Qualtrics vs SurveyMonkey

Qualtrics

Building a consent form on the survey platform is documented in the data-protection pages, and the research pages market AI-guided study design, concept testing, feature optimisation and pricing validation. We found no public information on question types, conditional branching, randomisation, validated scales, survey translations or accessible output, so for my ethics-board purposes only the basic authoring level is evidenced.

SurveyMonkey

The captured pages document skip logic and question-and-answer piping on the individual plan, A/B testing, multilingual surveys, block randomisation on Team Premier, and branching rules that skip to pages, randomly traverse page ranges, and show, hide or invalidate questions with ANY/ALL conditions — enough for a randomised design. A team library for reusable items and premium themes are also described; we found no public information on scoring or calculations inside the authoring tool, or on an accessibility standard such as WCAG for respondent-facing forms.

Qualtrics

The privacy statement confirms that customers send surveys to individuals and that respondent IP addresses may be collected for fraud prevention, while the homepage advertises a marketplace of integrations plus automated recommendations and responses. We found no public information on email invitations with reminders, managed contact lists, response quotas and closing rules, offline or kiosk collection, or a documented API and webhooks for responses.

SurveyMonkey

Email invitations go out from an address book via collectors, delivery runs through SparkPost email and Twilio SMS, payments and file uploads live inside the product, and webhooks and Zapier push responses onward — with SurveyMonkey Audience able to source panel respondents by country, age and income. We found no public information on invitation reminders, response quotas or closing rules, or on a REST API for reading and writing responses in the core survey product.

Qualtrics

Analysis appears in broad terms — AI guiding work from study design to synthesis, built-in frameworks and benchmarks, a research-grade model trained on millions of responses — alongside admin reports on usage and engagement. We found no public information on result tables, charts, filters, cross-tabulation with significance testing, or exports to SPSS, R, CSV or Excel; the portable machine-readable export in the privacy statement exists to serve individual data-subject requests rather than researchers, and label-preserving statistical exports are decisive for me.

SurveyMonkey

Cross-tabs with statistical significance, multi-survey analysis, AI sentiment and thematic analysis of open text, shareable dashboards with password protection and Enterprise SSO enforcement, and an SPSS export producing an SAV file are all documented. That covers most of a research workflow; we found no public information on weighting, R exports, or whether value labels are preserved in the SPSS export.

Qualtrics

This is the best-evidenced area: consent-form building, erasure tooling for personal data in survey responses, customer control over what is collected, retained and deleted, redaction and restriction of sensitive data, a data protection officer contact, EU and UK representatives, and standard-contractual-clause transfer safeguards are all documented. Against that, the privacy statement says respondent IP addresses may be collected from survey respondents for fraud prevention, and we found no public information on an anonymous mode that drops IP addresses, a standard statement of encryption at rest beyond optional customer-managed keys, or a published data processing agreement; the statement also discloses AI processing of personal information for model training while excluding customer platform data from its scope.

SurveyMonkey

There is a genuine consent mechanism — an intro page, a required yes/no consent question, and skip logic that disqualifies refusers, with example consent texts — alongside an online data processing agreement with automatic standard contractual clauses, AES 256 at rest, RSA 2048 in transit, and rights requests answered within 30 days. The ethics board will still ask about anonymity: the privacy notice documents IP addresses being used for duplicate prevention and de-identified response data being transferred to the US even from the EU data centre, and we found no public information on an anonymous mode, automatic deletion of responses after a retention period, or a named data protection officer.

Qualtrics

Single sign-on with multi-factor authentication, restricted internal access, project approval workflows, customer-controlled retention and customer-managed encryption keys are documented on the security page. We found no public information on where responses are hosted, an EU hosting option, self-hosting, granular roles, custom domains, white-labelling or an audit log, and the only portable export documented serves individual privacy requests rather than institutional portability — a real problem when the faculty asks where our data lives.

SurveyMonkey

A choice of US, Canada or EU data centre is described, together with three team roles, single sign-on, SCIM provisioning against Azure Active Directory, white-label branding on Team Premier and a custom subdomain on Enterprise, plus response exports in CSV, XLS, PDF and PPT. The EU data centre is Enterprise-only, and the pages state that downgrading from Enterprise means opening a new US account because data cannot be migrated; we found no public information on an audit log or an API for the core survey product.

Qualtrics

The contracting entity is Qualtrics, LLC of Provo, Utah, with Qualtrics Ireland Limited and a London entity named as EU and UK data representatives, and transfers rely on adequacy decisions or EU standard contractual clauses rather than the Data Privacy Framework. Hosting location and subprocessors are not described in the captured pages, and we found no published data processing agreement there, so the chain my faculty would need to approve is largely unevidenced even though ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type 2, HITRUST and FedRAMP certifications are stated.

SurveyMonkey

European customers contract with SurveyMonkey Europe UC in Dublin, the subprocessor list is published with names and locations, and a data processing agreement with standard contractual clauses and Data Privacy Framework certification exists. However, US data centres are the default, the EU centre is restricted to Enterprise customers, de-identified responses and AI prompts still travel to the US, and central subprocessors — AWS, OpenAI, Twilio, SparkPost, Salesforce — are US-based; we found no public information naming ISO 27001 or SOC 2 certifications.

Qualtrics

We found no public information on prices, plans, limits or a free tier on any captured page; the buying route on the homepage is a request-a-demo form, and the general terms describe consumption through Usage Metrics without stating what those units cost. The market-research page claims the unified platform delivers predictable pricing, but without numbers a procurement office cannot compute any annual cost from public pages.

SurveyMonkey

Team Advantage at €30 per user per month and Team Premier at €75 per user per month, each billed annually from three users with 50,000 and 100,000 responses per year and €0.10 per additional response, are published, and the terms state that prices exclude taxes, how auto-renewal and cancellation work, and that free-plan responses over the limit are hidden and deleted. Single sign-on and the EU data centre sit on the Enterprise plan behind a sales call, and we found no public information on a price for the individual paid plan.