Open source alternatives to SurveyMonkey

What SurveyMonkey does

SurveyMonkey is a hosted survey platform for employee feedback, customer feedback, market research, product development, events and online forms. Depending on the plan, it adds advanced logic and block randomization, payments, multilingual surveys, statistical significance testing, crosstabs, multi-survey analysis and AI-assisted analysis. Teams get roles and shared brand assets, and Enterprise adds SSO and administration tools. SurveyMonkey Audience, a panel of respondents, is sold separately, and the same company runs the Wufoo form builder.

Why people look for an alternative

• Responses you cannot see. The free Basic plan shows only a limited number of responses per survey, even if more are collected. According to the help center, responses over the limit cannot be viewed and are deleted a year after collection unless you upgrade.
• Data loss on downgrade. If a paid plan lapses back to Basic, responses over the Basic limit that are older than 365 days are deleted under the retention policy.
• Usage-based charges. Paid plans count responses across all surveys and users against a yearly allowance and charge for each extra response.
• Seats. Team plans need at least three users, every collaborator needs a seat, and accounts may not be shared.
• Hosting region. A choice of US, Canadian or EU data center appears only on the Enterprise plan, and there is no self-hosted edition.

What to compare in an alternative

1. Logic. Branching, piping, randomization, quotas and calculated fields for longer questionnaires.
2. Respondent management. Invitations and reminders, closed-access surveys, and anonymous or tracked responses.
3. Analysis and exports. Built-in reports, CSV and spreadsheet export, and formats for statistics software such as SPSS, R or Stata, plus APIs.
4. Languages. Multilingual surveys and translation workflows.
5. Volume and users. Self-hosted open source editions do not cap responses or charge per seat, but some open-core tools limit users or roles without a license.

Which one to choose

LimeSurvey is the closest match for research-style surveys. It offers complex logic with its Expression Manager, participant lists with invitations and reminders, quotas, anonymous responses, surveys in many languages, and exports to SPSS, R and Stata. It runs on ordinary PHP hosting or in LimeSurvey’s own cloud. Formbricks suits customer and product feedback programs, with NPS and CSAT questions, targeted website and in-app surveys, and EU hosting. SurveyKing is an MIT-licensed option that combines surveys with exams and department-based roles. For field research and data collection on mobile devices, including offline work, KoboToolbox and ODK Central are built for the job, with free or paid hosted servers and full self-hosting.