Introduction
Surveys and quizzes are integral tools for corporate trainers today. Long gone are the days of printed questionnaires. And the demand for practical form builder tools has been on the rise for some time now. 📈 With a number of options like Google Forms, Microsoft Forms, SurveyMonkey, and Typeform, choosing the best one can be daunting. But by using six criteria and weighing these options against one another, we can determine what the best choice for you will be. 🤔 In this post, we’ll unpack the top four form builders that corporate trainers use and arm you with the knowledge you need to decide which will work best for you. 💡
Understanding Your Needs
First and foremost, when selecting your ideal form builder, it’s recommended to get crystal clear on your objectives. 🎯 Beyond simple surveying, your needs might extend to integrating data analytics tools or CRMs, or even compiling results in Excel or Google Sheets. You may also have multiple use cases outside of surveying, like quizzes, polls, or signup forms. 📊 Once you have that identified, we will leverage our six key factors. Those factors are: ease of use in building forms, ease of reviewing results, look and feel, use cases, AI integration, and external tool integration.
Ease of Use in Building Forms
Starting with ease of use while building forms. When it comes to the most basic features, all builders are easy to use. 👍 Things like adding questions, multiple question types, and the tool being generally intuitive. For advanced functionalities like branching or recall, SurveyMonkey and Typeform lead the pack, whereas Google and Microsoft lag behind. 🚀 Having used both, I find SurveyMonkey to be slightly more intuitive. For that reason SurveyMonkey is my recommendation for ease of use during creation.
Ease of Viewing Results
Next, we will assess how easy it is to view the results. As a side note, we are only evaluating viewing the results inside the tool. Notably all of them have options to view the results externally. 🔍 That said, all of the builders perform remarkably well in allowing you to view results within their platforms. Each offers multiple ways to visualize data, making this factor less critical in decision-making. ✨ Each tool has at least three ways that you can view and break down the data. So all four get a gold star here. ⭐
Look and Feel
Moving on, we will assess the highly subjective criteria of look and feel. Before we jump into this, I think it’s only fair to admit that I have never been a huge fan of Microsoft or Google’s UI. 🤷♀️ (Except for the Google search engine, which is now and always has been fantastic.) With that out of the way, Google and Microsoft Forms have a decidedly generic appearance both when building and filling out forms. 😐 SurveyMonkey is a step ahead, but still not impressive enough to take the gold star. Meanwhile, Typeform, with its elegant and minimalist one-question-at-a-time format, outshines the rest in this category. 🤩 Especially when you consider how features like recall, branching, and logic can personalize the forms. Gold star for Typeform. ⭐
Use Cases
Fourthly, we assess the various use cases for which these tools can be used. From a corporate trainer’s perspective, essential functionalities like surveys, signup forms, and polls are a must. ✅ Even though Typeform probably offers the most versatility due to its advanced marketing and analytics capabilities, SurveyMonkey is a close competitor. That said, all options are suitable for the typical needs of corporate training. 💼 As a result, this factor should not heavily sway your decision, and each tool gets a gold star in this category. ⭐
AI Capabilities
Next, we compare the native built-in AI capabilities because using AI is all the rage these days. 🤖 Microsoft and Google offer basic AI functions, like suggesting possible answers for yes or no questions, handy but not groundbreaking. Conversely, SurveyMonkey and Typeform utilize large language models (LLMs) to auto-generate forms based on prompts. ✨ It’s worth noting that as with any current LLM, it isn’t 100% accurate and you would be hard pressed to get a publishable form from just one prompt. So while this feature offers a great launching off point for creation, you will still have to manually edit whether your end goal is a survey, quiz, poll, or signup form. ✍️ Because neither Typeform nor Survey Monkey radically outperformed the other in this category, both get a gold star. ⭐
External Integrations
Finally, our last criterion. How well do these tools integrate with other tools that may be in your tech stack? 🔗 Starting with Google Forms, which lacks integration capabilities outside of linking with Google Sheets. Which is a nice basic feature, but not particularly useful for intricate needs. 📉 Microsoft Forms integrates very well with Office 365 services, but lacks versatility with anything outside of the Office 365 Environment. The automation that you are able to build out with Power Automate and the data visualizations you can build out with Power BI are very impressive, but they are so finicky and complicated to use that it’s hard to recommend them unless you are a very advanced O365 user. 🤯
SurveyMonkey and Typeform boast numerous native integrations, although many require third-party services like Zapier. However, in a closer comparison of the two lists, Typeform does still have more integrations that do not require Zapier. 🏆 So for that reason, it edges slightly ahead and earns the gold star in this category. ⭐
Conclusion
With the scores in, Microsoft and Google Forms tie with two stars, SurveyMonkey earns four, and Typeform leads with five stars. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ However, given that half of the categories have multiple winners, your decision may ultimately depend on your budget and whether you’re already vested in Google’s or Microsoft’s ecosystem. If you have the budget and you’re in the market for premium integrations, state-of-the-art AI features, and an overall better user experience both for you and your responders, Typeform may just be the best bet for you and your team. 🥳 If you just can’t secure the budget and you’re stuck with either Google or Microsoft Forms, though, don’t fret; both are solid options. 👍
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