Qualtrics alternative for research teams

Most “alternative to X” pages are an advertisement with a comparison table stapled on. This one starts with the cases where Qualtrics wins, because if you are in one of them the rest does not matter and both of us would rather you found out here than three months into a migration.

The short version: Qualtrics is a mature survey platform for organisations that want a questionnaire builder anyone can use. Siamang Cloud is for teams that want the questionnaire to behave like source code — reviewed in a diff, validated on every commit, and traceable from a published table back to the exact instrument that produced it.

The actual difference

It is not the feature list. It is what the questionnaire is.

In a conventional survey tool the instrument is a record in a database that you edit through a UI. Editing it changes it; the previous state is gone. That is completely fine until someone asks which wording the first 300 respondents saw, or why the weighted result moved between two runs of “the same” analysis.

Here the instrument is a Python module in a git repository. So:

a change is a diff — reviewable before it reaches a respondent;
two researchers work on branches and merge through a pull request;
every push runs a validation pass that catches duplicate variables, skip targets that do not exist, unreachable pages, and quota cells naming a variable that does not exist — the one that otherwise lets fieldwork run past the cap it was meant to enforce;
an analysis run records the commit it ran against.

That machinery is described in full under version control for surveys.

Migrating, honestly

There is no one-click importer, and building one would mostly produce questionnaires nobody had read. What works is porting an instrument at the point where it is being revised anyway: the questionnaire gets rewritten as code, the validation pass finds the routing bugs that had been there for two waves, and from then on it is under review.

Existing response data does not need to move — load it into the project database from a file and analyse it alongside new waves.

If you are in a university

Check whether your institution already has a Qualtrics site licence. If it does, you are comparing “free at the point of use” with a paid subscription, and we will lose that comparison on price. The reasons to look anyway are the methods section and the data: a versioned, citable-by-commit instrument and an SPSS file that still has its value labels. See reproducible survey research for what that does and, importantly, what it does not do.

Qualtrics against us

Where Qualtrics is the better choice

A mature point-and-click builder. Anyone can author a questionnaire without writing code, which matters enormously if the people designing your instruments are not programmers.
Panel and sample procurement. Buying respondents is built into the workflow; we have no panel integration at all, so you bring your own sample or your own panel provider.
Enterprise procurement and compliance. Established security certifications, contractual SLAs, procurement paperwork your legal team has probably already seen, and single sign-on that works today.
Breadth of features accumulated over many years — conjoint and MaxDiff modules, employee and customer experience products, integrations catalogues far larger than ours.
Institutional site licences. Many universities already pay for Qualtrics, which makes it free at the point of use for researchers there — hard to compete with.

Where we are

The questionnaire is a file in a git repository, so a change to it is a diff, review happens in a pull request, and every commit is validated before it can be fielded.
Every analysis run and deployment records the exact commit it used, which is what lets you say later which instrument produced which data.
Exports keep the codebook. Variable labels, value labels and typed missing values survive into SPSS and Stata rather than arriving as bare integers.
Responses go to infrastructure you own — your BigQuery dataset, your Postgres, your bucket — declared as a task in the repository rather than configured once in a UI.
Priced per organisation, not per seat, so adding the whole team does not change the bill.

What it costs, annualised

Ours is published and flat: Free, Plus at $25/month and Pro at $200/month — $2,400 a year — priced per organisation rather than per seat, so a team of three and a team of thirty pay the same. Qualtrics does not publish list pricing; it is quoted per organisation and typically negotiated annually, so the only honest comparison is to get a quote and set it against a number you can read off a page. If your university already holds a site licence, that comparison will not favour us.

Questions

Do I need to write Python to use this?

To author a questionnaire, yes — it is a Python module, and that is the point rather than a limitation we plan to remove. If nobody on the team writes code, Qualtrics is the better tool and we would rather say so than sell you a migration you will regret.

Can I import my existing Qualtrics surveys?

There is no automatic importer. In practice teams port instruments as they come up for revision, which is also when the questionnaire gets read properly. Existing response data can be loaded into a project database from a file.

Is there single sign-on?

Not yet. SSO configuration storage exists but the login flow is deferred until after the 1.0 release, so if SSO is a procurement requirement today, this is not the tool.

What about buying respondents?

We do not sell or source sample, and there is no panel integration. You bring your own respondents, your own panel provider or your own recruitment; the platform handles the instrument, the fieldwork and the analysis.

Who is this actually a better fit for?

Teams where someone already writes code, where a study gets repeated or revised, and where the data has to end up in a warehouse or a labelled SPSS file — agencies running tracking studies, and academic groups who need to say exactly what they fielded.

A Qualtrics alternative for research teams