Forms and surveys decision
SurveyMonkey
A single developer or small team can build the core survey creation, hosting, and analytics features cheaply, but you cannot replace SurveyMonkey’s paid respondent panel, enterprise governance, and broad integrations — so build a limited in-house alternative or keep paying for those capabilities.
Visit website↗$30/mo
$360/yr
Per seat. Read off the official pricing page.
$50one-off30 h to build
$100/mo10 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 4 seats.
The code exists. It is not what you are paying for.
These 2 projects are real, published, and do the core job — and this page still says keep paying. What the subscription buys is marketplace liquidity, and none of that ships in a repository. Fork one anyway if you want to. Go in knowing what it does not carry. What stays hard ↓ · All SurveyMonkey alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Create a survey form, publish a shareable link/collector, collect respondent answers, store responses, run basic analysis/export.
What it still won’t have
- Access to SurveyMonkey Audience (global paid respondent panel)
- Enterprise admin, governance, and compliance features (SSO, dedicated data centers)
- Large catalog of ready-made templates and advanced AI analysis
- Built-in 200+ integrations and Connect hub
- Offline mobile collector and offline sync
What remains hard
- Marketplace liquidity
tap into our global audience panel of 335M+ people in over 130 countries
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 4 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 a minimal SurveyMonkey-like survey service using Next.js for the frontend, Node.js/Express for the API, and Postgres for storage. In scope: WYSIWYG survey builder (create/edit questions and simple skip logic), public collector generation (shareable URL + QR), endpoints to submit responses and store them, basic analytics endpoints (counts, cross-tabs) and CSV export, user auth (email/password) and account-scoped surveys, error handling, unit/integration tests, and Docker-based deployment. Out of scope: paid respondent panel, enterprise SSO/advanced compliance, offline mobile collector, 200+ third-party integrations, advanced AI-assisted analysis. Provide deployment instructions, CI pipeline, and monitoring alerts.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Pay verdict base20
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- Hard moats found in the evidence-3
- Evidence score28
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 productSurveyMonkey homepage
- official pricingSurveyMonkey pricing
- official docsSurveyMonkey features
- open sourceLimeSurvey/LimeSurvey
- open sourceTDuckCloud/tduck-survey-form
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
