SurveyMonkey vs OpinionX: product comparison

We compared features, limitations and pricing plans to work out whether SurveyMonkey or OpinionX is the better survey tool for your project.

OpinionX's free plan includes unlimited surveys, every method and every analysis feature, with 25 participants per survey, while SurveyMonkey's free Basic plan allows 10 questions per survey, one user, a limited number of viewable responses, and no ranking, matrix or best-worst questions.

A 5-person team costs $1,800 a year on SurveyMonkey Team Advantage (capped at 50,000 responses a year) or $5,520 on Team Premier, and OpinionX Analyze costs $900 a year with unlimited researcher seats and unlimited participants. We checked prices on each vendor's pricing page on 30 September 2026.

SurveyMonkey vs OpinionX: how do they compare?

Free version

OpinionX: The free plan includes unlimited surveys with every method and analysis feature unlocked, so you can test everything with up to 25 participants per survey before you pay.

SurveyMonkey: The free Basic plan limits you to 10 questions per survey and caps viewable responses per survey (25, according to the plan data on SurveyMonkey's pricing page). You need a paid plan for ranking, rating, slider, matrix and best-worst questions.

Specialism

OpinionX: OpinionX is for product and market research on priorities and trade-offs. It measures people's preferences with ranking and trade-off formats like Pair Rank, Points Rank, Order Rank, Conjoint Rank and MaxDiff, plus pricing research with Van Westendorp and Gabor Granger.

Once you've ranked people's priorities, OpinionX's analysis features let you filter the results to compare how different segments of participants voted, which is a huge help if you want to know what your customers care about most. Teams run OpinionX surveys to rank customer problems or feature importance, for example, then segment the results by pricing plan to compare free users with top-paying customers.

SurveyMonkey: SurveyMonkey is a general-purpose survey platform with broad functionality, and its subscription plans don't include MaxDiff or conjoint. Since June 2026 it sells MaxDiff and Van Westendorp as separate per-study purchases through LaunchPad, but it doesn't offer conjoint analysis on any plan.

Team collaboration

SurveyMonkey: Team plans start at 3 users. Five seats cost $1,800 a year on Team Advantage ($30 per user per month, billed annually) or $5,520 a year on Team Premier ($92 per user per month).

OpinionX: The free plan allows unlimited surveys and unlimited researcher seats, and the Analyze plan costs $900 a year for the whole team, with no per-seat pricing.

Support

OpinionX: Every user, free or paid, gets live chat support, with a median response time under 60 seconds.

SurveyMonkey: Email support is for paid plans only, live chat starts on the Advantage plan, and phone support is limited to Premier, Team Premier and Enterprise. Free users get a help bot.

How do the free versions of SurveyMonkey and OpinionX compare? 🆓

The screenshot below only shows SurveyMonkey's "Individual" plans; its "Team" plans have different feature limits and charge per user per year.

SurveyMonkey free → extremely limited

SurveyMonkey's free tier ("Basic") has limits on pretty much every part of the product:

• 10 questions per survey.

• A limited number of viewable responses per survey (25 in the plan data; SurveyMonkey hides and deletes any responses over the limit).

• 3 collectors per survey.

• 13 common question types; everything else needs a paid plan.

• 1 user per account (no collaboration).

• Can't ask for participants' contact information.

• No ranking, star rating, slider, matrix, best-worst or comment box questions.

• Can't add your own logo.

• No email or live chat support, only a help bot.

OpinionX free → generous baseline

OpinionX's free plan costs nothing and gives you:

• Unlimited surveys

• Unlimited researcher seats

• All survey methods unlocked

• All analysis features enabled

• Publish and share results with a link

• Export to Excel

• 25 participants per survey

The 25-participant cap suits internal pilots and testing a survey setup or research design before you scale up. Every survey format is on it too, including Pair Rank, Points Rank, Order Rank and Image Rank, which puts it way ahead of SurveyMonkey's free tier.

The free plan also includes MaxDiff, conjoint analysis, Van Westendorp and Gabor Granger, while SurveyMonkey sells the first and third as separate studies and doesn't offer the other two at all.

What does MaxDiff do?

MaxDiff finds which items in a list people feel most strongly about by forcing trade-offs, so nobody gets to rate everything as "important": participants keep picking the most and least important items from small sets instead of scoring each option on its own.

That removes rating bias and gives you a precise ranking across the full list, so you see what actually stands out to customers, whether that's product features, messaging angles, benefit claims or pain points.

What does conjoint analysis do?

Conjoint analysis shows how people trade off competing attributes, like price vs features, brand vs functionality or speed vs cost. Instead of asking participants what they prefer, it gives them realistic product combinations to choose between.

The analysis works out how much each attribute sways the decision and what people are willing to pay, which makes conjoint especially useful for pricing, packaging and feature prioritisation: you see how people behave when they have to choose, not just what they say they want.

On OpinionX, conjoint is on the free plan and you won't have to sit through a sales demo or sign a contract: sign up, build your first conjoint study and have results in minutes. SurveyMonkey's own MaxDiff page says it doesn't offer conjoint analysis.

Can you run MaxDiff, conjoint or pricing research on SurveyMonkey?

Partly, and only per study. In June 2026 SurveyMonkey launched LaunchPad, ten ready-to-run research studies you buy one at a time, starting from $1,000 per study with no subscription. You pay for panel responses separately on top, depending on how many you need and how specific your targeting is.

Two LaunchPad studies overlap with OpinionX:

• Feature Prioritization is MaxDiff for up to 50 features, and it includes TURF analysis to find the bundles with the highest reach.

• Price Optimization is a Van Westendorp price sensitivity study.

The rest are concept, idea, packaging, ad, message, name and logo tests. Each study is a single method, and none of them is conjoint or Gabor Granger. The regular subscription plans have a Best Worst Scale question type (Standard and above, max 10 items), but you only get the full MaxDiff analysis through LaunchPad.

Fair, SurveyMonkey does two things here that OpinionX doesn't: TURF analysis comes with its MaxDiff study, and LaunchPad has a built-in panel of 335M+ people in 130+ countries. On OpinionX you bring your own participants or buy them through a recruitment partner.

For most teams it comes down to the billing model. Every LaunchPad study is a new purchase, so the second MaxDiff costs the same as the first, while OpinionX's Analyze plan runs unlimited studies across every method for $900 a year and lets you put conjoint, MaxDiff and a pricing method in the same survey. If you're running more than one study this year, work out what the second one costs before you compare.

Moving a MaxDiff or pricing study off SurveyMonkey and want a second pair of eyes on the setup? Book a free 30-minute call (no obligation) and a research expert will go through your survey design with you.

How do the paid versions of SurveyMonkey and OpinionX compare?

SurveyMonkey paid → 6 different tiers

Its pricing page lists 6 paid plans: 3 for individual users and 3 for teams. The individual plans (Standard at $149/month billed monthly, Advantage at $468/year and Premier at $1,668/year) mostly unlock setup options that OpinionX gives you free, like more question types, conditional branching and your own logo.

The team plans charge per user, start at 3 users and are mostly the individual plans with team collaboration added. Team Advantage costs $30 per user per month and Team Premier $92 per user per month, both billed annually, and Enterprise needs 5+ users and a sales demo, with no public price.

Don't be fooled though: SurveyMonkey's paid plans still have response limits, counted across all your surveys. Take a team of 10 users on Team Premier, each creating one survey a month. That's 10 × $1,104 = $11,040 a year, and the 100,000-response allowance works out to 100,000 ÷ 10 users ÷ 12 months ≈ 833 responses per user per month. Every response over the limit costs $0.15, which is $150 for every extra 1,000.

OpinionX paid → three clear options

OpinionX has three plans, each building on the last:

Free: $0/year

Unlimited surveys, every survey method, every analysis feature, unlimited researcher seats, and publishing and sharing results. It's capped at 25 participants per survey, which suits internal testing, pilots and small projects.

Analyze: $900/year ($75/month, billed yearly)

Everything in Free, plus:

• Unlimited participants per survey

• 90 minutes of prepaid research consulting

• Custom survey link

• Remove OpinionX branding

It suits product and research teams running regular customer studies. Seats are unlimited, so a 5-person team pays $900 a year in total, half what the same team pays on SurveyMonkey Team Advantage ($1,800) and about a sixth of Team Premier ($5,520).

Accelerate: contact sales

Everything in Analyze, plus:

• 6 hours of prepaid research consulting

• Advanced security (SAML SSO, 2FA)

• Private team folders

• Invite external collaborators

• Dedicated account manager and procurement support

Accelerate is for enterprise teams running customer research at scale, and the research expertise comes with the plan instead of costing extra.

Should you choose SurveyMonkey or OpinionX?

If you run a lot of general surveys, SurveyMonkey's broad functionality makes sense, and LaunchPad's built-in panel and TURF analysis help if you need participants fast for a one-off study. Sadly though, the limited free tier makes it hard to test properly before you pay and the per-seat pricing gets expensive as you grow, on top of every advanced study being a separate purchase.

OpinionX's free plan gives you every survey method and analysis feature straight away, with a 25-participant cap that works for pilots and prototyping, and Analyze removes the cap for your whole team at $900 a year. SurveyMonkey Team Advantage costs $1,800 a year for five users, still caps total annual responses and doesn't include MaxDiff or conjoint at all.

If your team is focused on ranking, trade-offs and pricing (what customers care about most, how preferences differ across segments, which features are most important, what to charge), OpinionX has specialised methods and built-in segmentation that SurveyMonkey doesn't match, and you don't need an enterprise budget or a sales call to use them. You can run your first conjoint or MaxDiff study for free in under five minutes.

Frequently asked questions

Does SurveyMonkey offer conjoint analysis? No. SurveyMonkey doesn't offer conjoint analysis on any plan or as a LaunchPad study. OpinionX runs conjoint on every plan, including the free one, with automated analysis, a market simulator and a willingness-to-pay report.

Can you run MaxDiff on SurveyMonkey? Only as a LaunchPad study. SurveyMonkey's Feature Prioritization study is MaxDiff with TURF analysis, priced per study from $1,000 with no subscription. Its subscription plans have a Best Worst Scale question type, but not the full MaxDiff analysis.

What are the limits of SurveyMonkey's free plan? SurveyMonkey's free Basic plan allows 10 questions per survey, one user, 3 collectors per survey and a limited number of viewable responses per survey. Ranking, rating, slider, matrix and best-worst questions need a paid plan.

How much does SurveyMonkey cost for a team? SurveyMonkey's team plans start at 3 users. Team Advantage costs $360 per user per year with 50,000 responses a year, and Team Premier $1,104 per user per year with 100,000, so five users cost $1,800 or $5,520 a year. OpinionX Analyze costs $900 a year with unlimited seats.

Create your first OpinionX survey for free in under five minutes and see why teams at companies like Google, Amazon and Shopify use OpinionX for their research.