Survey Tools Testing: Typeform, Survey Planet, and Google Forms [Reviewed]

Client survey is an incredible tool. It can perform a surprising amount of functions, apart from the obvious one of getting user feedback. This includes remarketing, identifying your core audience and reaching out to it, or even subtly announcing upcoming releases. 

However, to organize an efficient client survey the marketer has a few important decisions to make. Should you conduct the questionnaire online or in-app? As a test or an interview? What kind of questions to ask? How many? How to structure and word them?

These are the questions you’ll have to figure out yourself :) Not only because they do not pertain to the topic of this article, but also because the answers to them highly depend on the specifics of your business. Not to mention they have been discussed a bazillion times before. Simple googling can provide you with all sorts of guidelines, such as:

• Use personal interview if you want the most informative answers
• Ensure statistical sampling of 35+ interviews to be able to divide the data into segments, make correct conclusions, and spot regular patterns.
• Include a variety of question types to make the survey more interesting
• Promise the participants tangible rewards to increase their engagement, etc.

Survey tools are APLENTY, how did I choose?

In this piece, I’d like to cover a less-discussed topic that is nonetheless quite important - choosing survey tools. There’s plenty of different survey services on the market and they offer wildly different features. Picking the tool that facilitates getting the information you need in the way you need can be vital, yet finding one proved quite difficult for me when I was building a poll for Goals by KeepSolid. 

First and foremost, I had to narrow down the selection to at least a couple entries. I ended up with three contenders: 

1. Typeform - it offers a lot of creative features and allows to create visually compelling tests
2. Survey Planet - because we’d previously used it and had an account there
3. Google Forms - because it’s free and Google

Keep in mind, this is by no means an all-out survey tools review, but rather my subjective rating of the experience with them in relation to the goals I had:

• Make a 20+ questions interview 
• Keep them entertaining, fast to complete, and easy to navigate on desktop and mobile
• Have a variety of question types - scoring, rating, free-answer
• Support clearly-presented survey results that would be convenient for me to analyze and present
• Track interaction statistics - survey completion rate, devices, average time, and the like
• Ability to add branding and corporate colors to the survey

Typeform VS Survey Planet VS Google Forms

In the scope of this comparison, I will rate the survey tools based on how they fared in a number of features - 0 if there is none, 0.5 if partially available, or 1 if the feature is present. The features are grouped into the following categories:

• Survey Building
• Survey Branding
• Results Analysis
• Interaction Stats
• UI/UX (Convenience)

And so, Typeform emerged a winner in this kinda-competition. Compared to others, it did most of what I needed (although, keep in mind, none of the three won over all of my goals).

It also has a few features that turned up quite handy at the end of the day, even though I didn’t request them initially, such as automatically sending follow-up emails. 

Other capabilities, such as templates or survey integration into a website, didn’t influence the score because I just didn’t need them. Lastly, I didn’t compare their prices, as these tools obviously have different target audience with different needs, and thus set their monetization accordingly. 

Which survey tool should YOU choose?

Typeform - for long, interactive surveys that allow to establish a dialogue with participants; for logical blocks and various effects; for landing page-like branding. Although, keep in mind that its rich functionality will take you some time to learn.

Google Forms - for conducting occasional surveys for free; for moderate customizability; for integrating the survey into your website. The drawback - the polls will look really mediocre.

Survey Planet - for setting up quick, short surveys; for convenient survey analysis. Alas, with little to no branding options, every survey will look quite generic.

First published here