What makes Edkimo a great SurveyMonkey alternative

When it comes to online surveys, most people still think of SurveyMonkey. Founded in 1999 SurveyMonkey has recently rebranded to Momentive.ai in an effort to focus on artificial intelligence and the B2B enterprise market. As they explain: “We chose the .ai domain to showcase the powerful AI and machine learning that underpins all of our solutions.”

We at Edkimo love to work with data! At the same time we are convinced that human education and learning are a free space and not the right place for the big data economy. Here’s why you should try Edkimo as a simple, lightweight, ethical, cost-effective and privacy-friendly SurveyMonkey alternative for your online surveys.

Edkimo vs SurveyMonkey comparison: What are the differences?

Simple vs complex

Edkimo is easy to use and understand with no training or prior experience in survey design. Edkimo helps you to focus on learning and to save time. There are no complex layers and navigational paths to create a survey in Edkimo. Just ask the questions that you and your participants care about most. You get all the important hints to create a simple and effective survey at a glance so you can focus on teaching and learning.

SurveyMonkey is a feature overkill for most survey managers, especially teachers and educators who cannot afford to work full-time on creating and managing online surveys. Try to start and run a simple student survey: what takes 1 click in Edkimo is almost 10 clicks away in SurveyMonkey. Just give it a try!

Data ownership of your surveys

By using Edkimo, you keep 100% ownership of your survey data and you protect the privacy of your participants at the same time. We are developing Edkimo with the principle “privacy-by-design” in mind. You remain completely in control of your survey data and you fully own all of your data.

1. Your survey data is not shared with advertising companies or any other companies in general.
2. Your survey data is not sent to any third-parties at all.
3. Your survey data is not mined for personal and behavioral trends.
4. Your survey data is not used to train an artificial intelligence.
5. Your survey data is not monetized.

That is not necessarily the case with SurveyMonkey/Momentive.ai, a tool that is created, hosted and run by a huge, public, AI company. A company that needs your and your participants’ personal data for its machine learning goals.

Privacy of you and your participants

Driven by investors’ interests and entrepreneurs’ ambition the privacy of web users is under threat. But there’s a growing privacy shift going on around the web. Edkimo is a part of that shift.

Even though the purpose of Edkimo is to gather data, this can still be done without collecting any personal data, without creating participant profiles, without using cookies and while respecting the privacy of other people.

By using SurveyMonkey, you’re sacrificing the privacy of your participants. With Edkimo you still gather all the important insights to help you understand how to improve learning and achievement, but this doesn’t come at a cost of the privacy of your participants.

Compliance with EU GDPR privacy regulations

If you are collecting anonymous survey data from users in Europe with a tool that sends the data to servers or third party servers outside the EU you need to ask for and get explicit consent from the participants according to the recent regulations such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

If you use Edkimo, all of your data on our servers is stored in the European Union (in Germany and Finland). With our privacy-by-design approach we avoid and minimize the collected data, we do not rely on data mining, do not create participant profiles and do not train an AI with your data.

Contrary to that, SurveyMonkey collects and sends a lot of personal data to servers outside the EU and it is a potential liability for your whole survey or evaluation. As a survey manager, that means you should and must disclose to your participants the potential privacy issues when you use a tool like SurveyMonkey. Their euphemistic privacy policy line reads like that: “We’re aware that many of our customers with EU users and EU affiliates would prefer that their data be hosted in the EU in mid-2019.”

Human Learning vs Machine Learning

Edkimo is a human learning company – SurveyMonkey is a machine learning company.

Edkimo helps you discover the magic of learning. We believe that the experts for learning and teaching are already in the room and do not need an outside expert, and certainly no machine to tell them what to do. All you need is an easy, fast and efficient way to make this human expertise visible and enter into a dialogue about teaching and learning.

SurveyMonkey needs a constant stream of huge amounts of data to feed and train their AI algorithms. This data comes from you and your participants. Keep that in mind and ask: Who serves whom?

David vs Goliath

Edkimo is human-centred, learning-focused, and made in Europe. We are purposefully not following the AI hype of Silicon Valley. By using Edkimo, you will support a small team of developers, teachers, and researchers, an independent business and the independent web. Learn more about us here.

SurveyMonkey, on the other hand, is a public company with a $3 billion market cap. Big data has always been their business. With their rebranding to Momentive.ai they pivot to Artificial Intelligence “with a purposeful balance of humanity and technology.” What could possibly go wrong when you run a survey on SurveyMonkey (or on of their other brands like GetFeedback)?

Why is Edkimo over 85% cheaper than SurveyMonkey?

Edkimo gives every user a 30-day free trial. Time to try it out and to collect as many responses as you want. After your free trial period you should be able to evaluate if Edkimo is a good fit for your needs. Depending on your business Edkimo starts at €5 per user/month. We do not offer a timely “unlimited” Free Plan as SurveyMonkey does. But their so-called “unlimited” plan is actually quite limited in numbers of responses and then jumps directly to 39€ per user/month. Edkimo is over 85% cheaper! Moreover, in all of SurveyMonkey’s plans you do not only pay in cash but also with your and your participants’ data. So take your time to compare, do the math, and decide what works best for you.

Why is Edkimo a great SurveyMonkey alternative?

Edkimo is a simple, intuitive, and privacy-friendly alternative to SurveyMonkey. It is an independent, human-centered, and learning-focused survey tool.

Edkimo is here to help you collect smart data and draw valuable insights at a glance while respecting the privacy of your participants, being compliant with GDPR.

Do you plan a survey project? Whether you are an experienced evaluator or want to design your first questionnaire: Give Edkimo a chance. Sign up for a 30-days free trial with no obligations and explore our simple and privacy-friendly survey tool.