Forms and surveys decision
Opinion Stage
A narrow, self-hosted quiz/poll core (embed widget + storage + basic analytics) is realistic for a single developer in ~30 hours, but reproducing Opinion Stage's polished no-code builder, AI features, integrations, and scale is non-trivial and justifies staying on the paid product for most teams.
Visit website↗Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need — the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship.
What a replacement has to do
- Serve an embeddable interactive quiz, collect responses, show result/outcome, and view simple analytics
What it still won’t have
- Mature no-code UI builder with templates and WYSIWYG styling
- Built-in AI quiz generation and advanced analytics
- Large-scale response quotas, CDN-optimized global delivery and hardened anti-bot features
- Prebuilt integrations and managed support/onboarding
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 2 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build an embeddable quiz service using React for the widget, Node.js/Express for the API, and Postgres for storage. Scope: (1) a JS embed snippet that loads a React quiz widget supporting multiple-choice questions, branching logic, and outcome pages; (2) authenticated admin UI to create/edit a quiz (title, questions, answer→outcome mapping), list quizzes, and view/download responses as CSV; (3) backend endpoints to publish quizzes, receive and store responses, and a webhook endpoint to POST responses to a configured URL; (4) simple analytics: total responses and drop-off per question; (5) deployable to a single VPS (Docker), with migrations, environment config, basic tests (unit for branching logic, integration for response flow), error handling, input validation, and TLS. Out of scope: rich WYSIWYG styling builder, AI generation, multi-tenant billing, GDPR/legal contracts, large-scale CDN edge distribution.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- Evidence score63
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time — so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productOpinion Stage home
- official pricingOpinion Stage pricing
- official docsProduct recommendation quiz docs
- open sourceLimeSurvey/LimeSurvey
- open sourcedidi/xiaoju-survey
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
