Google Surveys vs Google Forms: An updated comparison for 2024

Forms and surveys are excellent ways to gather data. Whether you’re conducting a customer satisfaction survey, sending a quiz to students, or polling your extended family about event RSVPs, forms and surveys can help you get insight from many people at once and make important decisions based on the data.

UPDATE:

As of November 2022, Google Surveys has been discontinued.

In this article, we compare Google Surveys vs Google Forms and show you another option that might work best for you: Jotform.

Looking for the best alternative to Google Forms?

Looking for the best alternative to Google Forms?

Jotform’s full-featured form-building solution is mobile-friendly and has the most integrations in the industry. Use it to collect payments, automate workflows, gather leads, and more.

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Start From Scratch

What is Google Forms?

Google Forms is a free, web-based form software that’s part of the Google suite of products, which also includes applications such as Google Docs and Google Slides. 

Google Forms features an intuitive and user-friendly editor, so setting up simple forms and surveys doesn’t require any coding knowledge. Google Forms also has a number of helpful features, such as a drag-and-drop interface for questions and conditional logic questions.

Pro Tip

Create powerful surveys and forms for your business for free with Jotform.

What is Google Surveys?

Google Surveys, which was previously known as Google Consumer Surveys, was designed for businesses to use when conducting market research. Typically, businesses used Google Surveys as an alternative to content paywalls. For example, online publishers used Google Surveys as a gateway to premium content — users would have to respond to questions in order to read certain content.

It was easy to create a custom market research survey and share it through popular publisher websites, which helped businesses gather important data. The tool also helped convert survey data into simple charts and graphs.

Key differences between Google Surveys and Google Forms

  • Pricing. Unlike Google Forms, which is free to use, Google Surveys charged fees based on the number of completed responses to your survey. This ranged from a few cents to a few dollars, and it depended on whether you were surveying a general group or a more specific group, such as people in a certain age group or postal code.
  • Purpose. While Google Forms is adaptable to many use cases beyond surveys, like quizzes and RSVP forms, Google Surveys was primarily meant for market research. Features differed between the two platforms; for example, Google Surveys had more sophisticated data analysis. 
  • Audience. Surveys and online forms made with Google Forms can be shared with emails, links, and website embeds. Google Surveys, however, offered custom targeting for surveys, so you had the opportunity to get less biased response data. 
  • Data analysis. Google Surveys offered more in-depth data analytics and reports. The response data in Google Forms can be stored in a linked spreadsheet using Google Sheets, but analytics are basically limited to summary statistics. 
  • Design. Forms created with Google Forms are customizable, so you can select question types, colors, images, and videos. Google Surveys was considerably less customizable.

Jotform: A Google Forms and Google Surveys alternative

Jotform is an excellent Google Forms alternative that offers robust features to help you accomplish your data-gathering goals.

Unlike Google Forms or Google Surveys, Jotform comes with thousands of free templates for forms, surveys, quizzes, polls, and more, and they cover every business process you can think of. In addition, Jotform also includes hundreds of free templates for tables, so it’s easy to organize large amounts of data to glean important insights. Jotform also has the ability to accept payments from over 40 secure payment gateways.

Google Forms is a good option for simple forms, and Google Surveys used to be a great choice for market research. But Jotform can do both of those things, plus a lot more. With a robust feature set, thousands of templates, and an intuitive user interface, Jotform is an excellent alternative for creating forms and surveys.

Check out our Google Forms guide

AUTHOR
Jotform's Editorial Team is a group of dedicated professionals committed to providing valuable insights and practical tips to Jotform blog readers. Our team's expertise spans a wide range of topics, from industry-specific subjects like managing summer camps and educational institutions to essential skills in surveys, data collection methods, and document management. We also provide curated recommendations on the best software tools and resources to help streamline your workflow.

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