Best European Alternatives to SurveyMonkey
Looking for a European alternative to SurveyMonkey? Surveys collect exactly the data GDPR was written about — opinions, health information, employee feedback, and special-category data collected by accident — and SurveyMonkey is a US processor holding the responses.
These European tools store responses in the EU, and two of them can be self-hosted so responses never reach a third party at all.
How we rank these tools — 4-step process
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European ownership, verified
The company is headquartered and incorporated in the EU, EEA or Switzerland, and processes customer data in Europe. A US parent company disqualifies a tool from this page regardless of where its servers are.
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Category fit and hands-on review
What the tool actually does, who it suits, and where it falls short — checked against the vendor’s own documentation, changelog and pricing page rather than its marketing copy.
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Compliance and pricing check
GDPR posture, hosting location and the prices quoted on this page are verified against the vendor’s public pricing before publication, and re-checked when we revisit the category.
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Position on this page
Placement on this page can be paid, and that can affect which tools appear here and the order they appear in. It never buys a good review: a tool that fails the checks above is not here at any price, and payment does not change the shortcomings we write about. A vendor can ask us to correct a factual error — not to remove a criticism.
Vendors can pay for visibility on this page. It never changes what an entry says about a product, including the criticism, and we earn nothing when you click through to a vendor. Paid placement can affect which tools appear here and the order they appear in. Editorial policy
7 European Alternatives to SurveyMonkey
Typeform
Conversational forms with the best completion rates in the category
Tally
Free forms that work like writing a text document
LimeSurvey
Open-source surveys you can host on your own server
Netigate
Employee and customer feedback with EU data storage
Mopinion
Website and in-app feedback for digital teams
Enalyzer
Survey and reporting platform with a genuinely free tier
SurveyHero
Swiss-hosted surveys with clean question logic
Key takeaways
- SurveyMonkey team plans start at three seats and meter responses: 50,000 a year on Team Advantage, then €0.10 for each one after that.
- The EU data centre is documented as an option for new Enterprise customers, so nobody on a published plan price can select European storage.
- The company was renamed Momentive in 2021, nearly sold to Zendesk, then taken private by Symphony Technology Group in a $1.5 billion all-cash deal agreed in March 2023 and renamed back.
- Tally and Enalyzer both offer free tiers without a response meter, which is not a discount on SurveyMonkey but a different pricing model.
- LimeSurvey is the only option here you can run on your own server, which is what turns a promise of anonymity into something an ethics committee can inspect.
Why people leave SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey is the tool everyone already knows how to use, and that is most of what it sells. A link from that domain gets opened, the template library covers almost any question someone wants to ask, and nobody in the organisation needs training. Those are real advantages and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.
The reason to look elsewhere is the shape of the bill. Team plans are priced per seat with a minimum of three users — €30 per user per month on Team Advantage billed annually, €75 on Team Premier — and on top of the seats the responses are metered: 50,000 a year on the first tier, 100,000 on the second, and €0.10 for every response after that, pooled across everything the team has running.
The individual Standard plan at €39 a month caps you at 1,000 responses a month. This is a product where a successful survey costs more than a failed one.
The second reason is where the answers land. SurveyMonkey does operate an EU data centre, and its own GDPR page describes it as an option for new Enterprise customers. Enterprise is quote-only.
So a school, a works council or a research group on a €30 seat cannot choose European storage at any price short of a sales conversation, which is a different situation from a vendor that simply offers no region at all — and it is worse, because it looks like it is available.
- You are billed for the answers, not the asking A response allowance is a strange way to buy research software, because the thing you are rationing is the thing you wanted. 50,000 responses a year across a team sounds enormous until an employee survey goes to 4,000 staff twice a year and a customer programme runs monthly, and then €0.10 a response turns a good quarter into an overage line. Several tools on this page do not meter responses at all, including two with free tiers.
- European storage exists and you probably cannot have it The EU data centre is documented as an option for new Enterprise customers. Everyone below that is on the default infrastructure regardless of what they are collecting, and no setting in the account changes it. For a Dutch hospital or a German employer this is the whole conversation, and it is the one fact about SurveyMonkey most comparison pages get wrong in the vendor's favour.
- Three seats before you have started Team plans require a minimum of three users, and every colleague who needs to see the raw responses needs one of their own. That is defensible pricing for a market research department and absurd for the common case, which is one person who runs surveys and three or four who want to read the results. It is the reason small organisations end up sharing a login, which is its own compliance problem.
- The company has changed hands and names twice It became Momentive in June 2021, agreed a $4.1 billion sale to Zendesk that collapsed in February 2022 when Zendesk shareholders voted it down, and agreed a $1.5 billion all-cash sale to Symphony Technology Group in March 2023 that took it private later that year, after which the SurveyMonkey name came back. None of that is misconduct. It does mean a data processing agreement signed a few years ago names a counterparty that has since been renamed, sold and renamed again, and most processor registers were never updated.
What you have to replace, not just match
Work out which of the four jobs your SurveyMonkey account is actually doing, because they barely overlap and no single European tool covers all four.
The first is the quick form — a sign-up sheet, an event registration, a request for feedback after a workshop. The second is the research instrument, with branching, quotas, matrices and a translation for each market. The third is the recurring programme: engagement, eNPS, customer satisfaction measured every quarter so the number can be compared with last quarter. The fourth is feedback captured inside a product or a website, where nobody is ever going to open a survey link.
Most accounts are doing the first and believing they are doing the second. Look at what actually ran in the last twelve months before choosing, because a tool bought for research capability and used for sign-up sheets is the most expensive mistake available in this category.
The alternatives compared
| Position | Tool | Headquarters | Pricing | Jurisdiction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | Typeform | Barcelona, Spain | Free tier / from $25 per month | EU (Spain) |
| #2 | Tally | Ghent, Belgium | Free with unlimited forms and submissions / Pro EUR 20 per month / Business EUR 65 per month, two months free when paid yearly | EU (Belgium) |
| #3 | LimeSurvey | Hamburg, Germany | Free self-hosted / LimeSurvey Cloud from about €29 per month | EU (Germany) |
| #4 | Netigate | Stockholm, Sweden | Custom pricing by programme and respondents | EU (Sweden) |
| #5 | Mopinion | Rotterdam, Netherlands | From about €259 per month | EU (Netherlands) |
| #6 | Enalyzer | Copenhagen, Denmark | Free tier with unlimited surveys and responses / paid plans for advanced features | EU (Denmark) |
| #7 | SurveyHero | Zurich, Switzerland | Free tier / paid from about CHF 15 per month | Switzerland (adequacy decision, outside the EEA) |
How each alternative compares to SurveyMonkey
- Which law reaches it. EU (Spain). SurveyMonkey is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. EU.
- Source code. Closed source, as SurveyMonkey is.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: Teams whose SurveyMonkey problem is the completion rate, not the price
Typeform SL is in Barcelona, and the thing it does differently is structural rather than cosmetic: one question at a time, with logic jumps skipping anything that does not apply. A SurveyMonkey page of stacked questions tells a respondent exactly how much of their evening this will take, and a proportion of them decide it is too much. Typeform withholds that judgement until they are already answering.
Against SurveyMonkey the practical argument is that you are buying finished responses rather than started ones. It also puts EU processing on every plan rather than reserving it for a quoted tier, which for a Spanish company is not a feature so much as an address.
It is not the tool for a research instrument. There is no quota management, long questionnaires suffer under the one-at-a-time format, and response limits on the lower tiers are a real constraint. If your SurveyMonkey account is running a fifty-question study across four countries, read further down this page.
What Typeform does better than SurveyMonkey
- A conversational format that measurably lifts completion, where SurveyMonkey shows the whole questionnaire at once
- EU processing on every plan, not an option reserved for quoted Enterprise contracts
- Spanish operating company, so no US parent sits above the responses
- Design and branding control that makes the form look like yours rather than like a survey tool
- Drop-off analytics that show which question is losing people, which is the number worth acting on
Where Typeform is a step down from SurveyMonkey
- Response limits on lower tiers, so the metering complaint is not fully solved
- No quota management, which SurveyMonkey's research-oriented plans do offer
- Long questionnaires are slower to complete one question per screen
- A smaller template and question library than SurveyMonkey's
Standout against SurveyMonkey. It is the only option here bought for a behavioural effect rather than a feature list: the format itself is the product, and it is aimed squarely at the responses SurveyMonkey never receives.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Belgium). SurveyMonkey is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. European Union, on servers the privacy notice does not name; Cloudflare Turnstile (US) handles bot detection on sign-up.
- Source code. Closed source, as SurveyMonkey is.
Best for: Anyone whose SurveyMonkey bill is driven by volume rather than features
Tally is Belgian, based in Brussels, and its free plan carries unlimited forms and unlimited responses. Put that beside €30 per user per month with a three-seat minimum and a 50,000-response allowance, and the comparison is not a discount — it is a different answer to the question of what you are paying for.
The editor is the second difference. You type, and formatting happens, the way a modern document editor works, so there is no field palette to learn and forms get made by the person who needs them instead of being requested from whoever owns the survey licence. Conditional logic, calculations and file uploads sit underneath, which is more than the free tier of a form tool normally carries.
What it will not do is research. There are no quotas, no statistical analysis and nothing resembling a multilingual instrument, and it cannot be self-hosted. Pro at $29 a month buys custom domains and the removal of branding. Treat it as the replacement for the two-thirds of your SurveyMonkey account that was never really research.
What Tally does better than SurveyMonkey
- Unlimited responses on a free plan, against an annual allowance and €0.10 for each extra
- No seat minimum, where team pricing starts at three users whether or not you have three
- Belgian company with EU processing on every tier, not only on a quoted contract
- A document-style editor that anyone can use without being given a licence first
- Conditional logic, calculations and file uploads included rather than tied to a plan level
Where Tally is a step down from SurveyMonkey
- No quotas, no statistical analysis and nothing for a formal research instrument
- Not self-hostable, so the anonymity argument is no stronger than SurveyMonkey's
- A much smaller integration and template catalogue
- Custom domains and branding removal need Pro at $29 a month
Standout against SurveyMonkey. It is the only tool here whose free tier removes the response meter entirely, which is the single line item that makes most SurveyMonkey invoices unpredictable.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany). SurveyMonkey is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Your own server, or German cloud.
- Source code. Open source, where SurveyMonkey is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
- Independently checked. GDPR — you remain controller when self-hosted.
Best for: Universities, works councils and anyone who has to show where the answers live
LimeSurvey GmbH has run from Hamburg since 2003, the software is GPLv2, and the self-hosted edition costs nothing but the machine it runs on. That is the option SurveyMonkey cannot offer at any tier: the responses arrive on infrastructure you control, you remain the sole controller, and there is no processor to name in the register.
It matters most where the promise of anonymity has to survive scrutiny. An employer telling staff that an engagement survey is anonymous is asking to be believed; an employer whose survey runs on a server the works council can inspect, in a mode that keeps the invitation list apart from the answers, is offering evidence. That distinction decides whether people answer honestly, which decides whether the exercise was worth running.
It is also the most demanding tool here. The interface is dated, there is a genuine learning curve, someone has to patch the server, and the respondent experience is plainer than anything else on this page. LimeSurvey Cloud from about €29 a month on German hosting removes the operational half at the cost of the sovereignty half.
What LimeSurvey does better than SurveyMonkey
- Self-hosting, so the responses never reach a third party and no residency tier has to be bought
- Quotas, 28 question types, matrices and multilingual instruments maintained as one survey
- GPLv2 licensed, so the code behind an anonymity claim can be read rather than trusted
- German company operating since 2003, with a German cloud for teams without a server
- No per-seat charge and no response meter when self-hosted, at any volume
Where LimeSurvey is a step down from SurveyMonkey
- A dated interface and a steeper learning curve than SurveyMonkey's
- Self-hosting needs someone to own updates, backups and uptime
- The respondent-facing design is plainer, which costs completion on consumer surveys
- Considerable overkill for a registration form or a quick poll
Standout against SurveyMonkey. It is the only option here where the sentence "nobody outside this organisation can see the responses" is a fact about your infrastructure rather than a clause in someone's contract.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Sweden). SurveyMonkey is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. EU.
- Source code. Closed source, as SurveyMonkey is.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: HR and customer teams measuring the same thing every quarter
Netigate AB has operated from Stockholm since 2005 and prices by programme and respondent volume rather than by seat, which is a direct answer to the structure that makes SurveyMonkey expensive: a continuous engagement or NPS programme is precisely the use case that burns through an annual response allowance.
What it adds is the apparatus around a recurring measurement — benchmarking so this quarter can be read against last quarter, HR system integration so people are surveyed as they join and leave rather than from a spreadsheet someone maintains, and reporting that suppresses results for groups below a minimum size so a four-person team cannot be identified by narrowing a filter. Getting an employee programme approved in Europe usually turns on that last point.
The cost is the way in. There is no self-serve tier and no published price, so evaluating it means a sales conversation, and it is a poorer fit than LimeSurvey for open-ended research where each study is different.
What Netigate does better than SurveyMonkey
- Priced by programme and respondents instead of per seat with a three-user minimum
- Built for repeated measurement with benchmarking, where SurveyMonkey produces one report at a time
- Anonymity thresholds in the reporting itself rather than managed by an administrator's discretion
- EU data storage as the default, not a tier you have to qualify for
- HR system integration that keeps a recurring programme running without manual distribution
Where Netigate is a step down from SurveyMonkey
- No self-serve signup and no published pricing, where SurveyMonkey takes a card in two minutes
- Less flexible than SurveyMonkey for one-off surveys that are all different
- Lighter than a dedicated customer experience platform on the CX side
- Overbuilt and overpriced for an organisation sending three surveys a year
Standout against SurveyMonkey. It is the only tool here whose pricing does not punish a high response rate, which is the exact situation an employee survey is designed to produce.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Netherlands). SurveyMonkey is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. EU.
- Source code. Closed source, as SurveyMonkey is.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: Digital teams fixing a specific page or step rather than asking a general question
Mopinion BV is in Rotterdam, founded in 2014, and it collects feedback inside the website or app at the moment something goes wrong, rather than emailing a questionnaire afterwards. That is a different instrument from anything SurveyMonkey sends, and it reaches a different population: the people who abandoned the checkout are not the people who answer surveys.
Against a SurveyMonkey account being used for customer feedback, the argument is timing and context. A form triggered on the payment page, with the session already attached, tells you which step failed. A survey mailed a week later tells you what someone remembers about it, filtered through whatever happened since.
It is the most expensive option on this page, from around €259 a month, and evaluation runs through a demo rather than a signup. It is also the wrong tool for the majority of SurveyMonkey use: it will not run an employee engagement study, a research instrument or an event registration.
What Mopinion does better than SurveyMonkey
- Captures feedback in the page or app at the moment of the experience, which no emailed survey reaches
- Session context attached to the response, so the answer points at a specific step
- Dutch company with EU storage, against an EU option reserved for quoted contracts
- Dashboards built for continuous digital feedback rather than for a single closed survey
Where Mopinion is a step down from SurveyMonkey
- From about €259 a month, far above every published SurveyMonkey plan
- Demo on request, with no free tier to test against real traffic
- Not a questionnaire tool: no research instruments, no employee programmes, no registrations
- Requires a website or app to instrument, so it does nothing for offline or email-only audiences
Standout against SurveyMonkey. It is the only tool here that collects an answer from someone who was never going to open a survey, which is the population every SurveyMonkey report is silently missing.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Denmark). SurveyMonkey is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Denmark/EU.
- Source code. Closed source, as SurveyMonkey is.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: NGOs, consultants and small teams that need results presented, not just collected
Enalyzer A/S has been in Copenhagen since 2000, and its free tier carries unlimited surveys and unlimited responses, with Danish and EU hosting. That combination — no response meter and a real reporting layer on the free plan — is rare enough to make it the default recommendation for anyone running a serious project without a budget.
The comparison with SurveyMonkey is uncomfortable for SurveyMonkey at the small end. A three-person charity pays €1,080 a year before any responses arrive on Team Advantage, and pays nothing at all here, while getting European storage that SurveyMonkey reserves for Enterprise.
Where it loses is reach and polish. The integration catalogue is a fraction of SurveyMonkey's, it is barely known outside the Nordics, advanced features sit behind paid plans, and it cannot be self-hosted, so it does not answer the anonymity question the way LimeSurvey does.
What Enalyzer does better than SurveyMonkey
- Unlimited surveys and responses on the free tier, against an allowance plus €0.10 per extra response
- Danish company with EU storage on every plan rather than on a quoted contract
- Reporting that presents results properly without an upgrade, which is unusual on a free tier
- No three-seat minimum before a team can start
- Operating since 2000, so the free tier is not a startup promise
Where Enalyzer is a step down from SurveyMonkey
- A far smaller integration catalogue than SurveyMonkey's
- Advanced features require paid plans, so the free tier has a ceiling
- Little recognition outside the Nordics, which can matter for external respondents
- No self-hosting, so anonymity is a contractual assurance rather than a demonstrable one
Standout against SurveyMonkey. It is the only free option here that comes with reporting good enough to present, which is what usually forces a small organisation onto a paid SurveyMonkey plan in the first place.
- Which law reaches it. Switzerland (adequacy decision, outside the EEA). SurveyMonkey is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Switzerland.
- Source code. Closed source, as SurveyMonkey is.
- Independently checked. GDPR-adequate.
Best for: Small teams wanting a presentable survey with storage outside both the US and the EU
SurveyHero is made by Enuvo GmbH in Zurich, founded in 2013, with a free tier and paid plans from around CHF 15 a month. Data is hosted in Switzerland, which sits outside the EEA under a European Commission adequacy decision — lawful for transfers from the EU without standard contractual clauses, and not the same thing as processing inside the single market. Write that down in the processing agreement rather than leaving it implied.
Against SurveyMonkey the appeal is proportion. It produces a clean, well-behaved survey with sensible question logic, at a price a department can approve without a procurement process, and without a seat minimum. For an organisation whose objection to SurveyMonkey is that it is a large American platform charging per head for something small, this is the least complicated exit.
It is also the narrowest tool on the page. There is no self-hosting, no programme management, no in-product capture, and the feature set thins out quickly on anything resembling a research study. It is ranked last because it does less than everything above it, not because it does it badly.
What SurveyHero does better than SurveyMonkey
- Swiss hosting outside both US and EU jurisdiction, where SurveyMonkey's EU option needs an Enterprise contract
- A free tier and paid plans from about CHF 15 a month, with no three-seat minimum
- Clean question logic without the configuration overhead of a research platform
- Small enough to adopt without procurement, which is often the actual blocker
Where SurveyHero is a step down from SurveyMonkey
- A Swiss supplier, so the transfer leans on a Commission adequacy finding instead of staying inside the single market
- The smallest feature set here: no quotas, no programmes, no in-product feedback
- Priced in Swiss francs, which complicates budgeting for a euro-denominated organisation
- A far smaller company and integration catalogue than SurveyMonkey
Standout against SurveyMonkey. It is the only option here that answers the storage question with a third jurisdiction, which suits organisations that trust neither American platforms nor the idea that EU hosting settles everything.
What actually breaks when you switch
The logic is the migration, not the data. Responses export as CSV, XLS, PDF and PowerPoint and land anywhere, but a questionnaire is skip rules, piping, randomisation, quotas and display conditions, and none of that has a portable format. Rebuild your most complicated instrument first, as a pilot, so the estimate for the rest is based on something real.
Do not cut over while a survey is collecting. A live collector link keeps working on the platform that issued it, and a wave split across two tools produces two datasets with different identifiers and different timestamps that somebody has to reconcile by hand. Finish the wave, then build the next one elsewhere.
The last problem is the people who read the reports rather than write the surveys. SurveyMonkey's output format is familiar to every manager who has ever received one, and a new tool's dashboard is not. Send one report in the new format alongside the old one before the switch, because a migration that produces charts nobody recognises gets quietly reversed.
Can I keep SurveyMonkey and just move the data to Europe?
Only by becoming an Enterprise customer, and only by asking. SurveyMonkey's own GDPR material describes EU hosting as available to new Enterprise accounts; there is no toggle on a Standard, Advantage or Team plan, and no published price for the upgrade.
That matters more here than in most software categories, because a survey is a collection instrument aimed at people who are not your customers — staff, patients, students, residents — and the question "where will my answer be stored" is one they are entitled to ask before answering. Answering it with a contract you have not signed is not an answer.
If you are large enough for an Enterprise conversation, have it: the product is good and the certifications are real, with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 accredited hosting behind it. If you are not, European storage is not something you can configure your way into, and that is the point at which this page becomes relevant.
How do the costs actually compare?
It depends entirely on how many people answer, which is the unusual part. Team Advantage is €30 per user per month billed annually with a three-seat minimum, so €1,080 a year before a single response arrives, with 50,000 responses included across the team and €0.10 each beyond that.
Set that against the European options and the models diverge rather than the prices. Tally and Enalyzer both run free tiers with no response meter. LimeSurvey is free if you host it and about €29 a month on its German cloud. Typeform starts around $25 a month and does limit responses on lower tiers, so it is the one European option here with a comparable constraint.
The honest reading is that SurveyMonkey is not badly priced for a market research team sending 50,000 surveys a year. It is very badly priced for a charity, a school or a department that sends four surveys a year to a thousand people each and needs five colleagues to see the results.
What does SurveyMonkey do that the alternatives do not?
Recognition, first. People open a link they have seen before, and a survey nobody opens has no data in it. That effect is small, real, and impossible for a smaller brand to buy.
Breadth, second. The template library, the question bank and the integration catalogue are larger than anything on this page, and a colleague who has used SurveyMonkey at a previous employer arrives already trained. Against that, most European tools here are narrower on purpose: Netigate does programmes, Mopinion does in-product feedback, LimeSurvey does research instruments.
What SurveyMonkey does not do, at any price a published plan will get you, is store your responses in the EU. That is the trade, and it is worth stating in one sentence before a procurement meeting rather than three pages into a comparison.
Can I move my existing surveys and results across?
The results, yes. SurveyMonkey exports responses as CSV, XLS, PDF and PowerPoint, and every tool here will take a CSV of raw responses into a spreadsheet or a reporting layer.
The surveys themselves, no. A questionnaire is not a document, it is logic: skip rules, piping, randomisation, quotas and display conditions that are expressed differently in every tool. A ten-question form is ten minutes to rebuild. An instrument with branching across four languages is a project, and it is the piece to pilot before committing rather than the piece to schedule last.
The third thing that does not move is the link. Anything already in the field keeps collecting where it is, so the sane migration runs the current wave to completion on SurveyMonkey and starts the next one on the new tool, rather than cutting over mid-fieldwork.
Which one to pick
If your account is mostly quick forms and the invoice is driven by volume, Tally or Enalyzer end the metering entirely and cost nothing, which is a larger saving than any plan comparison will show you.
If people are not finishing what you send, Typeform is the one tool here that addresses that directly, and it is the only reason on this page to pay more rather than less.
If you are collecting answers from staff, patients or students and have to be able to prove where they went, LimeSurvey self-hosted is the answer and nothing else here comes close — because SurveyMonkey reserves EU storage for Enterprise, and on any published plan the option is not available to you.
And if the account is really a quarterly programme rather than a set of surveys, Netigate is priced for that and SurveyMonkey is not. Mopinion and SurveyHero are the two specialists: one for feedback that has to be captured in the product, one for a small team that wants the responses in Switzerland and no procurement process to get there.
Frequently Asked Questions
Typeform if the problem is that too few people finish. Tally or Enalyzer if the problem is being charged per response. LimeSurvey if you need a real research instrument or have to demonstrate anonymity rather than assert it. Netigate if you run the same survey every quarter and want the trend. Mopinion if the feedback should be captured inside the product instead of emailed out. SurveyHero if you want something presentable with Swiss hosting.
Symphony Technology Group, a private equity firm, which agreed to buy the company in March 2023 for $1.5 billion in cash when it was still called Momentive. It had been renamed Momentive in June 2021 and had agreed a $4.1 billion sale to Zendesk that fell through in February 2022 after Zendesk shareholders rejected it. Under STG ownership the SurveyMonkey name returned, and the operating entities are SurveyMonkey Inc. in San Mateo and SurveyMonkey Europe UC in Dublin.
There is an EU data centre, and SurveyMonkey's own GDPR material presents it as an option for new Enterprise customers rather than a setting available on published plans. In practice that means a Standard, Advantage or Team customer cannot choose European storage. If your requirement is that responses stay in the EU, the answer on those plans is no, and it is worth confirming in writing rather than inferring from a compliance page.
There is a free Basic plan. Individual Standard is €39 a month billed monthly with 1,000 responses a month; Advantage Annual is €36 a month billed annually (€432 a year) with 15,000 responses a year; Premier Annual is €99 a month (€1,188 a year) with 40,000.
Team plans need at least three users: Team Advantage is €30 per user per month billed annually with 50,000 responses a year, Team Premier €75 per user per month with 100,000, and additional responses cost €0.10 each across the whole team. Enterprise is quoted.
It can be used lawfully: there is a data processing addendum, an Irish entity in SurveyMonkey Europe UC, ISO 27001 certification and SOC 2 accredited hosting. Compliance is not where this falls down. What you cannot do below Enterprise is keep the responses inside the EU, and for an employer or a public body collecting answers from people who did not choose the tool, that is usually the question that decides it.
Often, and more importantly they are priced differently. Tally and Enalyzer both run free tiers without a response meter, LimeSurvey costs nothing beyond hosting if you run it yourself, and SurveyHero starts around CHF 15 a month. Netigate and Mopinion go the other way: Mopinion starts near €259 a month and Netigate is quoted by programme, because both are sold to teams running continuous measurement rather than sending a form.
Responses export as CSV, XLS, PDF and PowerPoint, which is enough to carry the answers anywhere. The survey design does not export in any form another tool can read, so branching, quotas, piping and multilingual versions are rebuilt by hand. Budget for the rebuild rather than the export, and start with your single most complicated questionnaire so the estimate is honest.
They keep running where they are, because the collector link belongs to the platform that issued it. Do not cut over mid-fieldwork: a respondent list split across two tools produces two datasets that have to be merged by hand, with different response identifiers and different timestamps. Finish the wave, then build the next one somewhere else.
On any hosted platform you are asking people to take your word for it, because the administrator can in principle see who was invited and when a response arrived.
LimeSurvey, self-hosted, is the one option here where the server is yours, the anonymous response mode separates the invitation from the answer, and a works council or ethics committee can be shown the setup rather than told about it. Netigate takes a different route, suppressing results for groups below a minimum size so a small team cannot be identified by filtering.
Who worked on this review
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