Google Forms vs SurveyMonkey:

Written by:

Joe Hodges

So, you’re looking for the best way to run employee engagement surveys and have narrowed your search down to two contenders, Google Forms and SurveyMonkey. 

But how do you decide which one’s right for the job?

Well, part of my job at Charlie is to research other HR solutions so that we can improve our own platform, and I’ve studied the pros and cons of both tools pretty extensively. I’m going to share my learnings here and compare them both side-by-side, Google Forms vs SurveyMonkey, so that you can decide which is best suited to your HR needs. 

As part of running employee engagement and HR surveys, you’ll need to figure out the right process for your business — what types of survey questions to ask, when to ask them, and how frequently etc. So it’s important to bear in mind that a generic survey tool won’t solve all your HR problems. Because of that, I’ll also suggest an alternative to SurveyMonkey and Google Forms towards the end of this blog (hint: it’s a complete HR platform where surveys are just one of the available features), as then you'll be fully informed to make your choice. 

What are the main differences between Google Forms and SurveyMonkey?

Plans & pricing

Google Forms vs SurveyMonkey: In-depth comparison

Before we go deeper into Google Forms vs SurveyMonkey, let’s quickly review what you’re looking for a tool to deliver. You want something that:

• Collects feedback and insights from your employees, easily and efficiently 
• Enables you to consistently run employment engagement surveys and HR surveys
• Is within budget

SurveyMonkey is a common choice for medium to large-sized companies (300+ employees) with well-established HR teams, while Google Forms typically appeals to beginners because it’s free. 

SurveyMonkey and Google Forms are both generic, rather than HR-specific, tools. So let’s take a look at what they offer, and how they differ, with specific goals in mind. 

HR surveys and employee engagement surveys

🏆 SurveyMonkey wins

If your goal is to create and send surveys, then SurveyMonkey is always going to come out top: 

• SurveyMonkey’s ‘Build it for me’ feature creates the survey for you. You select ‘Build it for me’ at the top of the page and then follow the prompts from the Genius Assistant, which asks you a series of questions (Who do you want to survey? What’s your survey goal? etc.) It builds the survey from your answers and pre-populates it with questions that match your goal. Once the survey’s generated, you have the option to customise it. 
• You can select a ‘Employee Satisfaction’ template under ‘Build it for me’, for example, which will quickly build you a survey with nine questions. And the Genius Assistant will then help you to customise the basic survey. This feature is only available on paid accounts. 
• You can also choose to ‘Copy an existing survey’ in SurveyMonkey and recycle a previous survey’s structure and questions. So the more surveys you create, the more ready-made templates you have to choose from. SurveyMonkey is far superior to Google Forms when it comes to making surveys.
• Google Forms has some basic templates to get you started, but aside from those you have to do everything from scratch — including coming up with the questions, as there’s no question bank to pre-populate or seek inspiration from. 

Analytics

🏆 SurveyMonkey wins

One of the most applauded features of SurveyMonkey is its analytics.

The analysis tools in SurveyMonkey help you collect, share and respond to your survey data, and can be found in the ‘Analyse Results’ section of the survey. You can analyse employee engagement survey results, browse individual responses, and export survey data into different formats.

You unlock more features as you move up SurveyMonkey’s tier of account plans — the more advanced the plan, the more advanced the analytics. 

SurveyMonkey lets you create ‘rules’ to answer more specific questions about your data, and analyse survey results in different ways. Paid users can create an unlimited number of rules, and free users can create one rule.

Google Forms has no analytical features, but you can send form data to other Google apps in order to analyse it  — Google Sheets for graphs and charts, for example. 

Pricing 

🏆 Google Forms wins

Google Forms is free to access with a personal Google account, so it’s always going to win on price. It also comes as part of the Google Workspace package for businesses for a monthly subscription after a free trial period, but most people will likely use their personal account to test it out.

SurveyMonkey has a free basic plan, and you’ll receive a notification when you need to move to a paid account to unlock a selected feature. You can only send the most basic surveys for free, with a limited number of question types.