We review products independently, but we may earn affiliate commissions from buying links on this page. Terms of use. Online survey tool Qualtrics (which begins at $1,500 per year for the "Research Core 1" plan) got its start in supporting the research needs of academics who needed sophisticated questionnaires. Qualtrics remains a top choice of large enterprises to this day. The direct question access of its user interface (UI), logical branching options, block-based questionnaire design, and outstanding survey flow overview option makes Qualtrics our Editors' Choice in our online survey tool review roundup. However, its dense UI and endless rabbit hole of configuration options could be overwhelming to some users. Survey Design Dropping into Qualtrics' survey design UI can be disorienting, with the application providing five sets of menus on the screen by default. However, one of these—My Tasks (kind of a process checklist)—is largely duplicative, and seems designed to help acclimate those used to the workflow of SurveyMonkey. One nice touch that those managing multiple surveys will appreciate is Qualtrics' ability to easily switch among active projects via a menu at the upper left-hand of the screen, without having to go back to a "Home" screen. While products such as SurveyGizmo and WorldApp KeySurvey can import questions from preformatted Microsoft Word documents and many packages let you edit a previous survey as a template, Qualtrics enables you to import questions from previous surveys at any point in the survey design process. This can be a big time-saver when dealing with complex questions. Despite all of its UI clutter, Qualtrics' UI provides one of the most direct question manipulation options. If you notice a question or answer choice you'd like to change while reviewing a survey, then you can simply click it to edit it, without having to drop into a flow-disrupting, question-editing dialog box. The trade-off for this is that Qualtrics may show only a few options for each of the nine question parameters you can edit. Qualtrics includes exceptional support for carry-forward or masked answer choices—that is, answer choices presented based on the answers to previous questions. It is particularly strong when it comes to doing this based on responses to matrix-type questions, for which it offers 14 different options. Some of these, though, are considered separate question types by other tools. For example, a respondent might be asked to provide a satisfaction rating for a host of criteria. Using Qualtrics, you could take those criteria for which respondents gave the highest rating and ask those respondents to rank only those criteria in terms of importance in a future question. This cannot be done without custom coding in other packages. Here's another example: Respondents may be asked which of the following products they plan to purchase in the next year and then, again, be asked to rank only the ones they chose in terms of priority. Qualtrics would let you skip that ranking question if the respondents chose no products or only one, in which case, subsequent ranking would not be necessary. Qualtrics again shows its flexibility when it comes to question randomization and validation options, although not always for the best. For example, whereas most tools allow the option to randomize answers to prevent bias from the primacy and recency effect, Qualtrics lets one randomly insert a subset of responses for situations where one would want to gather data on a long list of options that would otherwise overwhelm an individual respondent. That said, other tools let you simply exclude answer choices such as "Other" and "None of the Above" from randomization with a simple checkbox. This requires heading into the Advanced Randomization dialog box in Qualtrics. The offering's forethought shines in how it previews surveys as well. Other products' Preview modes require you to choose between desktop and mobile previews because questions may need to be laid out differently in those UIs. Qualtrics, however, shows you both at the same time so you can evaluate whether optimization for one is worth compromises on the other. But if Qualtrics' questionnaire designer is great in terms of digging down into questions, then it is outstanding when it comes to understanding the bigger picture of a questionnaire. While other tools such as SurveyMonkey support grouping questions into blocks for survey organization, Qualtrics uses this concept at its core, and includes a best-in-class Survey Flow screen. Think of it as a "forest view" versus the "trees" of the questions; that helps you understand the path on which various logic branches will take respondents. You can even zoom in and out to focus on different critical junctures in survey design. Reporting Qualtrics' focus on customization and flexibility continues in its reporting. While many packages let one filter results based on the answer to a question, Qualtrics allows the building of elaborate rules similar to the criteria in its Skip Logic builder. It can also transpose charts without having to resort to a Microsoft Excel export, and even has layout options beyond other tools' theme choices to punch up a report for presentation without having to go into Microsoft Word. Qualtrics also features a powerful but intuitive cross-tab editor and a weighting editor to compensate for survey samples that may have some gaps in how representative they are. It offers some tools that may require a good knowledge of statistics to fully exploit, but these are generally reserved for even higher-priced tiers. While it is able to create shared reports like Toluna QuickSurveys does, Qualtrics lacks Toluna QuickSurveys' ability to maintain multiple shared reports that can include or exclude various data cuts. It also lacks the "to-do list"-like project management of WorldApp KeySurvey, another offering aimed at large enterprises. Pricing Qualtrics is unapologetically a professional tool and has been sold through a direct sales force. The company says it is trying to get to more standardized pricing. Its "Research Core 1" package, which includes all of the survey design goodies but lacks the advanced analytics on the reporting end, goes for about $1,500 per year. That's a higher price than Checkbox Survey, which is the next-highest-priced tool in this online survey tool review roundup. In other words, Qualtrics pricing starts where even the high end of all the other tools top out. Final Thoughts In a field where some high-quality offerings feel like pumped-up versions of market-leading SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics takes a unique approach that shows its thoughtfulness and power consistently across multiple phases of survey creation, fielding, and reports. And it generally succeeds in making its feature set discoverable. Few beyond the most sophisticated researchers will need to tap into its full power. However, paying the premium price it commands serves as a solid insurance policy against experiencing frustrating limitations. Qualtrics Bottom Line: An unapologetic online survey tool for professionals, Qualtrics is a go-to for enterprises that are willing to pay for the greatest flexibility.

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