Hi together,

I'm working as student assistant as part of IT at a private university. I was ordered to evaluate survey tools to find a standard survey tool for administration, teaching and science. As Free Software activist I suggested LimeSurvey but a certain department prefers Questinpro as survey tool.

Asking for specific reasons why LimeSurvey would bot be suitable for their needs I got the following answer:

- Randomization for survey experiments; storage of randomly generated survey vars etc. unclear; => in my case: most crucial limitation of Lime!
- Very large samples => limitations in LimeSurvey!
- Multiple project management / data storage => limitations in LimeS unclear.
- Handling with personalized IDs from survey panel provides (inbound/outbound ID portation) => no experience, but I'd expect limitations in Lime.

Because I've never used LimeSurvey for complex surveys I wanted to ask if someone is around who has long term experience in using LimeSurvey and would provide me some details to invalidate the points quoted above ("survey vars", "samples", "project management", "personalized IDs").


Best regards and I hope my question is not too unspecific - thx in advance!

Well, to be honest, I think someone made his mind already.

"I expect limitations..." without knowing the tool isn't a good sign.

I don't know QuestionPro, so I can't really compare either.


Randomization: Depends on what you need. Possible, but not a solution just clicking. You can generate random variables via the expression manager and store them in the database (equation type question). Not sure how QuestionPro handles that.

Very large samples: depends on what very large samples are. Limit for Limesurvey is basically the limit of the database (MySQL), so very large samples are possible. What could be more problematic are very long surveys, because then you can into the column limit. Not sure how QuestionPro handles that.

Multiple project management / data storage => limitations in LimeS unclear.

Not really sure what that is referring to. But each project is in its own table. Only authorized admins can access it. So you can seperate different projects.

Handling with personalized IDs from survey panel provides (inbound/outbound ID portation) => no experience, but I'd expect limitations in Lime.

No problem, just have a look at the panel integration feature.

So overall, I think LS can do what you want to. But if things start off like the did for you, go with QuestionPro. If something is not perfect with the chosen tool (and it will, no tool is perfect) it is not your fault and you can say: See...

For a QuestionPro user the impact of missing questiontypes and missing things like skip-logic (jump to question) or minimum quota limit might be bigger than expected.

If you want one LimeSurvey installation for all departments, I would rule out LimeSurvey. The user management is not able to reflect large organizations with different access levels. There is no folder concept to place survey, files and templates per user. www.questionpro.com/help/365.html

If the IT department can handle one or more installations of LimeSurvey for each department, you might get the user-management working.

But evaluation should be spent with the software. And not talking about the software. You can install LimeSurvey and make some cases. Feel free to report back about where LimeSurvey is beating QuestionPro and where QuestionPro can be the inspiration for LimeSurvey.

Thank you both, your answers are very helpful!

Last question:

jelo wrote: For a QuestionPro user the impact of missing questiontypes and missing things like skip-logic (jump to question) or minimum quota limit might be bigger than expected.

...sounds like LS has no question types and skip-logic but seems to be a standard feature. Did I understand you wrong?

You understood him wrong.

Limesurvey HAS question types ( manual.limesurvey.org/Question_types ) and it has a skip logic (via conditions or even quicker Expression manager).

What I think he tries to say is that there might be some question types in QuestionPro that are not available in Limesurvey. Which these are and if those are relevant to you, you would need to find out. And the skip logic in Limesurvey works by hidding questions and not jumping to a certain question. While this works very well and is very flexible, it is sometimes more work, especially when you would need long jumps.

holch wrote: And the skip logic in Limesurvey works by hidding questions and not jumping to a certain question.

Most surveytools call the skip logic of LimeSuvey "DisplayLogic" (show/hide questions) and use the term "Skip(To)Logic" when jumping to certain questions/positions is possible.

I can only recommend everyone to just create a testsurvey in LimeSurvey instead of just reading the featurelist.
The opinions about how powerful certain features are can differ a lot. E.g I would call the quota system of LimeSurvey very very basic. But others call it powerful and wonder what feature the quota system is missing. Depends on what tools everyone have used in the past.

I'd like to say that the user management/permissions system will be one of our first priority in 2018.

Well, we can discuss about the wording. But I think you can achive basically everything with the LS approach as well. That said, it is not very comfortable with very long "jumps", there I totally agree.

To be honest, I think there are other parts that would be far more important. Would be interesting to know how many users actually have a big amount of people in their organisation. My guess would be, that LS is rather used by smaller teams. But that would be interesting to see how this is distributed. With a lot of universities using it, my guess might be wrong.

But there are a few basic things that I think we really, really need to improve and which most probably are quicker to solve than a new permission system:
- Quota (out of the box allow more complicated quota and allow access to quota via EM would be great)
- Screening without workarounds (I think 0-Quota are not a very good solution for it and we need a "max answers" to close the survey at a certain sample size. Currently this needs a workaround with a hidden question, which is not ideal)
- Position "other" fields whereever you want in the survey
- allow "other" fields in array questions
- Easily add additional headers to scales, without having to do it with a Javascript workaround
- Allow subgroups in Lists and Arrays
- Allow relevance equations for answer options, not only for sub questions
- etc.

I guess Jelo has a few things to add as well.