Summary of our review

The biggest difference among the software we reviewed related to the ease of creating surveys and advanced survey logic capabilities (e.g. using data from a previous question or skipping a question).

If you are only interested in conducting a short, simple survey, any of the software we reviewed will probably work for you.

Survey logic

If you need to use survey logic, Qualtrics or Survey Gizmo are the best options. They offered the most comprehensive and flexible capabilities for skip and display logic, both for individual questions and for entire pages of questions.

Ease of use

If you frequently create surveys or are creating a long survey, Qualtrics offers the best user interface by far. But it is more expensive than its competitors, so the time savings may not make up for this additional cost.

Reliability and reputation

We were not able to assess reliability in this review, which is arguably one of the most important attributes of online survey software (nothing is worse than buggy or unreliable software when your survey goes live). All the applications chosen for this review appear to be widely used, which may indicate sufficient reliability. We recommend against using less well-known survey software for this reason.

Other features

All the software reviewed have reasonable themes for live surveys and all worked on mobile devices. All offered data export to CSV, and many had a number of additional options.

Discounts

Note that most software is available with discounts for academic institutions and non-profits. Notably, Question Pro is free for educational and not-for-profit users.