Top 6 Enterprise Survey Software Tools

Gathering information from customers and colleagues is a daily challenge within large organizations. Having a secure, efficient way to collect structured data is vital to countless processes across ops, HR, customer success, product, and other verticals.

Today, we’re diving deep into enterprise survey software.

Specifically, we’re going to check out the key purchasing decisions for survey tools, as well as the top priorities for enterprise use cases.

Then, we’ll move on to our top picks for enterprise survey solutions.

By the end, you’ll have all of the information you need to make a fully informed decision about the right solution for your specific requirements.

Let’s start with the basics.

What is enterprise survey software?

Enterprise survey software is used by large organizations to collect, store, manage, and analyze information from stakeholders, including customers, clients, vendors, employees, and other users.

In the first instance, this means enabling colleagues to design surveys, including their data schema and appearance, without requiring extensive technical skills.

So, where does this differ from a form builder?

Survey software typically also offers capabilities for analyzing our responses. That is, allowing us to aggregate and visualize key insights from the topic we’re conducting a survey on.

What leads us to…

When do enterprises need to conduct surveys?

There are countless different contexts where enterprises might need to gather survey data.

Broadly speaking, we can divide these into two clusters. First, there are internal surveys. These are typically carried out by departments including operations, HR, or finance, in order to gather information from authenticated users.

The key challenge is that these kinds of surveys are likely to deal with sensitive information about specific employees that we’ll need to store in the long term.

Then we have external-facing surveys.

These are used to gather information from customers, vendors, suppliers, or even members of the public. These could be unauthenticated users, but the information in question could still potentially be sensitive.

The bigger challenge, however, is that we’re typically dealing with a higher volume of respondents for whom UX is a bigger concern. So, we’ll likely need enterprise survey software that gives us more power to design efficient, attractive experiences.

What are the priorities for enterprises?

Of course, businesses of all sizes use survey tools. There are a few big players in this space. But, large organizations need to focus on slightly different issues and capabilities here.

One we’ve already alluded to is security. Enterprises typically have heightened security requirements, including self-hosting, air-gapped deployments, connecting to existing data storage, SSO, or other controls.

Similarly, many enterprises prioritize open-source solutions.

Centralization is another top priority. Whereas smaller teams might tolerate individual departments using different survey tools, in an enterprise context, we’re much more likely to want a solution that can be rolled out consistently.

Calculations around the total cost of ownership can also be quite different in an enterprise context. For instance, factoring in things like support costs, custom configurations, SLAs, and more.

Top 6 enterprise survey tools

Now that we have a firm grasp of what enterprise survey software is and what we’re looking for, we can start checking out some specific platforms.

As we said earlier, we’ve chosen a range of tools from across the market.

Let’s check them out.

1. Budibase

Budibase is the open-source, low-code platform that empowers teams to turn data into action. With extensive external data support, powerful automations, optional self-hosting, and autogenerated form UIs, there’s never been an easier way to ship data collection tools.

Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why Budibase is the fast, easy way to ship advanced forms.

Features

Budibase leads the pack for data connectivity. We offer dedicated connectors for querying RDBMSs, NoSQL tools, APIs, and spreadsheets from within our platform without ever storing data internally. Alternatively, you can use BudibaseDB to create custom schemas in seconds.

Build surveys from scratch with a vast library of components in our visual editor, or start with one of our autogenerated form and CRUD layouts. Our UI builder offers optional front-end JavaScript, conditional UIs, mobile responsive designs, and much, much more.

Budibase puts you in control of how and where your surveys are hosted. Use our cloud platform or self-host using Kubernetes, Docker, Digital Ocean, Portainer, Podman, and a whole host of other tools.

Use cases

Budibase is ideal for building advanced, secure forms. With free SSO, optional self-hosting, air-gapped deployments, and secure environment variables, it’s the clear choice for gathering sensitive data at scale.

We also offer flexible role-based access control that can be implemented at the level of data sources, queries, screens, or individual components so you can gather, analyze, and manage survey responses within a single application.

Our open-source, low-code platform is the top choice for IT teams that need to output working solutions at pace.

Check out our features overview to learn more.

Pricing

Budibase is free for up to five authenticated users in the cloud or twenty users if you self-host. Our free plan is one of the most generous in the low-code space, offering unlimited applications and single sign-on for authenticating users.

Paid plans start at $5 per month for authenticated users and $50 for app creators. Premium licenses also include custom branding, reusable code snippets, custom data views, synchronous automations, and restorable app backups.

For enterprise users, we offer custom pricing with air-gapped deployments, enforceable SSO, audit logging, environment variables, and more.

Check out our pricing page to learn more.

2. Jotform

Next up, we have Jotform. As perhaps the biggest name in the SaaS form-builder space, this is a strong offering for less technical users who need an easy way to output attractive forms and surveys.

However, this comes at the expense of some of the flexibility and advanced enterprise features that we can see in some other platforms.

Pros

Jotform’s major selling point is the ease with which we can output highly attractive survey UIs. There’s a flexible drag-and-drop UI for configuring 20+ components, along with a range of widgets for accepting payments. We can also add CSS to elements, but this is a little awkward, requiring us to edit a global stylesheet for our form.

It’s impressively easy to get started, with over 10,000 customizable templates. We can simply define our data model on the fly by simply adding new form components.

Jotform also offers built-in capabilities for analyzing survey responses, as well as stand-alone products for creating approval flows, mobile tools, and web apps without any coding skills.

Cons

The downside of Jotform is a comparative lack of flexibility relative to some of the other platforms in this round-up. For instance, there’s quite limited support for external databases, we can’t self-host, and there’s no option for front-end scripting.

We can make minor changes to the schema of the internal database independently of our survey UIs, but this is fairly limited, only really allowing us to include additional columns, such as statuses.

There’s also no option for creating relationships between stored tables in the internal DB, which could rule it out for more complex internal enterprise survey use cases.

Pricing

Jotform is billed on a per-form and usage-based model. On the free tier, we can build one form with up to 100 monthly submissions and a single authenticated user. However, we can only store up to 500 submissions in total at any given time.

Paid plans start from $34 per month and increase to $99 based on usage. These include some additional features, including custom branding, but still limit us to just one authenticated user.

We’ll need a custom enterprise license for important features like multi-user support, RBAC, SSO, or workflow capabilities, meaning that Jotform has the potential to be a relatively expensive option for many use cases.

3. Google Forms

Google Forms is probably the most popular survey tool on the market today. It’s a free, highly functional form builder, offering incredibly strong integrations with the wider Workspace ecosystem - most importantly, Google Sheets.

While it’s a strong option for building functional surveys on the fly, Google Forms lacks some of the design capabilities of other platforms.

Pros

What’s great about Google Forms is that we can output working, multi-step surveys with minimal design skills. Unlike most other platforms here, user experiences closely resemble the wider Workspace ecosystem, including Docs and Sheets.

Basic customizations are also quite easy. For instance, we can use color pickers to apply brand styling or use branching logic to conditionally display certain fields based on previous responses within a survey.

Google Forms generates reports based on survey responses, making it easy to perform simple aggregations. Alternatively, we can open the raw data in Google Sheets with a single click to perform our own analysis.

Cons

Google Form’s major drawback is that design customization is very limited. We’re really only able to configure the order that individual form fields appear in, along with minimal styling and editing display texts.

It’s also tightly optimized for sending data to Google Sheets rather than a traditional database. For example, if we wanted to add our responses to a SQL database, we’d either have to do this manually or set up a solution in Apps Script to handle syncing.

Google Forms is also not available as a self-hosted solution, which could rule it out for many enterprise use cases on security grounds.

Pricing

Another big upside to Google Forms is that it’s essentially free to use without limits. The only real usage limits we’re likely to encounter are related to our internal storage within a personal account.

However, some important features like custom branding are restricted to paid tiers. Notably, this isn’t offered as a standalone product, requiring us instead to purchase a Google Workspace license.

We’ll likely need to upgrade to a custom enterprise license for Google Workspace for most advanced security features.

4. Microsoft Forms

Microsoft Forms is a very similar solution to its Google counterpart, offered within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Again, it will be very familiar to Office users, making it a good choice for business-level colleagues.

However, like Google Forms, it also lacks some of the more advanced capabilities of some more feature-rich form builders.

Pros

As you might expect, what’s attractive about Microsoft Forms is that it offers strong integrations with the wider Microsoft platform, including the rest of 365, as well as Logic Apps and Power Automate.

One area where Microsoft’s offering is particularly strong is AI. We can use natural language prompts to create questions and survey fields, making it a quick and easy way to output data collection tools.

There are also some impressive capabilities for data visualization, as well as multi-language support.

Cons

Like Google Forms, Microsoft Forms suffers from a comparative lack of flexibility and customization. For instance, we can’t add front-end scripting or custom CSS, limiting us to the fairly rigid native design tools.

Workflow capabilities are also somewhat lacking. If we want to make more advanced survey-based internal tools, we’ll likely need to look to an alternative or another Microsoft platform such as Power Apps.

On the whole, despite Microsoft’s enterprise credentials, Forms is probably best suited to smaller-scale use cases, such as internal departmental surveys.

Pricing

Forms is offered within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, not as a standalone product. There’s a free trial available, but beyond this, we’ll need to purchase a license.

Licenses range from $6-22 per user per month. User and feature restrictions are applied across tiers.

Of course, if your business already owns a Microsoft license, Forms could be an attractive option. On the flip side, it’s unlikely to be worth the license cost in its own right.

5. TypeForm

TypeForm is another popular, standalone SaaS form builder. Like Jotfom, it offers a modern solution for non-technical colleagues to output attractive survey designs.

While it’s an especially strong option for creating multi-step forms, it also lacks a certain amount of design flexibility, instead offering highly opinionated UI-building experiences.

Pros

TypeForm makes it incredibly easy to build modern, multi-step forms. We can add fields and edit the schema of our data table simultaneously, with a default option of a single question per form step.

There’s a heavy emphasis placed on achieving attractive UIs, especially around implementing brand guidelines within our surveys.

We’re also particularly impressed by the native reporting functionality, which handles both response data and survey performance metrics, such as completions. This could make it a good choice for customer-facing use cases, such as sales or marketing.

Cons

One key drawback of TypeForm is that we can’t easily edit the schema of our data tables independently of the UIs. This could make it unviable for basic workflows, such as categorizing or approving individual survey responses.

There’s also no front-end scripting, custom CSS, or external database connections, meaning that TypeForm is unlikely to be suited to more advanced use cases.

TypeForm can’t be self-hosted, and important security features like SSO and access control are limited to paid tiers.

Pricing

TypeForm is a relatively expensive solution, starting from $25 per month for a single authenticated user and 100 survey responses.

There are then two additional fixed pricing tiers to overcome usage limits and access features such as white labeling.

Notably, we’ll need a custom enterprise license to use SSO, RBAC, and custom branding.

6. SurveySparrow

Lastly, we have SurveySparrow. Unlike some of the other platforms we’ve seen, this is a solution that’s highly focused on creating surveys for customer experience use cases.

As such, it offers some additional capabilities that other platforms do not, with the caveat that this comes along with a somewhat higher price tag.

Pros

SurveySparrow offers a mature, modern platform for creating surveys to monitor your brand reputation, including dedicated tools for NPS scores, CSAT, employee assessments, and conversational surveys.

It also offers omni-channel support, so we can send our surveys to customers using email, SMS, social, or other channels. It can even be used within ticketing or other customer support workflows.

SurveySparrow features a range of capabilities that most straight-up form builders can’t offer. For example, we can use AI prompts to create reports and automation rules, making it a powerful solution for non-technical colleagues.

Cons

Some users complain that, as a very comprehensive product, SurveySparrow presents a steep learning curve for outputting surveys. Additionally, there may be many features that aren’t strictly necessary in an enterprise survey software platform.

We can’t natively connect to an external SQL database, which could also rule it out for enterprise use cases. Instead, we’d have to rely on the platform API or an intermediary tool like Zapier or n8n to achieve this.

Another common complaint is that built-in reporting and analytics capabilities are lacking, with some teams reporting that they need to regularly export their response to CSVs in order to adequately work with their data.

Pricing

SurveySparrow offers a free tier for up to ten responses a month across three surveys. Beyond this, we’ll need to opt for a paid license, starting from $19 per month for a single user.

More likely, though, we’ll need to purchase one of the team licenses, which range from $79-$249 per month for 3-5 users, plus additional user fees.

Importantly, key features like SSO, WebHooks, and integration with SalesForce are restricted to the most expensive pricing tiers or custom enterprise licenses.

Turn data into action with Budibase

Budibase is the fast, easy way to build advanced forms and surveys.

With external database support, autogenerated form UIs, mobile-responsive designs, powerful automations, role-based access control, free SSO, optional self-hosting, and more, there’s never been a better way to ship secure, performant data collection tools.

Create professional custom solutions and deploy them anywhere, with totally optional custom code.

Check out our forms page to learn more.