NumoForms vs SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey is a mature research platform whose distinguishing asset is
SurveyMonkey Audience, a paid respondent panel it markets as reaching
hundreds of millions of people worldwide with a large set of targeting
options (checked July 2026, from SurveyMonkey’s own Audience page).
NumoForms sells no respondents at all: it is the instrument — 16
question types, conditional logic, scoring bands, save-and-continue resume
links, per-survey partner logos, and survey content and responses stored
in London (eu-west-2). If you need to buy a sample, buy
SurveyMonkey. If you already have your audience and the data must stay in
the UK, we are the closer fit.
What SurveyMonkey is genuinely good at
Two things, and both are real. The first is the panel: their SurveyMonkey Audience page advertises a global respondent pool with demographic and behavioural targeting, which means you can field a study on Tuesday and have a representative sample by Thursday. Nobody builds that in a year, and we are not pretending to. The second is institutional weight: SurveyMonkey has been running surveys since the late 1990s, publishes a methodology library, a question bank and expert-reviewed templates, and sells enterprise plans with the governance features large organisations ask for. Checked July 2026. Panel size, targeting options and plan features change — read surveymonkey.com and their current pricing before deciding.
If your question is “what does the British public think”, and you do not have a list of the British public, no amount of survey-builder features answers it. That is a sampling problem, and SurveyMonkey sells the answer.
Side by side
| Capability | NumoForms | SurveyMonkey |
|---|---|---|
| Respondent panel | None. You bring the audience | SurveyMonkey Audience — paid panel with targeting, per their Audience page |
| Question types | 16 kinds: matrix, drag-to-rank (full or top-N), rating, linear scale, recommend score, date, file upload, address with postcode checking, and the text and choice types | Large question-type library including matrix and ranking — check their current documentation |
| Layouts | Classic (one scrolling page), conversational (one at a time), paged (a section per screen) | Page-based surveys — check their current layout options |
| Conditional logic | Show/hide on earlier answers, rules matching any or all |
Skip logic and branching documented — availability varies by plan, check their pricing |
| Scoring and bands | Per-choice score, per-question weight, percentage bands on the thank-you screen, hidden questions excluded | Quiz scoring documented — check their help centre for current behaviour |
| Save and continue | Resume link on a 24-character token; partials stored separately from completed responses | Save-and-continue behaviour documented — check plan availability |
| Close date and response cap | Enforced by a database trigger; over the cap, the insert is refused | Response limits and cut-off dates documented — check how they are enforced |
| Partner co-branding | Collaborator logos set per survey, separate from the org brand kit | Branding and logo options documented at account/plan level |
| Exports | CSV with one column per matrix row and a separate column for “Other” detail; single response to PDF via print | Multiple export formats including CSV, PDF and SPSS on higher plans — check current pricing |
| Data residency | London (eu-west-2) on every account; TLS in transit, AES-256 at rest |
SurveyMonkey documents data-hosting options; check which apply to your plan |
| Integrations | Signed webhooks only: each response posted to your https URL, HMAC-SHA256 signed. No Zapier app, no public API | Integration directory published on their site |
SurveyMonkey column: taken from surveymonkey.com, checked July 2026. Rows that say “check” are ones we have not verified to the standard we would want quoted back at us — read their documentation rather than a competitor’s summary of it.
Where the difference actually is
Instrument versus sample
These are two different purchases that happen to be sold together. A panel answers “who do I ask”. A survey builder answers “what do I ask, and does the answer mean anything”. We only sell the second one, which is why a consultation for a district council, a staff engagement survey or a member questionnaire — all cases where you already know exactly who the respondents are — is where we compete and where the panel is irrelevant to the decision.
The plan-tier problem
The commercially awkward part of mature survey platforms is that the features you need for a serious study — logic, exports, custom branding — are distributed across price tiers, and the tier you need is discovered halfway through building. Everything described on this site — logic, scoring, matrix and ranking questions, save-and-continue, per-survey co-branding, CSV export and UK storage — is one product with no tiers to compare, because we have not set prices yet. The pricing page says exactly that rather than inventing tiers.
Data that stays in the UK
Survey content and responses sit in Supabase’s London region on every account, encrypted in transit with TLS and at rest with AES-256, with row-level security throughout and organisation isolation pinned server-side. Uploaded files go to a private bucket, readable only by the owning organisation through signed URLs that expire after 300 seconds. The security page describes the controls and the sub-processor list names everyone in the chain. For a UK public body writing a DPIA, that is usually a shorter conversation than a transfer-risk assessment. We are not ISO 27001 certified and have not completed a SOC 2 audit; we say so.
Accessibility as a requirement, not an add-on
Public consultations in the UK are covered by the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations, and an inaccessible survey is a legal problem as well as a data-quality one. Our accessibility work and the accessibility statement set out what has been done and what has not — including where we know there is work outstanding, which is the part most vendors leave off.
Exports that match how the data was collected
CSV export gives one column per matrix row, and a separate column for the free text behind an “Other (please specify)” option, so the analyst is not unpicking a concatenated string in Excel. Any single response can be printed to PDF from the browser — useful for a case file or an FOI response — with no PDF library shipped to respondents.
Reasons to choose SurveyMonkey instead
- You need to buy respondents. We have no panel and no plans for one.
- You need SPSS export, an established methodology library or an expert-reviewed question bank.
- You need SSO/SAML or offline collection, neither of which we have built — or your policy names a CAPTCHA specifically, where ours is a honeypot, a dwell-time floor and a rate limit instead.
- Procurement requires an ISO 27001 or SOC 2 certificate today. We have neither.
- You need the survey to push data into a named system with a ready-made connector. Ours is a signed webhook to an endpoint you write, with no Zapier app and no public API behind it.
Common questions
Is NumoForms a good SurveyMonkey alternative?
NumoForms is a reasonable SurveyMonkey alternative when you
already have your own audience and the responses must stay in the UK. It
provides 16 question types including matrix and ranking, conditional
logic, per-choice scoring with percentage bands, save-and-continue
resume links, per-survey partner logos, CSV export and storage in London
(eu-west-2). SurveyMonkey remains the better choice if you
need to buy respondents, because it sells access to a research panel and
NumoForms does not supply respondents at all.
Does NumoForms provide survey respondents or a panel?
No. NumoForms is the instrument, not the sample. It has no respondent panel and does not sell audiences. You bring your own list, embed the survey, or share the link. SurveyMonkey markets a global research panel through SurveyMonkey Audience.
Other comparisons
Read NumoForms vs Typeform if respondent experience is the deciding factor, vs Jotform if the form has to connect to other software, and vs Google Forms if the real incumbent is free. The full set sits under compare, and local government is the sector page where UK residency and per-survey partner branding matter most.
Bring your own audience.
Share a link, embed the survey in a page you already run, or pass identifiers in as hidden fields from the query string so each response arrives attached to the record it belongs to. We build the instrument; the sample stays yours.
- Hidden fields read from the query string
- CSV export with one column per matrix row
- Survey content and responses stored in London
