Surveys are beneficial for a lot of things like data collection, research and customer response. No doubt, you’ve had to fill a couple out or create them for clients and bosses.
Surveys can be a pain in the ass, frankly. Aside from making them look good - they have to function correctly. Oftentimes, the data is critical in nature, so security and ease of use is a must too.
I wanted to build a quick survey to give people after our Social Media Webinar on Thursday. I cForms in Wordpress rocks, but I don’t want to be emailed the data. I just want to download it once it’s all done. Hosted options like SurveyGizmo are limiting as to what the free account gives you, and all that stuff is sitting on some one else’s server!
So I ventured out to find an open source solution.
After trolling around SourceForge for hours, I finally found LimeSurvey.
LimeSurvey is a complete survey application that lets you do the install on your servers, build a really nice looking survey, and keep the results in a database.
One of the beautiful things about LimeSurvey is its ease of use. After only a couple minutes you can have something up and running. There is also some graphing and reporting options available in the admin panel.
So the next time you need a survey done, check out LimeSurvey. All you need to do is install it on your web server, populate the fields, and you’re off and running!
Let me know what you think about the app!
I love open source software, and my first time with survey software was 2 years ago installing and trying LimeSurvey (I'm in registered with them). I recommend them if individuals must have the data on their own servers and have the resources to do so. However, while a hosted solution, SurveyGizmo offers a lot of features (particularly at the paid levels) not available in other tools. For your audience, they probably have hosting, so give LimeSurvey a whirl, but absolutely check around to make sure you get the right fit for you.
Full Disclosure, I'm currently an employee at SurveyGizmo.
-Mario