FluidSurveys, which begins at $34 per month (billed annually), does everything the competition does, and then some. When your needs outgrow a consumer- or indiviual-oriented online survey tool then it's time to look at FluidSurveys. While the company has dropped its pricing somewhat since we first reviewed it, you should still be careful here because to get the most out of FluidSurveys, there's some significant learning involved. FluidSurveys is the enterprise sibling of SurveyMonkey. They are now one company (operating independently, thus we reviewed them separately) but the survey tools are similar in basic features and design philosophy. With FluidSurveys, you get more options, control, application integration, and collaboration tools—and you pay for the privilege. But if you need your survey to do more than the obvious, and your alternative is a lot of pesky customization, FluidSurveys can be quite a bargain. It's only FluidSurveys's price tag—four or five times the monthly cost—that made it lose out on the Editors' Choice award to SurveyGizmo. FluidSurveys presents its pricing scheme alongside SurveyMonkey's presumably to give prospective customers a less expensive option if the "Ultra"-class's $100 per month fee induces sticker shock. If you want advanced features such as enhanced SSL security, multi-user accounts, and Salesforce integration, you're advised to call for pricing. Creating Surveys To create a survey in FluidSurveys, you drag and drop question types onto the webpage canvas. Then you fill in the question text and permissible answers, and optionally change settings and survey flow. The answers can come from the survey bank, such as lists of U.S. states, frequency, importance rankings, or educational background. You get to those lists, unusually, from the "bulk answers" setting, used by other applications to speed up copy-and-paste typing; but it actually makes more sense this way. I don't like everything about its design process, though; each page is displayed separately, rather than letting you scroll through the entire survey at once, as in Zoho Survey. As with other online survey tools, you can start the design process by building on professionally designed templates. FluidSurveys's set of templates is extensive, with about 20 choices under "Customer Satisfaction" alone (e.g., hotel satisfaction, auto-repair shop satisfaction), and extending into categories few others touch, such as politics and healthcare. The theme of "more choices" continues: FluidSurvey has about three dozen question types and supports 64 human languages. Advanced question types include a 3D matrix, passwords, timers, and group/rank questions. Each question also supports an "extra description" with text formatting options, so you can explain things to the respondent. That would be a major advantage if, say, the survey is a final exam and you need to give the student the "problem statement" to respond to. The software also lets you add JavaScript, include custom CSS, or add touch support (which I didn't test). Like SurveyMonkey, FluidSurveys lets you have multiple text box answers to a single question, so you can ask respondents to "Enter the three cities you'd most like us to hold our next conference." Its text validation is extensive as well. Beyond the usual "email ID" or "phone number," FluidSurveys can make sure a response conforms to ZIP codes, currencies, dates in various formats—and quite a few more. The software's text validation capabilities blew all of the other products I tested out of the water. Publishing and Reporting No matter how and where you aim to get the survey into respondents' hands, FluidSurveys makes it possible. When it's time to publish, you can share the survey on any of several social networks, including Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Twitter, and Tumblr. The survey can be embedded on a website or deployed as a pop-up, printed to a paper document (imagine that), or saved as a QR code. You can make a survey pop-up on a webpage, accept payments from within the survey, deploy the survey in a kiosk mode, track respondents with fine-tuned granularity (with A/B testing), and for an extra cost find qualified respondents for your survey. The A/B testing includes suitability for accessibility and for mobile devices. Most survey solicitations are sent via email, and here too FluidSurveys builds in unique features, such as spam tests to ensure messages are delivered and unsubscribe links for recipients to gracefully reject participation. Contact and email lists can be generated manually or imported from Outlook, Plaxo, FreshBooks, MailChimp, Google, and Salesforce. You can also send nudges to would-be respondents who haven't participated yet. The FluidSurveys reporting is equally extensive, with a dashboard showing standard reports (with or without data filters) and cross-tabulations, with a report showing answers segmented by, say, age. It lets you track and display a lot of information beyond the response data, such as showing the time spent on page and the geography of the respondent. You may not always need to segment your reports to see how people in Asia Pacific regions vary in opinion from Europeans, but you'll be grateful that you can. Raw data can be saved to CSV, SPSS, StatWing, and XML, should you need to do even more data massaging. Here, too, you have a deceptively simple interface for "just the facts, ma'am" data intelligence, with a breathtaking number of options should you want to pretty-up the results. Among them are layout niceties, such as displaying question numbers or showing the chart-and-graph side-by-side, or controlling what's shown – percentages vs. count on a bar chart, or whether to include aggregate data (average values). If other applications included these choices, the options sure weren't obvious. A Heavy-Duty Enterprise Survey Tool Many of FluidSurveys's unique strengths come from its collaboration tools, as these are designed for teams, not a single individual holed up in a Data Analysis Ivory Tower. Other applications have a shared question bank where you store commonly-used questions-and-answers, for instance, such as a list of the company's product numbers. But among FluidSurvey tools is a shared library for resources beyond survey elements; I can imagine it containing shared information like a corporate communications standards document. Collaboration also means application integration: it connects to Dropbox for Business, FreshBooks, Salesforce.com, Mailchimp, Olark, and other services. For as heavy-duty an online survey tool as this is, FluidSurveys is remarkably easy to learn and use. The advanced options don't get in the way of the everyday features, so I could throw together a simple survey in only a few minutes. But the power is always there, only a few clicks away. Learning to take advantage of FluidSurveys will take some time, but that's natural for software with so many features. FluidSurveys is certainly overkill for most users, which takes it out of the class of Editors' Choice considerations for this roundup. (I can't compare a sports car and a commuter car using the same criteria.) But when you outgrow the capabilities of the general-purpose applications, in FluidSurveys you'll find all of the power for which you were yearning. Bottom Line: Unlike much of its competition, which is aimed at beginners and small businesses, FluidSurvey is an enterprise-grade tool aimed at survey professionals. It's not easy or cheap, but for serious users it'll get the job done.

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