How Paperform can help replace Google Surveys

In November of 2022, Google Surveys moved to a farm upstate, where it can run free with SurveyGizmo and the other sunset survey builders. And while it’s hard to say goodbye to a tool that's served you well, there are plenty of excellent alternatives out there that can take its place.

One such alternative is Paperform: an online form builder that has quickly gained popularity among businesses and individuals for its intuitive design, extensive feature set, and affordable pricing.

From its user-friendly interface and customizable templates, to its integrations with popular apps and excellent customer support, Paperform is a great Google Surveys alternative for anyone looking to conduct powerful surveys in style.

What did Google Surveys do?

Before it journeyed into the long thereafter, Google Surveys was a predominant market research platform that allowed businesses and organisations to conduct online surveys.

As a pay-per-response service, it was geared towards larger businesses that could afford it. The cost depended on the settings chosen by the user, the number of questions, as well as the country in which the survey was being conducted. In general, pricing ranged from $0.10 to $3 or more per survey response.

There was a free plan available for individual use, but like most free versions, the features were so limited that it wasn’t realistic for business owners or professional use.

Like most Google products, it worked swimmingly with the rest of the G-suite and was relatively easy to pick up. Now that it’s sunset, Google Forms has taken in most Google Surveys refugees.

8 Reasons Paperform is a Great Google Surveys Alternative

Google Surveys left a lot to be desired, even in it’s hay-day. It was expensive, it didn’t offer robust integrations with apps outside the G-suite, and, like Google Forms, there was virtually no customisation to speak of.

There was also the issue of reach. The pool of potential respondents for Google Surveys was limited to people who had the Google Opinion Rewards app installed on their phones and were willing to take surveys, which made it challenging for users to reach a larger a more diverse audience.

As a dedicated form and survey builder, Paperform is a fantastic alternative. It’s cheaper than Google Surveys, and more robust in terms of features and app connections. You can also share your surveys with anyone online, and the design options are unparalleled.

But we get it—we're a little biased. That’s why we’ve broken down seven specific pain points from Google Surveys users, and highlighted how Paperform can fix them.

1. Pricing

Google Surveys used a pay-per-response pricing method, with a payment scale that changed based on how many questions you asked, and how large your audience was. While it might seem like a simple way to price the service, it caused some upset for customers.

Survey data is most reliable when there’s plenty of it. When one person complains that your checkout process is clunky, it isn’t such a huge deal. When 300 people do it, you know you have a problem on your hands.

Therein lies the rub with the Google Surveys pricing plan. In order to get actionable insights from your surveys (particularly for market research) you had need to pay for quite a few responses.

Paperform offers a cheaper, more intuitive pricing system than Google Surveys. Our entry plan starts at just $20 per month, and offers everything you need to start sending as many beautiful, powerful surveys as you might want.

We don’t complicate things with pay-per-response pricing, and we don’t hike the price based on how many fields you add to your form.

Surveying your audience is the first step in a long journey to understanding your market and improving your business. We make it as simple and painless as possible, so you can start making those data-driven changes sooner.

2. Customisation and branding

Like most Google products, customisation wasn’t exactly a priority for Google Surveys. Regardless of how much you paid for the product, you’d end up with a survey that looked like every other Google Survey making the rounds.

The same can be said of Google Forms. They're all so...purple. There are very few options in terms of fonts, styles, or adding images and videos.

Customisation and branding are about more than just looks. A well-designed poll or survey is more enticing to fill out, which can lead to better survey results and fewer abandoned pages. Survey design is also a great opportunity to highlight your business' brand and professionalism.

For Google Surveys refugees looking for a more customisable alternative, you’re hard pressed to find a solution better than Paperform. You can change up your colours and fonts, create dynamic custom success pages, add (and edit) images, embed videos, and alter just about every element of your form from theme menu.

Our integration with Adobe Cloud makes it easy to import your unique branding into your form, all in a few clicks. We get that it’s important to have your survey be just that: yours. That’s why we get our branding out of the way, offer custom URLs, and leave the stylisation up to you.

Paperform is exceptional at providing no to low-code in-depth survey forms that look professional and intuitive no matter where you use them. Our team loves the level of complexity and customization its survey forms offer without overwhelming us with complicated commands and interfaces. It helps us work with market research projects and a simple customer feedback form with plenty of ease and efficiency.

–Nat Miletic, Owner and CEO @ Clio Websites

3. Question types

Google Surveys offered 12 field types for survey questions, and Google Forms only offers 9. They cover the standards, including checkboxes, multiple choice, scales, and open text. It’s enough for simple forms, but both products lack a few key fields, including ranking fields and emails.

The multiple choice grid in Google Forms can be a problem, too. You can jerry-rig it into a sort of ranking question, but the it’s not mobile optimised, the categories get cramped, and it’s a headache to double-check that all your settings are correct.

With Paperform, you get access to over 25 unique fields. Adding any of them to your survey is as easy as clicking on the page, hitting that / button, and typing out the name. All the essentials are covered, of course, including multiple choice, open text, and linear scale, but those are far from the only options.

We have dedicated ranking and rating fields, email fields, numbers, payment fields, and even appointment fields that integrate with your calendar.

And unlike Google Forms daunting multiple choice grid, our dedicated matrix field is easy to read and easy to set up. It also automatically transforms into individual multiple-choice questions when viewed on a phone.

4. Mobile Optimisation

Neither Google Surveys nor Google Forms are automatically mobile optimised, which means even if your form looks great on a laptop, it might be unrecognisable on a phone. In the digital age, that’s a pretty big roadblock.

Paperforms are all mobile optimised: they automatically shift and adjust to fit the screen on which they’re accessed. Whether your customers are filling out their satisfaction survey on an iPad, a laptop, or a phone, they’ll be able to see all your questions easily.

We've found Paperform to be an invaluable tool for customer feedback surveys. The analytics that come with Paperform help us make informed decisions on how we can improve our customer onboarding process and increase customer loyalty. We’ve also been able to use Paperform as a platform for running A/B testing experiments for different elements of the user interface. This has helped us optimize the customer experience across multiple devices and platforms.

–Lisa Dietrich, Partner at girokonto.io

5. Customer Support

Survey building can be tricky, especially for business owners juggling a hundred and one tasks at any given moment. When you get stuck, it’s essential to have a streamlined customer support process to help you through it.

Because of the sheer number of Google Forms users, live customer support just isn’t a possibility. There’s no chat feature for users who need troubleshooting, and no way to contact a real, live representative for survey building guidance in real time.

As a smaller, more personalised service, Paperform is able to prioritise our customer service. We understand that our team is our greatest asset.

You can reach out to our dedicated customer support staff at any time to get thorough, personalised assistance to any survey challenge you might be facing. It’s true. Just click that blue chat icon to see for yourself. Someone will be with you shortly.

6. Integrations

If you want to share your survey results with your CRM tool, an outside analytics tool, or any other app or service, you’ll need to make use of integrations.

Let’s say you’re building a customer satisfaction survey, and you want to share the results with your CRM tool. An integration between your survey builder and Salesforce could update your customer profiles based on their form responses—all without any additional work from you.

Unfortunately, integrations like that aren’t really an option with Google Forms. Neither Google Surveys nor Google Forms offer robust integrations outside the G-suite. If automating processes is important to you, you'll need a different product.

Paperform is a great option. With over 3,000 direct and Zapier integrations to choose from, your automation possibilities are endless. Connect your survey with Salesforce to update customer profiles, or with Airtable to create perfectly populated spreadsheets.

We also integrate with Google Sheets, Google Calendar, and Gmail so you can get the best of both worlds: easy connections with the G-suite, and an intuitive, professional survey builder.

Because the retail industry is crowded with various marketing strategies, we use survey forms to gather customer testimonials and create content out of them for social proof. Paperform helps simplify our marketing processes with its superior integration and automation capabilities when gathering customer surveys and marketing through our e-commerce website, social media pages, and mobile app partners.

–Robert Johnson, Senior Director of Merchandising at Coast Appliances.

7. Response Rate

When it comes to boosting your response rate, survey design is an important place to start. Your respondents are busy. And while they might value your business, nobody has hours to kill sorting through page after page of endless questions.

More often than not, your respondents can't dedicate an hour of uninterrupted time to taking your survey. They’re shooting off a quick response while they’re waiting for the train, or during intermission at their kids show.

To help improve your response rates, you want your surveys to be:

• Easy to read
• Easy to fill out on a phone
• Easy to finish in one sitting

Paperform can help with all three. Our robust design options empower you to create surveys that are clear and concise without skimping on beauty and brand.

You know all about our mobile optimisation, but you may not know about Guided Mode. This feature allows you to display one question at a time, which makes answering on a phone even easier.

You can add progress bars to help motivate respondents across the finish line, and break up your survey into shorter pages to keep it organised and approachable. And with our multiple one-click answer options, you can gather the data you need without driving your respondents up the wall.

The main problem we had with Google Surveys was that it lacked the customization features we felt we needed. The platform also seemed a bit outdated with limited functionality. Our survey completion rate has increased by 25% since switching to Paperform, and we expect this rate to go higher as we continue leveraging the platform’s features to optimize our forms.

–Tom Leighton, COO of Sofary

8. Versatility

Google Surveys was a powerful app for market research, but versatility was never it’s defining feature. It was the bottle opener of tools: great for one thing, but not so helpful for much else.

Paperform, on the other hand, is a digital Swiss army knife of tools. It’s a dedicated form and survey builder with all the powerful features you need to create payment forms, contact forms, landing pages, quizzes, and a whole lot more.

It’s all possible with our intuitive, no-code editor and advanced features like conditional logic and calculations.

We've switched to using Paperform for our NPS surveys because of its innovative and customizable templates. What I love about Paperform is it gives our team the flexibility to make unique survey content without requiring high technical skills. It also has built-in features that are easy to follow and allows seamless navigation for our clients when providing feedback.

–Allan Stolc, Founder and CEO of Bankly.

Get more from your survey builder with Paperform

Google Surveys was a fantastic market research tool, and it’s loss has left thousands of users looking for a solution. If affordability, customisation, and versatility are important to you, you really can’t do better than Paperform.

It's the perfect way to get more from your survey builder, without paying extra for more tools in your tech stack. But don’t take our word for it. Give it a spin yourself with our 14-day free trial, no credit card required, and see what you can create today.