Review of Survey Monkey For Enterprise Web Surveys

This is a guest post by David, He is a guest writer at http://www.blogsynergy.com
Survey Monkey is the most popular online survey tool for a reason: it is simple, cheap, and fast. However, while those ingredients can make a product a resounding success with consumers, they do not always add up to an attractive package for business use. This review will look at some of the strengths and weakness of Survey Monkey.

To their credit, the folks at Survey Monkey have obviously gone to some effort to improve their product over the past couple of years. Many of the most sorely lacking features have been added on to its feature list, and in our tests they worked quite well. The new features have also been executed in a way which preserves Survey Monkey’s core simplicity. We see this as being a very good thing, and wish that some of the more robust, research-oriented survey packages could manage to achieve similar levels of simplicity. At present, the best balance between robustness and ease of use is probably achieved ActiveCampaign’s Survey Software package.

Survey Monkey falls notably short when it comes to survey creation and design. The look and feel of their interface just feels outdated to us, and makes survey creation more of a chore than the ActiveCampaign tool. If you want to rearrange your survey pages or question items, you are presented with a rather arcane system of plain HTML buttons. This type of interface was to be expected in 2000 or so, but now the proliferation of smooth AJAX user interfaces has shown us that web apps can be so much more.

Another area where we were disappointed by Survey Monkey was in advanced survey logic. Although their developers have implemented simple survey question logic, it is still not possible to create full question branches as you can do in more business-focused tools. This is a major problem because sophisticated internet research methods allowing for fine-grained segmenting of your respondents absolutely require this, unless you have somehow found a pool of survey takers who are willing to complete tremendously large surveys.

In conclusion, Survey Monkey is a highly decent consumer-level survey tool. For enterprise surveys, you will be better served by a tool that specifically targets the needs of business users.