SurveyMonkey Alternative: empirio.ai Compared 2026

SurveyMonkey is one of the best-known names in online surveys and an all-rounder for almost any kind of research: 100+ templates on the free plan, an interface in 16 languages, a quiz that marks itself and ready-made connectors to the usual automation services. What the free plan actually gives you is a good deal tighter than the brand recognition suggests: ten questions per survey, 40 responses per survey, and no data export at all, in any format.

We put SurveyMonkey and empirio.ai side by side criterion by criterion: first what they share, then where they diverge, then the strengths and weaknesses of both. The two tools solve the same job but are built for different demands, and at four points SurveyMonkey wins this comparison outright: the number of templates, the languages of the interface, the quiz with automatic marking, and the ready-made connectors to automation services.

The point is that you can decide for yourself which of the two suits your project. That is why every table states from which plan a feature is available, rather than showing a bare tick.

📌 In short

• SurveyMonkey: an international all-rounder covering many use cases, with 100+ templates on the free plan, 16 interface languages, a quiz with automatic marking and finished connectors to Zapier, Make, n8n and Power Automate.
• empirio.ai: the modern AI survey tool with EU hosting. Survey data and AI features run 100 per cent inside the EU, the AI helps from the first draft through to the finished analysis, and all 35+ question types belong to the free plan. Paid features start at £19 a month, below SurveyMonkey's first paid plan, and every plan stays cancellable monthly.
• For organisations in the UK there is a third question underneath the feature list: where the answers are stored. empirio.ai keeps them in the EU on every plan; at SurveyMonkey the EU data centre is reserved for Enterprise customers, so a transfer to the United States has to be covered before the first response arrives.

Features, limits and plans were checked against each provider's documentation and pricing pages on 31 August 2026, every figure in two independent passes. Free-tier terms change often in this category. If you spot something that has moved, let us know and we will fix it the same day.

SurveyMonkey or empirio.ai: what suits you?

The two have more in common than most comparisons admit. Both build online surveys, both allow an unlimited number of them, both can be embedded on a website, both bring an AI assistant that turns a description of your goal into a questionnaire, and both stay free for as long as you want them. For a simple enquiry either one gets you there.

The differences start where an enquiry turns into a survey:

• SurveyMonkey is an international all-rounder. A very large template library, 16 interface languages and a feature set grown over two decades. Where SurveyMonkey sits among the big providers is set out in our overview of survey tools compared. The free plan, though, is more of a shop window than a workbench: ten questions, a capped number of responses, no export.
• empirio.ai is the modern AI survey tool with EU hosting. All 35+ question types, matrix, ranking and NPS included, belong to the free plan, and so does the AI that writes the questionnaire. What sits in the EU is not only the survey data but the AI processing as well, and the data processing agreement comes with it. The one thing that is capped is the number of respondents: 50 a month, and the allowance resets every month. Data export starts at £19, AI analysis at £39, and every plan can be cancelled monthly.

As at August 2026.

Notes:

• empirio.ai: Most features can be tried out for free, including the ones from the paid plans. You only pay once you switch one of them on in a published survey. Every plan can be cancelled monthly, and paying annually gives you two months free.
• SurveyMonkey: Individuals get three paid plans. Standard is the only one you can pay for month by month. Advantage and Premier are sold as annual packages only, so a full year has to be paid up front. Advantage sits below Standard on the monthly rate and still does more; the year in advance is what buys that. Above them the only route on is the Team plans, from three paid seats: Team Advantage and Team Premier, billed per user per month.

On the data processing agreement both tools stand level, and that is written here deliberately. SurveyMonkey supplies one on the free plan without anybody having to ask for it, together with the current standard contractual clauses for the EU, the UK Addendum and the Swiss clauses. That is more than many international providers manage. The difference sits one line above: a contract governs how data is processed, not where it is stored. And without an Enterprise agreement, SurveyMonkey stores it in the United States.

The weaknesses row sits deliberately near the top. A comparison that only finds strengths in its own tool is not a comparison: anyone who wants a quiz marked automatically is better off with SurveyMonkey, so is anyone who needs a finished connector to Zapier or Make, and anyone collecting more than 50 responses a month for the long run will be paying at empirio.ai.

What is free with SurveyMonkey and empirio.ai?

Both tools can be used free of charge indefinitely, but they draw the line in completely different places. SurveyMonkey caps the questionnaire and the analysis and opens up its large template library in return. empirio.ai caps the number of respondents and opens up almost the full feature set in return, templates, EU hosting and the data processing agreement included.

As at August 2026.

The languages row refers to the tool itself, that is, the language you work in. Whether your questionnaire can also be shown in several languages is a separate question, and it comes up further down in the chapter on building a survey. Elsewhere SurveyMonkey cites 57 languages: those are the pre-filled system texts respondents see, not the interface, and the two figures get mixed up regularly.

The respondents row is the one most comparisons get wrong, because the unit of measurement changes from plan to plan at SurveyMonkey. On the free plan it is 40 responses per survey; on Standard it is 1,000 per month; on Advantage 15,000 and on Premier 40,000 per year. Go over the limit on a paid plan and you pay for the overage, while unused allowance simply expires. So there is no single figure at SurveyMonkey that answers “respondents per month” at all.

That is exactly what decides whose free plan is the better one for you. If you run a lot of short surveys one after another, SurveyMonkey comes out ahead: its 40 responses count per survey, not per month, so five surveys give you five lots of 40. If instead you run one survey that stays open for several weeks, empirio.ai wins: there the allowance of 50 respondents resets every month, whereas at SurveyMonkey 40 responses per survey is the end of the line.

The point at which SurveyMonkey's free plan actually fails in day-to-day use appears in none of these rows, though, but two chapters further down: without a paid plan SurveyMonkey lets you export nothing at all, not as CSV, not as Excel, not as PDF. The answers you have collected stay inside the tool.

Creating a survey: which editor offers what?

When it comes to building the questionnaire the two tools sit closer together than in any other chapter — SurveyMonkey is not a form builder, after all, but a full-grown survey tool. The difference is what survives on the free plan and how many steps up the ladder you have to climb at SurveyMonkey. The AI features of both tools get a chapter of their own further down. The table is sorted by the empirio.ai plans, from free to Enterprise.

As at August 2026.

A word about the plan names, without which this table is hard to read. For individuals SurveyMonkey has three paid plans: Standard, the only one that can be paid month by month, plus Advantage and Premier, both sold as annual packages. Advantage costs less per month than Standard and does more; the annual commitment is the trade. Anything above that is a Team plan starting at three paid seats.

One row looks unremarkable and turns out to be decisive in practice: at SurveyMonkey a change to the questionnaire goes live straight away, even in the middle of a running survey, and anybody filling it in at that moment may lose their answers. There is no draft mode alongside the live survey. At empirio.ai you carry on editing the draft and publish only when everything fits.

The second row with consequences is the one on multilingual surveys. Both tools can do it, but by very different routes. At SurveyMonkey the feature belongs to Premier, the dearest individual plan, and the translating is manual: download a file, translate it, upload it again. At empirio.ai it comes with the Pro plan and the AI translates at the touch of a button. For 30 questions in four languages that is the difference between ten minutes and half a working day.

And the bottom row goes clearly to SurveyMonkey: empirio.ai does not offer a quiz with automatic scoring. If you want to test knowledge and mark it on the spot, that is where you should be.

Analysing a survey: who delivers more than a pie chart?

The basics are covered by both: work through answers one at a time, look at results as charts, watch the numbers move in real time. The difference starts with everything beyond that — and on the free plan it starts very early. The table is sorted by the empirio.ai plans.

As at August 2026.

The most important row of this whole comparison sits in the middle of that table. SurveyMonkey's free plan has no data export: not Excel, not CSV, not PDF. The provider's own help centre puts it plainly: “Exports are available on paid plans.” Run the survey for an undergraduate dissertation on the free plan, then try to take the raw data into SPSS, R or Excel for the analysis chapter, and you hit a wall. At empirio.ai export comes with the Lite plan, in CSV, Excel, JSON and SPSS.

And a detail that only shows up once you are working: on the free plan SurveyMonkey allows exactly one rule, shared between filtering, comparing and display. Spend that one rule on a filter and you can no longer compare. The drop-off rate — the question of where respondents give up — does not appear in SurveyMonkey's documentation at all; at empirio.ai it comes with Lite and is in practice the fastest way to work out which questions to cut. What the AI adds on top of all this is the subject of the next chapter.

Which tool has the better AI features?

One thing the two share: in both tools the first questionnaire is written by AI from a short description, and free of charge. After that the common ground ends. At empirio.ai the AI helps from the first draft through to the finished analysis: write the questionnaire, sharpen individual questions, check the whole thing, analyse free-text answers, summarise results. At SurveyMonkey it stops after the writing — there is no way to have the AI rework a single question or review a finished questionnaire, and the analysis only begins with the Advantage annual package.

As at August 2026.

Three rows deserve a second look.

First, the condition that appears in no pricing table. According to the help centre, both the AI summary of results and the theme analysis require the survey to be written in English and to sit in the US data centre. For a survey written in British English that is fine; for one written in Welsh, Polish or any other language your respondents use, it is not, even with the right plan booked. And a European or UK organisation that picks the Enterprise variant with the EU data centre rules the theme analysis out altogether. What is left there is sentiment analysis, which does run in the EU data centre. That is the point at which data protection and AI features get in each other's way at SurveyMonkey. At empirio.ai the question never arises: survey data and AI processing both sit in the EU, and the analysis works in the language the survey was written in. There is also an allowance to keep in mind: 20 requests per survey, while the AI analysis at empirio.ai runs without a cap.

Second, the translation. SurveyMonkey offers multilingual surveys but no machine translation of the questionnaire: you download a file, translate it yourself and upload it again. At empirio.ai the AI takes that over from the Pro plan.

Third, the MCP server. Both providers have a route by which language models work directly with the survey tool. Since May 2026 SurveyMonkey has offered a connector for Claude built on the Model Context Protocol; there is no freely connectable endpoint for agents of your own. empirio.ai runs an open MCP server through which language models such as ChatGPT or Claude can create, edit and analyse a survey entirely on their own, without anybody opening the interface — and because 50 responses a month belong to the free plan, refreshed every month, that stretches beyond setting the survey up to the finished result. How it works in practice is shown in our article on the empirio.ai MCP server.

Sharing and managing: who takes part, who gets to help?

On distribution the two tools sit close together. The difference shows up in administration, and there it is less about features than about what they cost. Sorted by the empirio.ai plans.

As at August 2026.

Two rows explain why SurveyMonkey gets expensive quickly in a team. The first is collaboration: at SurveyMonkey the route to it runs through the Team plans, and those start at three paid seats. Two people want to work on one survey, so three seats get paid for, on Team Advantage or Team Premier, billed per user per month. At empirio.ai inviting viewers and editors comes with the Plus plan at £39, with no per-head price and no minimum headcount.

The second is two-factor authentication. At empirio.ai it belongs to the free plan; at SurveyMonkey it does not exist. For an account holding personal answers that is an unusual gap.

One row describes the case that comes up most often in practice: the employee survey. Only your own staff should be able to take part, and yet nobody should be able to trace who answered what — which is usually the first thing a union representative or the employee forum will ask about, and the thing that decides whether people fill it in honestly. Both tools can do it, and here SurveyMonkey is ahead, because there it belongs to the free plan, while at empirio.ai it starts at £39 a month.

Interfaces and integrations: what can be connected?

Most surveys need no interface at all. But as soon as the answers are supposed to land somewhere automatically — in a CRM, in a ticketing system, in an automation workflow — this becomes the most important point on the whole list. Here SurveyMonkey wins the most important row, and empirio.ai wins the direct interfaces above it.

As at August 2026.

Ready-made connectors to automation services do not exist at empirio.ai yet; at SurveyMonkey they do. The Zapier connection belongs to its free plan, and from the Standard plan all the other integrations are available without restriction, Make, n8n and Microsoft Power Automate among them. If that is exactly what you are after, SurveyMonkey is the shorter road. The big connections to Salesforce, Power BI, Tableau, Marketo and Zoom, however, stay reserved for the Enterprise licence.

The other way round, empirio.ai leads on the direct interfaces. REST API, CLI and webhooks come with the £69 plan: webhooks push every new response to an address of your choosing the moment it arrives, the REST API lets you pull surveys and results yourself, and the command-line tool lets you script both. At SurveyMonkey the route there runs through the integrations. Ready-made connectors are being added at empirio.ai step by step.

All features compared

The full picture, 55 criteria in one table: the basics first, then sorted by the empirio.ai plans from free through Lite, Plus and Pro to Enterprise, then what empirio.ai does not offer, and the price at the end.

As at August 2026, subject to change.

Why empirio.ai instead of SurveyMonkey?

Pricing

At empirio.ai 50 respondents a month are free, with an unlimited number of questions. Lite costs £19 a month and brings 100 respondents, complex logic jumps and data export. Plus costs £39 and brings 1,000 respondents, your own logo, cross-tabulation and AI analysis. Pro costs £69 and brings 3,000 respondents, multilingual surveys and the interfaces. Every plan can be cancelled monthly, and paying annually gives you two months free.

At SurveyMonkey the ladder is built differently, and that is where the real difference sits:

• Basic, free. Ten questions and 40 responses per survey, a selection of question types, a questionnaire written by AI, sharing on social networks, embedding on your own website and the Zapier connection.
• Standard, payable month by month. More question types, your own design, limited logic, email invitations, data exports, around 200 integrations and 1,000 responses a month.
• Advantage, annual package only. Every design, a few more logic options, the AI analysis and 15,000 responses a year.
• Premier, annual package only. 40,000 responses a year, surveys without the SurveyMonkey logo, every logic option, cross-tabulation, multilingual surveys and randomisation.

One paragraph on the amounts, because they are harder to pin down for the UK than anywhere else. SurveyMonkey prices each market separately and states that the figures are not conversions of one another. For the United Kingdom it publishes no pound list price: uk.surveymonkey.com and surveymonkey.co.uk show UK visitors the US dollar rates, and the UK editions of the software directories reproduce those same dollar figures. What a UK visitor sees is $129 a month for Standard Monthly, $39 a month for Advantage Annual and $139 a month for Premier Annual, the last two billed annually only, which works out at $468 and $1,668 a year. The provider names pounds as a genuine billing currency with its own price points, so the amount that finally lands on the card is a pound amount at SurveyMonkey's own rate — you see it at checkout, not on the pricing page. That is why the SurveyMonkey column in the tables above names plans rather than sums: a figure we cannot evidence for this market has no place in a comparison table.

Two things stand out about the ladder itself. First: the only plan you can cancel monthly is also the one that does least, and it costs more per month than the plan above it. Advantage is cheaper than Standard and brings more with it; a full year in advance is the price of that. Second: monthly cancellation ends after the first paid plan, and anyone wanting to work as a team lands on the Team packages from three paid seats, Team Advantage or Team Premier, billed per user per month.

That is the real difference in price, and it shows at both ends:

• At the entry point. At empirio.ai the extended features — complex logic jumps and data export — cost £19 a month. At SurveyMonkey the same things begin with Standard, the first paid plan.
• At the top end. At empirio.ai every plan stays cancellable monthly, all the way up to Pro. At SurveyMonkey that stops after the first paid plan: from there you pay a year in advance, or you buy three seats and use two of them.
• On the price list itself. empirio.ai publishes its prices for the UK in pounds, openly on the pricing page, so you can work out the cost before you sign up. SurveyMonkey shows UK visitors dollar rates and names the pound amount during checkout, which makes the two harder to put side by side than the feature lists suggest.

Two features make the gap especially tangible. AI analysis belongs to the Plus plan at empirio.ai for £39 a month, cancellable monthly; at SurveyMonkey it begins with Advantage, which exists only as an annual package. And multilingual surveys cost £69 a month at empirio.ai and are translated by AI; at SurveyMonkey they sit in Premier, again annual only, and the translating is done by hand.

Questionnaire design

A survey is more likely to be finished if it looks the part. Templates exist almost everywhere; current ones do not. This is where empirio.ai scores with modern templates: 21 ready-made questionnaires, all of them on the free plan, with not one of them asking for an upgrade. The eight design options come with Lite, and your own colours and logo with Plus.

SurveyMonkey has the considerably bigger template library, and that is a genuine strength: over 100 templates are available on the free plan, with many more beyond it. The limit lies elsewhere. The more substantial templates require an upgrade, because the free plan stops at ten questions — so it is precisely the detailed templates that cannot be used for free. empirio.ai has no such question limit, and each of its 21 templates is fully usable on the free plan. On designs, though, SurveyMonkey is ahead: 22 of them, twelve already on the free plan, against the eight design options that come with Lite at empirio.ai. Your own colours and your own logo start on a paid plan in both tools.

Editor

The empirio.ai editor will write the questionnaire with AI if you want it to. You describe the goal in one sentence, the AI suggests questions, and you change the order and the wording by drag and drop. Individual questions can be reworked by the AI when they have come out too long or too leading, and the finished questionnaire can be checked over in one pass. SurveyMonkey manages the first AI draft too, also for free — what it does not offer is sharpening single questions or reviewing the finished thing.

The difference lies in the work that comes after. At SurveyMonkey every change takes effect on the live survey immediately; there is no draft beside it. Reword a question during fieldwork and you have intervened in a running study. At empirio.ai you carry on in the draft and publish when everything fits.

Features

empirio.ai brings 35+ question types, among them matrix, ranking and NPS as types in their own right, and all of them on the free plan. SurveyMonkey has 27 question types, of which 15 are unlocked on the free plan; the other twelve, matrix and ranking included, need a paid plan. After the survey goes out the gap is wider: comparison mode and drop-off rate from Lite, cross-tabulation and filters plus AI analysis from Plus. On its free plan SurveyMonkey allows exactly one rule for filtering and comparing together, and knows no drop-off analysis per question at all.

Data protection

empirio.ai hosts in the EU on every plan, and the data processing agreement is part of the free plan — expressly for the UK and Switzerland as well. For a UK controller that matters in a very practical way: the EU and the EEA are covered by the UK's own adequacy regulations, so data sitting there needs no further transfer mechanism. And the EU location holds for 100 per cent of the processing, so not only the survey data but the AI processing as well. That is exactly where international providers tend to leave a gap: the survey may sit in Europe while the AI analysis still runs through a US subprocessor.

SurveyMonkey does well on the contract itself. It forms part of the terms of service automatically for all self-service customers and contains the current standard contractual clauses for the EU, the UK Addendum to those clauses and the Swiss version — which is what Article 28 UK GDPR asks of a processor contract. In the EEA the contracting party is not the US parent company but an Irish entity. Storage is the other question. SurveyMonkey states itself that the EU data centre is open to Enterprise customers only and that most European customer data sits on servers in the United States. Even with Enterprise, login data, logs and respondents' contact details remain in the US according to the provider, and the AI features run through US services.

For an organisation in the UK that makes this a restricted transfer under the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, and it needs covering before the first response arrives. There are two routes. The first is the UK Extension to the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, the so-called UK-U.S. data bridge: the ICO expects you to check that the US business holds an active status on the DPF list, that it has self-certified specifically to the UK Extension, and that the certification covers the type of data you are sending, HR or non-HR (How does the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework work?, Information Commissioner's Office, accessed on 31 August 2026). SurveyMonkey Inc. states a self-certification under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework including the UK Extension and the Swiss-U.S. DPF. Where the bridge does not apply, the fallback is the ICO's International Data Transfer Agreement or the UK Addendum to the standard contractual clauses, and with either of them a transfer risk assessment of your own.

So the question is not whether it is permitted, but what you are relying on. An adequacy finding is a political decision that can be reviewed and struck down — which is exactly what happened to its predecessor, Privacy Shield, in 2020. The current EU decision is under observation: an appeal against the dismissal of the annulment action of 3 September 2025 has been before the Court of Justice since 31 October 2025, and on 31 July 2026 the European Data Protection Board asked the Commission to examine whether a US Supreme Court judgment on the independence of the US trade regulator affects its continued validity (EDPB letter to the European Commission, accessed on 31 August 2026). The UK Extension is a separate arrangement and would not fall automatically with the EU decision, but it rests on the same certification in the same country. And the cover only lasts as long as SurveyMonkey Inc. stays certified; the current entry is held by the US Department of Commerce in the Data Privacy Framework participant list (accessed on 31 August 2026), and checking it is on you. Host in the EU instead and none of this chain is needed. What follows from all of it in a particular case is set out in our article on data protection in surveys. This article is not legal advice.

How do I create a free survey with empirio.ai?

A survey comes together at empirio.ai in four steps: describe the goal, adjust the questions, share the link, analyse the results. The whole editor can be tried out beforehand, including the features from the paid plans. The upgrade is only due once you switch one of them on in a published survey.

1. Describe the goal. One sentence is enough, for example “measure customer satisfaction after purchase”. The AI survey editor turns that into a first questionnaire. Alternatively you start with an empty survey or a ready-made template.
2. Adjust the questions. Change the order by drag and drop, delete what is superfluous, add from 35+ question types — with no question limit. How a good questionnaire is put together is set out in our article on creating a questionnaire.
3. Share the link. Publish the survey and send out the link, produce it as a QR code, or embed it on your own website.
4. Analyse the results. Directly in the tool with the AI tools, cross-tabulation and filters, or as an export to Excel, PowerPoint, Word and PDF.

Create a free survey now

SurveyMonkey alternative: what speaks for empirio.ai?

Seven points make the difference in practice. Most of them sit on a higher plan at SurveyMonkey, or are missing altogether.

• A far less restricted free plan. An unlimited number of questions instead of ten, all 35+ question types including matrix, ranking and NPS, 50 respondents a month — and the AI writes the questionnaire for free as well. On SurveyMonkey's free plan 15 of the 27 question types are unlocked, and ten questions is the ceiling.
• Data export from £19. CSV, Excel, JSON and SPSS from Lite. SurveyMonkey's free plan has no export at all, in any format, and the first paid plan is Standard.
• Every plan stays cancellable monthly. At SurveyMonkey the flexibility ends after the first paid plan: Advantage and Premier come as annual packages only, and the route beyond them leads into Team packages from three paid seats.
• Modern templates, all on the free plan. This is not about the biggest selection — SurveyMonkey has more templates and more designs. It is about a survey looking like it was made this decade, and about no template sitting behind an upgrade: all 21 empirio.ai templates are usable for free, while at SurveyMonkey it is the detailed ones that need the upgrade.
• AI from the first draft to the finished analysis. Write the questionnaire, improve questions, check the whole thing, analyse free-text answers, summarise results and translate at the touch of a button — in the language of the survey and inside the EU. At SurveyMonkey the AI stops once the survey goes out, and the analysis requires English-language surveys in the US data centre.
• Collaboration without a per-head price. Viewers and editors from the Plus plan. At SurveyMonkey the route runs through the Team plans from three paid seats, billed per user per month.
• 100 per cent EU, the AI included. EU hosting belongs to the free plan at empirio.ai, and it covers the survey data and the AI processing. At SurveyMonkey the EU data centre exists only in the Enterprise solution, and the AI analysis runs exclusively in the United States.

Which tool suits which project fits into six lines:

Conclusion

SurveyMonkey is a mature survey tool with a broad feature set, a very large template library and 16 interface languages. Anyone working in an international team, wanting a quiz marked automatically, or needing a finished connector to an automation service is in good hands there. The free plan, though, is not a workbench but a shop window: ten questions, 40 responses per survey and no data export. And the two features people actually choose a survey tool for in 2026 — AI analysis and a storage location in Europe — sit in plans at SurveyMonkey that rule each other out: the AI summary and the theme analysis require the US data centre, and the EU data centre requires Enterprise.

One point decides the question more often in practice than it appears in comparisons. As soon as a survey is not purely private but runs for a company, a charity, a university or a practice, personal data is processed on your behalf, and that requires a data processing agreement with the provider of the tool. In the UK this follows from Article 28 UK GDPR, read with the Data Protection Act 2018; the ICO sets out when such a contract is needed in its guidance on contracts between controllers and processors, accessed on 31 August 2026. The same obligation applies in the EU under Article 28 GDPR, and in Switzerland Article 9 of the revised FADP requires a contract for commissioned processing.

Purely private surveys among family and friends are outside all of this. A survey for a dissertation is not: there your university's rules apply on top, and at most institutions the survey needs research ethics committee approval before a single link goes out — a form that routinely asks which tool you are using, where the data will be held and how long you will keep it. Whether your particular case falls under the contract obligation is decided by your organisation's data protection officer, or by your supervisor and ethics committee at university.

This is where the two tools part company, and not over the contract but over the storage location. Both supply the contract, SurveyMonkey even automatically and on every self-service plan. The data itself, though, sits in the United States without an Enterprise agreement, and that is the point at which a transfer risk assessment starts rather than ends. At empirio.ai EU hosting and the contract belong to the free plan, and the question of a third-country transfer never comes up.

The second difference is the cut of the plans. At empirio.ai the paid range starts at £19 and every plan stays cancellable monthly — you pick the model that fits your project and change it when the project changes. At SurveyMonkey it starts with Standard, and after that first plan the only ways on are an annual commitment or a Team package from three seats.

Where to go next

• Looking for an overview of every provider? Survey tools compared
• Want to settle the budget first? What surveys cost
• Got questions about data protection? Data protection in surveys
• Want to build a good questionnaire yourself? Creating a questionnaire

Ready for your survey?

At empirio.ai, an online survey tool from Germany, you create your first survey for free, with AI support and 50 respondents a month.