Lightning Tools Lightning Forms vs. Sogolytics

Overall, there are many use cases for which Lightning Forms provides a slick, easy to develop and extremely useful solution. Request forms that need to be actioned and inspection forms are the scenarios that we have used them for so far, which have seen a lot of success. We have decided that other scenarios that are perhaps more sensitive, for instance forms that may contain special category data relating to our customers, are less appropriate given the permissions/licensing constraints of both SharePoint and Lightning Forms.

One of the most significant benefits of using Sogolytics is its robust reporting capabilities. The platform allows us to generate comprehensive reports with clear visualizations, making communicating our results to funders easy. This has greatly enhanced our transparency and accountability, demonstrating the effectiveness and impact of our programs.As a nonprofit organization, we are incredibly grateful for Sogolytics' support to organizations like ours. The platform's accessibility and user-friendly interface have made it an indispensable tool in our efforts to provide quality programs to schools and students in need.

• Simple user interface - users of the forms intuitively aware of how/where to input information. This is in part due to being able to show or hide different questions or areas of the form, and making them required or not, based on previous answers.
• Low/simple code - building complex forms with automation and multiple dependencies or lookups is relatively easy once you get started. You have the power of JavaScript to use and do some quite clever things if you can get to grips with it - a lot of solutions are only a Google away.
• As it is based on SharePoint, it integrates perfectly with the rest of the M365 suite. Things like PowerAutomate enhance its functionality even further.

• Easy to use - easy to create surveys, send to participants and review the results
• The library of ready to use templates is so helpful!
• The large variety of question types helps to keep the survey interesting for the participant.
• The "smart" question logic is amazing. I love having a follow up question appear depending on how the participant answers a previous question.

• The styling of the form can sometimes be slightly awkward to use depending on what you're looking to do. For instance, if I was looking to highlight fields that users have missed (left empty), I would need to set up a validation for that question and then set a style for that particular field for when it is invalid. When you have a large and complex form with lots of dependencies, this is awkward.
• Support for complex and niche issues is slightly lacking in my experience. I submitted a helpdesk ticket for help with a strange issue I couldn't figure out, which took several weeks to get a response to. Because it is niche, it's more difficult to find an answer by searching the internet. Luckily, knowing there is likely to always be a fix if you find the right place/use the right formula, I manage to resolve the issue with some trial and error.
• It is disappointing that Lightning Forms does not integrate with the MS Lists app. Having the ability to access the form through the list app would add in a lot of useful functionality, including a better experience for users when taking photos to add as attachments.

• Providing users the ability to follow along a specific question example (eg. placeholder text in questions that users can see what the answer might look like)
• Better media management and implementation (eg. placing images/videos/gifs/etc. as standalone assets in the survey)
• Making the images added into a survey responsive to the screen they are being viewed on (eg. any images added to a survey do not adjust to the size of the screen, consequently showing up very small on mobile/tablet view)
• Exporting the survey to Word looks horrible - we'd love if the survey could be exported the way it looks when live into a similar-looking Word document or template

Will definitely use the software again as soon as we need another survey to be conducted.

Incentivized

It is very user friendly both to me who is building the content (with little background knowledge of coding etc., other than what I have picked up from using products like PowerAutomate, PowerBI, a bit of html etc.) and to end users of varying levels of IT proficiency. This has been extremely important as we have used the forms to make relatively large process changes, and need to have our users on board and seeing that it is actually easier than it was before.

Everything on the platform is laid out logically and in a manner that even our less technical administrators can go onto the system and create/manage any surveys or feedback questionnaires. The options for distribution of these surveys are also simple and straight forward with all available choices showing. Our users don't need to know the ins and outs of the system to be able to use it.

Some support has been okay, but in one instance of a fairly complex problem, the support team were not able to provide me with a fix within a few weeks, before I was able to find a workaround myself.

I had an issue whereby I used a free trial that ended, locking me out of my account. I contacted their customer service to help with this issue, which they resolved in under half an hour. I was extremely impressed with their speed and quality of service, which led me to filling out this review!

We were using Microsoft Forms, SharePoint Lists and PowerAutomate to attempt to do much of what we are currently doing. Functionality is very limited in comparison. The ability to make questions required based on previous answers was a massive improvement from normal SharePoint List forms and has greatly improved the quality of data. Also just the very visual display and customisation is much better.

I evaluated several different products, including SurveyMonkey. SoGoSurvey appeared to have the most features at the best value. Unfortunately, the "free" service didn't satisfy our needs and we had to upgrade during the first survey. I found SurveyMonkey and SoGoSurvey to be very comparable.

Incentivized

• We changed the process by which site colleagues report repairs on behalf of customers. Instead of emailing them into a shared inbox, they now report them using a lightning form. We have seen a great improvement in the time taken for our team to log the repair issue from the time is arrives with them.
• We anticipate that streamlining our void property reletting process by using a SharePoint kanban board view with lightning forms (providing a single platform for all things void) will reduce avoidable days vacant and therefore reduce our void loss.

• Cost. The software is very reasonably priced when judged against its functionality. The cost and risk of deploying paper surveys, coupled with the additional time it would take to input the data before analysis, means we have a lot less to worry about, have saved time and money.
• Data and reputation. Security of data is important to us. Using this software has enhanced our credibility with clients. We're serious about data security and this software shows that we are.
• Ethics and reputation. We are also serious about achieving the highest ethical standards in research, and nothing in this software impedes our ability to meet these standards.
• Speed. The online training, all of which has been 1-2-1, helped me get to grips with the software and deploy it quickly. The quality of training is very high indeed.