Most comparisons of questionnaire tools are comparisons of the editor. Question types, logic builders, how the drag and drop feels. All of that is real, and almost none of it is what a team is annoyed about six months in. The annoyances six months in are that the monthly allowance ran out on the nineteenth, that only one person can log in, and that nobody is sure whether the reply to Tuesday's submission was ever sent.
So this comparison is built the other way round. It starts with what each tool counts, because that determines the day it breaks. Then it looks at what each one does once an answer has arrived, because that determines whether it saves any work at all.
All figures below come from each company's published pricing and support pages as of September 2026, at monthly rates unless stated. Nearly all of them are cheaper paid yearly.
Start from what the tool counts
Every questionnaire tool picks something to meter. There are four common choices and they fail in four different ways.
Metered by responses. The bill tracks demand rather than effort. A quiet quarter costs little and a busy one costs a lot, which sounds fair until the busy one is the month the questionnaire is doing its job. The ceiling lands at the worst possible moment by design.
Metered by surveys or forms. You start archiving and deleting old questionnaires to make room, which means throwing away the thing that would have been quickest to duplicate next time.
Metered by seats. Predictable, and it puts a price on letting a colleague help. Several tools in this category set the seat count at one on every plan below enterprise, which rules them out for shared work regardless of the monthly figure.
Metered by almost nothing. The bundled and free tools. No meter, and correspondingly little help once answers arrive.
None of these is wrong in itself. But an ongoing enquiry form and an annual staff survey have opposite shapes, and the meter that suits one is the wrong meter for the other. The test takes a minute: picture the busiest month rather than the typical one, and ask which number moves. If it is the number of responses, avoid a response meter. If it is the number of colleagues who need to help, avoid a seat meter set at one.
What the free tiers actually give you
Free plans are where most questionnaires start, and the published limits vary by two orders of magnitude.
| Tool | Free plan | What runs out first | Users |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Forms | Included with a Google Account | No published response allowance | Collaborators you invite |
| Microsoft Forms | Free with a personal Microsoft account | 200 responses per form | Collaborators you invite |
| Tally | Unlimited forms and submissions | Fair usage guidelines | 1 |
| Jotform Starter | Yes | 5 forms, 100 submissions a month | 1 |
| Zoho Survey | Yes | 10 questions per survey, 100 responses | 1 |
| QuestionPro | Yes | 200 responses per survey | 1 |
| SurveySparrow | Yes | 75 responses per quarter, 3 active surveys, 10 questions each | 1 |
| SurveyMonkey Basic | Yes | A viewable response limit, shown once you sign up | 1 |
Three of those rows deserve pulling out.
Microsoft Forms is the same product with two very different ceilings. A form built under a Microsoft 365 work or school account accepts up to 5,000,000 responses. The same form built under a free personal Microsoft account accepts 200, and a paid personal account 1,000. Teams who build a questionnaire on whichever account the browser happened to be signed into can lose responses to a cap nobody knew existed.
SurveyMonkey's free tier works differently from the others. Basic lets you view a limited number of responses per survey even if you collect more, and the pricing page does not publish the figure: it appears once you sign up. Collection continues, visibility does not.
Tally is the outlier in the generous direction, offering unlimited forms and unlimited submissions on the free plan subject to fair usage guidelines, which is unusual enough in this category to be worth knowing.
The price of a second person
This is where the differences get expensive, and it is the least discussed line on any pricing page.
| Tool | First paid step, monthly | What it includes | Users |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tally Pro | 24 USD | Not metered by responses, unlimited members in shared workspaces | Unlimited |
| Typeform Basic | 39 USD | 100 responses per month | 1 |
| Jotform Bronze | 39 USD | 25 forms, 1,000 submissions per month | 1 |
| Jotform Silver | 49 USD | 50 forms, 2,500 submissions per month | 1 |
| Typeform Plus | 79 USD | 1,000 responses per month | 3 |
| QuestionPro Advanced | 99 USD per user, billed annually | 25,000 responses per year | 1 |
| Typeform Business | 129 USD | 10,000 responses per month | 5 |
| Jotform Gold | 129 USD | 100 forms, 10,000 submissions per month | 1 |
Jotform's individual plans are single user throughout. Starter, Bronze, Silver and Gold each list one user, and multiple users arrive only on Enterprise. QuestionPro's Advanced plan is also one user, with the Team Edition starting at five users and 83 USD per user per month billed annually. SurveyMonkey's team plans begin at three users billed annually, and charge for each response over the included allowance.
Read those two facts together and the shape of the category appears. Response volume is priced in visible steps. Collaboration is often priced as a jump to a different class of plan. A team of four handling a moderate number of responses can easily end up paying an enterprise rate for a volume that the cheapest plan would have covered, purely because four people need to see the answers.
What happens to a response after it lands
Collecting answers is a solved problem. Every tool above does it well enough that the remaining differences are aesthetic. The work that follows is where the gap is real, and it has three parts.
Does a response have an owner
If three people can see the responses, something has to record which of them is handling any given one. Google Forms and Microsoft Forms have no such field. A collaborator on a Google Form can edit any part of it including the responses, and a Microsoft Forms collaborate link lets several people view and edit the structure, the layout and the responses. Both are all or nothing at the form level, with nothing at the level of an individual answer.
So teams add a column to the exported spreadsheet and fill it in by hand. That works at twenty responses a month. At two hundred it produces the two failures everybody recognises: the respondent who gets two different replies, and the respondent who gets none.
Does a response have a status
An answer is not finished when it arrives. It is finished when somebody has dealt with it. Without a status, the only way to find out what is outstanding is to read the whole list again, which is why the list eventually stops being read at all. Tools built around stages put that status on the response itself, so the question of what is outstanding is a filter rather than an act of memory.
Where does the reply live
Almost every tool can send an automatic acknowledgement. Very few can send the actual reply. That gets written in Gmail or Outlook, which means the record of the reply lives in one person's sent items, and the response itself carries no evidence that anything happened. A month later there is no way to answer the question "did this person ever hear back from us" without asking three people.
Can the answers be moved out again
The last part is portability, and it decides how expensive a wrong choice is. Every tool here exports a CSV. Far fewer import one, and the difference matters, because a questionnaire that has been running for two years holds history that nobody wants to abandon.
An import worth having does two things: it matches the columns in the file to the questions in the new form, and it matches choice answers by their labels rather than requiring a coded value. Without both, moving five hundred past responses means retyping them or leaving them behind in the old tool, which is the reason teams stay on a plan they have outgrown. Ask about the import path before committing, not after.
Where the answers are stored
Worth checking before a questionnaire collects anything with a name in it.
Tally is a Belgium based company that stores form data in Europe. Microsoft Forms data sits in the tenant of the account that created the form, which is why the work account and the personal account behave like separate products. Google Forms data sits in the Drive of the owning account. Tools with regional hosting commitments say so on their own pages, and if a page does not say, it is worth asking rather than assuming.
The other half of this is internal access. A questionnaire collecting salary expectations, medical details or complaints should not be readable by everyone with a login. Tools that offer view only roles, or roles below full administrator, make that possible. Tools that treat every collaborator as an editor do not.
Match the tool to the shape of the questionnaire
Three shapes cover most cases.
The one off study. A hundred or a thousand responses, analysed once, presented as a chart. Volume matters, follow up does not. This is what the response metered research tools are built for, and their per year allowances suit it well: QuestionPro Advanced at 25,000 responses a year, SurveyMonkey's team plans at 50,000 or 100,000, SurveySparrow's tiers from 2,500 up to 36,000 a year.
One caution on this shape. An annual allowance is not a monthly one divided by twelve. A study that collects 20,000 responses across three weeks and nothing for the rest of the year fits inside a 25,000 per year plan and would blow through most monthly plans several times over. Check which unit the allowance is stated in before comparing two numbers that look similar.
The recurring internal questionnaire. Small, frequent, low stakes. Bundled tools win here on cost and familiarity. Google Forms and Microsoft Forms cost nothing extra and the results view answers the question without an export.
The questionnaire that starts a conversation. Applications, enquiries, registrations needing confirmation, support requests. Each row is a person waiting for a reply. Volume is unpredictable, several people share the work, and the value is entirely in the follow up. This is the shape where response meters and single seat plans both hurt, and where the same handful of use cases turn up in organisation after organisation.
Sort the questionnaires in use into those three groups before comparing prices. Most teams find the third group is small and generates nearly all of the manual work.
What to change first
Take the questionnaire that produces the most follow up, and check two numbers on your current plan: the response allowance and the number of people it lets in. If either one is the reason work is being done in a spreadsheet, that is the thing to fix, either with a tighter process around the export or with a tool that keeps the submission, the owner and the reply in one place. Leave the questionnaires that end in a chart exactly where they are.
Q1. Which online questionnaire tool has the most generous free plan?
On published limits, Tally offers unlimited forms and unlimited submissions on its free plan subject to fair usage guidelines, and Google Forms comes with a Google Account without a published response allowance. Among the survey specialists the free tiers are much tighter: 200 responses per survey on QuestionPro, 100 responses on Zoho Survey, and 75 responses per quarter on SurveySparrow.
Q2. Why do questionnaire tools charge by response rather than by user?
Because response volume correlates with how much value the customer is getting, and it grows without a sales conversation. The consequence for the buyer is that the bill rises exactly when the questionnaire is busiest. If your response count swings between quiet and busy months, a plan metered by people is more predictable even when the headline price looks higher.
Q3. Can several people share the work of answering responses?
It depends on the tool, and the answer is often no on the cheaper plans. Jotform's Starter, Bronze, Silver and Gold plans each include one user, and QuestionPro's Advanced plan includes one. Tally's Pro plan at 24 USD a month allows unlimited members in shared workspaces. Check the seat count before the response allowance if more than one person handles the answers.
Q4. Is Google Forms or Microsoft Forms enough for a work questionnaire?
For anything that ends in a chart, yes, and they cost nothing extra. The limitation is that neither attaches an owner or a status to an individual response, so once a questionnaire needs a reply per person, the tracking moves into a spreadsheet maintained by hand. Also check which Microsoft account created the form: a free personal account caps responses at 200 per form.
Q5. What should be checked about data storage before collecting sensitive answers?
Where the data physically sits, and who inside the organisation can read it. Tally states that it stores form data in Europe as a Belgium based company. Microsoft Forms and Google Forms keep data in the tenant or Drive of the owning account. On internal access, look for a view only role, because a tool where every collaborator is automatically an editor makes it impossible to give someone read access to answers without also giving them the ability to change them.
Q6. How many responses does a typical team actually need?
Far fewer than most pricing pages assume, which is why response meters catch people out in the other direction. A recruitment form might take 40 applications a month and a support form 300, both comfortably inside a 1,000 response allowance. The pain in those cases is never the volume, it is that four people share the work and the plan that covers the volume covers one login.