Here are some best free open source survey tools to conduct surveys online. With these tools, you can create surveys and publish them publicly. Here these tools let you create a custom survey from scratch that you can publish. And you can publish unlimited surveys for any purpose. Being open source, you can host them on your own server and then publish unlimited surveys and get responses. Also, you can run them locally in a network for the same if you want to collect responses to some specific question in your university or work place. All the tools that I have added in the list can easily be installed on a server or on a local machine.
There are many online survey creators that you can use for the same. But in the free plan, they put some limitations and that is why you can host your own survey creators at really cheap prices and where everything is unlimited. For self hosted survey tools, you can use the ones that I will discuss in the below post. Just grab their source code from the links that I will mention and install them easily. Also, some of these tools provide their demo version or limited access to the hosted version which is useful in case you want to try them out before actually deploying them on a server.
4 Free Open Source Survey Tools to Conduct Surveys Online:
LimeSurvey
LimeSurvey is one of the best free survey makers that you can try. It is open source and there is a hosted version of this service as well where it provides a limited free plan as well. You can sign up for the free plan and then you can start creating and publishing surveys. The interface of this tool has a lot of options but it’s very simple to use it. Just create surveys, add questions in it, customize the answering options for the users and then simply publish it.
If you want then you can allow people to take your survey anonymously or by registering their email address. In the free plan, it lets you receive 110 responses on the surveys that you create using its hosted plan. If you want everything unlimited then you can set up your instance of LimeSurvey on a server.
Use the homepage URL of LimeSurvey from above and create a free account to use the survey maker. Or you can grab its source code from here and then install it on your PC locally or on production server. The installation involves server with PHP 5.0 or up and MySQL database. You can easily fulfill these requirements using the XAMPP web server. Just download the code and put in the XAMPP server directory and the point your browser there. Got through the installation and then start using it in the same way as you use the hosted version. Create unlimited surveys, add questions, specify the answering options and then publish them. Simple as that.
Maian Survey
Maian Survey is simple open source survey tool that you can use to to create and publish unlimited surveys. It runs locally as well on a production server with minimum technical knowledge. Using this tool, you can create unlimited surveys by adding unlimited questions in them. You can specify the answer types according to questions like adding text box, checklists to record answer from a user.
The interface of the tool is very simple and can easily manage all the surveys that you create using it. If you want to see how the survey page looks that it creates then there are demos on the homepage of this tool. You can test the single or multiple pages surveys created by their tool.
Maian Survey uses a web server and MySQL database to run. After getting the source code, you just have to edit the database credentials in the “maian\survey\inc\connect.php” file and save it. Next point the browser to the main root and its web interface will show up. The default username and password is “admin/admin”. Log in to the dashboard and the start creating the surveys. Create a survey, give it a name, and then simply start adding questions and customize the answering options. Finally publish your survey start getting the responses. Simple as that.
PHP Survey Builder
PHP Survey Builder is another very nice and simple survey maker that you can use for free. Here it lets you create unlimited surveys with unlimited questions. And the best part is that here it doesn’t uses the database servers to save the survey data. It uses the offline database file in SQLite and you just have to enable an extension for it. There is no need to do any configuration in it to use it. You just put it in the Apache server directory and start the tool. The survey builder tool is very simple. You can add questions and specify the type of answer with it. It allows you to record text-based and choice based answers.
You can simply grab source code of this survey builder from above and then simply start using it. If you get error during the login screen then you will have to enable the SQLite extension in the “php.ini” file of the server. Just open the “php.ini” file with any text editor and then find “;extension=sqlite3” or “;extension=php_sqlite.dll” entry and then remove the semicolon from it to enable it and save changes in the file.
Now, simply open the browser and point it to the root directory of the tool. The default username and password is “root@localhost” and “12345” which you can use to access the dashboard. After that, you can start building the surveys. Create a new survey, provide its name and then add the corresponding questions. Next save them and it will give you link to the survey page that you can share with anyone you want. The results of the survey will appear in the dashboard that you can analyze and even download them in a CSV file.
QSM
QSM stands for Quizzes and Survey Master. It is actually an open source plugin for WordPress that lets you create surveys on WordPress. You can use this plugin on your hosted WordPress site and then use it to publish surveys. It offers an intuitive interface to create and publish surveys. You can create unlimited surveys with full customization and publish them. Here it offers you a Question Bank feature that you can use to create a question store. The question bank lets you import questions for quick survey building.
If you know how to use WordPress plugins then you can easily get started with this. Get the ZIP file of the plugin from above and then upload that in the plugins section of WordPress. Next, activate it and “Quizzes/Surveys” option will appear on the left sidebar. Click on it to go to the web interface of the tool to start creating surveys.
Create your first survey by giving it a name and then start adding questions in it. While adding questions, you can add images in your questions and specify the type of answers you want to receive. You can add multiple choice questions or simple textual answer based questions in your survey. You can also add multiple pages and save the changes. Finally, publish your survey and share its link with anyone you want.
Final thoughts
These are the best free open source survey tools that you can use to create and publish online surveys. You can deploy them on a server or use them locally to do whatever you want. All the tools can easily be deployed and you can use them to build any kind of survey you want. You can receive all the responses on the admin section and then you can download that results to do research or anything that you want. So, if you are in need of some free open source survey tools then this post will be so helpful.
