Best open source survey tools for solopreneurs

LimeSurvey

The veteran of this list: a survey platform in continuous development since 2003, still the default in universities and research teams, with 30+ question types, branching logic and translations built in. You can run the Community Edition on ordinary PHP hosting for nothing, or pay for LimeSurvey Cloud, whose free tier is deliberately tiny and whose entry plan is the most expensive starting price among the hosted tools here. Two things to know before choosing it: the editor feels dated next to the newer builders on this page, and the cloud ladder is confusing, because the Expert plan works out cheaper per month than the entry Basic plan if you pay a year up front.

Formbricks

Built for asking questions inside a product rather than mailing out a questionnaire: link surveys, email surveys and in-app pop-ups aimed at a chosen slice of your users, all managed from one place. The core app is AGPLv3 and self-hosts with Docker, and the hosted Hobby tier is free for a couple of hundred responses a month, which covers a solo founder running periodic satisfaction checks. The catch is the jump to the first paid tier, which is the steepest on this page, so plan on self-hosting if your volume grows.

OpnForm

The most generous free hosted plan here by some distance: unlimited forms and unlimited submissions, with conditional logic, computed fields, webhooks and API access, at no cost. It is a Laravel and Nuxt app under AGPLv3, so you can move the whole thing onto your own Docker host later without changing tools. Paying buys branding removal, custom domains and analytics rather than a higher response allowance, which is an unusually honest split for a form builder and the reason it suits someone whose volume is unpredictable.

HeyForm

A polished one-question-at-a-time builder in the Typeform mould, with conditional logic, payments, file uploads and signatures, released under AGPLv3 and documented for Docker self-hosting. Its hosted service is the odd one out on this page: there is no free tier at all, only a 7-day trial, and the cheapest plan is billed annually. That makes HeyForm a tool you pick because you intend to run it on your own server, where it is free and unmetered, rather than for its cloud.

Typebot

Typebot turns a survey into a conversation: a visual builder of 45+ blocks, branching paths, payment inputs, and deployment as a chat bubble, popup, embedded container or WhatsApp bot. Read the license before you commit, because this is the one row on this page that is not open source in the usual sense: it ships under the Functional Source License, which the project itself calls fair source, and each release only becomes Apache 2.0 two years later. In practice you may self-host it and build client work on it, but you may not resell hosting or embed the editor in a competing product.

SurveyJS

Not a service at all, but a set of MIT-licensed JavaScript form libraries you drop into your own React, Angular, Vue or plain-JS app, with the answers going straight to your database. Nothing is metered and nothing is hosted for you, which is exactly the appeal for a solo developer who is building a product and wants forms inside it rather than a survey link to send out. The free part is the renderer: the drag-and-drop Survey Creator, the analytics dashboard and the PDF generator are commercial, sold once per developer rather than by subscription.

Form.io

A developer platform rather than a survey app: you build a form in the drag-and-drop editor and Form.io generates the API and data store behind it, then you embed the renderer in your own Angular or React front end. The engine is open source under OSL-3.0 and installs on Node.js with MongoDB. Its hosted platform is priced for companies, not individuals, with a 30-day trial and then a monthly figure well beyond the rest of this page, so treat Form.io as a self-host-or-skip option unless you are building an application that needs form-driven APIs.

Nextcloud Forms

If you already run a Nextcloud server, Forms is a free app you switch on from the app management screen, and the questions and answers never leave your own instance. It is deliberately small: a modest set of question types, results you can view in the browser or export as CSV in the same format Google Forms uses, and no vendor cloud or paid tier of its own. Pointless if you do not run Nextcloud, and close to the obvious answer if you do.

KoboToolbox

Built for field research rather than website feedback: forms that keep working offline on a phone, GPS and media capture, and analysis and reporting on top, used across humanitarian and monitoring work in more than 200 countries. The software is AGPLv3 and self-hosts with Docker. Read the pricing carefully before assuming it is free: the free Community plan is for nonprofits, government agencies and educational institutions, and a private company or personal account pays from the Starter plan up. That makes it a poor default for most solopreneurs and an excellent one if your work is collecting data in the field.

ODK Central

The other serious offline data-collection stack, and the only fully permissive one here: Apache 2.0 from the mobile Collect app through to the Central server you install yourself. The makers say plainly that a technical user can self-host and self-support it for nothing, and sell a managed ODK Cloud aimed at organizations with per-project submission limits. Choose it over KoboToolbox when you want a permissive license and a simpler server, and Kobo when you want the analysis and reporting layer that ODK leaves to you.