Every list of survey apps ranks the same thing: how pleasant the app is to build in. That is the part of the job that takes an afternoon. The part that takes months is everything that happens after the responses start arriving, and almost no comparison covers it.
So this list is sorted by what each app lets you do with the answers. The building is assumed to be fine, because in 2026 it generally is. What separates these apps is the allowance that decides when collection stops, the seat count that decides who can help, and whether a single response can be assigned, tracked and replied to.
Figures are from each company's published pricing and support documentation as of September 2026, at monthly rates unless noted.
The apps that arrive with something already paid for
Google Forms comes with a Google Account. There is no published per form response allowance, which makes it effectively unlimited for normal use. After collection, the Responses tab offers three views that suit three different questions: a summary of counts and charts, a per question view that lists every answer to one question in sequence, and an individual view showing one respondent's whole submission. Link to Sheets puts everything in a live spreadsheet, and the More menu offers a static CSV download. Email notifications for new responses can be switched on, and a Form notifications add-on adds more notification options and customised follow up emails.
Microsoft Forms comes with Microsoft 365, and it is two products wearing one interface. A form created under a work or school account accepts up to 5,000,000 responses. The same form created under a free personal Microsoft account accepts 200, and a paid personal account 1,000. Forms are capped at 200 questions each and 400 forms per user, a count that includes anything sitting in the recycle bin. Responses export to an Excel workbook, and a share to collaborate link lets several people view and edit the structure, layout and responses of a form somebody else started.
Both are the right answer for anything that ends in a chart. Neither attaches anything to an individual response.
The apps built for surveys at scale
SurveyMonkey prices by year and by team. Team Advantage includes 50,000 responses a year and Team Premier 100,000, both starting at three users and billed annually, with each response over the allowance charged individually. The free Basic plan is unusual: it lets you view a limited number of responses per survey even if more are collected, and the pricing page does not state the figure, which appears once you sign up.
QuestionPro offers a genuinely usable free tier at 200 responses per survey with 30 question types and one user. Advanced is 99 USD per user per month billed annually with 25,000 responses a year and 38 question types. Team Edition is 83 USD per user per month billed annually, starts at five users, and includes 100,000 responses a year and 46 question types. Research Suite is quote based and starts at ten users.
SurveySparrow meters by year with a quarterly free tier. Free allows 75 responses per quarter across three active surveys of up to ten questions each, with one user. Basic allows 2,500 responses a year, Starter 15,000, and Business 36,000 across three users.
Zoho Survey has a free plan with unlimited surveys but ten questions each and 100 responses, one user. Basic raises that to 12,000 responses a year with unlimited questions, Plus to 3,000 a month, Pro to 5,000 a month, and Enterprise to 7,000 a month across three users.
These four are built for research, and the response allowances show it. They are excellent at the thing they are for and expensive for anything else, because a team of four handling 300 responses a month pays for seats it needs and volume it does not.
The apps built around the form itself
Typeform prices by responses per month and by seats together. Basic is 39 USD a month with 100 responses and one user. Plus is 79 USD with 1,000 responses and three users. Business is 129 USD with 10,000 responses and five users. Questions are unlimited on all of them. The one question per screen format is the reason people choose it, and it genuinely lifts completion on long surveys.
Jotform meters forms and submissions, and holds seats at one. Starter is free with 5 forms and 100 submissions a month. Bronze is 39 USD with 25 forms and 1,000 submissions, Silver 49 USD with 50 forms and 2,500 submissions, Gold 129 USD with 100 forms and 10,000 submissions. All four are single user plans, and multiple users arrive only on Enterprise. Annual billing brings those to an effective 34, 39 and 99 USD a month.
Tally does the opposite. The free plan carries unlimited forms and unlimited submissions subject to fair usage guidelines. Pro is 24 USD a month and adds branding removal, custom domains, partial submissions, and unlimited team members in shared workspaces. Business is 74 USD. It is a Belgium based company storing form data in Europe.
What the allowances actually compare to
Set side by side, the numbers are harder to compare than they look, because the apps state them in different units.
| App | Free plan | First paid step | Responses on that step |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Forms | Included with a Google Account | Not applicable | No published allowance |
| Microsoft Forms | 200 per form on a free personal account | Included with Microsoft 365 | Up to 5,000,000 per form on work or school |
| Tally | Unlimited under fair usage | Pro, 24 USD | Not metered by responses |
| Typeform | 1 user | Basic, 39 USD | 100 per month |
| Jotform | 5 forms, 100 submissions a month | Bronze, 39 USD | 1,000 per month |
| Zoho Survey | 10 questions, 100 responses | Basic | 12,000 per year |
| SurveySparrow | 75 per quarter, 3 surveys | Basic | 2,500 per year |
| QuestionPro | 200 per survey | Advanced, 99 USD per user, annual | 25,000 per year |
| SurveyMonkey | Viewable limit shown at sign up | Team Advantage, annual, 3 users up | 50,000 per year |
A per year allowance and a per month allowance are not interchangeable. A study that collects 20,000 answers in three weeks and nothing afterwards fits comfortably inside 25,000 a year and would breach a 1,000 a month plan twenty times over. A support form taking 400 answers every month, steadily, does the reverse: fine on a monthly plan, and a poor use of an annual research allowance.
Work out the shape of your volume before comparing two numbers that look similar. Spiky and large points to annual allowances. Steady and moderate points to monthly ones or to no meter at all.
Three things the responses need, and most apps do not provide
Collecting answers is solved. Handling them is not, and it breaks into three parts.
An owner. If four people can see the responses, something has to record which of them is dealing with any one of them. None of the bundled apps has a field for it. Google Forms gives collaborators the ability to edit any part of a form including its responses. Microsoft Forms does the same through its collaborate link. Both are permissions at the form level, not assignment at the response level, so teams add a column to the export and maintain it by hand. That works at twenty a month. At two hundred it produces the respondent who gets two different answers and the respondent who gets none.
A status. A response is not finished when it arrives, it is finished when somebody has acted on it. With no status field, finding out what is outstanding means rereading the entire list, which is why the list eventually stops being read. Apps that give a response a stage turn that question into a filter.
A place for the reply. Nearly every app can send an automatic acknowledgement. Very few can send the real reply, so it gets written in Gmail or Outlook and the record of it lives in one person's sent items. The response itself shows no evidence that anything happened.
Getting the answers back out
There is a fourth thing, less urgent until the day it matters. Every app here exports a CSV. Far fewer import one, and that decides how expensive a wrong choice turns out to be. A survey running for two years holds history nobody wants to abandon, and an import worth having matches the columns in the file to the questions in the new form and matches choice answers by their labels rather than demanding coded values. Without that, moving old responses means retyping them, which is why teams stay on plans they outgrew years earlier.
The phone matters more than the feature list
Most survey links are opened on a phone, which makes the respondent experience a practical question rather than a design preference.
Two things move completion rates. One question per screen, which Typeform built its product around and which several others now offer, reduces the visible effort of a long survey to one decision at a time. A progress indicator does something similar by answering the only question a respondent has, which is how much longer this will take.
Two things reduce them. A matrix or grid question, which is unreadable at phone width no matter which app renders it. And a form that looks nothing like the organisation that sent it, which in an era of phishing training reads as suspicious rather than neutral. Apps that allow a header image, a colour and a font are not offering decoration, they are offering the first second of credibility.
One more thing worth deciding before sending rather than after: whether the survey is anonymous. Collecting an email address makes a response traceable and therefore answerable, and it also makes respondents more careful about what they write. Leaving it off produces franker answers and forfeits any follow up. Both are valid choices, and the failure is making neither, then discovering that the honest answers cannot be acted on because nobody knows who wrote them. Whichever way it goes, state it in the form description, because a respondent who cannot tell will assume the less comfortable option.
Test on an actual phone before sending. Every app on this list has a preview, and the preview takes two minutes.
Picking one
Three questions settle it faster than any feature comparison.
How many people need to touch the answers? If the answer is more than one, check the seat count first, because Jotform's individual plans and QuestionPro's Advanced plan each include one user while Tally's 24 USD Pro plan includes unlimited members.
Is the volume spiky or steady? Spiky and large favours the annual research allowances. Steady favours a monthly allowance or no meter.
Does each response need a reply? If not, the app that is already paid for is almost certainly enough. If so, the deciding feature is not in the editor at all, and the situations where this comes up are remarkably consistent across organisations.
What to change first
Count the people who need to see your busiest survey's answers, and check whether your current plan actually allows that many logins. If the answer is no and the work is being divided by spreadsheet, that is the thing to fix, either by tightening how that spreadsheet is maintained or by moving those responses somewhere that keeps the answer, the owner and the reply together.
Q1. Which survey app is best if the budget is zero?
For volume, Tally, which offers unlimited forms and unlimited submissions on its free plan under fair usage guidelines, and Google Forms, which has no published response allowance. Among the research focused apps the free tiers are much tighter: 200 responses per survey on QuestionPro, 100 on Zoho Survey, and 75 per quarter on SurveySparrow.
Q2. Is Microsoft Forms limited to 200 responses?
Only on a free personal Microsoft account. A paid personal account allows 1,000, and a Microsoft 365 work or school account allows up to 5,000,000 responses on a single form. Since the editor looks the same in all three cases, check which account is signed in before a survey goes out, because the cap is silent.
Q3. Which apps let more than one person work on the responses?
Google Forms and Microsoft Forms both let collaborators see and edit everything, including responses, though neither divides responses between people. Tally's Pro plan at 24 USD a month allows unlimited members in shared workspaces. Typeform includes three users on Plus and five on Business. Jotform's Starter, Bronze, Silver and Gold plans each include one user.
Q4. Why are survey apps priced per response when form builders often are not?
Because survey apps are sold for research, where the value genuinely scales with the sample size, and a bigger study is worth more to the buyer. Form builders are sold for ongoing operations, where volume is a cost rather than a benefit. If your survey is really an operational form, a response meter will feel like a penalty for being busy, because that is effectively what it is.
Q5. Does one question per screen actually improve completion?
It reduces the visible effort at any one moment, which helps most on long surveys and on phones. It does not fix a survey that is too long or that asks questions the respondent cannot answer. The larger gains usually come from cutting questions and from replacing free text with something countable, both of which are decisions made before any app is chosen.
Q6. What should be checked before collecting sensitive answers?
Where the data is stored and who internally can read it. Tally states that it stores form data in Europe as a Belgium based company. Google Forms and Microsoft Forms keep responses within the owning account's Drive or tenant. On internal access, look for a view only role, because an app where every collaborator is automatically an editor cannot give someone read access without also giving them the power to change the answers.