Survey3—Open Source Surveys

16 Aug, 2007 research

As part of my IS research I run a lot of online surveys. I’m sometimes asked what survey service I use. I don’t use any commercial service, but instead use Survey3, an excellent open source survey tool.

Survey3 was developed by fellow IS researcher Conan Albrecht and has a lot of nice features.

It integrates great with Apache so you can run surveys from your own server–this means you can be independent of survey services like SurveyMonkey.

It is open source, so it’s easily customizable. This is important for me because I integrate my surveys with my web-based experiments.

It is developed in Python

Is lightweight, and runs great on Linux

Can save data to a database or in XML format

I’ve ran Survey3 nearly non-stop for two years on my modest Linux server and I’ve never had any trouble or crashes, and have reliably collected hundreds of surveys. I recommend it.

UPDATE 11/24/2007: Survey3 is no longer under active development?in fact, its project page has been removed. I am still hosting it at the above link. It still works great and I use it regularly.

Anthony Vance

Survey3—Open Source Surveys

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