Online survey tools are a dime a dozen, but you will not be sorry you’ve checked this one out.
I signed up for Survs earlier this year because I’ve tried a number of online survey applications in the past and none have proven to suit my specific needs so far, and I wanted to see if it was a match for the likes of SurveyMonkey, Zoomerang and countless others I’ve tested. Unfortunately, the startup was in private beta and refused to grant me access for months on end, until today. As just announced on the company’s blog, Survs is now in public beta and free for all to take for a ride.
Survs helps you create, edit, deploy and analyze web-based surveys that can be easily and significantly customized. Not to say that it boasts loads of features you won’t find in any other online survey tool, but I found it incredibly easy to set up and edit new surveys as a first-time user and that’s already a notable achievement for services that are so easily made over-complex.
I particularly liked the fact that a lot of attention has gone to the overall design and copywriting of the AJAX-heavy application, which made the whole experience remarkably straightforward every step of the way. Survs lets you kick off with a basic feel, but after some time you’ll notice the little things that show how much power remains hidden behind the application’s primary screens.
The service has been designed to make it easy to collaborate with other people on surveys, and it even enables you to share your surveys results, templates and themes online at any point, which are features that are too often missing when web survey tool providers start feeling the need to make their applications too simple. In my opinion, Survs pretty much strikes the perfect balance between easy-to-use and feature-rich.
Surveys can be distributed to users in various channels, each with their own reports, either by a simple hyperlink, e-mail or an embeddable widget. I created a quick one you can see below, but if I have any gripes about Survs it’s that they don’t really deliver a great end user experience:
Extra bonus points go to Survs for considering internationalization of the service right off the bat, with the ability to choose from eight (mostly European) languages for survey templates and text fields. Users can even go ahead and create and apply custom languages sets to any survey, which is very smart.
The app may well be in public beta for now, but no word on pricing yet, although the company is boasting about the fact that it will charge competitive prices for upgraded accounts. So far, you can see the link for the upgrade plan in your account settings, but clicking in it doesn’t reveal the tariff plan yet nor does it tell you anything about the premium features you’ll be buying yet. I asked the company for feedback about that part of the equation, but unless they utterly fail to live up to their promises of keeping the rates below average, I’d definitely consider becoming a paying customer.
Update: that was quick.
“Paying customers are charged monthly or annually. Monthly plans range from $20 USD to $120 USD, in addition to the feature-limited free plan. All paid plans are complemented with a usage rate. Each of these plans include a maximum number of survey responses that can be collected per month. Customers exceeding this threshold will be charged for each response over the limit in the end of the relevant subscription cycle.”
Survs is a product of Enough Pepper, a small startup from Lisbon, Portugal.
Not bad; still, the best priced, and also most underrated survey platform I’ve ever used is Limesurvey’s opensource offering: http://limesurvey.org
scott…
where the heck where you like 3-4 days ago when i peeled back limesurvey to create a survey!!
you could have saved me some time!
peace
ps. and yeah, it appears to be solid on the design side..
Yes, LimeSurvey especially rocks – used it for years now.
The LimeSurvey also offers hosting by LimeService http://www.limeservice.com if you don’t want to fiddle with the installation. Really nice!
I’ve been using this for a good deal of time and let me tell you right off the bat that this is a pleasure to use.
Every little detail count… you can see that they’ve given a good deal of thought to each and every bit of interaction. It just does what you ask and helps you find you way among the building of your surveys.
The way we can manage each channel for the surveys is definitely useful. We’ve been using it to gather feedback for several stuff work and the fact that you can export *our* data (they say so on their blog) out of their app makes this the perfect tool for the excel-aholics out there.
What’s with the ridiculous URLs?
At $19 a month with unlimited responses for both Zoomerang and SurveyMonkey, and a very good competitor in SurveyGizmo I’m not sure how these guys are going to compete on price. With pricing of $20 to $120 monthly with no obvious features over the big guys, its going to be a hard sell. The usability thing only goes so far when stacked against companies that have been doing this for years on end with a very solid infrastructure.
There is nothing wrong with a prettier, more usable tool, as long as the power is under the hood. You mentioned SurveyGizmo, and I’ve seen some of version 2’s look and I think it will take a very solid ‘infrastructure’ as you put it and greatly improve the front-end experience in the survey builder. Mind you, I’ve seen it because I am an employee of SurveyGizmo (full disclosure here), but thought I’d wet some pallets with what is coming in the next few months!
I like Feedbackfarm.com’s service. It is completely free, full of functionality.
Where is the money in these apps. Dime a dozen…
Robin: thanks for this update. I’ve never actually used these tools (yet), nor am I a primary research professional, but I can’t help but wonder if these tools are limited by their scope. how do you know you have a representative sample? if the respondent base in not pre-qualified, then you have to get demographic data from them in the survey — wouldn’t’ that make it a bit top heavy? I’m not saying these tools are not useful, just wondering what kinds of conclusions you can infer from the data you get.
I played with it for 5 minutes. a serious research shop would discount it almost immediately.
fluff and nonsense may improve the user experience but it doesn’t get you much further. overall, it looks like a great package, but it doesn’t reach the standard, or even come close.
nevertheless, for quick internet surveys where you don’t need complex logic, I’m sure it will fit in well into an already crowded space.