SurveyMonkey Alternative: empirio.ai Compared 2026

SurveyMonkey is one of the best-known names in online surveys and an all-rounder for almost every kind of research: 100+ templates on the free plan, 16 interface languages, a quiz with automatic grading, and ready-made connectors to the usual automation services. The free plan 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 have in common, then where they differ, 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 interface languages, the quiz with automatic grading, 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 which plan a feature is available on, rather than showing a bare check mark.

📌 In short

• SurveyMonkey: an international all-rounder covering many kinds of research, 100+ templates on the free plan, 16 languages, a quiz with automatic grading, and ready-made connectors to Zapier, Make, n8n, and Power Automate.
• empirio.ai: the modern AI survey tool with EU hosting. Survey data and AI processing both stay in the EU, the AI helps from the first draft through to the finished analysis, and all 35+ question types are part of the free plan. Paid features start at $19 a month instead of $129, and every plan can be canceled monthly.
• Both are good survey tools, they are simply cut for different jobs. Which one fits depends on what you have in mind, so a short look at your own requirements pays off before you decide.

We checked features, limits, and plans against each provider's documentation and pricing pages on August 31, 2026, every figure in two independent passes. Free-plan 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: which one fits you?

The two tools have more in common than most comparisons admit. Both build online surveys, both allow unlimited surveys, both can be embedded in a website, both come with an AI assistant that writes the questionnaire from a description of your goal, and both stay free for as long as you want. For a simple question round, either one gets you there.

The differences start where a question round turns into a survey:

• SurveyMonkey is an international all-rounder. Very many templates, 16 interface languages, and a feature set that has grown over two decades. Where SurveyMonkey sits among the large providers is set out in our overview of survey tools compared. The free plan is more of a shop window than a workplace: ten questions, a capped number of responses, no export.
• empirio.ai is the modern AI survey tool with EU hosting. All 35+ question types including matrix, ranking, and NPS are part of the free plan, and so is 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 cap is the number of respondents: 50 a month, and it resets every month. Data export starts at $19, the AI analysis at $39, and every plan stays cancelable monthly.

As of August 2026.

Notes:

• empirio.ai: Many features can be tried for free, including the ones from the paid plans. You only pay once one of them is switched on in a published survey. Every plan can be canceled monthly, and paying annually gives you two months free.
• SurveyMonkey: In the United States there are three paid plans for individuals, and they are priced separately from the European ones. Standard Monthly costs $129 a month and is the only one you can genuinely pay month to month. Advantage Annual costs $39 a month and Premier Annual $139 a month, but both are sold a year at a time, so $468 and $1,668 up front. Advantage is therefore cheaper than Standard Monthly and does more, in exchange for a full year's commitment. Above that it is team plans only, from three paid seats: Team Advantage from $30 per user per month, Team Premier from $92, both annual.

On the data processing agreement the two stand level, and that is stated here on purpose. SurveyMonkey provides it on the free plan already, without anyone having to request it, together with the current standard contractual clauses for the EU, the UK, and Switzerland. That is more than many international providers do. The difference sits one row above it: 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 high up on purpose. A comparison that only finds strengths in its own tool is not a comparison: anyone who wants a quiz with automatic grading is better off with SurveyMonkey, the same goes for anyone who needs a ready-made connector to Zapier or Make, and anyone collecting more than 50 responses a month on an ongoing basis will pay at empirio.ai.

What is free in 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 in exchange releases almost the full feature set, including every template, EU hosting, and the data processing agreement.

As of August 2026.

The Languages row is about the tool itself, the language you work in. Whether the questionnaire can also go out in several languages is a different question, and it comes up further down in the chapter on building the survey. SurveyMonkey names 57 languages elsewhere, which is the set of pre-filled system texts shown to respondents, not the interface, and the two numbers 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 Monthly 1,000 per month, on Advantage Annual 15,000 and on Premier Annual 40,000 per year. Go over the limit on a paid plan and you pay per additional response; unused allowance expires. A single figure for respondents per month does not exist at SurveyMonkey at all.

That is exactly what decides whose free plan is the better one for you. If you run many short surveys one after another, SurveyMonkey is the better bet: the 40 responses count per survey rather than per month, so five surveys give you five times 40. If instead you run one survey that stretches over several weeks, empirio.ai wins: the allowance of 50 respondents resets every month, while at SurveyMonkey 40 responses per survey is the end of the line.

The point where SurveyMonkey's free plan fails in everyday use is not in any 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.

Building a survey: which editor offers what?

When it comes to building, the two tools are closer together than in any other chapter. SurveyMonkey is not a form builder after all, it is a full survey tool. The difference lies in how much of that survives on the free plan and how many steps up the ladder SurveyMonkey asks you to take. The AI features of both tools have a chapter of their own further down. The table is sorted by the empirio.ai plans, from free through to Enterprise.

As of August 2026.

One note on the plan names, without which this table is hard to read. For individuals SurveyMonkey sells three paid plans in the United States: Standard Monthly at $129 a month, the only one that is genuinely month to month; Advantage Annual at $39 a month; and Premier Annual at $139 a month. The last two exist only as an annual plan, so $468 and $1,668 paid up front. Advantage is therefore cheaper per month than Standard and does more, and what you pay for that is a year's commitment. Everything above is a team plan from three paid seats.

One row looks unremarkable and is decisive in practice: at SurveyMonkey, changes to the questionnaire go live immediately, even in the middle of a running field phase, and someone who is filling it in at that moment may lose their answers. There is no draft alongside the live survey. At empirio.ai you keep working in the draft and publish once 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 Annual, the most expensive individual plan, and the translation is manual work: download a file, translate it, upload it again. At empirio.ai it comes with the Pro plan, and the AI translates at the press of a button. For 30 questions in four languages, that is the difference between ten minutes and half a working day.

And the row at the very bottom goes clearly to SurveyMonkey: empirio.ai does not offer a quiz with automatic scoring. If you want to test knowledge and grade it on the spot, that is the right place.

Analyzing a survey: who gives you more than a pie chart?

Both handle the basics: go through answers one by one, look at results as a chart, watch the numbers come in live. 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 of August 2026.

The most important row of this comparison sits in the middle of the table. SurveyMonkey's free plan has no data export, not as Excel, not as CSV, not as PDF. SurveyMonkey puts it plainly in its own help center: exports are available on paid plans. Anyone who fields the survey for a capstone project or a thesis on the free plan and then wants to run the raw data through SPSS or Excel hits a wall. At empirio.ai the export comes with the Lite plan, in CSV, Excel, JSON, and SPSS.

And one detail you only notice once you are working: on the free plan SurveyMonkey allows exactly one rule, shared between filters, comparison, and display. Use that one rule as a filter and you cannot compare any more. 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 shorten a questionnaire. 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 have in common: with both tools the first questionnaire comes out of a short description, written by AI, 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, analyze free text, summarize results. At SurveyMonkey it stops at the building stage. Having the AI rework a single question or review a finished questionnaire is not on offer there, and the analysis only begins in the Advantage Annual package.

As of August 2026.

Three rows deserve a second look.

First, a condition that reads very differently from here than it does from Europe. SurveyMonkey's help center states that the AI summary of results and the topic analysis both require the survey to be written in English and to sit in the US data center. For a survey run from the United States in English, that is not a restriction at all: both conditions are met by default, and the feature simply works. It turns into one the moment you step outside that setup, for example with a questionnaire fielded in Spanish for a bilingual workforce, a study with participants at a European partner institution, or an organization that has chosen SurveyMonkey's Enterprise setup with the EU data center, which switches the topic analysis off again. Two things stay in place whatever your setup. The first is a quota: 20 requests per survey, while the AI analysis at empirio.ai runs without a cap. The second is the plan it sits in. At SurveyMonkey the AI analysis starts with Advantage Annual, sold only as a year at $468 up front; at empirio.ai it belongs to Plus at $39 a month, cancelable monthly.

Second, 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. SurveyMonkey has offered a connector for Claude since May 2026, built on the Model Context Protocol; there is no freely connectable endpoint for your own agents. empirio.ai runs an open MCP server through which language models such as ChatGPT or Claude can build, edit, and analyze a survey entirely on their own, without anyone opening the interface. And because 50 responses a month belong to the free plan, refreshed every month, that is enough not just to set a survey up but to carry it through to a finished result. How that works in practice is shown in our article on the empirio.ai MCP server.

Sharing and managing: who can take part, who can work on it?

When it comes to distribution the two tools sit close together. The difference appears in administration, and there it is less about which features exist than about what they cost. Sorted by the empirio.ai plans.

As of August 2026.

Two rows explain why SurveyMonkey gets expensive 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 who want to work on one survey therefore pay for three seats, which means $30 per user per month for Team Advantage, $90 a month for the smallest possible team, or $92 per user for Team Premier, $276 a month. Both are annual plans. At empirio.ai, inviting viewers and editors comes with the Plus plan at $39 a month, with no per-seat 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 take part, and still nobody should be able to trace who said what. 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. In the United States this is usually an HR project rather than something negotiated with a works council, which means the anonymity promise in the invitation email is the only thing carrying it. That makes the mechanism worth checking before you send: a fixed list of respondents on one side, answers with no identifier on the other, and no way to join the two back together.

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 the CRM, in a ticketing system, or 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 of August 2026.

Ready-made connectors to automation services do not exist at empirio.ai so far, and they do at SurveyMonkey: the Zapier connection belongs to the free plan there, and all remaining integrations are available without restriction from $129 a month, among them Make, n8n, and Microsoft Power Automate. If that is exactly what you are looking for, SurveyMonkey is the shorter route. The large connections to Salesforce, Power BI, Tableau, Marketo, and Zoom do stay reserved for the Enterprise license.

The other way round, empirio.ai leads on the direct interfaces. REST API, CLI, and webhooks come with the $69 plan: webhooks report every new answer to an address of your choice 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 at empirio.ai are being added over time.

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 of August 2026, subject to change.

Why empirio.ai instead of SurveyMonkey?

Pricing

At empirio.ai, 50 respondents a month are free, with no limit on the 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 the AI analysis. Pro costs $69 and brings 3,000 respondents, multilingual surveys, and the interfaces. Every plan can be canceled monthly, and paying annually gives you two months free.

SurveyMonkey prices the United States separately, with its own plan names, and the shape of that lineup is the single most important thing in this comparison. There are three plans for individuals, and only one of them is a monthly plan in the ordinary sense of the word:

• Basic, free. Ten questions and 40 responses per survey, a selection of question types, the questionnaire written by AI, sharing on social networks, embedding on your own website, and the Zapier connection.
• Standard Monthly, $129 a month, cancelable monthly. More question types, your own design, limited logic, email invitations, data export, around 200 integrations, and 1,000 responses a month.
• Advantage Annual, $39 a month, but sold as a year, so $468 up front. All designs, a few more logic options, the AI analysis, and 15,000 responses a year.
• Premier Annual, $139 a month, also sold as a year, so $1,668 up front. 40,000 responses a year, surveys without the SurveyMonkey logo, all logic options, cross-tabulation, multilingual surveys, and randomization.

Two things stand out. First: the only plan you can cancel monthly is also the only one that does less than the cheaper plan above it. Advantage Annual costs $39 a month against Standard Monthly's $129 and comes with more, and what you pay for that is a full year in advance. Anyone who wants to field one survey this quarter and nothing after it has exactly one option at SurveyMonkey, and it is the $129 one. Second: from the second plan on, monthly cancelation is gone, and anyone who wants to work as a team lands in the team plans from three paid seats, so Team Advantage at $30 per user per month, $90 a month for the smallest possible team, or Team Premier at $92 per user, $276 a month.

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

• At the entry point. At empirio.ai, advanced features such as complex logic jumps and data export cost $19 a month. At SurveyMonkey the cheapest paid plan you can actually pay month to month costs $129. That is not a rounding difference, it is close to seven times as much for the first step out of the free plan.
• At the top end. At empirio.ai every plan stays cancelable monthly, right up to Pro at $69. At SurveyMonkey that ends after the first paid plan: from there you either pay a year up front or you buy three seats and use one of them.

Two features make the gap concrete. The AI analysis belongs to the Plus plan at empirio.ai, $39 a month, cancelable monthly, and it runs without a cap on requests; at SurveyMonkey it starts with Advantage Annual, which exists only as a year at $468, and it is capped at 20 requests per survey. And multilingual surveys cost $69 a month at empirio.ai and are translated by the AI; at SurveyMonkey they sit in Premier Annual at $1,668 for the year, and the translation 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, and 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 colors and logo with Plus.

SurveyMonkey has by far the larger template library, and that is a genuine strength: over 100 templates are available on the free plan already, with many more beyond it. The limit is somewhere else. The more extensive 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, SurveyMonkey leads: 22 of them, twelve on the free plan, against the eight design options at empirio.ai that come with Lite. Your own colors and your own logo start with a paid plan at both.

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 reviewed in one pass. SurveyMonkey can produce the first draft by AI as well, free of charge; sharpening single questions and reviewing the finished questionnaire are not on offer there.

The difference lies in the work that comes after. At SurveyMonkey every change takes effect on the live survey immediately, and there is no draft beside it. Reword a question during the field phase and you are reaching into a survey that is already running. At empirio.ai you keep working in the draft and publish once everything fits.

Features

empirio.ai brings 35+ question types, among them matrix, ranking, and NPS as types in their own right, 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 among them, need a paid plan. After the survey goes out the gap is wider: comparison mode and drop-off rate from Lite, cross-tabulation, filters, and the AI analysis from Plus. On its free plan SurveyMonkey allows exactly one rule for filters and comparison together, and it has no per-question drop-off analysis at all.

Data privacy

empirio.ai hosts in the EU on every plan, and the data processing agreement is part of the free plan. That covers 100 percent of the processing, so not only the survey data but the AI processing as well. That is exactly where international providers tend to have a gap: the survey may sit in Europe while the AI analysis still runs through a US subcontractor.

Read from the United States, EU hosting is not automatically an argument, and we are not going to pretend it is. If you survey customers in Ohio about a product launch, a storage location in Frankfurt buys you nothing you need. It starts to matter in three situations, and they are more common than they look. When your respondents are in the EU or the UK, because European data protection law then applies to you as well, whatever your own address is. When a study runs with participants at a European partner institution and the review board asks where the answers will be stored. And when your company has European subsidiaries that are themselves subject to the GDPR and have to be able to answer that question in writing. In each of those cases the shortest answer is a tool whose data never leaves the EU in the first place, including the AI processing, which is the part that most often gets carved out of the promise.

SurveyMonkey does well on the contract itself. It is automatically part of the terms of service for all self-service customers and contains the current standard contractual clauses for the EU, the UK, and Switzerland, and in the EEA the contracting party is an Irish entity rather than the US parent company. Storage is the other question. SurveyMonkey states itself that the EU data center is open to Enterprise customers only and that most European customer data sits on servers in the United States. Even with Enterprise, the provider says login data, logs, and respondent contact details remain in the US, and the AI features run through US subcontractors.

The transfer to the US is covered: SurveyMonkey Inc. lists a self-certification under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework including the UK extension and the Swiss-U.S. DPF, and the European Commission's adequacy decision applies. Seen from an American desk, the framework is worth reading from the other side. It is the instrument that lets a European counterpart hand you personal data at all, whether that is a partner university, a client's European subsidiary, or a panel provider. If the framework stops holding, the flow of data does not get slower, it stops, and it stops on your side of the table. And it is under pressure. An appeal against the dismissal of the annulment action of September 3, 2025 has been pending before the Court of Justice of the EU since October 31, 2025, and on July 31, 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 the framework's continued validity (EDPB letter to the European Commission, accessed on August 31, 2026). The cover also lasts only as long as SurveyMonkey Inc. stays certified; the current entry is kept by the US Department of Commerce in the Data Privacy Framework participant list (accessed on August 31, 2026), and checking it is on you. Host in the EU and that whole chain is beside the point.

Closer to home there is a contract requirement either way. Under the CCPA as amended by the CPRA, a business that hands personal information to a service provider needs a written contract with the terms the statute specifies, and the California Attorney General sets out what the law expects of businesses and the service providers they use (California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), California Office of the Attorney General, accessed on August 31, 2026); enforcement is shared with the California Privacy Protection Agency. Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Texas, and a growing list of other states carry comparable requirements. Both tools supply that contract. What follows from all of it for your particular case is set out in our article on data privacy 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, analyze 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. Analyze 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 free plan with far fewer walls. Unlimited questions instead of ten, all 35+ question types including matrix, ranking, and NPS, 50 respondents a month, and the AI writes the questionnaire free of charge as well. On SurveyMonkey's free plan 15 of the 27 question types are unlocked, and it stops at ten questions.
• Data export from $19. CSV, Excel, JSON, and SPSS from Lite. SurveyMonkey's free plan has no export at all, in any format, and its cheapest month-to-month plan costs $129.
• Every plan stays cancelable monthly. At SurveyMonkey the flexibility ends after the first paid plan: Advantage Annual and Premier Annual are sold a year at a time, and the road above them leads into team plans from three paid seats.
• Modern templates, all on the free plan. This is not about the biggest selection, because SurveyMonkey has more templates and more designs. It is about a survey looking like it was built this decade, and about no template sitting behind an upgrade: all 21 empirio.ai templates are free to use, while at SurveyMonkey it is precisely the detailed ones that require one.
• AI from the first draft to the finished analysis. Write the questionnaire, improve individual questions, check the whole thing, analyze free text, summarize results, and translate at the press of a button. At SurveyMonkey the AI stops once the survey goes out: reworking single questions and reviewing a finished questionnaire do not exist there, and the analysis starts in Advantage Annual, a year at $468, capped at 20 requests per survey. At empirio.ai it is $39 a month, cancelable monthly, and uncapped.
• Collaboration without a per-seat price. Viewers and editors from the Plus plan. At SurveyMonkey the route runs through team plans from three paid seats, billed per user per month.
• You know where the data is, including the AI. empirio.ai keeps survey data and AI processing in the EU on every plan, the free one included. At SurveyMonkey the EU data center is Enterprise only, and the AI analysis runs in the US either way. If your respondents are in the US, that is a detail. If they are in the EU, if the study runs with a European partner institution, or if a European subsidiary has to answer the question in writing, it is the whole point.

Which tool suits which project fits into six lines:

Conclusion

SurveyMonkey is a mature survey tool with a wide feature set, a very large template library, and 16 interface languages. If you work in an international team, want a quiz graded automatically, or need a ready-made connector to an automation service, you are in good hands there. The free plan, though, is not a workplace but a shop window: ten questions, 40 responses per survey, and no data export.

The two features people actually pick a survey tool for in 2026 are the AI analysis and a say over where the answers are stored, and from the United States the first of them is easy to get. An English-language survey in the US data center meets SurveyMonkey's conditions for the AI summary and the topic analysis without any effort on your part. What it costs is the other half of the sentence: the feature begins in Advantage Annual, which is sold a year at a time, and it is capped at 20 requests per survey. And if a study has to be hosted in the EU, that is Enterprise only, at which point the topic analysis switches off again.

One question is worth settling before the first link goes out, and it turns on whom you survey and in whose name, not only on the tool. As soon as a survey stops being purely private and runs for a company, a nonprofit, a university, or a clinic, someone else's personal information is being processed on your behalf, and a written contract with the provider is what covers that. There is no single federal rule in the United States that says so, but state law increasingly does: California requires a written contract with a service provider or contractor under the CCPA as amended by the CPRA, and Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Texas, and others carry comparable requirements. If your respondents are in the EU or the UK, the GDPR and the UK GDPR reach you regardless of where you sit, through Article 3(2), and Article 28 requires that contract in writing.

On campus there are two more steps that no comparison table shows. Anything that counts as human subjects research goes to the IRB before the first invitation goes out, and review boards routinely ask which tool is being used and where the responses are stored, a question that is a great deal easier to answer when the answer is one jurisdiction rather than three. And where a survey touches education records, FERPA applies (What is FERPA?, U.S. Department of Education, accessed on August 31, 2026). A capstone project or a master's thesis is not private in this sense; your institution's own rules apply on top.

There is one clear exception. If the survey is purely private, among family and friends, and the answers never leave that circle, none of this applies and you can skip the question entirely.

Who decides is neither us nor the tool. That call belongs to your organization's privacy counsel or compliance team, and at a university to your advisor and the review board. Between the two tools the difference is smaller at the contract than at the storage. Both supply the contract, SurveyMonkey automatically and on every self-service plan. The data itself sits in the United States without an Enterprise agreement, and for a study with European participants that is where an assessment starts rather than ends. At empirio.ai, EU hosting and the contract come with the free plan.

The second difference is the shape of the offer. At empirio.ai paid features start at $19 and every plan stays cancelable monthly, so you pick the model that fits the project and change it when the project changes. At SurveyMonkey the entry point you can pay month to month is $129, and after it there is only an annual commitment or a team plan 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 privacy? Data privacy in surveys
• Want to build the questionnaire well 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.