SurveyZ is an entirely web-based, self-service internet survey system developed and operated by Utah-based Qualtrics. It offers a variety of advanced capabilities, including unique survey questions, branching, looping, piping, trigger-based responses and form grading as well as an unparalleled collection of pre-written surveys that you can borrow questions from or use as the basis for your own surveys. The design and organization of the SurveyZ survey development environment isn’t particularly impressive (it looks like something out of 1998), and the design options for the surveys themselves are fairly limited — yet the design process is fairly smooth and even the most complex surveys can be created by individuals with very little experience. SurveyZ has a built in e-mail invitation system and a very limited reporting engine. All in all, if you’re looking for a survey system that can do just about anything and you don’t care so much about design or reporting, SurveyZ may have everything you need.

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Opinio 5 is a well-designed, easy to use and highly customizable internet survey system published by Oslo, Norway based ObjectPlanet. The software, which is available both as a hosted service and as an application you can install on your own web server, offers all of the major features you would expect to find in a moderately advanced packaged with a few very powerful and interesting extras (and a couple of notable deficits). It is perfect for a corporate research department or organization with users at several levels — novice will find it fairly easy to create smart looking surveys very quickly, while more advanced users will be able to control precisely how the surveys look and feel. Opinio also offers a highly configurable reporting engine that for some applications may completely replace the need to examine the results in an outside data analysis package. The software is well priced, extensible, and is definitely worthy of consideration for any midsized research department looking for a flexible, easy to manage internet survey package.

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ResearchExec, owned and operated by the Fairfield, Connecticut based company of the same name, is an entirely web-based survey system that is available either as a hosted solution or as a package you can install on your own server. It offers a tremendous amount of customizability as well as a number of advanced features such as the ability to set quotas for individual questions and advanced survey logic. It has integrated panel management that allows you to send surveys to specific members based on their responses to previous surveys. The survey development system, while elegantly designed and extremely flexible, is tedious to use and does not play well with FireFox 1.5 or Internet Explorer 7 RC1. It offers very little in terms of a reporting system, and you should expect to do most of your analysis in a separate program such as Excel or SPSS. Because of the focus on advanced features, the sharper learning curve and the lack of a reporting engine, ResearchExec is more likely to appeal to users at a professional research firm and not those looking for a quick easy way to produce and report on internet research.

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In the July, 2006 issue of the Market Research Society’s Research Magazine, Tim Macer reviewed Perseus SurveySolutions 2.0, a multi-user online survey solution with integrated sampling, invitation management, report preparation and publishing, which is aimed at large enterprises wishing to consolidate and co-ordinate all their research and feedback activities.

Tim liked the Word-like interface for designing surveys, the centrally controlled ‘profiles’ that allow direct links to enterprise databases to provide "real-time and moment-of-truth sampling" and the simple results portal; he didn’t like the fact that there was no intelligent support for coding or consolidating open-ended data, the limited range of statistics, and the fact that it was labourious working with open-ends.

Read Tim Macer’s full review of Perseus Survey Solutions EFM 2.0