Pulseri vs form and survey tools

What each kind of tool is for

A form tool is a blank page. You choose the questions, share a link and read the answers. That suits a registration form, a quiz, a pre-launch poll or a long study that a few hundred people fill in once.

A feedback tool starts from a different job. You know who you want to hear from, and you want to hear from them again and again. It remembers who you asked, picks the moment and makes sure someone reads a bad score before it goes cold. Pulseri keeps a list of People with facts such as their plan or when they last used your product, and sends a short survey to the right ones.

How they charge

Prices change, so read each plan page on the day you buy. How a tool charges matters more over a year than any figure.

Typeform sells plans by monthly responses and by team seats ¹. You can outgrow a plan when your answers go up. SurveyMonkey prices team plans per user. Each plan includes a yearly allowance of responses, and each response above it has its own charge ⁴. SurveyMonkey keeps single sign-on for its Enterprise plan ⁹.

Pulseri counts People, the customers and team members you track, and includes every answer. Larger teams can talk to us about an Enterprise plan.

What happens after someone answers

A form tool stores the answer. You open a dashboard or spreadsheet to see it, and you set up a notification yourself if you want to hear about a bad score.

The better form tools can help. SurveyMonkey can post responses to a Slack channel, and its filters let you choose which answers get posted ⁶. Typeform lists a Slack connection for responses ³. Google Forms can email the form owner when something arrives ⁷, and a linked Google Sheet keeps the rows ⁸. For a small, steady flow of answers, that may be enough.

In Pulseri, a rule says what counts as a low score. When an answer matches, the right channel gets a message, so a person can follow up. The picture shows the path from a score of 3 to that message.

Five steps: a customer scores 3, a rule for scores of 6 or lower matches, an alert is created, a message appears in the team chat and the team can follow up. A switch shows a score of 10: no alert, and a review request goes out instead.

Emily CarterNorthwind Books

3

“Exports take far too long.”

Rule

Matches

Score 6 or lower

Unhappy answer from Emily Carter

New alert

#customer-feedback · Pulseri

New unhappy answer from Emily Carter at Northwind Books: 3 out of 10. Exports take far too long.

Owner: Camila Reyes

Asking the right person, once

A form link goes to whoever you send it to. Send it to everyone every quarter and some get asked too often while others never see it. Pulseri records when each person was last asked and leaves a gap before asking again. You can also send a short survey right after a moment that matters, such as a support ticket closing or a payment going through.

Pick who to ask by facts you already have, such as a paid plan. Ask your own team in a separate round, so their answers stay out of your customer numbers.

When a form tool is the better choice

If you run two or three surveys a year, a form tool often costs little and does the job. If you need a very custom look, many page types or payments, a form builder gives you more room. If you send one survey to a list of strangers, you do not need a record of People.

Pulseri is the better choice once you rebuild the same pieces by hand: a list of who to ask, a reminder not to ask twice, a message when a score is low and a trend chart.

Moving over from a form tool

Keep old forms for the jobs they do well. For feedback that runs all year:

1. Export your people and old answers from your form tool and keep the file.
2. Add your People to Pulseri with the facts you use to group them, such as plan or team.
3. Pick the question you already ask, so people see wording they know.
4. Choose a low-score rule and the chat channel that should hear about it.
5. Send the first survey to a small group and check the alert before you widen it.

Keep reading

• Pulseri vs Typeform: the head-to-head page for forms.
• Pulseri vs SurveyMonkey: the head-to-head page for general surveys.
• Replace feedback spreadsheets: one list of people, each asked once.