36 Most Popular Survey Tools for Market Researchers

In today's data-driven market research landscape, choosing the right survey tool can make all the difference in gathering meaningful insights. Whether you need text responses, voice recordings, or video feedback, the survey platform you select should align with your specific research goals and target audience. This comprehensive guide explores 36 of the most popular survey tools used by market researchers, highlighting their unique features, target audiences, ideal use cases, and data collection methods.

Qualtrics

Data Collection Methods: Text, Voice, Video

Target Audience: Enterprise companies, academic institutions, and government agencies.

Ideal Use Cases: Qualtrics excels at complex research projects requiring sophisticated logic, multilingual capabilities, and advanced analytics. Its Experience Management (XM) platform makes it perfect for large-scale customer experience research, employee engagement studies, and academic research requiring IRB approval.

SurveyMonkey

Data Collection Methods: Text, Video

Target Audience: Small to medium-sized businesses, individual researchers, and non-profits.

Ideal Use Cases: SurveyMonkey's user-friendly interface and affordable pricing make it ideal for quick-turn market research, customer satisfaction surveys, and event feedback. Its video response capabilities have improved, allowing for more engaging qualitative insights without extensive technical knowledge.

Typeform

Data Collection Methods: Text, Video

Target Audience: Design-conscious brands, digital marketers, and customer experience professionals.

Ideal Use Cases: Typeform's beautiful, conversational interface delivers higher completion rates for consumer surveys. It's particularly effective for brand perception studies, website feedback, and product testing where user engagement is crucial.

Google Forms

Data Collection Methods: Text

Target Audience: Small businesses, educators, and budget-conscious researchers.

Ideal Use Cases: While lacking advanced features, Google Forms is unbeatable for free, simple surveys that integrate seamlessly with other Google products. It works well for basic customer feedback, event registrations, and preliminary research before investing in more sophisticated tools.

Microsoft Forms

Data Collection Methods: Text

Target Audience: Organizations using Microsoft 365, educational institutions, and enterprise businesses.

Ideal Use Cases: Microsoft Forms integrates perfectly with the Microsoft ecosystem, making it ideal for internal research within organizations already using Teams and SharePoint. Its quiz functionality also makes it suitable for knowledge testing within market research.

Alchemer (formerly SurveyGizmo)

Data Collection Methods: Text, Voice, Video

Target Audience: Mid-sized to enterprise businesses requiring compliance and security.

Ideal Use Cases: Alchemer's strength lies in its balance of powerful features and usability. It excels at complex market research requiring HIPAA, GDPR, and other compliance certifications, making it popular for healthcare, financial, and B2B research.

Medallia

Data Collection Methods: Text, Voice, Video

Target Audience: Enterprise companies focused on customer experience.

Ideal Use Cases: Medallia's comprehensive voice-of-customer platform combines survey capabilities with AI-powered text, speech, and video analytics. It's ideal for large organizations needing ongoing customer feedback across multiple touchpoints rather than one-off research projects.

UserTesting

Data Collection Methods: Text, Voice, Video

Target Audience: Product teams, UX researchers, and marketing professionals.

Ideal Use Cases: UserTesting specializes in video feedback, making it perfect for observational research where seeing user interactions matters. Product usability testing, website optimization, and concept testing benefit from its ability to record screen activity alongside participant commentary.

Forsta (formerly Confirmit)

Data Collection Methods: Text, Voice, Video

Target Audience: Market research agencies and enterprise insight teams.

Ideal Use Cases: Forsta offers enterprise-grade survey capabilities with robust panel management. It's particularly valuable for tracking studies, large-scale global research, and projects requiring sophisticated sampling and quotas.

Voxco

Data Collection Methods: Text, Voice

Target Audience: Market research firms and large enterprises requiring multi-modal data collection.

Ideal Use Cases: Voxco's strength is its true omnichannel capabilities across online, phone, mobile, and face-to-face methodologies. It's ideal for complex research projects requiring mixed-mode data collection, particularly when telephone interviewing is part of the methodology.

Zoho Survey

Data Collection Methods: Text

Target Audience: Small to medium businesses already using Zoho products.

Ideal Use Cases: Zoho Survey's integration with the broader Zoho ecosystem makes it valuable for businesses wanting to connect survey data directly to their CRM. It works well for customer feedback loops, lead qualification, and sales research.

SurveySparrow

Data Collection Methods: Text, Video

Target Audience: Customer experience professionals and marketing teams.

Ideal Use Cases: SurveySparrow's conversational interface works excellently on mobile devices, making it ideal for reaching consumers on the go. Its NPS survey capabilities and automation make it perfect for customer experience tracking and feedback loops.

Remesh

Data Collection Methods: Text

Target Audience: Innovation teams and market researchers needing qualitative insights at quantitative scale.

Ideal Use Cases: Remesh's AI-powered platform enables real-time conversations with hundreds of participants simultaneously. It's ideal for concept testing, idea generation, and exploratory research where you need qualitative depth with quantitative validation.

Dscout

Data Collection Methods: Text, Voice, Video

Target Audience: UX researchers, ethnographers, and product development teams.

Ideal Use Cases: Dscout's mobile-first approach allows researchers to capture in-the-moment video experiences, making it perfect for customer journey mapping, usage diaries, and contextual research where understanding real-world environment matters.

LimeSurvey

Data Collection Methods: Text

Target Audience: Technical researchers, academic institutions, and organizations with privacy concerns.

Ideal Use Cases: As an open-source solution, LimeSurvey offers complete control over data and hosting. It's ideal for researchers with technical resources who need customization or have strict data sovereignty requirements, such as government research or studies involving sensitive information.

Attest

Data Collection Methods: Text, Video

Target Audience: Marketing teams and brand managers in consumer goods companies.

Ideal Use Cases: Attest combines survey capabilities with built-in consumer panels, making it efficient for brand tracking, market sizing, and concept testing when you need quick access to consumer respondents without managing your own panel.

Pollfish

Data Collection Methods: Text

Target Audience: Mobile app developers, digital marketers, and agile research teams.

Ideal Use Cases: Pollfish's mobile-first approach and built-in respondent network make it ideal for quick-turn consumer research. Its strength lies in the ability to reach mobile audiences through in-app surveys, perfect for digital product testing and millennial/Gen Z research.

SoGoSurvey

Data Collection Methods: Text, Voice

Target Audience: Corporate research teams focused on employee and customer experience.

Ideal Use Cases: SoGoSurvey's comprehensive platform works well for organizations needing both customer and employee feedback systems. Its robust security features and compliance certifications make it suitable for sensitive research in regulated industries.

Typeform VideoAsk

Data Collection Methods: Text, Video

Target Audience: Marketers and user researchers seeking qualitative insights.

Ideal Use Cases: Typeform VideoAsk combines the platform's engaging design with video response capabilities, making it perfect for brand perception studies, emotional response testing, and research where seeing respondents' facial expressions and environments adds context.

Lookback

Data Collection Methods: Text, Voice, Video

Target Audience: UX researchers and product development teams.

Ideal Use Cases: Lookback specializes in remote user testing with screen recording and video/audio capture. It's ideal for product usability studies, app testing, and digital experience research where observing user interactions provides crucial insights.

Hotjar

Data Collection Methods: Text, Video

Target Audience: Digital marketers, conversion optimization specialists, and website managers.

Ideal Use Cases: While primarily known for heatmaps, Hotjar's survey capabilities work well for on-site feedback and digital experience research. It's particularly valuable when combining behavioral data with direct user feedback on websites and digital products.

Aftercare

Data Collection Methods: Text

Target Audience: Customer success teams, e-commerce businesses, and service-based companies focused on retention.

Ideal Use Cases: Aftercare is particularly valuable for customer experience tracking, churn prevention research, and studies requiring multiple touchpoints throughout a customer relationship. It's less ideal for general market research and better suited for operational customer feedback that drives immediate action.

Conveo.ai

Data Collection Methods: Text, Voice

Target Audience: Digital marketers, customer insights teams, and organizations seeking higher engagement rates.

Ideal Use Cases: Conveo.ai shines in contexts where survey fatigue is a concern, engaging younger demographics who prefer chat interfaces, and research requiring a more natural dialogue flow. Its conversational approach yields higher completion rates and richer qualitative insights compared to traditional survey formats, especially on mobile devices.

Voxpopme

Data Collection Methods: Text, Voice, Video

Target Audience: Consumer insights teams, brand managers, and market research agencies.

Ideal Use Cases: Voxpopme specializes in video-first feedback, allowing researchers to collect, analyze, and share consumer-recorded video responses at scale. It excels at emotional response testing, packaging research, and concept evaluation where seeing and hearing authentic consumer reactions provides richer context than text alone.

Phebi

Data Collection Methods: Voice

Target Audience: Market research agencies, healthcare researchers, and companies focused on emotional analytics.

Ideal Use Cases: Phebi's voice-enabled survey technology uses AI to analyze not just what respondents say but how they say it. The platform detects emotional signals, hesitation, and cognitive effort, making it ideal for sensitive topic research, healthcare studies, and concept testing where uncovering subconscious reactions is crucial.

Opinly.ai

Data Collection Methods: Text, Voice

Target Audience: Product teams, customer experience professionals, and agile market researchers.

Ideal Use Cases: Opinly.ai leverages AI to transform voice feedback into actionable insights. Its platform works particularly well for ongoing customer experience monitoring, product feedback loops, and research requiring rapid analysis of large volumes of qualitative data with sentiment analysis capabilities.

QuestionPro.com

Data Collection Methods: Text, Voice, Video

Target Audience: Mid-sized to enterprise businesses, academic researchers, and market research professionals requiring advanced analytics.

Ideal Use Cases: QuestionPro excels at complex research designs requiring specialized methodologies like pricing studies, segmentation research, and product optimization. Its strength lies in blending quantitative rigor with qualitative insights within a single platform, making it ideal for mixed-methods research where connecting different data types is crucial.

QualSights

Data Collection Methods: Text, Voice, Video

Target Audience: Consumer packaged goods companies, retail, and consumer insights teams.

Ideal Use Cases: QualSights offers an immersive research platform combining video, voice, and text data collection with AI-powered analytics. It excels at in-home usage tests, shopper insights research, and ethnographic studies where observing consumers in natural environments provides contextual understanding of behaviors and preferences.

Truelytics

Data Collection Methods: Text, Voice, Video

Target Audience: Financial advisors, wealth management firms, and financial services researchers.

Ideal Use Cases: Truelytics offers specialized survey capabilities for the financial services industry, making it ideal for client satisfaction research, advisor performance measurement, and compliance-sensitive feedback gathering where industry-specific context and security requirements are paramount.

Discuss.io

Data Collection Methods: Text, Voice, Video

Target Audience: Enterprise insights teams and market research agencies conducting in-depth qualitative research.

Ideal Use Cases: Discuss.io shines for in-depth exploratory research, concept testing that requires dialogue, and studies where facial expressions and non-verbal cues are crucial data points. It's particularly valuable for international research where seeing participants in their home environments adds contextual understanding.

Voiceform

Data Collection Methods: Text, Voice, Audio

Target Audience: Customer experience teams, market researchers seeking emotional insights, and brands wanting more authentic feedback.

Ideal Use Cases: Voiceform works exceptionally well for emotional research questions, feedback requiring nuance, and studies where typing barriers might limit responses. It's particularly effective for open-ended questions where the richness of voice provides much more context than text alone.

Jotform

Data Collection Methods: Text, Video

Target Audience: Small businesses, non-profits, and individual researchers with limited technical resources.

Ideal Use Cases: Jotform combines form building with survey capabilities in an exceptionally user-friendly interface. It excels at event registrations, lead generation research, and feedback collection where integration with payment processing or document collection is required alongside survey questions.

Formstack

Data Collection Methods: Text

Target Audience: Healthcare organizations, educational institutions, and businesses with complex workflow needs.

Ideal Use Cases: Formstack's survey capabilities are part of a broader workflow automation platform, making it ideal for research that triggers subsequent processes. It works particularly well for patient intake research, enrollment studies, and organizational feedback that needs to flow into approval workflows or document generation.

Voicebridge

Data Collection Methods: Voice

Target Audience: Market research, customer insights, and employee engagement teams at financial services, consumer goods, policy research, and telecommunications teams.

Ideal Use Cases: Voicebridge specializes in AI-moderated conversational voice surveys that feel more natural to respondents. The platform excels at complex research topics where a dialogue approach yields better insights than traditional questionnaires, such as decision-making research, customer journey mapping, and exploratory consumer studies.

Conclusion

The survey tool landscape continues to evolve, with platforms increasingly specializing in particular data collection modalities or research methodologies. Modern survey tools now go beyond simply collecting data to offering integrated analytics, emotion detection, and deeper qualitative insights through voice and video. When selecting the right platform for your market research needs, consider:

• The complexity of your research design
• Your target audience and how they prefer to engage
• The specific data collection methods needed (text, voice, video)
• Security and compliance requirements
• Integration needs with your existing technology stack
• Budget constraints and ROI requirements
• The depth of analysis and reporting capabilities

By matching your specific research goals with the right survey platform, you can gather richer insights that drive more informed business decisions. Whether you need quick consumer feedback or in-depth qualitative insights, there's a survey tool designed to meet your unique market research needs.