Updated on September 18, 2026
SurveyMonkey is an online survey platform for creating, distributing and analyzing professional questionnaires. Over 250,000 organizations rely on it to question customers and employees. A free Basic plan gets you going, and individual paid subscriptions begin at $39 per month billed annually. Its AI now drafts a questionnaire from a single prompt and sorts open-ended answers by theme and sentiment in seconds.
The SurveyMonkey builder works by drag and drop, with dozens of question types and conditional logic that reshapes the path based on each answer. You describe your study in one sentence, and a full draft questionnaire appears, ready to fine-tune.
On the analysis side, the tedious part vanishes. Where you once read hundreds of free-text replies one by one, the AI groups opinions by topic and tone within seconds, a real time-saver if you already juggle several data analysis tools. One caveat, the conversational assistant currently works in English only, on North American data centers.
SurveyMonkey Audience opens up a worldwide panel of 335 million people, billed per response on top of your subscription. No contact list of your own, no problem, you target a precise profile and results land within hours. Handy for testing a price point, comparing two logos or measuring a Net Promoter Score in an unfamiliar market.
The platform also connects to over 200 services, with Salesforce, HubSpot, Stripe and Microsoft Teams leading the pack, and has opened up to Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini so collected feedback can be put to work without switching windows. Against Typeform or Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey holds the well-equipped middle ground, deeper than the former, cheaper than the latter.
The free Basic plan allows 10-question surveys with roughly 25 viewable responses each, enough to try the tool rather than run a real study (the monkey mascot, for the record, has been at it since 1999). Paid tiers mainly scale up response volume and analysis depth.
These figures shift as the lineup gets reshuffled, so treat the official pricing page as the final word before subscribing.
| Plan | Price | Included responses |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | Free | 25 viewable per survey |
| Standard monthly | $99 per month | 1,000 per month |
| Advantage annual | $39 per month | 15,000 per year |
| Premier annual | $139 per month | 40,000 per year |
| Team Advantage | $30 per seat per month | 50,000 per year, 3-seat minimum |
| Enterprise | Custom quote | Unlimited |
Yes, the Basic plan is free with no time limit, but each survey is capped at 10 questions and roughly 25 viewable responses. Exporting data, customizing the design or going past that quota requires a paid plan, starting at $39 per month billed annually.
SurveyMonkey complies with GDPR for its European customers, with a dedicated legal center and data processing agreements. Hosting happens in the cloud, historically in the United States, while Enterprise plans add data residency options and HIPAA-enabled features for regulated industries.
Each response beyond your plan's quota is automatically billed at $0.15. Unused responses from one billing period do not roll over to the next, so pick a tier sized for your busiest campaigns rather than your yearly average.
Google Forms is completely free and covers simple forms well. SurveyMonkey pulls ahead once a study gets serious, with deeper branching logic, automatic analysis of open-ended answers and a built-in respondent panel, none of which exist in Google's tool.
Verdict: Marketing, HR and product teams that gather feedback year-round will find SurveyMonkey a safe bet, from the first draft question to the final report. For a one-off poll, the free plan is a low-stakes way to learn the ropes before paying.
