Open-source alternatives to Typeform and SurveyMonkey

The trouble with survey tools is the way they charge. SurveyMonkey's Team Advantage is £20 per user a month on an annual bill, with a minimum of 3 users. That's £720 a year before you've asked anyone anything. Typeform charges by responses, and its Basic plan covers just 100 a month across your whole account. Unused ones don't roll over, either.

If you send a short customer survey twice a year, a free plan may well be enough. Paying starts to sting when forms become a regular part of how you work, which is when open source starts to make sense.

LimeSurvey

LimeSurvey has been around since 2003, and it's built for people who take surveys seriously.

• Over 30 question types, and over 80 languages.
• Conditions, so questions appear only when they're relevant to the person answering.
• Quotas, for when you need a set number of responses from particular groups.
• Properly anonymous surveys. Turn this on and there's no way to connect answers to people, though it does limit a few other features.
• Exports for analysis, including SPSS.

It's also easy on hosting. LimeSurvey 7 needs PHP 8.1.29 or later, at least 128 MB of PHP memory, and one of MariaDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL or Microsoft SQL Server. It takes about 380 MB unpacked, so allow well over the 500 MB minimum for uploads and answers. That's ordinary web hosting territory.

There's a paid hosted version too, if you don't want to run it. The Expert plan is shown at £360 a year for 10,000 responses, though checkout is in euros. You can choose a UK server, which is a nice touch.

The catch is that it's a serious tool, and I'd expect it to feel like one. Don't count on the slick one-question-at-a-time look of Typeform out of the box.

Formbricks

Formbricks is the modern option, aimed at teams that want surveys inside their own website or app as well as sent by link or email.

• Surveys everywhere: website, in-app, link and email.
• A generous free edition. The Community Edition has unlimited surveys, responses and users, plus advanced logic, multi-language surveys, the full API and webhooks.
• Built for developers, with SDKs for connecting it to your own products.

The free edition has one workspace only, and quite a lot sits behind the enterprise licence: SSO, two-step login, teams and access roles, contact management and workflows, along with hiding the "Powered by Formbricks" line. Enterprise pricing is by quote, with no public price list.

It's heavy, too. The docs describe a stack of eight services including PostgreSQL, Redis and S3-compatible storage, with 2 CPUs and 4 GB of memory as "a floor, not a comfortable target". For low real-world use they suggest 4 CPUs and 8 GB. Formbricks' own managed cloud is listed as coming soon, so check where that's got to if you'd rather not host it.

The UK angle

Survey answers can get personal quickly, particularly staff surveys or anything touching on health. So this is one of the categories where it's worth knowing where your data sits.

That said, the paid tools are fine for most firms. SurveyMonkey's Trust Centre says it has data centres in the US, Ireland and Canada, with location choice for Enterprise users. For an ordinary customer feedback form, that's not a reason to move. Just tell people in your privacy notice, and don't collect more than you need.

If you do handle sensitive responses, self-hosting keeps them on a server you control. LimeSurvey's hosted plans also give you a UK server without you having to run anything, which may be the simplest answer of the lot.

Either way, you're responsible for those answers. That means deleting them when you no longer need them.

Honest drawbacks

• LimeSurvey is a more technical tool. Expect a learning curve, and more work to make forms look nice.
• Formbricks needs a proper server, and its stack is a lot for a small business.
• Two-step login is a paid extra on Formbricks, which I'd want on anything holding personal data.
• Fewer ready-made integrations than the big paid tools, so expect some setup.
• Spam protection needs thought. On Formbricks it's an enterprise feature.
• Someone has to run it: updates, backups and making sure emails go out.

Which one?

My pick is LimeSurvey. It covers what most small businesses need, runs on ordinary hosting, and there's a UK hosted option if you change your mind. The main drawback is that it takes more learning than Typeform, and it won't look as polished without some work.

Formbricks is the realistic alternative if you've got a developer and want surveys inside your own website or app.

Need it built or customised?

If you'd like form answers to flow straight into your own systems, the team at Dev Partners can build that connection.

Sources

• SurveyMonkey pricing
• SurveyMonkey Trust Centre
• Typeform pricing
• Typeform: response limits
• LimeSurvey on GitHub
• LimeSurvey website and features
• LimeSurvey installation requirements
• LimeSurvey pricing and hosting
• LimeSurvey: setting conditions
• LimeSurvey: survey quotas
• LimeSurvey: exporting responses
• Formbricks on GitHub
• Formbricks self-hosting
• Formbricks licence and editions
• Formbricks pricing