyze them in an organized and conclusive manner. Therefore, you need high quality reporting tools. Overall, SurveyMonkey’s reporting tools are robust.

Summary Reports

SurveyMonkey offers a summary report for each of your entire survey. Overall, this report is informative, but not very customizable.

As you can see above, SurveyMonkey displays in a bar graph, the number of respondents who scored in each percentile. SurveyMonkey also includes statistics such as the lowest score, median, highest score scored on your survey, the mean score, and the standard deviation.

These statistics are especially useful if you are using your survey as a quiz. You can use these statistics to see how fair your quiz is and whether your quiz is a true representation of your respondents’ skill sets.

Question Specific Reports

Besides summary reports, SurveyMonkey also offers question specific reports. These reports are very informative and customizable.

SurveyMonkey offers a wide range of different chart types you can display your data in including, bar, pie, and column chart and line graph. You can also view how many got the question correct, the average score, the standard deviation from the mean.

Trends

SurveyMonkey also displays response behavior trends for your survey overall and per question. These tools in SurveyMonkey are informative and somewhat customizable.

You can view trends like completion rate, time spent on survey, and which question was the most skipped. SurveyMonkey also shows how many responses occur at what hour.

Data Export

If you want to share your data, then you’ll need to export it in a shareable format. The formats that SurveyMonkey lets you export your data into include:

SurveyMonkey Integrations

SurveyMonkey lets you integrate with other applications, which expand its functionality. We’ve listed below some of the integrations SurveyMonkey offers:

Mobile

SurveyMonkey offers a mobile application for both Apple and Android. SurveyMonkey’s mobile application is easy-to-use and lets you create surveys either from scratch or from a template. However, you cannot track responses or view any kind of reporting or analytics in regards to your surveys.

Customer Support

Overall, SurveyMonkey’s customer support is average. This is mainly because it only offers one channel, email, as a support channel. Phone support is only available for premier plan users. However, SurveyMonkey’s email support is available 24/7.

SurveyMonkey’s help articles have great readability and are informative, but not too word heavy. They also include videos, bulleted lists, a table of contents, and bold terms and titles, which improve the readability of their articles.

Is It Right For You?

Overall, SurveyMonkey is a robust survey software solution. We recommend it to those who prefer an all-in-one solution and need a wide range of survey distribution channels.