Free online surveys: from survey form design to report

1. 1

   Choose a template

   Start from a ready-made survey template or a blank page; sign-up is free and needs no bank card.

2. 2

   Arrange your questions

   Drag and drop star ratings, Likert scales, NPS, matrices, multiple choice and text answers; with conditional logic each person only sees the questions that apply to them.

3. 3

   Share the link

   A short link, a QR code, email or SMS invitations, or an embed on your site; the form displays correctly on phones too.

4. 4

   See the results

   Charts and reports build themselves as responses arrive, and you export PDF and Excel in one click.

You don't have to start from a blank page. These templates come with their questions, options and conditions ready, and once you copy one you can change any part of it:

• Customer satisfaction (CSAT) after purchase: three short questions after a purchase or delivery: overall satisfaction, the reason and permission to follow up.
• Loyalty survey (NPS): the NPS question with separate branches for detractors, passives and promoters.
• Employee satisfaction survey: 25 Likert items across five dimensions, from the workplace to work–life balance.
• Post-event survey: a low score asks for a reason, and workshop attendees get questions of their own.
• Course evaluation: course content, instructor and organization, plus an NPS question.
• Website user experience survey: the goal of the visit, success, ease and problems, shown as a pop-up on your site.
• Food and cafeteria quality survey: a weekly check of food quality, staff courtesy and cafeteria hygiene.

Every template can be browsed without signing up and also comes as a print-ready Word and PDF file; the full list is in the template gallery.

The shorter a customer satisfaction survey form is, the more responses it gets. This four-part structure works for most businesses:

1. 1

   Overall satisfaction

   One star or 1–5 scale question: “Overall, how satisfied were you with your purchase or our service?”

2. 2

   Experience dimensions

   A matrix with several items — quality, price, response speed and staff attitude — on one shared scale.

3. 3

   Recommendation to others

   A 0–10 NPS question; a number you can compare month over month.

4. 4

   Reason for the score

   A text box that conditional logic opens only for low scores, asking what should improve.

There are ready-made templates for more specific businesses too: Restaurant survey, Online shopping survey, Product feedback and Customer complaint form. Pick one and adapt its questions to your own business.

NPS is the question “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend?” answered on a 0–10 scale. Porsino has a built-in NPS field, and its report is generated automatically: the NPS score plus the promoter, passive and detractor breakdown.

Other common metrics have their own reports too: Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Customer Effort Score (CES). If you weight options, assign a score to each one so a total score is computed for every response and included in the Excel export.

For measuring employee satisfaction, the Employee satisfaction survey template is ready, with 25 Likert items across five dimensions: workplace, management, pay and benefits, growth and development, and work–life balance. The Job satisfaction, 360-degree feedback, Wellbeing and burnout check and Meeting effectiveness templates are there too.

Employees answer honestly only when they trust that the survey is anonymous. In the form settings, switch on anonymous survey mode so that the IP address, browser and device fingerprint are not stored and respondents see this at the top of the form; don't ask identifying questions either. If you need to know who responded, use personal invitations, and tell employees so before you start.

With a report filter — say, “sales department only” — every chart is computed on that group, so you can see each unit's result separately.

• Link and QR

  Post the short link in messaging apps, email or social media, or print the QR on invoices and the reception desk; there's iframe code for your own site too.

• Personal invitations

  Enter your contact list by hand or import it from Excel, and send everyone a single-use link by SMS, email or Telegram (whichever channel is set up in the system); you know who has responded and nobody responds twice.

• Automatic reminder

  Automatic reminders are re-sent to anyone who hasn't responded yet.

• Kiosk mode

  Put a tablet in your shop, at an exhibition or at reception; after each submission the form clears itself for the next person, and each device has its own identifier.

Satisfaction isn't measured once; the trend is what matters. Set a daily, weekly or monthly schedule on invitations so a fresh invitation goes to the same list every period and each period's responses are recorded separately. Then use the “Compare two time periods” report to set this month against the last.

Response rates don’t depend on the questions alone; a survey that looks tidy and familiar with your brand is completed more often. You get 14 ready-made skins with adjustable card style, density and button shape, and the brand kit puts your organization’s logo and colors on every survey.

For surveys that need to stand out — a festival, an event, an ad campaign or a customer survey for a luxury brand — there are 15 special themes: complete designs with an artistic background and an image header, such as “Cherry blossom”, “Kashi tile”, “Nebula”, “Autumn” and “Coffee”. Previews of the themes are free, and they activate from the “Pro” plan up; see the full list on the Online form builder.

The moment the first response arrives, reports build themselves: a chart per question, descriptive statistics, matrix heatmaps, response trends over time, the drop-off point at each question and word clouds for text answers. There are 117 ready-made reports in total, and with filters you can view any chart for a specific group of respondents.

For the management meeting, arrange the key cards side by side on a custom dashboard, put live presentation mode on the screen, or send a public report link to someone without an account. PDF, Word, Excel and CSV exports are ready too.

A survey serves an operational decision: how customer satisfaction did this month, which branch is falling behind, or which of several options to choose; each question is read on its own and the result is percentages and charts. A research questionnaire for a thesis or paper measures a construct with several items and needs validity, reliability and statistical analysis. If yours is the second kind, see Build an online questionnaire; direct SPSS export, sample size and Cronbach's alpha are covered there.

For the principles of question design, sample size, raising the response rate and a pre-launch checklist, read how to create an online survey: nine steps with worked numbers, good and bad sample questions and seven common mistakes.