Google Forms vs. Qualaroo Insights

Appropriate Scenarios

• Data collection
• Formative assessment
• Survey/questionnaire
• File uploads (Can be limited to particular sizes or file types).

Inappropriate Scenarios

• Lessons where you need instant feedback to answers rather than waiting for the whole form to be completed.
• File Uploads where not all of the users have Google accounts.

Incentivized

It makes it easy to move from design to development. We collect highly targeted feedback without organizing a meeting to discuss every iteration, saving time and effort. The comments are open-ended and unorganized. But with survey Nudges, we can ask additional questions about design UI/UX.

• Capture of information from clients and/or consultants for real-time analysis.
• Knowledge evaluation for our work team, the predefined templates allow the creation of tests and knowledge tests that are very didactic and easy to grade.
• The acquired data is cleanly integrated with google spreadsheets allowing for fast and accurate analysis.
• The form completion notifications are customizable and do their job well.

Incentivized

• It helped to develop a more focused approach towards customer discovery.
• We can create any survey in minutes and deploy it to collect feedback to understand customers’ expectations and fears. We then channel this data into our optimization strategies.
• We receive hundreds of responses each day, and Qualaroo reduces the feedback analysis time with its inbuilt AI-based analytical tool, helping us close the feedback loop quickly.

• Edit view limits the questions as seen by viewers. The view function is nice to toggle between to see what the question will look like, but the edit view of some questions (like checkboxes) is confusing for the editor.
• It would be wonderful to be able to assign responses to go to specific users. The user needs to go into the responses section and select the option to receive notifications, versus the owner of the form being able to do that.
• Having a dependency feature for questions (in addition to sections) would be very helpful, so that if a question is answered a certain way, another question appears.

Incentivized

• They could expand their templates to cover more scenarios (although it has been a long time since we needed their templates - we develop our own questionnaires tailored to our clients’ geographies).
• On the other hand, there are way too many options in the targeting section, but we have gotten used to skipping past them while creating surveys. Perhaps that’s more for companies who target wide audiences. We only collect client feedback, so we don’t really use ‘targeting’ as such.

I will definitely renew my use of Google Forms because I really like the ease of use and the number of tools that Google forms provide. I also love that I can administer a test in real-time and get results in a timely manner

Incentivized

The micro-survey landscape is evolving very quickly and it seems like there is a new entrant almost every month. I'm generally happy with Qualaroo (we got what we expected) and I like the folks on the Qualaroo team (support is fast and friendly and rarely needed), but there haven't been real improvements to the platform in the last eight months. We will be re-assessing Qualaroo's features and price versus other competitors when our current contract is up.

The interface is simple and intuitive. The first time you use Google Forms, it has a built in tutorial that goes through all the basics. Most people can pick up how to use it with minimal support. There are some advanced features that require a bit more work but there are plenty of videos and directions online. Google has a great support section that is easy to follow

Incentivized

We know the value of consumer feedback and believe that users actually want to be a part of the process. With Qualaroo, we have learnt that people like answering certain types of questions, especially if you ask them something about themselves — like what they want most and their motivations behind purchases — they can’t resist typing a response.

In the years I've used GoogleForms I've never ran into any issues with the reliability or availability. Google is a gigantic company with essentially limitless resources which makes it very easy to trust that I will continue to be able to enjoy the same reliability I've come to know and expect from GoogleForms

Incentivized

I've never experienced an outage where Qualaroo was unavailable. I don't think I've even gotten notices for scheduled down/maintenance time. The platform is always available.

One of the things that comes as a benefit of the lack to create complex logic branching and truly custom design is that there isn't lot of room to bog down the software. GoogleForms has always loaded just as fast as my internet service and device would allow it. I'm not sure about front end integrations or integrations into the form itself, as I've never explored it, but on the backend, I've never had any issues with integrations channeling from GoogleForms from the GoogleForms's end of things.

Incentivized

Our developers complain that Qualaroo is just one of several similar site add-ons that slow down our site performance. I'm skeptical that Qualaroo has any measurable impact on our page load times, but don't have any hard evidence either way. The Qualaroo admin interface and reporting mechanisms are all quick and reliable.

I have not had to use Google Forms support - it's always worked as expected. However, with other Google products, I've always been able to find a plethora of resources for answering questions or dealing with issues. The benefit of Google is how widely adopted its products are and how robust its support is.

Incentivized

I have only contacted customer support twice, and they have managed to solve my problem every time. There is a slight waiting time between the query and resolution, but other than that I don’t need to contact them time and again to understand things since their help section is sufficient most of the time.

Not available for the Pro edition.

Qualaroo doesn't offer full-blown online training, at least not that I've used or needed. The online help documentation is adequate and Qualaroo-sponsored webinars are informative.

Have your technical team set up the "Identify" feature right out of the gate - this is a "fire and forget" feature. Once it's set up, your data is much more valuable. Also, if there are very specific kinds of page targeting you might imagine doing, have a technical person set up and test at least 2-3 examples of using Qualaroo's regular expression features to achieve this targeting. With a couple good examples in place to work from, it becomes much easier to create your own regular expressions for custom targeting.

Google Forms is easy to use and affordable. The biggest benefit, however, is that our organization already uses other Google products heavily. Because of this Google Forms was our top choice. Some smaller departments in our organization still use other solutions, such as SurveyMonkey, but as a whole it has been helpful to standardize on a single product.

Incentivized

We decided to go with Qualaroo because it offered the ability to capture UTM data, as well as sent event information back to Google Analytics. In addition, the services Qualaroo provided was just right - not too many bells and whistles at a fair price point. Overall, Qualaroo was the right fit for us.

Incentivized

GoogleForms lacks the ability for complex logic branching and the ability to truly design it in a custom manner. It's pretty obvious when you land on a GoogleForm that it is in fact a GoogleForm. This rating solely reflects the lack of flexibility which in turn makes it something that wouldn't usually be scaled. That being said, if needing to scale a simple solution, GoogleForms would be up for the job.

Incentivized

Qualaroo's simplicity has its down sides when it comes to scaling. Managing multiple nudges across multiple domains, at least in the Pro edition, is challenging. The active nudges all appear as a single list on the admin home page, automatically grouped by domains. Archived nudges are on a separate tab. It would be helpful to have a folder system to organize nudges. Also, once you have multiple active nudges that are targeted to different sections of your site using regular expressions, it's difficult to keep track of what is appearing where. It's also difficult, if not impossible, to figure out where you may have competing nudges. And there's no ability to assign reporting or configuration access to other members of your team. The Pro edition has a single login, which must be shared if you have multiple staff who want to use Qualaroo.

• Google Forms provides us a vehicle to gauge faculty and student response to our online courses and their features in real time so that we can keep our courses updated for students and faculty who facilitate them.
• Since Google is free, provides storage space, and provides Shared Drives (at least in our institutional account), using Google Forms helps us manage our data. We support over 400 courses with thousands of sections so Google Forms helps us manage the data coming out of these courses, mostly student and faculty feedback about what is working and what is not.
• We encourage our faculty to use Google Forms to survey their students for prior knowledge, for interest inventories, and the like. It's incredibly nimble and useful for collecting data quickly and presenting results in easy-to-understand charts and graphs.

Incentivized

• Qualaroo gives us the insights we need to answer specific questions, connect with our customers, and in general feed ideation during early stages of product discovery.
• The speed with which our product R&D teams can go from 0 to getting usable data is highly valuable to us. We operate and move quickly, so our tools must be self-serve and easy to use in order to be viably added to our team’s development process. Qualaroo is like that, so we have been sticking with it. In less than 5 minutes, teams can go from having almost entirely opinion-backed ideas to having ones that are data-backed by targeted customer feedback. This step in the discovery process makes us more efficient and increases the chance that the experiments we run will yield a positive impact.
• Understanding and anticipating customer needs is the backbone of our product development strategy. All our employees are encouraged to identify and address these needs in some way as part of their jobs. We have an in-house feedback collection process that also runs on Qualaroo to see what our collaborative minds can think of.