Alchemer vs. Lightning Tools Lightning Forms

Price to performance, Survey Gizmo is a great tool. There are a couple hiccups but it has a ton of features that you can't get from some of the SMB competition and it even rivals some of the Enterprise competition. If you are looking for a large scale surveying platform, it may be worth it to go with one of the more expensive, team-oriented enterprise versions, but if you're part of a mid sized enterprise or SMB team, SurveyGizmo is worth it.

Incentivized

We've used lightning forms on literally dozens of our SharePoint sites now and it's just excellent, especially because it doesn't interfere with our ability to governance and administer the sites

• Streamlines the survey process and provides quality data.
• Provides a wide variety of question types and filtering options in order to ensure the proper questions are being asked.
• Better improves outcomes for constituents/patients.
• Easy to edit and reformat questions as desired.
• Easy to navigate, export data, and create reports.

Incentivized

• Simple user interface - users of the forms intuitively aware of how/where to input information. This is in part due to being able to show or hide different questions or areas of the form, and making them required or not, based on previous answers.
• Low/simple code - building complex forms with automation and multiple dependencies or lookups is relatively easy once you get started. You have the power of JavaScript to use and do some quite clever things if you can get to grips with it - a lot of solutions are only a Google away.
• As it is based on SharePoint, it integrates perfectly with the rest of the M365 suite. Things like PowerAutomate enhance its functionality even further.

• Advanced logic - more difficult than what it should be. If I'm piping answers to another question, I shouldn't have to create a lengthy logic script for it to perform (this is just with advanced logic).
• Too "bubbly" of a template - I didn't like the clouds so I had mine switched to a more basic format.
• Accounts - should be able to create different accounts for different users and separate the surveys based on the user.

Incentivized

• The styling of the form can sometimes be slightly awkward to use depending on what you're looking to do. For instance, if I was looking to highlight fields that users have missed (left empty), I would need to set up a validation for that question and then set a style for that particular field for when it is invalid. When you have a large and complex form with lots of dependencies, this is awkward.
• Support for complex and niche issues is slightly lacking in my experience. I submitted a helpdesk ticket for help with a strange issue I couldn't figure out, which took several weeks to get a response to. Because it is niche, it's more difficult to find an answer by searching the internet. Luckily, knowing there is likely to always be a fix if you find the right place/use the right formula, I manage to resolve the issue with some trial and error.
• It is disappointing that Lightning Forms does not integrate with the MS Lists app. Having the ability to access the form through the list app would add in a lot of useful functionality, including a better experience for users when taking photos to add as attachments.

The feature sets, agility, and flexibility remain approachable and incredibly powerful. Support is also very responsive and top notch. Overall, with a bit of basic foundational skills, there are seemingly an unlimited number of use cases for which Alchemer can be leveraged.

Incentivized

It is very user friendly both to me who is building the content (with little background knowledge of coding etc., other than what I have picked up from using products like PowerAutomate, PowerBI, a bit of html etc.) and to end users of varying levels of IT proficiency. This has been extremely important as we have used the forms to make relatively large process changes, and need to have our users on board and seeing that it is actually easier than it was before.

Every once in awhile, it is necessary to solicit support. On those occasions, support is extremely responsive and supportive. It has been my experience that [if] they can't walk you through the desired endpoint, they will take a look at your build and remedy for you.

Incentivized

Some support has been okay, but in one instance of a fairly complex problem, the support team were not able to provide me with a fix within a few weeks, before I was able to find a workaround myself.

Our business team takes pride in immersing ourselves with the wide variety of survey-based platforms available. Much of our goal is recommending the proper people, processes, and technologies to our customers and many of those recommendations come from our own experience with the tools. SurveyGizmo fills an extremely valuable role within business analytics. It helps gain the voice of the customer (or end-user) while offering a wide-ranging functional platform for data gathering and organization. SurveyGizmo is up to the task when competing with other high-profile tools and is a fantastic business option for those looking for a proficient survey tool.

Incentivized

We were using Microsoft Forms, SharePoint Lists and PowerAutomate to attempt to do much of what we are currently doing. Functionality is very limited in comparison. The ability to make questions required based on previous answers was a massive improvement from normal SharePoint List forms and has greatly improved the quality of data. Also just the very visual display and customisation is much better.

• It has always delivered on all our business objectives. I think that the reason why it's a bit [more] expensive than other providers.
• It has helped us to optimize resources especially man hours involved in survey design.
• It has been a valuable partner in almost all [of] our uses.

Incentivized

• We changed the process by which site colleagues report repairs on behalf of customers. Instead of emailing them into a shared inbox, they now report them using a lightning form. We have seen a great improvement in the time taken for our team to log the repair issue from the time is arrives with them.
• We anticipate that streamlining our void property reletting process by using a SharePoint kanban board view with lightning forms (providing a single platform for all things void) will reduce avoidable days vacant and therefore reduce our void loss.