Survey123, SurveyMonkey or Google Forms: when a planning project needs more than a survey

When Survey123 is the right call

Survey123 is the strongest of the three for spatial input, and your GIS staff probably know it already. Residents can answer a public survey without an ArcGIS account, map answers land directly in a feature layer, and for forms your own field staff fill in, it remains the natural choice.

The costs show up around the survey. Building one takes an ArcGIS user with a Creator-level user type and publishing rights; if that's one GIS analyst at your firm, every public survey waits in their queue. Esri's own documentation says the web designer's question types and smart features are limited, and points to Survey123 Connect or the new Survey123 Studio for the rest, both of which work in XLSForm spreadsheets. Survey123 also doesn't make the project page. At the firms we met in Pittsburgh, that was most often a Wix site, with a domain bought for that one project.

Looking for a Survey123 alternative?

Most firms looking for a Survey123 alternative want to keep ArcGIS and change what sits around the survey: the project site, the authoring queue and the hours after it closes. Senf is an alternative to that public-engagement workflow, not to ArcGIS itself. Residents add points, routes and areas, and the answers sync live into ArcGIS Online as they arrive.

Keep Survey123 where it is the stronger tool. For offline field collection in its mobile app, followed by a sync, Survey123 is built for the job and Senf is not; Senf's offline option is a printed survey for open houses. On license cost, Survey123 may add little if your firm already has the ArcGIS access, though ArcGIS Online credits can apply to storage, geocoding and printing reports. Senf lists $2,500 per project, or $9,990 a year for unlimited projects, and building a project for a proposal is free. Current plans are on the pricing page.

When SurveyMonkey or Google Forms is enough

Keep them for what they do well. A client satisfaction survey, a staff poll or a short English-only questionnaire with no location in it runs fine in either, and Google Forms costs nothing. SurveyMonkey's paid plans now group English open-text answers into AI themes, so on a single-language survey without a map, much of the coding work is handled. For engagement platforms beyond these three, see SurveyMonkey alternatives for online engagement.

Public engagement on a planning project asks more of the tool, and the first gap is location: neither has a question that records a place. SurveyMonkey's Click Map captures one click on an image you upload, while Google Forms add-ons can capture the respondent's device location. That tells you where they stood when they pressed submit; the corner they were writing about goes unrecorded.

Translation is the next gap on public projects. SurveyMonkey offers multilingual surveys on its Premier plans, with each translation uploaded as a file, while Google's Forms documentation describes no built-in way to offer one form in several languages. Length shows up too. Brian Reetz, Principal at Design Collective, on a 35-question park survey:

Outgrowing SurveyMonkey on public projects? Here are five SurveyMonkey alternatives for community engagement, compared.

What changes when the question is "where?"

Transportation and landscape projects ask spatial questions by default. Where should the bike lane go? Which crossing feels unsafe after dark, which way do people walk to the bus stop, where would shade help most? A flat survey turns each of those into a dropdown of street names, or into an open-text box that someone geocodes by hand later.

A map question records the answer as geometry. In Senf a resident drops a pin, draws the route they ride or outlines the block that floods, and the answer arrives with its coordinates. For design work, residents comment on the actual site plan, placed to scale on the map where it will be built. Map answers sync into ArcGIS Online as they arrive, so your GIS layer stays current while the engagement is still running, and they export as GeoJSON or Shapefile for ArcGIS Pro and QGIS. The map-based engagement page shows each question type.

Carroll Creek Park in Frederick, Maryland shows what that looks like on a real project. Design Collective's landscape practice ran the park refresh survey in Senf between February and April 2026, with map pins, drawn routes, image-preference questions and conditional logic across 35 questions.

residents started the survey

2,201

finished all 35 questions

1,436

completion rate

65.2%

average time to complete

10m 32s

About 140 of those respondents were 75 or older. Reetz on reading the results:

The case study on how Design Collective ran Carroll Creek covers how the firm used the survey in its proposal and what the data changed in the design.

What the survey costs after it closes

License fees are the small number in this comparison. The larger one is the hours between the survey closing and the client seeing results. That time goes to exporting to Excel, coding open-text comments by hand or pasting them into ChatGPT, merging the map answers back in and building charts one at a time for the deck.

The hours drop because the analysis happens in the same table as the responses. Senf suggests categories for every open-text answer, and your team edits them. If someone already pastes a prompt into ChatGPT to sort comments, that prompt becomes the instruction on a column, filled for every response and kept beside the map answers, demographics and paper forms. Charts export as PNG or SVG in your client's colors, ready for the one or two slides that usually go into the council presentation. The guide to turning open-text comments into client-ready reports walks through the workflow.

A public process also has to stand up to questions. Senf allows one response per device by default and flags suspicious ones, such as surveys finished at bot speed. Your team decides what to exclude, and every excluded response stays on record. When a planning commissioner asks whether the survey was gamed, you can show them exactly which responses were set aside.

Paper, open houses and the project site

Most engagement still includes an open house, and the paper forms from it usually get typed up afterwards. Senf prints the survey for the open house and reads the completed forms back in from scans, tagged by source and in the same dataset as the online answers. A person checks anything the scan can't read with confidence. The paper survey guide shows the round trip.

The project site lives in the same place as the survey. Each project gets a multi-page site with its timeline, events, documents and FAQs. It runs on its own address, a participate.app domain or one your client already owns, so the per-project Wix build and the domain purchase drop out. Campaign links and QR codes for each channel then show which flyer, newsletter or post brought in people who took part, beyond counting page visits.

How to decide for your next project

Six questions settle it. If residents need to answer with a location and two more answers are yes, the flat survey tool will cost the project more in hours than an engagement platform costs in license fees.