Survicate vs. SurveyMonkey: Which software is Better?

When looking for good survey software, there are quite a few options out there. Among them, there are two excellent choices, SurveyMonkey and Survicate.

In this comparison between Survicate and SurveyMonkey, I’ll explain what a web survey is, the benefits of conducting surveys online, distribution channels and pricing plans offered by two services. After this short read, you’ll have a better idea which software is the ultimate choice for conducting online surveys and collecting customer feedback.

Let’s start with the quick introduction first.

Survicate is a cloud-based software that provides services for collecting feedback from website visitors. It allows you to create, distribute and collect survey results from a specific group of visitors to find out who your target visitors are and what they are interested in. In other words, it enables you to generate high quality heads for your sales team through user-friendly surveys.

SurveyMonkey is a software as a service (SaaS) company that provides online services for building survey forms and collecting survey feedback from users. Not only does it help you collect responses in a more interactive way, but with its built-in AI-powered tools, it can predict possible flaws in your survey design, review questionnaires, and guide you to improve survey performance.

Web Survey: Explained

A survey is basically a research method of collecting data about behaviors, needs and opinions from users. The data collected through surveys is then used by researchers to better understand the problems and issues or any other topic of interest.

In the past, surveys were conducted through offline modes such as newspapers, interviews, polling stations, questionnaires and a few others. However, with the advancement of technologies, it has become rather common to distribute them over digital touchpoints like social media, email, websites, mobile apps, etc.

A web survey is a set of structured questions that respondents are asked to answer over the Internet, usually by filling out an online form. It turned out that this technique takes less time than the traditional method of collecting data where you would usually go through one-on-one interaction. Plus, it proves to have a higher response rate and can include the respondents from a variety of communities.

Which distribution channel should you choose for survey?

For a survey to be conducted effectively, distribution channels play an important role. The channels are as crucial as the toppings on a pizza: it can work with limited options, but they can improve the final results. Both Survicate and SurveyMonkey add various channels so that your surveys can reach a larger audience and collect more responses.

Survicate and SurveyMonkey are closely matched when it comes to distributing surveys through digital touchpoints as both allow the gathering feedback across different devices (laptops, smartphones, tablets) and various channels (email, link, chat, website and web apps, social media, mobile app and more).

However, the are some obvious differences. Let’s first take a look at the popular channels among the two services.

Email Survey

Email is the most popular direct distribution channel that you can use to deliver your content and get faster response from your audience.

With SurveyMonkey, you can directly invite people by sending an email survey through their website. It gives you the ability to compose and send survey mail using built-in link or survey question embedded in email. Plus, you can easily track users who have taken surveys, send a reminder email to non-respondents, and send an acknowledgment to people when your survey is complete.

On the other side, Survicate doesn’t offer exactly the same capability, but you rely on third-party tools like HubSpot or Salesforce to write and send your embedded email surveys.

Is it a good choice to include a survey question directly in your email?

The short answer to this question is Yes.

By embedding a question directly in your email, you give your respondent a taste of the survey by allowing them to answer the first question of your survey directly from its email client.

For example, you might want to collect feedback from users after they’ve used your product or service and how they rate your services overall. To keep the survey short, you would simply create a one question survey requesting score between 1 to 10. This is the most important thing you would be interested in. That’s the ultimate goal. However, sometimes you will want to collect additional data. In this case, you will be adding more questions to your survey but they will not be visible until the user answers the first survey question by mail.

The second best example is sending an email survey right after the user has interacted with your customer service. It’s about whether your users are really happy with your customer service or not.

Website Survey

Another popular channel for conducting surveys is your website.

Most businesses use this mode to solicit additional views from their website visitors. A good example of conducting a website survey is allowing your customers to share their thoughts on a product and/or service. Generally speaking, often new businesses entering the market would like to hear the opinions of their real customers who have purchased their services and the website is the critical source for this.

Saying goodbye is never easy, especially for businesses that are losing customers. For most businesses, retaining existing customers is a priority. Even if you offer the best services, customers would always leave for one reason or another.

So, another good reason for conducting a website survey is asking customers who wish to stop using your product or service. In fact, asking them a few quick questions gives you important information about what made them quit and helps you improve retention rates in the future after carefully analyzing their needs. So, you can address the issue for everybody else.

Survicate and SurveyMonkey not only let you create and run surveys on your website, but they also give you plenty of options to target your surveys to the right audience at the right time so they don’t get distracted.

Mobile (or In-App) Survey

An in-app or mobile survey is very useful method for collecting feedback from customers about their experience using your app as well helps understand the pain points from them. It helps you improve the survey response rate by delivering the survey on mobile devices and increases the likelihood to collect real-time feedback from users.

An example of a mobile survey is a retail giant who wants to understand from its customers using app survey whether they prefer to buy through a mobile app, online, or other channels.

Moreover, these surveys are well-optimized for smart devices and customers can attend them with ease.

So far, the three survey distribution channels listed above are widely used but not limited. Few other methods of sending surveys online and collecting responses include web links, social media, SMS, and marketing tools.

Pricing: Which is an affordable option?

What the two services have in common is that both offer a free plan that costs you $0 per month. But with that free plan comes a number of limitations. While Survicate lets you collect up to 25 survey responses per month, SurveyMonkey does not have such a limit, so you can collect an unlimited number of responses. However, you can access up to 10 responses per survey. There is no restriction on the number of surveys you can create with the services.

Compared to Survicate’s standard pricing plan, SurveyMonkey has categorized its pricing into two categories suitable for business and personal use.

The paid plan from SurveyMonkey which brings values for money starts at $40 per month and includes 5,000 survey responses per year, averaging almost 420 responses per month with no limit on the number of questions per survey. On the other hand, paid plan from Survicate starts from $65 per month, which is considerably more than what SurveyMonkey asks for, plus you can only collect up to 250 survey responses per month. But there is another important thing to consider before you decide to buy any service. SurveyMonkey has a limitation with its personal plans as only you have to administer the entire portfolio, while Survicate offers a more collaborative way of working by inviting an entire team to manage and distribute the work.

If you are aiming to distribute your surveys to a larger audience, you will need to go for their second tier which allows you to collect more survey responses. The second paid plan from SurveyMonkey costs $80 per month and includes 1250 responses per month. On top of that, you get additional perks like the ability to customize your survey URLs, redirect survey respondents to a custom link when completed, invite up to 3 people to your account to team up on SurveyMonkey. While comparing with the second paid plan from Survicate, we noticed a big difference. For almost the same number of responses if not more, Survicate charges $129 per month. There, SurveyMonkey wins by huge margin. Overall, you save almost ~$50 per month.

Next, both SurveyMonkey and Survicate have a very special enterprise plan that is perfect for big companies and retail chains. This plan overcomes all the limitations of the other plans you seen above. For $289 per month for their ultimate plan, you can collect maximum 5000 survey responses per month. Needless to say, but you get all the features from the other Survicate pricing plans. What’s more, you can even periodically export your survey data through the use of Survicate APIs and store it on your own server for analysis using your favorite BI tools. No fixed price is set for the SurveyMonkey business plan.

Verdict

Well, it would be difficult to make a clear winner here, as Survicate and SurveyMonkey are capable of running a variety of surveys through various channels, both in online and offline mode. They offer pretty similar features, but the price is the only significant fact that might make you more likely to go with SurveyMonkey.

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