Checkbox Survey isn't a feature standout among online survey tools, but it does strike a nice balancing act. The software, which starts at $450 per year for a hosted version (an on-premises installation is also available), offers excellent customizability that's tempered by a user interface that's not so complex you'll need to spend all your time learning it. For companies with more-than-casual but less-than-intense survey requirements, Checkbox Survey could be the "just right" option. The Basic subscription for Checkbox Survey provides one user with online support. The team support kicks in at the Professional plan level (which is priced at $175 per month, billed monthly) for five users, team subscriptions, phone support, an application programming interface (API), SPSS integration, and multilingual support. For $345 per month, you get 15 users, priority support, and such niceties as use of your own domain name for branding. Its overall functionality and price point falls just shy of our Editors' Choice award winner SurveyGizmo, but Checkbox Survey is still an impressive and full-featured online survey tool. Creating the Survey It took me a while to warm up to Checkbox Survey because its user interface (UI) is staid and a little overly formal—like a customer service clerk who asks all the right questions and gives you the information you asked for, but never smiles. Checkbox Survey's creation process involves filling in a set of forms rather than interacting with a tool that cheerfully guides you through something you infrequently do. Compare that to Editors' Choice SurveyGizmo, whose prompting text is relentlessly friendly: "What would you like to name this survey (Pick a good one!)?" But the more I worked with Checkbox Survey, the more I liked this online survey tool. Well-designed applications are continuously discoverable, and you can accomplish the basics in just a few keystrokes without the software's advanced features getting in your way. But when you do need something extra—such as ensuring a respondent gives no more than three answers to a multiple-choice question—the functionality is sitting right there, ready for you to turn it on. Despite the "wearing a suit" formality of its UI, Checkbox Survey achieves that difficult balance. Checkbox Survey's design for creating surveys is based on creating a logical page flow shown on the left-hand side of the screen. Each question has a tabbed dialog box containing the visual preview, question text, choices (such as the answers you supply for the multiple-choice question), relevant options (such as whether or not this is a required question or if an "other" write-in is permitted), appearance (e.g., left justified), and survey logic (with both a basic view and heavy-duty conditions such as "If Q1 was not answered and Q3=No"). The Checkbox Survey's UI could use an injection of SurveyGizmo's handholding guidance, and surface some of its cooler features with suggestions on how they might improve the survey as SurveyMonkey does. You can ask your questions in just about any way you can imagine. There are all sorts of rating scales, including rank order, sliders, and "happy/sad face" images. Matrix questions are more than checkboxes; the rows can be numerical, drop-down lists, rating scales, and sliders including sum totals. In this it compares favorably with far more expensive options such as FluidSurveys. You can include CAPTCHA fields (a feature shared only by SurveyGizmo) and enable respondents to upload files, making Checkbox Survey suitable for building such surveys as a job application questionnaire. You can instruct the software to display images, scores, and responses, which are useful for creating educational materials. Text can be verified to make sure the respondent entered an email address, numbers (decimal, integer, money), postal code, phone number, social security number, or URL. If you made a list of "need to have" and "nice to have" features, Checkbox Survey likely would let you mark every one. Checkbox Survey has a library of pre-created questions, including website satisfaction and demographics (because nobody wants to type in all 50 answers to "Which state do you live in?" much less remember how to spell Massachusetts). You can also import questions in Extensible Markup Language (XML), which can aid in application integration. While the pre-created libraries are a bit thin as compared to tools such as Editors' Choice SurveyGizmo, you can add your own oft-used questions. There are about a dozen style options (such as "autumn" or "parchment") controlling font options and background color choices, but Checkbox Survey doesn't specialize in creating visually arresting surveys. The styling is adequate for most business needs, though some companies will yearn for more appearance controls, as you'd find in Campaign Monitor GetFeedback. You can, however, apply different style templates to a survey's mobile and Web browser versions. Speaking of which: Previewing the survey lets you see how it looks on a PC, tablet, or smartphone. It's nowhere near as impressive as Campaign Monitor GetFeedback's mobile support, but the preview prevents embarrassing surprises. Deploying the Survey Once you're ready to share the survey, you can do so with a shared URL—but even that has a lot of granularity—far better than "here's a link for you to distribute." A survey can be shared publicly, or you can require a password, invitation, or (uniquely) a membership in an access or registration list. You can close out the survey based on date (so nobody expends effort when the answers will be ignored) or when you reach a certain number of respondents. Surveys can be shared with a URL or embedded on your website. You can also post a link on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or LinkedIn. The Checkbox Survey email invitations include customizable text, so the message you send out appears just the way you want. On the downside, there's no email list management or integration with existing customer relationship management (CRM) tools to get those IDs, as with Zoho Survey; be prepared to copy-and-paste email IDs. On the plus side, though, you can see how well people are responding: Checkbox Survey monitors how many such invitations were sent, as well as the response rates and bounces. You can trigger email alerts, too, as with Outside Software eSurveysPro. This tells a respondent the form was received (as with a job application), including data merged from the survey, such as first and last name. Or you might send an email to a support team when a customer's satisfaction rating is marked as dreadful. If you're doing surveys to measure user feedback, any way to respond to an unhappy customer is immediately a valuable opportunity. Reporting Power at Your Fingertips All that data collection is accompanied by reporting tools so powerful they're actually a bit daunting. Expect to spend some time with the Checkbox Survey help features, including its useful how-to videos. While it doesn't have the depth of community support of SurveyGizmo, I find no fault with Checkbox Survey's documentation. By default, the report-creation wizard generates plain-vanilla pie charts and bar charts, and maybe that's enough for basic corporate research. But oh boy, does the reporting module have lots of power under its hood. Data can be visualized with line graphs, bar charts, pie charts, and doughnut charts, with or without accompanying summary data. You can fiddle with a bar chart's size, background colors, and margins if you want. You can permit people to save the charts or download them as vector images. Checkbox has plenty of support for filters ("show only respondents over 50") and cross-tabulations ("show results broken out by age"). But here the raw power does creep in front of its usability; using these features is complex enough that I was dissuaded from experimentation. With some fiddling, you can extract all sorts of useful data to help you see relationships and make better decisions – but it absolutely requires "some fiddling." As a result, Checkbox Survey is not among my favorite reporting modules among these survey tools (SoGoSurvey is still on top in that regard), as I felt as though I needed to learn a lot before I could get started. But that's a stuck-at-beginner problem you won't share for long. I don't like everything about Checkbox Survey, such as the odd omissions in its deployment features. However, I do like how many things the software does well, such as its number of question types, email alerts based on response data, and survey logic flow. The tool's excellence has enough in the plus column to erase the negatives. It's simple enough for occasional use, but formidable enough for in-depth research. Bottom Line: Checkbox Survey stands out in terms of customizability. This package makes it easy to customize any aspect of an online survey and whip out simple questionnaires as you need them.

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