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 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.
Qualtrics
SurveyMonkey
This judge's pick
Criterion by criterion
Form & survey building
Qualtrics
The survey-platform documentation covers building a consent form and the market-research pages describe AI guiding study design, so question authoring clearly exists, but question types, conditional logic, templates and branding for the builder are not described on the captured pages. For a colleague building an event registration without IT, there is nothing here to judge how far they can get.
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
Qualtrics
Surveys are sent to individuals and responses come back into the platform, with omnichannel feedback, an integrations marketplace, intelligent automation and human or synthetic panels named. However, we found no public information on file uploads, payments inside the form, submission notifications or routing a response into a CRM or spreadsheet — exactly what damage reports with photos and paid order requests would need.
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
Qualtrics
The pages advertise AI synthesis from study design to results, connected insights across research and customer-experience data, built-in benchmarks and frameworks, and admin reports on user engagement and usage. Charts per question, filters, cross-tabulation, standard scores such as NPS, and exports to CSV, Excel or SPSS are not described on the captured pages.
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
Qualtrics
Building a consent form is a documented use case, the customer decides what data is collected, retained and deleted with tooling that deletes personal data from survey responses to satisfy GDPR erasure requests, encryption in transit with an optional customer-held key layer and PII redaction are stated, and a data protection officer is named. The privacy statement does say respondent IP addresses may be collected for fraud prevention, and we found no public information on a published data processing agreement or an anonymous mode.
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
Qualtrics
Single sign-on with multi-factor authentication, restricted internal access, project-approval workflows and a system-status page are documented, along with admin reports on engagement and usage. Hosting location, an EU option, custom domains or white-labelling, an audit log and a complete export of forms and responses that another tool could import are not described on the captured pages.
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
Qualtrics
The contracting and responsible entity is Qualtrics, LLC of Provo, Utah, with Irish and UK data representatives appointed, transfers relying on adequacy decisions or EU Standard Contractual Clauses, and ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2 stated. Hosting location, ownership and every subprocessor remain unknown on the captured pages, which also state that personal information may be processed using AI technologies including for training models, and that certain personal information has been shared with advertising partners.
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
Qualtrics
The captured pages contain no price figures and the homepage routes buyers to Request Demo, while the general terms define Usage Metrics as the units customers consume, so billing appears usage-based with no public unit prices. The "predictable pricing" line on the market-research page carries no numbers, so an annual cost for a given volume of registrations or damage reports cannot be computed from public 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
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.