All of the online survey tools I tested offer the ability to connect with third-party panels, which are groups of respondents who may need to meet certain requirements, such as being nationally representative or working in a particular industry.
To access these audiences, one must often pay companies specializing in recruiting and retaining them.
Some tools, such as SurveyMonkey, provide a way to pay for access to different groups of consumers via the survey software itself.
But Toluna QuickSurveys (which begins at $85 per month for the Premium plan) is actually developed by Toluna, one of the largest survey panel companies in the world.
Because of this, you can avoid some of the tedious and error-prone customization steps that are needed to integrate panels with other packages.
Honest, Objective Reviews
Daxdi.com is a leading authority on technology, delivering Labs-based, independent reviews of the latest products and services.
Our expert industry analysis and practical solutions help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology.
Toluna QuickSurveys can be used for any survey task or any audience, such as employee evaluations, as it offers 12 human resources (HR)-related templates.
However, the company's focus on external surveys has led it to create prepackaged options for testing packaging (PowerPack) or branding concepts (PowerConcept).
Toluna QuickSurveys does not earn our Editors' Choice, a designation that instead goes to competitor Qualtrics in our online survey tool review roundup.
Designing Online Surveys
In other online survey tools, picking the folks to whom you want to send the survey generally occurs when a survey is completed and ready to be launched.
In Toluna QuickSurveys, though, it is right up front with options on demographics, education level, work position, and other segments.
From there, you enter Toluna QuickSurveys' questionnaire-building user interface (UI), which, unlike any other online survey tool I reviewed, puts pages in tabs at the top of the screen instead of laying them out vertically.
Toluna says it has done this to encourage a good practice of keeping surveys on separate pages to avoid having respondents peek ahead to questions that could influence them.
However, other packages that use a vertical list of questions do this by default.
Indeed, the only product that made this process a bit confusing was Outside Software's eSurveysPro (40.00 Per Month for the Premium Plan, Billed Monthly at eSurveysPro) .
As it is, the UI can easily contain more than 30 unnamed tabs, which makes navigating a questionnaire a headache as you try to remember what question was on which page.
Toluna QuickSurveys provides an "Organize" screen that lets you drag and drop pages to reorder them, but unfortunately, does not let you jump back into a question from that screen for editing.
Like other online survey tools, Toluna QuickSurveys lets you paste in a set of answer choices from another document to save time.
However, one nice touch is that it also lets you switch back to that list at any time for easier answer choice batch editing.
That said, unlike every other product I looked at—including the very basic SurveyPlanet (180.00 Per Year for the Pro Plan, Billed Annually at SurveyPlanet) —the app doesn't let you duplicate questions, missing out on a great time-saver.
Instead, it requires you to save any question you want to easily modify into a question library, a feature also offered by many tools that allow reuse of frequently used questions.
Via it's "Don't ask" feature, Toluna QuickSurveys supports display logic—that is the ability to show or hide a question based on the responses to a previous question from that question.
It also supports skip logic, the ability to show or hide future questions based on a response.
However, the tool doesn't support setting up a single rule with multiple conditions, which means skipping to a question based on the answers to two other questions directly.
The best you can do is set up two separate rules that produce the same result.
Setting up rules is also more difficult than it needs to be because Toluna QuickSurveys curiously provides a very narrow menu for choosing questions to skip, which makes it harder to determine what's the right question to which to jump.
Furthermore, regarding these rules, Toluna QuickSurveys doesn't anchor these "filters" as it calls them with the questions.
Instead, it has a separate "Survey logic" screen similar to the "Organize" screen that displays filters in the order they were created, not in the order of the pages or questions where they are activated.
This makes troubleshooting survey logic more difficult than it needs to be.
Another curious design decision Toluna made was in previewing questions.
Questions that are not supposed to be shown in the final survey are labeled with a note indicating that they will not be in the final survey.
While there is some value in knowing what's being skipped that would be enhanced by knowing why it's being skipped, it distracts from the idea of previewing a survey as a respondent would see it.
Reporting
Toluna QuickSurveys separates out its reporting from other parts of its UI.
The tool provides a nice summary of how long a survey has been out in the field and how close it is to completion by gender.
It also clearly shows response counts for each question, an important factor in large-scale surveys that is often not shown by default in other tools.
Toluna QuickSurveys opens charts in reports with a nice animation.
It supports exporting to SPSS, Microsoft Excel (Free at Apple.com) , and Microsoft PowerPoint, but not to PDF.
Within questions, it includes filtering and cross-tabbing options based on the results of other questions or demographics.
There's particularly strong support for subpopulations, which can be combined or nested as a factor for further analysis.
Toluna QuickSurveys has excellent features for sharing reports, including password protection, the ability to set an expiration date, and the choice of whether to allow analyses such as cross tabulations to be included with the report.
Pricing
While Toluna's business may be more about selling access to panels than Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), customers are charged a premium for use of Toluna QuickSurveys even when fielding their surveys via Toluna.
For others, access to the tool's analytics costs $85 per month.
If you're going to use Toluna's panel, then the integration of Toluna QuickSurveys with it and the benefit of single-source billing may be appealing.
However, for a comparable fee, there are more mature and polished options on the market.
While Toluna has been pushing Toluna QuickSurveys, it offers excellent support for competitive tools.
Cons
Tabbed questionnaire builder scales poorly.
Filters and skip logic are not tied to questions.
Question overview mode is limited.
The Bottom Line
Toluna is one of the largest respondent panel purveyors in the industry, which might attract you to its QuickSurveys tool.
However, while it's a fairly solid tool, Toluna's solution is still best mostly for surveys with relatively straightforward structures.
All of the online survey tools I tested offer the ability to connect with third-party panels, which are groups of respondents who may need to meet certain requirements, such as being nationally representative or working in a particular industry.
To access these audiences, one must often pay companies specializing in recruiting and retaining them.
Some tools, such as SurveyMonkey, provide a way to pay for access to different groups of consumers via the survey software itself.
But Toluna QuickSurveys (which begins at $85 per month for the Premium plan) is actually developed by Toluna, one of the largest survey panel companies in the world.
Because of this, you can avoid some of the tedious and error-prone customization steps that are needed to integrate panels with other packages.
Honest, Objective Reviews
Daxdi.com is a leading authority on technology, delivering Labs-based, independent reviews of the latest products and services.
Our expert industry analysis and practical solutions help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology.
Toluna QuickSurveys can be used for any survey task or any audience, such as employee evaluations, as it offers 12 human resources (HR)-related templates.
However, the company's focus on external surveys has led it to create prepackaged options for testing packaging (PowerPack) or branding concepts (PowerConcept).
Toluna QuickSurveys does not earn our Editors' Choice, a designation that instead goes to competitor Qualtrics in our online survey tool review roundup.
Designing Online Surveys
In other online survey tools, picking the folks to whom you want to send the survey generally occurs when a survey is completed and ready to be launched.
In Toluna QuickSurveys, though, it is right up front with options on demographics, education level, work position, and other segments.
From there, you enter Toluna QuickSurveys' questionnaire-building user interface (UI), which, unlike any other online survey tool I reviewed, puts pages in tabs at the top of the screen instead of laying them out vertically.
Toluna says it has done this to encourage a good practice of keeping surveys on separate pages to avoid having respondents peek ahead to questions that could influence them.
However, other packages that use a vertical list of questions do this by default.
Indeed, the only product that made this process a bit confusing was Outside Software's eSurveysPro (40.00 Per Month for the Premium Plan, Billed Monthly at eSurveysPro) .
As it is, the UI can easily contain more than 30 unnamed tabs, which makes navigating a questionnaire a headache as you try to remember what question was on which page.
Toluna QuickSurveys provides an "Organize" screen that lets you drag and drop pages to reorder them, but unfortunately, does not let you jump back into a question from that screen for editing.
Like other online survey tools, Toluna QuickSurveys lets you paste in a set of answer choices from another document to save time.
However, one nice touch is that it also lets you switch back to that list at any time for easier answer choice batch editing.
That said, unlike every other product I looked at—including the very basic SurveyPlanet (180.00 Per Year for the Pro Plan, Billed Annually at SurveyPlanet) —the app doesn't let you duplicate questions, missing out on a great time-saver.
Instead, it requires you to save any question you want to easily modify into a question library, a feature also offered by many tools that allow reuse of frequently used questions.
Via it's "Don't ask" feature, Toluna QuickSurveys supports display logic—that is the ability to show or hide a question based on the responses to a previous question from that question.
It also supports skip logic, the ability to show or hide future questions based on a response.
However, the tool doesn't support setting up a single rule with multiple conditions, which means skipping to a question based on the answers to two other questions directly.
The best you can do is set up two separate rules that produce the same result.
Setting up rules is also more difficult than it needs to be because Toluna QuickSurveys curiously provides a very narrow menu for choosing questions to skip, which makes it harder to determine what's the right question to which to jump.
Furthermore, regarding these rules, Toluna QuickSurveys doesn't anchor these "filters" as it calls them with the questions.
Instead, it has a separate "Survey logic" screen similar to the "Organize" screen that displays filters in the order they were created, not in the order of the pages or questions where they are activated.
This makes troubleshooting survey logic more difficult than it needs to be.
Another curious design decision Toluna made was in previewing questions.
Questions that are not supposed to be shown in the final survey are labeled with a note indicating that they will not be in the final survey.
While there is some value in knowing what's being skipped that would be enhanced by knowing why it's being skipped, it distracts from the idea of previewing a survey as a respondent would see it.
Reporting
Toluna QuickSurveys separates out its reporting from other parts of its UI.
The tool provides a nice summary of how long a survey has been out in the field and how close it is to completion by gender.
It also clearly shows response counts for each question, an important factor in large-scale surveys that is often not shown by default in other tools.
Toluna QuickSurveys opens charts in reports with a nice animation.
It supports exporting to SPSS, Microsoft Excel (Free at Apple.com) , and Microsoft PowerPoint, but not to PDF.
Within questions, it includes filtering and cross-tabbing options based on the results of other questions or demographics.
There's particularly strong support for subpopulations, which can be combined or nested as a factor for further analysis.
Toluna QuickSurveys has excellent features for sharing reports, including password protection, the ability to set an expiration date, and the choice of whether to allow analyses such as cross tabulations to be included with the report.
Pricing
While Toluna's business may be more about selling access to panels than Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), customers are charged a premium for use of Toluna QuickSurveys even when fielding their surveys via Toluna.
For others, access to the tool's analytics costs $85 per month.
If you're going to use Toluna's panel, then the integration of Toluna QuickSurveys with it and the benefit of single-source billing may be appealing.
However, for a comparable fee, there are more mature and polished options on the market.
While Toluna has been pushing Toluna QuickSurveys, it offers excellent support for competitive tools.
Cons
Tabbed questionnaire builder scales poorly.
Filters and skip logic are not tied to questions.
Question overview mode is limited.
The Bottom Line
Toluna is one of the largest respondent panel purveyors in the industry, which might attract you to its QuickSurveys tool.
However, while it's a fairly solid tool, Toluna's solution is still best mostly for surveys with relatively straightforward structures.
