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 Market Researcher
Runs customer and brand studies for a mid-sized consumer-goods company, three waves a year in four languages. Wants logic and quotas that keep the sample clean, invitations with reminders, cross-tabs and NPS without exporting to a spreadsheet first, and open answers grouped into themes before the board meeting.
Qualtrics
SurveyMonkey
This judge's pick
Criterion by criterion
Form & survey building
Qualtrics
Surveys are clearly authored in the product — documentation covers building a consent form and the market research pages describe AI guiding study design — but the captured pages give no detail on question types, conditional logic, quotas, translated survey masters or accessibility.
SurveyMonkey
Branching, dynamic and advanced logic with skip-to-page, hide, show, disqualify and random-page actions are documented, and the pricing pages add question and answer piping, A/B testing, block randomisation, multilingual surveys and a shared team library. We found no public information on quotas inside logic, scoring or calculations, or a stated accessibility standard, so I cannot confirm the controls I use to keep a four-language sample clean.
Distribution, response collection & workflows
Qualtrics
Omnichannel feedback collection, human panels combined with synthetic respondents, project workflows with approval controls, automation and an integrations marketplace are all documented. The fieldwork pieces I depend on — email invitations with reminders, unique links, response quotas, documented webhooks or a response API — are not described on these pages.
SurveyMonkey
Invitations go out through an address book and collectors with named email and SMS delivery vendors, SurveyMonkey Audience sells targeted completes by country, age and gender, and Zapier triggers plus conditional webhooks into Tableau, Power BI, Slack or Teams pass responses on automatically. We found no public information on invitation reminders, unique per-respondent links, or response quotas and automatic closing rules, which are the controls that keep my three waves a year clean.
Survey analysis & reporting
Qualtrics
Analysis plainly happens inside the product, from AI-driven synthesis and connected insights to built-in benchmarks and frameworks and admin usage reports. The pages never show cross-tabulation, NPS or CSAT scores, open-text theming, or exports to Excel or SPSS, so I cannot verify the analyst workflow I need before a board meeting.
SurveyMonkey
Crosstabs with statistical significance, thematic analysis and AI sentiment on open text, multi-survey analysis, and shareable dashboards with password or SSO protection are all listed, with exports to SPSS as an SAV file as well as CSV, PDF, PPT and XLS. We found no public information on weighting or trend reporting across survey waves, so I could not confirm two pieces my board reporting depends on.
Consent, GDPR & respondent data
Qualtrics
Consent forms are a documented use case, the customer decides what data is collected, retained and deleted, GDPR erasure reaches survey responses and contacts, sensitive answers can be redacted or restricted, and encryption in transit plus bring-your-own-key are stated. We found no public information on a published data processing agreement or an anonymous mode, and the privacy statement says respondent IP addresses may be collected for fraud prevention.
SurveyMonkey
A self-serve data processing agreement with standard contractual clauses, AES 256 encryption at rest and RSA in transit, consent questions whose skip logic disqualifies anyone answering No, creator-controlled retention and a 30-day commitment on rights requests are documented. We found no public information on an anonymous mode that drops IP addresses — the privacy notice describes using IP addresses for duplicate prevention and inferred location — nor on automatic deletion after a retention period, tracking-cookie controls or a named data protection officer.
Hosting choice, teams & portability
Qualtrics
Single sign-on and multi-factor authentication are stated and admin reports break usage down by department, so team use is real. We found no public information on hosting location or an EU option, granular roles, an audit log, white-labelling, or a full export of forms and responses — the only portability described is a machine-readable format for individual privacy requests.
SurveyMonkey
Three team roles with separate admin rights, single sign-on with SCIM provisioning through an identity provider, white-label branding and a custom subdomain are documented, and accounts can sit in US, Canadian or EU data centres — though the EU centre is Enterprise-only and data cannot be migrated back on downgrade. We found no public information on an audit log or a documented API for exporting SurveyMonkey forms and responses as such; the response exports cover CSV, PDF, PPT, XLS and SPSS.
European sovereignty
Qualtrics
The contracting entity is Qualtrics, LLC of Provo, Utah, co-headquartered with Seattle; EU and UK data representatives are named in Dublin and London, and transfers rely on standard contractual clauses or adequacy decisions rather than the Data Privacy Framework. We found no public information on where responses are hosted, on the subprocessor chain, or on a published data processing agreement, and the privacy statement reserves the right to train AI on personal information and to share personal information with advertising partners.
SurveyMonkey
The chain is disclosed in unusual detail: a subprocessor list with each provider's location, an Irish contracting entity for EEA, UK and Swiss customers, an online data processing agreement with transfer impact assessments, and named AWS infrastructure with an Ireland option. Storage defaults to the US, the EU data centre is Enterprise-only and covers specified data types, and the email, SMS and AI vendors are US-based with de-identified response data transferable to the US; we found no public information on ISO 27001 or SOC 2 certification.
Pricing transparency
Qualtrics
We found no public prices on any page we read: the homepage routes buyers to a demo request, the terms define consumption in usage metrics without figures, and the market research page claims predictable pricing without a number. An annual research budget cannot be computed from the public pages captured.
SurveyMonkey
Team Advantage at €30 per user per month and Team Premier at €75 per user per month are published with minimum users, annual billing, 50,000 and 100,000 responses per year, and €0.10 per additional response, plus tax treatment, auto-renewal, cancellation and refund rules and the free tier's deletion behaviour above its response limit. The Enterprise plan, where EU hosting and single sign-on sit, is contact-sales only, and Audience responses are sold separately without a published price.
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.