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20 Comments

Modern Open Source Alternative to SurveyMonkey / Typeform

What do you think? Is there a need for an open source alternative to SurveyMonkey/Typeform?ย ๐Ÿค”

Surveys are still the best way to figure out what people think of your product/event/company/โ€ฆ and if used in the right way are the perfect answers to the โ€œwhyโ€-questions analytics canโ€™t answer.
After helping companies collect customer feedback for the past few years, I realized that there is a need for a modern, privacy-friendly open source alternative to Survey-Monkey and Typeform - self-hosted, customizable, easy to use & with integration capabilities into your own systems.
Existing open-source alternatives like LimeSurvey are way too complicated and outdated in any way!

Do you feel the same way? Whatโ€™s the biggest problem you have with existing survey solutions?
I started building a first landingpage. Please sign up for the waitlist to stay up to date ๐Ÿค— https://opensource.couchsurvey.com

  1. 2

    Great idea. I'd recently been wondering if something like this existed.

    Just signed up to get notified on the launch. Best of luck with this!

    1. 1

      thanks, happy to see that you have the need, too :-) I am going to sent you a message once we have the first version online ๐Ÿ’ช

  2. 1

    What's the technology stack looks like ?

    1. 1
      • React / Next.JS
      • Typescript
      • TailwindCSS
      • Prisma

      @sachingk What do you think? :-)

      1. 1

        Sounds good.

        I come from a PHP background. I see lot of Node Js based open source solutions these days.

        As long as you have a seperate usable API in this project, you would add lot of value to the users.

  3. 1

    You need a cheaper product, not necessarily open source.
    I wrote a piece about it: https://www.callmefred.com/the-market-needs-an-affordable-alternative-to-typeform/

    1. 2

      thanks for the article - insane how they increased prices.
      my problem with typeform/surveymonkey etc. isn't necessarily the price as there are so many survey other and also cheaper solutions out there. For me having the opportunity to host it yourself so that the survey data is owned by you is and to customize it to your needs (own domain, logo, colors,...) is crucial. GDPR in the EU makes this more relevant year over year as US solutions gets harder to use for a lot of companies. Public institutions have an even harder time because here in Germnay they are forced to use Open-Source software as long as it fits their requirements. And usability doesn't count so they are stuck with LimeSurvey.
      Over the last years many companies have proved that open-source and a startup business are not mutually exclusive but benefit each other by building a great product as a community and gaining big reach you would have a hard-time as yet another SaaS company.

    2. 1

      Hi Fred, have you tried out Tally? It's a free Typeform alternative and would love to hear your thoughts. Forms are free without limits, we compared our product to Typeform in this post: https://blog.tally.so/tally-a-free-typeform-alternative/

      1. 2

        Hi Marie, nice evolution at Tally. I've updated my piece with a featured paragraph dedicated to your tool: https://www.callmefred.com/the-market-needs-an-affordable-alternative-to-typeform/ I will A/B test Tally on a few legacy flows I still have on Typeform.

        1. 1

          Great, thanks a lot!

  4. 1

    I'm a fan of https://blocksurvey.io/ one actual use of blockchain to keep the data secure by @wilsonbright

    Self hosting for basic forms seem overkill?

  5. 0

    You determined there's a need for privacy-friendly open source alternatives by companies because the companies you helped explicitly stated this need? Or you realized no such thing exists in the market, therefore you alone feel the need to build it?

    1. 1

      A lot of companies I worked with (especially in the public and education sector which have strict regulations to data handling and should use open source where possible) had the problem that the use of LimeSurvey was way too complicated and they wanted to do more surveys, but the hassle to do so was too big. Or they were able to convince their superiors to bend their regulations on Open-Source and GDPR and created their surveys in SurveyMonkey. Both is not good.

      1. 0

        Did you somehow downvote me? If so, can I ask how you did this? I was simply asking an innocuous question to determine what you meant by "need" (since if what you claim is true, that "lots" of companies you worked with truly told you this, it becomes unclear why you pose this question)

        1. 1

          I didn't downvote you, i don't even have an option for that.
          also didn't think your question was negative - it was a good critical question to ask ;-)
          I posted it because even though there are companies who told me their problems, building an open source project requires a community and also independent tech-aware people and smaller companies who adapt that first. And if you guys say that this is a bad idea or are aware of other projects that I haven't seen yet, it would be unnecessary and very hard to build such a thing. On the other hand, if you like it, I get confirmation from a perspective I haven't gotten yet and maybe even someone wants to join the development :-)

          1. 1

            Can you give an example of smoeone you dealt with bending "regulations on Open-Source" so I understand what the issue is? Also why would strangers saying it's a bad idea make it "very hard to build," I don't quite understand

            1. 1

              In Germany for example institutions in the public sector needs to use Open Source software first to solve their problems. If thats not manageable they could use a proprietary product that fulfills their requirements in terms of data privacy (mainly GDPR). The whole GDPR space is still in development and it's often not completely clear if e.g. a product of an US company is allowed to be used or not. So if the Open-Source options are not there, they can argue to use a proprietary solution within the EU and even when there are no options they could also argue to use a solution which under which is from outside the EU. Every rule like this has it's clear reasons why it's there and the companies and institutions dealing with this problems are increasing based on the better clarification of data privacy and whats allowed and what not.

              For me posting that is all about getting feedback and validating the idea. If there are other competitors or feedback that
              discard my hypotheses it's of course still possible to technically build it but it's much harder grow within the market and get the traction it needs.

              1. 1

                But why is it much harder to grow just because users of this site (who are just indie hackers) say it's a bad idea? You believe the companies you dealt with need it based on your professed experiences, those European companies are your target market and potential customers, their feedback is what matters

  6. 3

    This comment was deleted 2 years ago.

    1. 3

      It looks really similar to Notion, but for forms

    2. 2

      Thanks for mentioning Tally, @TomGrigory! ๐Ÿ™

      Tally is not open source as mentioned above, but it's modern, easy to use and all data is encrypted and only readable by the data owner. We integrate with Google Sheets, Zapier, Notion and Airtable, and hope to launch our own API + webhooks end of this summer.

      Happy to answer any questions if you have any. Let me know. ๐Ÿ˜Š

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