Comparing SurveyMonkey versus Google Survey

There are many survey platforms available that allow you to collect data and receive responses from large scale collection events. SurveyMonkey and Google Survey are to of the largest online survey providers available today - let's have a look at how they compare. SurveyMonkey is a cloud-based platform that assists users in creating, sending, and analyzing text-surveys. Users can run customer satisfaction surveys to receive feedback on products and services, they can send employee engagement surveys to learn how satisfied employees are with the company, among many other uses for quantitative and qualitative collection. Google Survey is more of a market research platform that surveys internet users. They allow marketers to predict customer behavior and evaluate market trends.

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey’s strength is the easy collection and organizing of feedback from individuals. The platform does simple tasks like collecting client responses and feedback in a user-friendly way. Users who subscribe to a team plan gain access to various collaborative features to enhance their collection needs. You can give different team members the ability to view, comment on, or edit surveys. Team members can leave comments on both survey previews and results, and a notification will be sent to other team members to let them know someone made a change or comment was left.

Pros Cons
  • Provides templates are efficient and user-friendly. It is pretty easy to quickly create a survey to your specifications
  • Mobile interactivity less engaging than via laptop. There are more limitations when using SurveyMonkey on the phone than a computer.
  • Allow you to provide multiple ways to answer questions, for example, short answers, paragraphs, and radio buttons.
  • They provide limited access to third-party results analytics. Users would appreciate greater access to additional platforms, especially when analyzing open-ended questions and answers.
  • Sharing surveys is very easy. You can choose to import an extensive list of email addresses you want to share the survey to, or you can manually input your own.
  • While SurveyMonkey has a free plan, it is widely limited. You can create unlimited surveys on the free plan, but you can only ask ten questions and receive 100 responses per survey.
  • Survey previews: you can first send it to yourself to understand how it will feel and look to the user.

 

When it comes to customizations, SurveyMonkey’s free plan is very limiting. It allows you to choose up to nine pre-designed themes and adjust your survey layout. Compared, of course, to the premium plan which enables you to upload logos and offers a large variety of customization. The premium plans start at $32 per month for individual plans and $25 per user per month for team plans, with a minimum of three users. At this price point, some individuals may find it too expensive and instead look for a cheaper option.

Google Survey 360

Google Survey 360 (not to be confused with Google Forms, which is a simple survey administration app that is included in the G Suite of applications) is a business service provided by Google. It’s part of their marketing suite of tools that allows for paid market research surveys that can be embedded into searches, content, or a variety of other mechanisms to get the right target demographic to provide feedback. 

Pros Cons
  • The data collected integrates with Google Sheets, allowing quick analysis.
  • Some users have reported the main disadvantage with Google Survey is customization. The templates and fonts available are limited, making customizing surveys almost impossible. 
  • When it comes to deeper analytical capabilities, Google Survey can provide a lot, but takes a skilled user to get the most out of it.
  • Users can create responsive surveys using adaptive technologies like branching. For example, based on a respondent’s answer, the survey can jump to a specific question directly related to the previous.

 

Google Surveys are priced on a price per completed response basis, with the price based on the audience you want to reach. Prices differ for surveys with 1 question and surveys with 2 to 10 questions. As with other paid market research platforms, responses to a survey are only considered complete if all questions in the survey were answered.

Additional Consideration

With SurveyMonkey, users can ask 10 questions for free, send polls by email, post them anywhere online, and get notified whenever someone answers. To be able to ask more than 10 questions, users need to subscribe to one of SurveyMonkey’s paid plans. When you create a poll with SurveyMonkey you can access the results in real-time. 

Both SurveyMonkey and Google Survey 360 give you the ability to select exactly what demographic of individuals you want to answer your polls, for example, individuals interested in sports, and then you can narrow it down to those specifically interested in Golf. What’s great about both services is, for a cost, they will fill these demographic needs per your request which can greatly assist your market research needs. 

According to SurveyMonkey, they have a large database on individuals based on age, income, gender, and country for you to choose from. You can choose how many respondents you need and the price per respondent is approximately $2. There is also a cost for each question, $1 and if you decide to target the US market the cost is $1.25. You can also choose the distribution of gender you want to answer the question ie more males than females or vice versa. You can also do the same with age.

Google Survey 360’s target audience ability allows you to place screening questions in your survey. These can be simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ questions which allow for branching and response validation. For example, question one may ask, “Do you like golf?” If the respondent answers “yes,” they will move on to the rest of the survey. 

If your survey does include screening questions, the price per completed response is custom and is determined based on a short audience test. Prices for surveys with screening questions start at a minimum of $3.00 per completed response and vary based on length of the survey (10 question maximum), target audience, and incidence rate (minimum of 5%).

When deciding between Google Survey or SurveyMonkey, both offer comparable results and really comes down to whether they can satisfy the demand for your demographic. Both allow for customization, different types of questions, and different pricing options based on your needs. Also remember, Google Forms might be a good option for someone who just needs a quick data collection event and has a cohort already built, or is brand new to creating surveys and wants to test things out. Its limited options make it easier and quicker to create a survey as there are fewer options to confuse you, plus serviceable features at its free level.