As of 29 Oct 2026, the panel rates LimeSurvey 3/5 and SurveyMonkey 3/5 in Forms & Surveys. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 5 of the 6 judges pick LimeSurvey and 1 picks SurveyMonkey. LimeSurvey scores higher on 1 of 7 criteria (Form & survey building). SurveyMonkey scores higher on 5 of 7 criteria (Survey analysis & reporting, Pricing transparency, Hosting choice, teams & portability, plus 2 more). Provenance — LimeSurvey: EU-Made; SurveyMonkey: Rest of world. Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made.
LimeSurvey and SurveyMonkey split by criterion, with no overall call. Form building goes to LimeSurvey — mean 7.5 against 6.8, five judges lean LimeSurvey, one SurveyMonkey — on 28+ question types, conjoint and maxDiff methods, relevance equations and 80+ languages. Analysis and reporting goes to SurveyMonkey — 7.0 against 4.8, six lean SurveyMonkey, zero LimeSurvey — on crosstabs, significance testing and AI text analysis; we found no public information on LimeSurvey cross-tabulation or weighting. Collection and workflows splits: means favor SurveyMonkey 6.3 to 5.8, yet three judges lean LimeSurvey on invitations, quotas and access codes. Pricing transparency leans SurveyMonkey, 6.2 versus 5.2. Sovereignty means tie at 5.7 with five judges leaning LimeSurvey, whose data residency is EU-optional versus US default. Weighted totals favor LimeSurvey across five judges — operations manager 7.3 to 6.5, HR lead 6.8 to 6.0 — while the data protection officer's 6.4 to 0 is a split the verdict flags as anomalous.
Choose LimeSurvey if
You need research-grade form building — conjoint/CBC, maxDiff, relevance equations and 80+ languages — where the mean stands 7.5 to 6.8 with five judges leaning LimeSurvey against one, and five of six judges gave it 9.
Your team sends mass invitations with bounce handling, quotas and unique access codes per respondent; three judges lean LimeSurvey here, and we found no public information on SurveyMonkey quotas, reminders or unique links.
You need the option of EU data residency: LimeSurvey's data residency attribute is EU-optional, SurveyMonkey's is US default, and five judges lean LimeSurvey on sovereignty with means tied at 5.7.
You want to run the software yourself — the verdict documents a free self-hosted Community Edition under GPLv2, and three judges lean LimeSurvey on hosting and administration.
Your procurement excludes US Cloud Act subprocessor exposure, which is SurveyMonkey's listed attribute; LimeSurvey's subprocessor exposure is listed as unknown.
Choose SurveyMonkey if
You need crosstabs with statistical significance, password-protected or SSO-enforced dashboards, and an SPSS export — six judges lean SurveyMonkey on analysis and reporting, 7.0 versus 4.8.
Your team analyzes open-ended responses — SurveyMonkey documents AI sentiment and thematic analysis, while we found no public information on LimeSurvey open-text analysis.
You want published team pricing: Team Advantage €30 per user per month and Team Premier €75 per user per month, from 3 users billed annually; pricing transparency leans SurveyMonkey 6.2 to 5.2.
You need a European contracting entity — SurveyMonkey's legal entity jurisdiction is Ireland, and the verdict credits a published subprocessor list and an online DPA with standard contractual clauses.
Read this comparison as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.
The HR Lead
Runs the yearly engagement survey and pulse checks for a German company of six hundred, with the works council reading every question. Wants anonymity that is real and stated, results hidden below a minimum group size, reports per department that managers can read, and answers that are deleted when the agreement with the works council says so.
LimeSurvey
This judge's pick
SurveyMonkey
Criterion by criterion
Form & survey building
LimeSurvey
The captured pages document 28+ question types including nine matrix variants and an NPS type, skip logic with piping, relevance equations and randomisation of questions and groups, reusable questionnaire labels, 80+ languages with quick translation, custom HTML/CSS/JS design, and WCAG 2.2 AA named, plus conjoint/CBC, MaxDiff and quotas among the research methods. We found no public information on versioned forms with change history or a published accessibility conformance report.
SurveyMonkey
Skip logic, question and answer piping, A/B testing and block randomization are listed plan features, multilingual surveys and an employee-engagement template set are public, and the Apply product documents branching, dynamic and advanced logic with show/hide/skip actions and ANY/ALL multi-condition rules. The consent pattern is genuinely well documented: a required yes/no question with skip logic that disqualifies anyone who declines. We found no public information on calculations or scoring, custom CSS, or a named accessibility standard such as WCAG or BITV.
Distribution, response collection & workflows
LimeSurvey
Invitations and reminders go through mass mailing to a survey participants table with unique access codes per respondent, automatic bounce handling, quotas and scheduled start and end times, alongside QR codes, embedding, password-protected links, panel integration and a RemoteControl API via XML-RPC/JSON-RPC. We found no public information on approval routing, conditional notifications, webhooks or offline collection.
SurveyMonkey
An address book feeds the invitation collectors, email and SMS delivery run through named providers, payments can be collected inside the form, webhooks push responses conditionally into Slack, Teams, Tableau and Power BI, and Zapier can trigger on every new complete response or add contacts and send surveys. We found no public information on email reminders with unique links, response quotas or closing rules, offline collection, or a documented API for the core survey product — the pages we read describe only Wufoo's API. That leaves this between the solid mid level and the advanced one.
Survey analysis & reporting
LimeSurvey
Responses can be filtered, charted, monitored in real time and exported to SPSS, R, Stata, CSV, Excel and PDF, with quick graphical statistics and backend data entry. We found no public information on cross-tabulation with significance testing, open-text or sentiment analysis, or trend reports across survey waves.
SurveyMonkey
Crosstabs, statistical significance, multi-survey analysis, AI thematic analysis and sentiment on open text are listed features, results dashboards auto-update while a survey runs and can be password-protected or, on Enterprise, locked behind SSO — usable as manager-facing department reports. Exports reach CSV, Excel, PDF, PowerPoint and SPSS with an SAV file. We found no public information on weighting, trend reporting across survey waves, or suppressing results below a minimum group size, which is the first question my works council asks.
Consent, GDPR & respondent data
LimeSurvey
Anonymous surveys with an explicit anonymous mode, a data processing agreement in the customer account, a named data protection officer, 2048-bit SSL in transit, configurable always-encrypted storage for sensitive answers and participant fields, and the stated position that only strictly necessary session cookies are set cover most of what my works council asks about. We found no public information on customer-defined retention periods with automatic deletion or on tooling for per-respondent access and erasure requests.
SurveyMonkey
Consent statements with skip logic that removes declining respondents, a disqualification page and example consent texts in German and English are well documented; an online DPA with standard contractual clauses, encryption in transit and at rest, creator-controlled retention and privacy-rights responses within 30 days are all stated. The concern for us: IP addresses are used for duplicate-response prevention and inferred location, and we found no public information on an anonymous mode that does not store them, on automatic deletion at a fixed period, or on cookie controls for the form itself. De-identified response data is also stated to be transferred to the United States and used to train models.
Hosting choice, teams & portability
LimeSurvey
A free GPLv2 self-hosted Community Edition, selectable data centers (EU, US, and more) with data stored in Germany on Hetzner, SSO with SAML and LDAP on the Corporate plan, white-label domains and survey import/export with an API are all documented. We found no public information on an audit log or granular per-form roles, and the terms state only reasonable efforts toward 99% availability.
SurveyMonkey
Team roles (Primary Admin, Full User, Analyst), two seat types, SSO on Enterprise and SCIM provisioning with an identity provider like Azure AD are documented, plus white-label branding, a custom subdomain and exports to CSV, PDF, PPT, XLS and SPSS. An EU data centre exists but is reserved for Enterprise customers, data cannot be migrated back if you downgrade, and accounts opened before 2019 cannot move at all; we found no public information on an audit log or a self-hosted edition. EU storage being a sales conversation rather than a plan choice is what caps this for a 600-person German company.
European sovereignty
LimeSurvey
The contracting entity is LimeSurvey GmbH in Hamburg with a register number and German VAT ID, hosting runs on named German infrastructure (Hetzner in Gunzenhausen), the AI functions run on an open-source model in the provider's own infrastructure, and the named third-country processor Zoho is covered by EU standard contractual clauses. ISO 27001 is stated only as in progress, the data processing agreement is stored in the customer account rather than published, and we found no public information on a complete subprocessor list with locations.
SurveyMonkey
The rest-of-world contracting entity is SurveyMonkey Europe UC in Dublin with an Irish-entity DPA for EEA customers, the subprocessor list is published with locations and a PDF download, and standard contractual clauses plus Data Privacy Framework certification are stated. But storage defaults to the US, the EU data centre is Enterprise-only, and the chain runs through US providers for hosting (AWS), email (SparkPost), SMS (Twilio), AI (OpenAI, Anthropic), analytics (Snowflake) and support (Salesforce), with survey prompts sent to a US AI vendor and de-identified responses transferred to the US from the EU data centre. We found no public information on security certifications such as ISO 27001 or SOC 2.
Pricing transparency
LimeSurvey
Basic is 34€ per month billed monthly, Expert 29€ and Business 75€ per month billed annually, all including 19% VAT, with stated limits for Basic (1 admin user, 1,000 responses per month, 250 MB) and Expert (3 admin users, 10,000 responses per year, 1 GB) and a two-week online cancellation right. The Corporate plan carrying SSO, SAML and the dedicated server is "Contact sales", and we found no public information on overage or extra-response prices or the Business plan's user and response limits.
SurveyMonkey
The team plans are public — Team Advantage at €30 per user per month from 3 users billed annually with 50,000 responses a year, Team Premier at €75 per user per month with 100,000 responses a year and €0.10 per additional response — with taxes excluded, auto-renewal and cancellation terms stated, and the free tier's over-limit behaviour explicit (responses hidden and deleted unless you upgrade). But SSO and the choice of a US, Canada or EU data centre appear only in the Enterprise plan, which the pricing page presents as "get a demo" for 5+ users, priced on request. For a buyer who must have EU hosting for works-council-approved surveys, the real annual cost is not computable from the public pages.
Sovereignty, side by side
Dimension
LimeSurvey
SurveyMonkey
Legal entity
Not determined
Not determined
Hosting location
Not determined
Not determined
Hosting options
Not determined
Not determined
Open source
Not determined
Not determined
Data processing agreement
Not determined
Not determined
Transfer impact assessment
Not determined
Not determined
Facts, side by side
Only facts both products carry under the same definition — anything else would not be a fair row.
As of 29 Oct 2026, the panel rates both 3/5. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 5 of the 6 judges pick LimeSurvey and 1 picks SurveyMonkey. Which one fits depends on the criteria that matter to you; the table on this page shows both side by side, and each judge’s reading has its own page. Both were scored by the same AI bench under the same rubric, from public evidence only, as the methodology describes.
Is LimeSurvey or SurveyMonkey European?
LimeSurvey is European (EU-Made). SurveyMonkey is not European by provenance (Rest of world). Provenance is read from each company’s own legal pages: who builds it and who owns it.
Do LimeSurvey and SurveyMonkey have a free plan?
As of 29 Oct 2026, LimeSurvey’s own pages state a free plan; SurveyMonkey’s pages as captured do not. Each product page links the pricing page it was read from.