As of 29 Oct 2026, the panel rates Qualtrics 1.5/5 and SurveyMonkey 3/5 in Forms & Surveys. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 0 of the 6 judges pick Qualtrics and 6 pick SurveyMonkey. SurveyMonkey scores higher on 6 of 6 criteria (Form & survey building, Survey analysis & reporting, European sovereignty, plus 3 more). Provenance — Qualtrics: Rest of world; SurveyMonkey: Rest of world. Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made.
SurveyMonkey's means lead form building (6.8 vs 2.3), collection and workflows (6.3 vs 3.0), analysis and reporting (7.0 vs 2.5), hosting and administration (6.7 vs 3.3), sovereignty (5.7 vs 1.8) and pricing transparency (6.2 vs 0.8), with 0 judges leaning Qualtrics and 6 leaning SurveyMonkey. The split is consent and data protection: 6.0 vs 4.8, 4 ties, 2 judges lean SurveyMonkey; Qualtrics' verdict credits five of six judges at 5-6 for consent building, GDPR erasure and redaction of sensitive data. Qualtrics' weighted totals run 0 — the data protection officer scored zero on each criterion — to 4.2; SurveyMonkey's run 6.0 to 6.7. No prices appear on any captured Qualtrics page; SurveyMonkey publishes Team Advantage at €30 and Team Premier at €75 per user per month, Enterprise at "Get a demo". Sovereignty attributes: Qualtrics — US jurisdiction, ownership, residency and subprocessors unknown; SurveyMonkey — Irish entity, US-default residency, US CLOUD Act exposure.
Choose Qualtrics if
You need GDPR erasure that deletes personal data from survey responses, tickets and contacts — Qualtrics' consent verdict drew 5-6 from five of six judges, and 4 judges tied the two products on consent and data protection.
You need redaction of sensitive data and customer control over what is collected, retained and deleted — both credited in Qualtrics' consent verdict, its strongest criterion (mean 4.8).
You need documented consent-form building — the consent bench gave Qualtrics 5-6 from five of six judges.
You need single sign-on with multi-factor authentication, bring-your-own-key encryption and project approval workflows — Qualtrics documents these, with hosting and administration scores clustered at 4.
Choose SurveyMonkey if
You need crosstabs with statistical significance, AI sentiment and thematic analysis, password-protected or SSO-enforced dashboards and SPSS export — analysis and reporting scored 7 to 7 (mean 7.0 vs 2.5), with 6 judges leaning SurveyMonkey.
You need published team prices before buying — Team Advantage €30 per user per month and Team Premier €75 per user per month, from 3 users billed annually; pricing transparency leans 6 judges to 0 (6.2 vs 0.8).
You need form building and collection depth — means 6.8 vs 2.3 and 6.3 vs 3.0, with 6 judges leaning SurveyMonkey on each.
You need an Irish contracting entity, a published subprocessor list and an online DPA with standard contractual clauses — sovereignty leans 6 judges to 0 (5.7 vs 1.8), though the EU data centre is Enterprise-only.
You need hosting and administration strength — mean 6.7 vs 3.3, with 6 judges leaning SurveyMonkey.
Read this comparison as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.
The Data Protection Officer
Signs off every form tool a department wants to use and has found health data in a feedback form before. Wants a data processing agreement and a subprocessor list on the vendor's own pages, consent fields and an anonymous mode that drops IP addresses, retention periods that delete on their own, EU hosting the customer can choose, and roles that keep responses away from people who do not need them.
Qualtrics
SurveyMonkey
This judge's pick
Criterion by criterion
Form & survey building
Qualtrics
The data-protection documentation walks through building a consent form, confirming surveys are authored in the product, and the platform is marketed for research design. The captured pages give no detail on question types, conditional logic, languages, templates or accessibility, so I cannot verify any of the authoring depth I would want to see before a department deploys this.
SurveyMonkey
Branching, dynamic and advanced logic with skip, hide, show and randomise actions, question and answer piping, A/B testing, block randomisation and multilingual surveys go well past basic authoring, and a team library plus white-label branding serve teams. We found no public information on calculations or scoring, and no accessibility standard is named on the captured pages.
Distribution, response collection & workflows
Qualtrics
Intelligent automation, omnichannel feedback, human panels combined with AI synthetic respondents, and project approval workflows mirroring internal processes are all documented, and the erasure tooling refers to survey responses, tickets and contacts. What is missing for me is the mundane detail — invitations, reminders, quotas, links and embedding — none of which the captured pages describe.
SurveyMonkey
An address book feeds survey invitations, file upload and payments are plan features, and webhooks push each response into tools like Tableau, Power BI, Slack and HubSpot, with Zapier triggers and actions on top. We found no public information on reminders with unique links, response quotas, offline collection or approval routing, and the API licence documented on the captured pages is the one for Wufoo.
Survey analysis & reporting
Qualtrics
Built-in frameworks and benchmarks, AI-guided synthesis from study design onward, connected insights across research and experience data, and admin usage reports are documented. I found no public information on cross-tabulation, standard scores such as NPS, dashboards with permissions, or export formats such as CSV, Excel or SPSS.
SurveyMonkey
Crosstabs with statistical significance, AI sentiment and thematic analysis, shareable dashboards with password protection or SSO, and an SPSS export alongside CSV, PDF, PPT and XLS make the analysis layer serious. Weighting and trend reports across survey waves are not described on the captured pages.
Consent, GDPR & respondent data
Qualtrics
Strong operational controls: a documented consent-form use case, GDPR erasure across responses, tickets and contacts, redaction and restriction of PII, encryption in transit with bring-your-own-key, customer-set retention and deletion, and a data protection officer contact. I stop short of an unconditional sign-off because the privacy statement says IP addresses may be collected from survey respondents for fraud prevention with no anonymous mode described anywhere I was shown, and it discloses processing personal information with AI for model training and sharing data with advertising partners.
SurveyMonkey
A self-serve online data processing agreement with standard contractual clauses built in, documented consent statements whose skip logic disqualifies anyone who declines, and AES 256 at rest with RSA in transit are what I want before signing anything. But the privacy notice describes respondents' IP addresses being used for inferred location and duplicate-response prevention, retention is left to the creator rather than automatic deletion periods, and we found no public information on an anonymous mode, cookie controls on the forms, or a named data protection officer.
Hosting choice, teams & portability
Qualtrics
Single sign-on with multi-factor authentication, bring-your-own-key encryption, and internal access restrictions even within the customer's organisation are documented, alongside admin usage reports. I found no public information on a selectable EU data region or self-hosted edition, granular roles per form, an audit log, white-labelling, or a complete export of forms and responses another tool could import; the portable machine-readable export I saw covers individual rights requests only.
SurveyMonkey
US, Canada and EU data centres are offered, with three team roles, documented SCIM provisioning, SSO on the Enterprise plan, white-labelling, and exports across CSV, XLS, PDF, PPT and SPSS. The EU data centre is reserved for Enterprise customers and data cannot be migrated if you downgrade, and we found no public information on an audit log or a self-hosted edition.
European sovereignty
Qualtrics
The contracting entity is Qualtrics, LLC of Provo, Utah, and I found no public information on hosting location, ownership or the subprocessors who would touch responses, while the privacy statement confirms transfers to affiliates and third parties in other jurisdictions. Standard Contractual Clauses or adequacy decisions, an Ireland-based EU representative, and published ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2 certifications are stated safeguards, but I cannot verify where responses sit or who processes them, and the AI training and advertising-partner disclosures concern me for a chain that may carry health data.
SurveyMonkey
The Irish entity SurveyMonkey Europe UC contracts customers outside the US and Brazil, subprocessors are published with locations and purposes, and the online agreement carries the transfer mechanisms with a transfer impact assessment. Against that, storage defaults to US data centres, the EU centre is Enterprise-only with AI prompts processed by a US vendor and de-identified EU responses still transferred to the US, while email, SMS, AI and support all run through US subprocessors; we found no published ISO 27001 or SOC 2 certification on the captured pages.
Pricing transparency
Qualtrics
No public prices appear on any captured page: the homepage routes buyers to a demo request, contracts run through Order Forms, and consumption is measured in Usage Metrics whose rates are never published. A buyer cannot compute an annual cost from these pages, whatever the marketing says about predictable pricing.
SurveyMonkey
Team plans are public at €30 and €75 per user per month with 50,000 and 100,000 responses a year, €0.10 per additional response, and tax treatment, renewal and cancellation terms all stated. The Enterprise tier that carries SSO and the EU data centre is contact-sales only, and the individual plan's price and the free tier's response limit are not on the captured pages.
Sovereignty, side by side
Dimension
Qualtrics
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.
Legal · Address
privacy@qualtrics.com · 333 W River Park Drive, Provo, Utah 84604, USA1
As of 29 Oct 2026, the panel rates SurveyMonkey higher: 3/5 against 1.5/5. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 0 of the 6 judges pick Qualtrics and 6 pick 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 Qualtrics or SurveyMonkey European?
Qualtrics is not European by provenance (Rest of world). 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.