SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, Alchemer and Microsoft Forms, and Who Actually Writes the Questions

You work out your own numbers first, then price against them. Decide how many colleagues need access, how many responses you expect in a year, and whether the answers have to reach another system. SurveyMonkey is thirty a user a month on Advantage and ninety two on Premier, three seats minimum. Alchemer is fifty five, a hundred and sixty five or two hundred and seventy five a user, three seats maximum. Microsoft Forms is free. Qualtrics routes you to a form. Ask each for an annual figure at your real numbers, and compare those rather than the ones on the page.

Almost never on the software. It goes wrong on ownership and on follow through. The first round goes out and gets a good response, the second is late, the third never happens, and the answers to the first are still in an export nobody has opened. Six months later the program is a folder on a shared drive. The tool did not fail. Nobody was running it.

You do, entirely. You hold your own Zoho Survey subscription in your own name and you pay Zoho directly for it. We work inside it as administrators. If you end this tomorrow the account, every question set, every response and all the reporting stay exactly where they are, and we hand back the administrator seat.

For a lot of businesses, yes, and we would rather say it here than after you have signed. If somebody will genuinely write and run the asking, Microsoft Forms is free and already in your tenant, and one Alchemer seat is fifty five dollars. Use those. Come back if that person turns out not to exist, or turns out to be too busy by March.

Microsoft Forms, always, because it is free and there is no arrangement under which that changes. After that it depends on your shape. For one researcher, Alchemer Collaborator at fifty five is the cheapest paid option. For three or more people who all need access, SurveyMonkey at ninety a month beats Alchemer, which will not sell you a fourth seat at all. We are more expensive than any of them. Three hundred a month is a management fee sitting on top of a license you are already paying for.

On a subscription, first somebody has to notice, and that is the part that fails. No vendor support tier covers it, because nothing is broken. Alchemer gives Collaborator customers email support and holds phone support for annual Professional and Full Access plans. SurveyMonkey puts phone support on Premier. With us, holding the schedule is part of the fee, so the noticing is ours rather than yours.

No, and it usually goes better if you do not. The normal order is the customer facing survey first, because that is the one with a decision attached to it, then the recurring internal ones, then the long tail of forms nobody has read in months. Most of the value sits in the first group and most of the volume sits in the last.

Often, and it is real work rather than a tidy up. We read what is there, find the same thing asked two different ways in two different places, identify the rounds that quietly stopped, and settle which wording wins. Expect that last part to be the bulk of it. Inherited programs are usually accurate about what was asked and silent about what anybody did with the answers.

Four to eight weeks for most businesses, and longer where the audience lists live in three systems that disagree about who the customer is. The survey itself is a day or two of thinking and an afternoon of building. The time goes on agreeing what you are trying to learn, and on the contact data that turns out to need cleaning before anything can be sent.

Possibly nothing, and that is a fine answer. Somebody who owns this properly will do it better than a monthly retainer, because they are there every day. The question is whether it is actually on their list. Sending the next round of a survey that went fine last time is the work that is always reasonable to postpone until next week.

Two cases, and both are common. If your questions are internal and occasional, Microsoft Forms is sitting there already paid for, and if somebody will use it the money is better spent elsewhere. And if you ask your customers something once a year and read the answers over a coffee, that is genuinely fine and we will say so.

We raise it before you have paid us anything, because that is what the fit review is for. Often the real problem is that nobody is empowered to act on what customers say, or that marketing and support hold opposite views of who is being served, or that the answers are already known and unwelcome. Those are the things to deal with first, and no survey will fix any of them.

Three hundred dollars a month, per organization, as published on the Managed Zoho Survey service page. Response volume does not change it and neither does headcount. The Zoho Survey license itself you buy from Zoho, and it remains yours.

Thirty days’ notice ends it. Everything stays exactly where it is, because the subscription was always yours. We hand back the administrator seat, write up every question set and why each question is worded as it is so the next person is not guessing, and list the sends we would keep running.

A rough list of the ways you already ask customers things, and an honest account of what you would change if the answers came back badly. That second list is never complete and does not need to be. It tells us the shape of the problem, and the fit review finds the rest.