Is Google Forms or SurveyMonkey cheaper?

Google Forms starts at $0 with any Google account (free plan available). SurveyMonkey starts at $0 (Basic), then around $30 per user per month billed annually for Team Advantage with a three-user minimum (free plan available).

Google Forms vs SurveyMonkey

An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.

The short answer

Both sides assessed

Google Forms compared with SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey brings survey methodology that Forms has no equivalent for: crosstabs, statistical significance testing, block randomization, and a respondent panel to buy sample from. Google Forms brings unlimited free collection and a Sheet. Take SurveyMonkey when you need defensible research; take Forms when you need answers in a spreadsheet by Friday.

SurveyMonkey compared with Google Forms

Google Forms collects unlimited responses for nothing and dumps them into a Sheet where you can analyze them yourself. SurveyMonkey costs over a thousand dollars a year minimum and does the analysis for you, properly, with weighting and significance testing. If you or a colleague are comfortable in a spreadsheet and the stakes are low, Forms wins outright. If the results drive a real decision, the methodology is what you are paying for.

Choose Google Forms if

Internal data collection, event RSVPs, class quizzes, simple feedback surveys, and any situation where volume is unpredictable and the budget is zero, especially for teams already inside Google Workspace who want responses to land in a Sheet.

Choose SurveyMonkey if

Organizations where survey work is a recurring job rather than an occasional task, needing methodologically sound questionnaires, crosstab and significance analysis, multilingual versions, or purchased respondent panels, and able to absorb a three-seat minimum on team plans.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Google Forms	SurveyMonkey
Category	Forms	Forms
Starting price	$0 with any Google account (free plan available)	$0 (Basic), then around $30 per user per month billed annually for Team Advantage with a three-user minimum (free plan available)
Pricing model	Free for anyone with a Google account, with no response metering. The business version is bundled into Google Workspace, which is priced per user per month and is never bought for Forms alone.	Per-user-per-month subscription with a three-seat minimum on team plans, an annual account-wide response allowance, and automatic per-response overage billing. Individual plans exist for solo users at higher per-person rates.
Free plan	The full product: unlimited forms, unlimited responses, all question types, branching, quizzes, file uploads to Drive, collaboration, and Sheets export, with no branding badge and no upgrade prompts.	Basic allows unlimited surveys but caps each at 10 questions and 3 collectors, and restricts how many responses you can actually view, so data collected past the limit is held until you upgrade.
Free trial	14 days on Google Workspace for the business version; the consumer version needs no trial because it is permanently free	No general free trial; the Basic plan is the evaluation path and paid plans are commonly sold with a money-back window
Best for	Internal data collection, event RSVPs, class quizzes, simple feedback surveys, and any situation where volume is unpredictable and the budget is zero, especially for teams already inside Google Workspace who want responses to land in a Sheet.	Organizations where survey work is a recurring job rather than an occasional task, needing methodologically sound questionnaires, crosstab and significance analysis, multilingual versions, or purchased respondent panels, and able to absorb a three-seat minimum on team plans.
Setup time	Five minutes. There is no account to create for anyone with a Google login, no billing step, and no configuration before the first question exists.	An hour for a straightforward survey from a template. A methodologically careful study with logic, quotas, and multiple language versions is a multi-day exercise, most of it design work rather than tool configuration.
Learning curve	Effectively none for building. The only real learning is understanding that branching happens between sections rather than fields, which shapes how you have to structure anything complicated.	Low to build, moderate to analyze. The builder is familiar to anyone who has used a survey tool, but crosstabs, weighting, and significance testing reward someone who understands what they mean; used carelessly they produce confident nonsense.
Platforms	Web app, Mobile web (responsive forms), Iframe embed, Available inside Google Drive and Workspace	Web app, iOS and Android apps, Website embed and popup collectors, Email invitation collectors, QR codes, Offline collection
Compliance	Covered by Google Workspace security and compliance certifications, HIPAA-capable within covered Workspace editions under a signed business associate agreement, GDPR through Google's data processing terms	GDPR with a data processing agreement, Enterprise security controls and audited certifications, HIPAA-oriented arrangements handled through Enterprise agreements
Founded	2008	1999
Headquarters	Mountain View, California	San Mateo, California
Ownership	Owned by Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL), publicly traded	Privately held by a consortium led by Symphony Technology Group since May 2023

Strengths and limitations

Google Forms

Strengths

No response limit, no overage, and no pause behavior, which removes the single biggest risk in this category.
Genuinely free with any Google account, with no branding badge on the form and no upsell prompts.
Live collaboration on the form itself with Drive-style sharing, so several people can edit without seat licences.
Quiz mode with automatic grading and per-answer feedback is best in class and the reason Forms dominates education.

Limitations

No native payment collection at all; taking money means a third-party Marketplace add-on and handing your form data to that vendor.
Branching is section-level only, with no field-level conditional show and hide, no answer piping, and no scoring outside quiz mode.
File uploads require respondents to sign in to a Google account, which makes the feature unusable on most public-facing forms.
Visual customization stops at a header image, a color, and a font, so the form always reads as a Google Form.

SurveyMonkey

Strengths

The only product in this category with genuine research methodology: crosstabs, significance testing, weighting, block randomization, and a methodologist-written question bank.
Overage billing rather than a hard cut-off, so a successful survey never stops collecting mid-field, which is the failure mode that damages competitors.
SurveyMonkey Audience lets you buy targeted respondents outright, which no form builder can offer.
SPSS export alongside CSV, Excel, and PDF, which matters to academic and professional researchers.

Limitations

The three-user minimum on team plans means the entry cost is roughly $1,080 a year even for a one-person research function.
The free plan withholds responses you have already collected until you pay to view them, which is the least honest structure in the category.
Crosstabs, multilingual surveys, and white labelling all require Team Premier at roughly three times the Advantage price.
Custom subdomain and SSO are Enterprise-only, so a paying team plan customer still cannot serve surveys from their own domain.

Pricing compared

Google Forms

Free for anyone with a Google account, with no response metering. The business version is bundled into Google Workspace, which is priced per user per month and is never bought for Forms alone.

Free (personal Google account)$0
Google Workspace Business StarterAround $7
Google Workspace Business StandardAround $14
Google Workspace Business PlusAround $22
Google Workspace EnterpriseCustom

As pure capability per dollar this is unbeatable and the comparison is not close, because the denominator is zero. The correct way to evaluate Google Forms is not whether it is good value but where it stops being adequate, and the boundary is sharp: the moment a form is customer-facing, takes money, needs field-level conditional logic, needs partial-submission data, or needs to sit on your own domain, Forms cannot do it and no amount of Workspace spend will change that. Until then, paying $348 a year for a prettier version of what you already own is a decision you should be able to justify with a completion-rate number, not a preference.

SurveyMonkey

Per-user-per-month subscription with a three-seat minimum on team plans, an annual account-wide response allowance, and automatic per-response overage billing. Individual plans exist for solo users at higher per-person rates.

Basic$0
Individual Advantage AnnualAround $46
Individual Standard Monthly$99
Team AdvantageAround $30
Team PremierAround $92
EnterpriseCustom

SurveyMonkey is bad value as a form builder and good value as a research platform, and the mistake most small buyers make is evaluating it as the former. At the three-seat minimum you are spending over a thousand dollars a year before a single response arrives, which is indefensible if you wanted a contact form. What that money buys is a question bank written by methodologists, crosstabs, significance testing, weighting, SPSS export, benchmark data, multilingual versions, and the ability to buy respondents from a panel, none of which exist anywhere else in this category at any price. If survey work is a recurring responsibility with decisions attached, the tooling is worth the premium. If it is an occasional task, almost anything else here is cheaper and sufficient.

Editorial verdict on each

Google Forms

Google Forms is the correct default and the honest baseline: free, unmetered, collaborative, instantly available, and completely exportable. For internal collection, quizzes, RSVPs, and any survey where a spreadsheet is the deliverable, buying something else is usually a preference dressed up as a requirement. It also has a sharp and well-defined edge. It cannot take payments, cannot do field-level logic, cannot show you who abandoned the form, cannot sit on your domain, and cannot collect a file from someone who is not signed in to Google. Those are not gaps Google is going to close, because Forms exists to make Workspace stickier rather than to compete in this market. Start here, be honest about which of those limits you have actually hit, and only then go shopping.

Read the full Google Forms profile

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is the incumbent, and its pricing shows it: a three-seat minimum, per-user billing, and the genuinely useful analysis features sitting on a Premier tier at roughly triple the entry rate. Judged as a form builder it is indefensible, and the free plan's habit of holding back responses you already collected is the worst practice in this category. Judged as a research platform it is the only real option here, because crosstabs, weighting, significance testing, block randomization, SPSS export, benchmarks, and a purchasable respondent panel exist nowhere else in this market. Buy it when survey work is part of someone's job description and the results drive decisions somebody has to defend. For everything else, including most small-business form needs, you are paying research-platform prices for a job Google Forms, Tally, or Jotform will do better and cheaper.

Read the full SurveyMonkey profile

Google Forms profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; SurveyMonkey last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.