Compare
formr vs LimeSurvey
Both are free, open-source survey engines with no respondent pool attached. formr is built for longitudinal studies; LimeSurvey is general-purpose.
Side by side
| formr | LimeSurvey | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Georg-Elias-Müller-Institute of Psychology, University of Göttingen | LimeSurvey GmbH | ||||||
| Pricing model | Open source + paid options | Free tier + paid plans | ||||||
| Free tier | Yes | Yes | ||||||
| Deployment | Cloud, Self-hosted | Cloud, Self-hosted | ||||||
| Open source | Yes | Yes (GPL-2.0) | ||||||
| Best for | Academic researchers running longitudinal or diary studies that need feedback generated from prior responses. | Researchers and institutions wanting either full data control via self-hosting or a low-cost managed survey tool. | ||||||
| Pricing | Free and open source, maintained by a university psychology department; free instance available at formr.org. Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site. | Community Edition is free to self-host; LimeSurvey Cloud is a paid monthly or annual subscription with tiered response and storage limits.
Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget. | ||||||
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Verdict
formr and LimeSurvey are both open-source survey software that supply no respondents of their own — you bring your own list either way — but they're built for different study designs. LimeSurvey is a general-purpose survey engine: 28+ question types, skip logic, quotas, and an 80+ language interface, free to self-host with no response caps, or available as a paid managed Cloud subscription. formr is narrower and academically specialized: it chains multiple surveys into longitudinal or diary designs with automated reminders between waves, and embeds R directly into the flow so a respondent can see a personalized chart built from their own prior answers before continuing.
Choose formr if
- Your study is longitudinal or a diary design, run over weeks or months rather than a single sitting.
- You want R-generated dynamic feedback (via ggplot2 or ggvis) shown to participants based on their own data.
- You're in an academic psychology or behavioral-science context where formr's design conventions are already familiar, and OSF integration for versioned study materials matters.
Choose LimeSurvey if
- You need a general-purpose survey tool for a standard, single-wave questionnaire.
- You want the option to avoid server administration entirely via the paid Cloud tier, with white-label branding and priority support.
- You need a wide range of question types, quotas, and multi-language support out of the box.
What they share
Both are genuinely free at the entry point — formr's hosted instance and LimeSurvey's self-hosted Community Edition cost nothing — and neither supplies respondents, so either one still leaves you needing a source of participants, such as Prolific for vetted research participants or a panel provider like Cint or Dynata for a broader consumer sample. Both also carry less commercial polish and support infrastructure than paid platforms, which is the trade-off for being free and, in formr's case, academically maintained rather than commercially supported.
Last reviewed September 22, 2026