LimeSurvey

What LimeSurvey does

LimeSurvey is an online survey application written in PHP, and the README says the team has worked on it since 2006. It targets serious survey work: customer and employee feedback, academic studies, government consultations and multilingual research. Surveys can have unlimited questions, the README lists more than 30 question types and over 900 templates, and a single survey can be offered in more than 80 languages.

Its logic engine, the Expression Manager, sets whether a question is shown, inserts earlier answers into question text, validates input against other answers and runs calculations with more than 70 functions. An Equation question type stores calculated results in the response data, which is useful for scoring and assessments. Quotas can stop collecting once a group has enough answers.

Research and participant features

The survey participants feature is where LimeSurvey differs most from Google Forms or Typeform. You can import a participant list from CSV or LDAP, send email invitations and reminders, track who has answered, and close a survey so that only people with an unused access code can respond. Codes also work with anonymous surveys, in which case LimeSurvey keeps no link between the participant record and the answers. Public self-registration is available too.

Results can be viewed as statistics in the app or exported to Excel, CSV, Word, HTML or PDF, and to SPSS, R and Stata for analysis. The RemoteControl API (XML-RPC or JSON-RPC) lets other systems import surveys, manage participants and export responses.

Self-hosting LimeSurvey

LimeSurvey Community Edition runs on an ordinary PHP stack. The README lists PHP 8.1.29 or later with mbstring and PDO, any PHP-capable web server such as Apache 2.4 or nginx, and MySQL 8.0, MariaDB 10.3.38, PostgreSQL 14 or Microsoft SQL Server 2019 or later. The manual asks for at least 250 MB of disk. Installation means uploading the release package to the server, making a few directories writable and running the web installer. The README recommends the stable downloads over the development repository, and the manual does not describe an official Docker method.

Two-factor authentication, LDAP and SAML sign-in, and plugins such as an audit log are part of the open source code.

Hosted version

LimeSurvey GmbH runs LimeSurvey Cloud with a free package and paid plans. Customers choose where their data is stored: Germany, Finland, the United Kingdom, the USA, Canada or Australia.

Limitations

The admin interface is dense, and the classic page-by-page survey style looks different from the one-question-at-a-time layout of Typeform, although themes can change a lot. Writing complex logic means learning the Expression Manager syntax. Product teams that want to show short surveys inside their app will find Formbricks a better fit.

Who it suits

LimeSurvey suits universities, researchers, public bodies and HR or market-research teams who need participant management, anonymity, quotas and exports to statistics software, and who want the choice of running it on cheap PHP hosting or in a cloud region of their choice.