Our picks for the best employee survey software are:
What are the best employee survey tools?
| Standout feature | Starting price* | Free trial? | ||
| Connecteam | Device agnostic | $29/mo. for the first 30 users | 14 days | Visit Connecteam |
| SurveySparrow | White labeling options | $19/mo. | 14 days | Visit SurveySparrow |
| Culture Amp | Guided action planning | Contact sales | No | Visit Culture Amp |
| Zoho Survey | Small business to enterprise support | $25/mo. | Seven days | Visit Zoho Survey |
| QualtricsXM | Sentiment analysis | Contact sales | No | Visit QualtricsXM |
*Unless otherwise specified, starting prices are based on annual billing.
Connecteam: Best for small businesses with a mobile workforce
Connecteam is a workplace management and employee experience platform that unifies internal communication, time tracking, scheduling, engagement, training, and document storage in one place. Small and medium businesses (SMBs) can choose from three product “hubs” to create an employee engagement app unique to their needs.
Because Connecteam built its platform to facilitate communication and collaboration among the company, its surveying feature is best for mobile, distributed teams. Users can access surveys on their mobile devices and complete them at their convenience within the Connecteam app.
Push notifications, auto-reminders, and direct chat capabilities ensure employees notice and complete new surveys on time. If you’re in an industry like retail, manufacturing, service, or hospitality, this encourages participation from your frontline workers. It also demonstrates your commitment to hearing feedback from your entire workforce — even those not tied to a desk.
Plus, Connecteam’s surveys allow you to understand the effectiveness of some of its front-end human resources (HR) features, like onboarding, training, scheduling, or paid time off (PTO) management. For greater employee engagement and satisfaction, you can quickly improve these features, like eliminating or adding new training courses.
Did you know?
Connecteam offers a secure work chat feature to communicate directly with individual employees, team members, or departments. Employees can even create chats to facilitate project or employee resource group discussions.
This also makes it easier to talk to distributed teams about survey results and how their outcomes will influence initiatives directly affecting employees’ everyday work.
Pros
Cons
Mobile app
Connecteam is a mobile-first platform, so managers and employees can access all features from its HR mobile app. This includes surveying, making it easy for on-the-go employees to answer questions from their mobile devices in between assisting customers.
Android and Apple users give the app high scores in the Google Play and App stores. Connecteam responds frequently to positive and negative reviews, offering assistance and workarounds for any technical issues with the app.
Survey tracking
If you’re a survey administrator, Connecteam allows you to track survey responses to promote 100% completion rates. Because of Connecteam’s mobile-friendly interface, reminding employees isn’t limited to follow-up emails. Instead, you can send mobile push notifications or chat message reminders for your distributed workforce.
Connecteam separates its pricing by “hubs” and “tiers.” Although this allows you to pick and choose features you need for a more customized product, it’s an expensive option compared to standalone survey products.
Below is a table outlining Connecteam’s various price options by hubs (columns) and tier plans (rows).
| Operations | Communications | HR & Skills | |
| Small business | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| Basic | $29/mo. for first 30 users + $0.5/user/mo. for each additional user. | $29/mo. for first 30 users + $0.5/user/mo. for each additional user. | $29/mo. for first 30 users + $0.5/user/mo. for each additional user. |
| Advanced | $49/mo. for first 30 users + $1.5/user/mo. for each additional user. | $49/mo. for first 30 users + $1.5/user/mo. for each additional user. | $49/mo. for first 30 users + $1.5/user/mo. for each additional user. |
| Expert | $99/mo. for first 30 users + $3/user/mo. for each additional user. | $99/mo. for first 30 users + $3/user/mo. for each additional user. | $99/mo. for first 30 users + $3/user/mo. for each additional user. |
| Enterprise | For employers with 201–10,000 employees; please contact sales for a quote. | ||
Note that Connecteam offers a 14-day free trial and that all prices above are based on annual billing.
Connecteam is an excellent option for companies that have a primarily deskless workforce and need to gather employee feedback without disrupting daily workflows. With features like direct messaging, anonymous suggestion boxes, and reminders, Connecteam allows you to foster a sense of employee community, open and honest dialogue, participation, and engagement.
True, Connecteam lacks some of the advanced analytics of platforms like SurveySparrow and QualtricsXM. If you’re a small business, though, these options may be overwhelming and unnecessary for your operation anyway. Therefore, Connecteam may be better if you want quick implementation and adoption throughout your workforce.
SurveySparrow: Best for enterprises
SurveySparrow is a standalone surveying platform that can collect both employee and customer feedback. Moreover, because it’s a survey-focused platform, its features are significantly more advanced than Connecteam’s, making it a wise choice if you need high-volume surveying and advanced customization.
For example, with SurveySparrow you have various ways to cultivate employee feedback, instead of only on an ad hoc basis. SurveySparrow’s purpose-focused surveying options include:
With each survey cadence, you can gain insight into workplace satisfaction throughout the employee life cycle. Based on your findings, your company can then make data-informed decisions on improving workplace culture or efficiency. In turn, employee retention increases for every employee concern you take seriously and take measures to improve.
Outside of employee surveying, SurveySparrow offers additional features for large organizations. White labeling options, for example, allow you to stylize your surveys and email communications to strengthen brand awareness between employees and customers. Meanwhile, its no-code website chatbot can help gather, save, and analyze feedback from employees and customers with little effort.
Pros
Cons
Advanced analytics
SurveySparrow’s reports are constantly updated in real-time as survey responses roll in. Additional capabilities like cross-tabulation and report filters also allow you to compare and contrast responses across respondents for a granular look at the variables behind employee engagement.
Recurring surveys
SurveySparrow allows you to automate sending surveys at the frequency of your choice, such as daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. This enables you to gather data on the same parameters over time, like eNPS, to monitor whether company changes have affected employee happiness.
In addition, you can customize email reminders for both non- and partial-responders to ensure employees complete pivotal surveys and give you a well-rounded view of your organization.
SurveySparrow offers five pricing tiers, depending on the features you need. Prices also fluctuate within each tier depending on the number of survey responses you expect to receive each month.
Note: All prices are based on annual billing.
Free plan
- $0 per month.
- Up to 50 responses per month.
- Three active surveys.
- Up to 10 questions per survey.
Basic
- Starting at $19 for 0–5,000 responses per month.
- Maximum price at $119 for 10,000 responses per month.
- One administrative user.
Essentials
- Starting at $49 for 0–15,000 responses per month.
- Maximum price at $274 for 30,000 responses per month.
- Three administrative users.
Business
- Starting at $99 for 0–100,000 responses per month.
- Maximum price at $1,099 for 200,000 responses per month.
- Five administrative users.
Enterprise
- Contact SurveySparrow for a quote.
SurveySparrow unites customer and employee experience surveys in one platform, allowing enterprises to craft customized feedback journeys for both. In addition, automations, multiple language options, and unique question types enable you to drill down into the factors affecting employee morale across various locations and countries.
As a result, SurveySparrow is a great solution for strengthening your brand or analyzing the responses of big-picture company plans before taking action.
Culture Amp: Best for science-backed survey templates
Culture Amp is a popular performance management tool with modules for performance reviews, goal tracking, one-on-one meetings, and coaching. However, its emphasis on science-backed employee feedback and engagement surveys makes it a unique addition to our shortlist — and a great choice if you want to be more intentional about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
For example, Culture Amp’s survey templates are backed by peer-reviewed literature, in-house industrial/organizational (I/O) psychologists, and data scientists. Culture Amp also runs its own research institute, Culture Lab, that collects information on employee performance and engagement from various countries, regions, and industries.
Thus, if you’re an international business, Culture Amp helps you accurately measure employee engagement while remaining culturally or regionally appropriate. In turn, Culture Amp provides action planning and guidance on re-engaging employees to strengthen your company’s culture and values and reduce attrition.
Did you know?
Effective performance management is important because it elevates your company’s productivity and innovation. It also contributes to employee engagement since it helps to clarify their roles’ expectations.
As a result, software like Culture Amp frequently includes performance management and engagement elements to track, understand, and reduce employee unhappiness.
Pros
Cons
Survey templates
Culture Amp provides more than 30 science-backed, customizable survey and performance review templates. Examples of survey templates include:
- Psychosocial health.
- Engagement.
- Inclusion.
- Change.
- Team effectiveness.
- Individual effectiveness.
Beyond reducing the administrative workload of your HR teams, using these templates can help you surface valuable insights into what drives employee satisfaction.
Post-survey guidance
Culture Amp’s Focus Agent pinpoints what areas you should address following your engagement surveys. Like its survey templates, Culture Amp’s Focus Agent takes a scientific approach to analyzing survey data. It looks at survey answers and external benchmark data to suggest the most relevant areas for change, similar to an I/O psychologist.
Focus Agent makes interpreting the data you collect easier, giving you a starting point to implement change.
Culture Amp doesn’t disclose pricing, so you must call for a custom quote. It offers three modules.
- Engage: Engagement and pulse surveys, focus areas, action planning, benchmarks, and turnover predictions.
- Perform: Goal and objectives and key results (OKRs) tracking, performance reviews, and self-reflections.
- Develop: Development plans, career paths, competency levels, and one-on-one conversations.
Several review outlets indicate that Culture Amp starts at $5 per user, per month.
If you’re looking for a solution with pre-built survey templates and the backing of the scientific community, then Culture Amp is our top choice. What’s more, its performance management and career development features assist in putting the results of your surveys into action — such as implementing more training or OKRs to track change progress.
Zoho Survey: Best for scalability
Zoho Survey is a standalone surveying solution similar to SurveySparrow in features and scope. However, Zoho Survey offers more competitive pricing and HR-focused survey templates than SurveySparrow. As a result, it’s a better starter solution for businesses with 100 employees or fewer.
Zoho Survey’s user interface is intuitive for new users, allowing you to drag and drop more than 25 different question types into your survey. You also don’t need code to customize your surveys with your logo, colors, fonts, headers, or backgrounds. If you intend to use the platform for more than just surveying your employees, this is a great way to tie customer experience and interactions to your unique brand.
Small businesses can start with Zoho Survey’s free plan, which allows you to create unlimited surveys with a 10-question, 100-response maximum for each. In comparison, SurveySparrow’s free plan is limited to three active surveys and a 50-response maximum per month.
So, small businesses could operate entirely out of Zoho Survey’s free plan without purchasing a paid tier, whereas SurveySparrow users are very restricted. Even if you reach Zoho’s response limit, its lowest paid tier, Plus, offers distribution and branding customization options that SurveySparrow’s equivalent basic tier does not.
Pros
Cons
Access to Zoho product suite
Although you can purchase Zoho Survey as a standalone product, it works best when integrated with its entire product suite, like Zoho CRM and Zoho Recruit. This allows you to track customer and employee engagement data and compare it to other sales and HR metrics for more meaningful action plans.
Multilingual options
If you’re growing into the international marketplace, Zoho Survey lets you craft surveys in up to 75 languages, with interface support in 26 languages. As a result, you can collect survey responses from your employees in different regions and even sort responses by language for comparison.
Zoho Survey can also translate survey responses into the language of your choice through its integration with Google Translate, ensuring you receive insights from your employees worldwide.
Zoho Survey offers four pricing tiers with a seven-day free trial of its Enterprise edition.
Free plan
- $0 per month.
- Unlimited surveys.
- Up to 100 responses per survey.
- Up to 10 questions per survey.
Plus
- $25 per month (billed annually).
- Unlimited surveys.
- Unlimited questions (if billed annually) OR 3,000 responses per month (if billed monthly).
- One administrative user.
Pro
- $35 per month (billed annually).
- Unlimited surveys.
- Unlimited questions (if billed annually) OR 5,000 responses per month (if billed monthly).
- One administrative user.
Enterprise
- $75 per month (billed annually).
- Unlimited surveys.
- Unlimited questions (if billed annually) OR 7,000 responses per month (if billed monthly).
- Three administrative users.
If you’re new to surveying software but expect to grow, Zoho Survey offers scalable pricing tiers to help you add features as your employee count and customer base increase.
Likewise, its support for multiple languages makes it a great choice if you plan to hire, or already employ, workers in various countries. Your surveys become less one-sided, and your global workforce will feel more invested in your company if you listen and implement their feedback.
QualtricsXM: Best for advanced reporting and analytics
QualtricsXM is an experience management platform best known for its tools to collect and analyze business, customer, employee, service, and product information. Because the software collects such a vast amount of data from various sources, QualtricsXM’s platform is well-known for its advanced reporting and insight capabilities, with help from artificial intelligence (AI).
What’s more, QualtricsXM intentionally ties customer and employee experience data together, since one often influences the other. For example, Qualtrics can link survey data showing high satisfaction with your company training to increased customer retention. The ability to connect those means you can continue to invest in training for improved customer satisfaction and company profitability.
While other platforms on our list, like SurveySparrow and Zoho Recruit, include analytics like cross-tabulation, filtering, and trend reports to spot patterns and insights, QualtricsXM’s is significantly more advanced.
For instance, Qualtrics’ Experience ID AI interface isn’t limited to employee or customer survey responses; it also collects unstructured data from social media posts and informal conversations for a more holistic view of the drivers affecting engagement. This means you can reveal areas where employees are unsatisfied that you may not have considered investigating.
Pros
Cons
Predictive analytics
QualtricsXM’s Predict iQ can help you create a churn prediction model to help forecast the likelihood of customers leaving or employee attrition. With insights delivered in plain language, your HR team or people managers can take proactive measures to address areas of negative feedback.
Sentiment analysis
QualtricsXM’s Text iQ and XM Discover modules gather data from various open sources, including surveys, social media, review sites, chatbots, calls, chats, and external forums, then analyze feedback as positive, negative, or neutral.
Through visualizations like word maps, heat maps, or constellation charts, you can quickly identify areas driving employee dissatisfaction for more targeted engagement initiatives.
QualtricsXM’s pricing requires a custom quote; however, many review outlets indicate that its minimum starting price is around $1,500 per year.
QualtricsXM’s emphasis on real-time analytics and AI makes it a great choice if you value in-depth insights with little administrative effort. Likewise, its predictive analytics and suggestions make it particularly useful for companies in highly competitive markets since it allows you to be proactive instead of reactive to the needs of your employees.
Moreover, QualtricsXM gathers data from other areas besides surveys, like internal chats and company forums, providing you with a 360-degree view of employee engagement.
Employee survey tools FAQs
How to choose the best employee survey software
The best employee survey platform depends on the size of your business, the volume of surveying you intend to do, the sophistication of the analysis tools you need, and what you plan to investigate. After comparing several options on the market, use our advice below to make a selection:
If none of these solutions seem right, check out our Employee Engagement Software Guide for a complete list of options to fit your needs.
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