Switch to ScatterSpoke if you need the why behind answers: Spoke interviews each person, asks a follow-up when a reply is vague, and gives you the answer with the quotes behind it. Stay with SurveyMonkey if you run large quantitative studies, buy respondents through SurveyMonkey Audience, or rely on advanced branching and crosstabs. Classic surveys here are free and unlimited, and your first ten agent surveys are free, so you can run one question both ways before you decide.
Price wasn’t the problem. A redesign pushed this customer off the feature they paid for: a product fix, not a discount.
SurveyMonkey is a mature form and survey platform. ScatterSpoke is built for the moment a form answer says “fine” and you need to know what that means.
Built only from SurveyMonkey’s own pricing and feature pages and ScatterSpoke’s docs. Where a page doesn’t say, we write “Not stated.” Comparing with Typeform or Qualtrics instead? See Typeform alternative or Qualtrics alternative.
| SurveyMonkey | ScatterSpoke | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | Basic: unlimited surveys, 10 questions per survey, and a limited number of responses you can view per survey (the exact number shows after sign-up) | Classic surveys and their responses unlimited; first ten agent surveys free (one-time credits that don’t expire); one seat |
| Paid plans | Individual from $39/month billed yearly ($468), or $149 month to month; multi-user plans from $30 per user per month, 3 users minimum, billed yearly. Details below | Pro, Business and Enterprise; allowances are per workspace, not per seat. See pricing |
| Follow-up questions | AI follow-up questions: none listed on SurveyMonkey’s AI features page (checked Sep 27, 2026). Skip logic (paid) and advanced logic (Premier and up) send people to your next fixed question based on an earlier answer | Agent surveys: Spoke asks follow-ups live, based on each person’s reply. Classic surveys: AI follow-up questions are a paid option |
| AI features | All plans: Build with AI, AI survey import, AI Connectors for Claude and ChatGPT, Answer Genius recommendations. Advantage and up: Analyze with AI, a chat over your results (20 prompts per survey on Advantage, 50 on Premier, unlimited on Enterprise), and response quality detection | Spoke runs each interview within the goal, tone, topics and probe depth you set, then summarizes the results in the Agent Results Brief |
| Open-ended answers | Thematic analysis and sentiment analysis of open-ended text on Advantage, Premier, multi-user and Enterprise plans. AI summaries of each open-ended question’s results, announced April 9, 2026 (plans not stated) | Themes with supporting quotes, the number of people behind each, and disagreement; every response readable as a transcript, including Spoke’s follow-ups |
| Exports | CSV, XLS, PPT and PDF, plus SPSS export; data exports are listed from the Standard plan up | CSV export from the survey; respondents can save their own transcript at the end |
| Respondent panel | SurveyMonkey Audience: 335M+ people in 130+ countries, from $1 per response, sold separately | You invite your own people: link, QR code, email invitation or embed, with reminders to people who haven’t answered |
| Respondent experience | The questions you wrote, with skip logic on paid plans; 13 common question types on Basic, more on paid plans | Agent surveys: a short conversation in the browser; no seat or workspace access needed. On Free, classic-survey respondents verify their email |
SurveyMonkey facts from its own pages, checked September 27, 2026: individual pricing, multi-user pricing, plan details, AI features, its April 9, 2026 analysis update and SurveyMonkey Audience. Prices in USD as listed; check their site for current terms. ScatterSpoke facts from the ScatterSpoke docs, checked the same day. Weighing up Google Forms too? See ScatterSpoke vs Google Forms.
If one of these is your main job, SurveyMonkey is the better fit, and switching would cost you something.
You need thousands of fixed answers you can count, compare and cut by segment. SurveyMonkey’s plans include up to 100,000 responses a year, with crosstabs and SPSS export.
SurveyMonkey Audience sells responses from a panel of 335M+ people in 130+ countries. ScatterSpoke doesn’t supply respondents: you invite your own customers, users, staff or students.
Advanced logic, block randomization and multilingual surveys are on SurveyMonkey Premier. If the routing is the survey, stay where the routing is.
SurveyMonkey’s multi-user plans list shared brand assets and user roles, and Enterprise offers a US, Canada or EU data center.
SurveyMonkey lists 200+ integrations from Standard up. If your surveys feed other tools automatically, check those connections before you move.
In a form, “Too expensive” lands in a text box and the survey moves on. AI can summarize a thousand of those, but nobody asked any of those people what “too expensive” meant. In an agent survey, Spoke asks one follow-up about what the person just said. These are illustrative examples.
Price wasn’t the problem. A redesign pushed this customer off the feature they paid for: a product fix, not a discount.
Behind “fine” is a specific, fixable annoyance that costs this person time every week.
The biggest difference is the free tier. SurveyMonkey’s paid plans are listed in full below so you can compare them yourself.
| SurveyMonkey | ScatterSpoke | |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Basic: 10 questions per survey; a limited number of responses you can view per survey, even if you collect more. If you downgrade to Basic, responses over the limit that are older than 365 days are deleted | Classic surveys and their responses unlimited, on every plan. First ten agent surveys free, as one-time credits that don’t expire. Anonymous responses need a paid plan |
| Individual plans | Standard $149/month billed monthly (1,000 responses a month). Advantage $39/month billed yearly, $468 (15,000 a year). Premier $139/month billed yearly, $1,668 (40,000 a year) | Pro: 20 agent surveys a month. Business: 150 a month. Enterprise: unlimited. Classic surveys stay unlimited on all of them. Prices |
| Multi-user plans | $30 per user per month (50,000 responses a year) or $92 per user per month (100,000 a year), from 3 users, billed yearly. Enterprise from 5 users, custom price | Seats: Pro 1–5, Business 5–250, Enterprise custom. People answering your surveys never use a seat |
| Going over | $0.15 per additional response on paid plans | Add-on pack of 50 agent surveys; purchased credits don’t expire. Classic survey responses stay unlimited |
SurveyMonkey prices from its individual pricing page and its multi-user pricing page, checked September 27, 2026, in USD. ScatterSpoke allowances from the plans and tiers docs, checked the same day.
Yes. On ScatterSpoke, classic surveys and their responses are free and unlimited on every plan, and your first ten agent surveys, where Spoke asks each person follow-up questions, are free too.
SurveyMonkey has a free Basic plan with unlimited surveys, up to 10 questions per survey, and a limited number of responses you can view per survey. SurveyMonkey shows the exact number after you sign up. Skip logic and data exports are listed on its paid plans.
As of September 27, 2026, SurveyMonkey lists Standard at $149 a month billed monthly, Advantage at $39 a month billed yearly ($468), and Premier at $139 a month billed yearly ($1,668). Multi-user plans start at $30 per user per month for at least 3 users, billed yearly. Extra responses cost $0.15 each. SurveyMonkey says it offers special pricing for students and educators in the US and UK, and that nonprofits and charities may qualify for discounts.
It depends on the job. For large quantitative studies, bought panel responses or heavy branching, SurveyMonkey is hard to beat. If you need to know why people answered the way they did, a tool that follows up with each person, like ScatterSpoke’s agent surveys, gets you further.
Yes. In a ScatterSpoke agent survey, Spoke interviews each person and asks follow-ups based on what they actually said, within the goal, topics and probe depth you set. SurveyMonkey’s logic sends people to your next fixed question instead.
For simple forms, many people start with Google Forms. Neither asks follow-up questions based on what someone just said. See our Google Forms comparison for the details.
Copy your questions into a classic survey, or turn the one you most need the why for into an agent survey. If your SurveyMonkey plan includes exports, download your past results as CSV first so you keep them.
Classic surveys are free and unlimited. Your first ten agent surveys are on us. No card.
