Cool Survey Tools

If you run a website for very long, either you or your client will want to do a survey. Magazines, for example, often want to do readership surveys to see how well their content is meeting readers’ needs. Organizations like to ask questions about their services.

Many of them sign up with a service like SurveyMonkey. This online service does make it easy to set up and run a survey, but beyond a very basic survey, it costs money. Fortunately, there are a couple of open-source software packages that will do many of the same things.

The one I’m most familiar with is phpESP. Like many open-source projects, the design is quite spartan and the documentation could be improved. BUT, it does work.

Not only does it have the tools to design a survey, it will generate reports for you. It will even do cross-tabbing. This latter feature is very useful for analyzing a survey’s raw data.

Another open-source package that I’ve seen recommended is PHPSurveyor. I just recently found out about this package, and while I haven’t used it, it looks to be a little bit more finished product than is phpESP. I think I’ll try this out on an upcoming project.