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 Operations Manager
Replaces paper and PDF forms at a service company: event registrations, supplier onboarding, damage reports with photos, order requests with a payment. Wants forms a colleague can build without IT, file uploads, a submission that lands in the right inbox and the CRM or spreadsheet without copy and paste, and a price that does not jump when the response count does.
LimeSurvey
This judge's pick
SurveyMonkey
Criterion by criterion
Form & survey building
LimeSurvey
Everything my colleagues need to build without IT is documented: 28+ question types including matrix variants, skip logic with piping and valuation rules, randomisation, relevance equations, 800+ templates, custom HTML/CSS design, and 80+ languages with quick translation. Accessibility is stated against WCAG 2.2 AA and research methods like conjoint and MaxDiff go well past routine form work; we found no public information on form versioning with change history or a published accessibility conformance report.
SurveyMonkey
A colleague can build real forms here: branching with hide/show/skip actions, question and answer piping, A/B testing, multilingual surveys, themed or white-labelled branding and a template library for event feedback and NPS are all listed, and teams can reuse question items from a shared library. We found no public information on built-in calculations or on an accessibility standard for respondents, which keeps it below the research-grade level.
Distribution, response collection & workflows
LimeSurvey
Distribution and participant management are covered well: open or closed access with unique access codes per respondent, mass mailing of invitations and reminders, embedding, QR codes, captcha, save-and-resume, quotas, scheduled start and end, and upload storage on the plans, so the photos on our damage reports would land. The captured pages do not show payment or signature capture in the form, approval routing, notifications on arrival, webhooks, or native connectors to a CRM or spreadsheet; onward automation rests on the XML-RPC/JSON-RPC API and paid custom plugins.
SurveyMonkey
File uploads and payment acceptance are on the plan lists, an address book drives email and text invitations, Zapier triggers on each new complete response, and documented webhooks push answers into Slack, HubSpot, Zendesk, Tableau and Teams — that covers my requirement that a submission lands in the CRM without copy and paste. We found no public information on email reminders, unique links, QR codes or approval routing, so I stop short of the top level.
Survey analysis & reporting
LimeSurvey
Live response summaries, filtering, graphs and quick statistics with graphical export cover day-to-day use, and exports go to CSV, Excel, PDF, SPSS, R and Stata plus public statistics. We found no public information on cross-tabulation with significance testing, weighting, or open-text and sentiment analysis.
SurveyMonkey
Exports cover CSV, Excel, PDF, presentation and SPSS files, crosstabs and statistical significance sit on the team plans, and dashboards can be shared by link with password protection and auto-update while the survey is open. Sentiment and thematic analysis of open text is stated, but we found no public information on weighting or significance testing inside cross-tabs.
Consent, GDPR & respondent data
LimeSurvey
A data processing agreement is stored in the customer account, a named data protection officer is published, anonymous surveys are a first-class mode, transport uses SSL with daily encrypted backups, and the cookie FAQ explains only strictly necessary session cookies are set so no consent banner is needed. Encryption of responses at rest is configurable per question type and participant field rather than on by default, and we found no public information on retention automation or tooling for access and erasure requests per respondent.
SurveyMonkey
An online data processing agreement with standard contractual clauses is offered to self-serve customers, consent statements with skip logic that removes non-consenting respondents are documented with worked examples, encryption in transit and at rest is stated, and rights requests get an answer within 30 days. We found no public information on automatic retention deletion, field-level protection of sensitive answers or a named data protection officer.
Hosting choice, teams & portability
LimeSurvey
This is where they stand out for an operations buyer: a free GPLv2 self-hosted Community Edition, a choice of seven hosting regions with data stored in Germany on Hetzner hardware, SSO with SAML and LDAP on the Corporate plan, white-label and custom domains, and exports in documented formats backed by a remote-control API. We found no public information on an audit log or granular roles per form or folder.
SurveyMonkey
Three team roles with per-survey sharing, SCIM provisioning against an identity provider, single sign-on on the Enterprise plan, white-label branding, a custom subdomain and response exports in documented formats give me the team controls I need. The EU data center is Enterprise-only and downgrade means opening a new US-hosted account with no data migration, and we found no public information on an audit log.
European sovereignty
LimeSurvey
The chain that matters to us is documented and European: LimeSurvey GmbH of Hamburg is the contracting entity with a German register number and VAT ID, responses sit on Hetzner Online GmbH hardware in Gunzenhausen, Germany, a DPA is published, third-country transfers use EU standard contractual clauses, and the AI functions run on an open-source model in provider-controlled infrastructure. The gaps keep it short of the top: ISO 27001 is stated only as in progress, one subprocessor (Zoho) is named rather than a published list with locations, and we found no public information on ownership.
SurveyMonkey
European customers contract with SurveyMonkey Europe UC in Dublin, a data processing agreement is published and the subprocessor list names every provider with its locations. Storage defaults to US data centers, the EU data center is Enterprise-only, and even then AI prompts and de-identified data go to the US while email, SMS, support and AI subprocessors are all US-based, so the chain is far from European end to end.
Pricing transparency
LimeSurvey
Plan prices, limits and VAT are public: Expert at 29€/month billed annually with 10,000 responses/year and 3 admin users, Basic at 34€/month billed monthly with 1,000 responses/month and 250 MB upload storage, Business at 75€/month billed annually, plus two-week online cancellation and quarterly price-adjustment terms with notice. For a buyer like me the gaps are real: the Corporate plan with SSO and the dedicated server is 'Contact sales', the captured pages do not show the Business plan's response limits or the cost of exceeding a response limit, and plugin installation carries extra fees, so the cost of a growing response volume is not computable from these pages alone.
SurveyMonkey
Team plans are public at €30 and €75 per user per month, billed annually from three users, with 50,000 and 100,000 responses per year and €0.10 per additional response, plus stated tax treatment, auto-renewal and cancellation terms — I can nearly compute my annual cost, and the €0.10 response overage is a clear price rather than a surprise. Enterprise is priced only through a demo, and we found no public price for a single-user paid plan.
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.