SurveyMonkey is the incumbent of online surveys, and it's built, priced, and sold like one: per-user plans, annual commitments, response caps with overage fees, and a free tier that won't even show you all your responses. If you just want great forms and surveys without procurement-grade pricing, Formly is the modern alternative: AI builds your form from a description, one flat plan covers unlimited responses, and your AI agent can run the whole thing over MCP.
Formly Pro is $29/month, or $24/month billed annually. Unlimited forms, unlimited submissions, no per-user pricing, no overage fees, cancel anytime. Every feature is included: AI generation, custom domains, white-labeling, team collaboration, webhooks, API.
Describe what you want to learn ("a customer satisfaction survey with an NPS-style rating, a favorite-feature question, and an open comment") and Formly generates the pages, questions, and field types. Refine it in a full editor or keep iterating by prompt.
Formly ships an MCP server and a REST API, so agents like Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and Codex can create surveys, publish them, and pull responses for you, including asking your agent to summarize this week's answers instead of exporting a CSV. See the MCP guide.
Multi-page flows, conditional logic, and answer piping keep surveys short and relevant, the things that drive completion. And Formly is hosted in Europe, GDPR compliant, with no cookies and no respondent tracking.
| Feature | Formly (Pro) | SurveyMonkey |
|---|---|---|
| Responses | ✅ Unlimited | ❌ Annual caps + overage fees |
| Pricing Model | ✅ One flat plan | ❌ Per-user tiers, annual billing |
| View All Responses on Entry Plan | ✅ Yes | ❌ Free plan caps viewing (25) |
| AI Form/Survey Generation | ✅ Included | ⚠️ AI assistance on paid plans |
| AI Agent Access (MCP + REST API) | ✅ Included | ❌ No MCP |
| Custom Domains | ✅ Included | ⚠️ Subdomain at Enterprise |
| White-Label / Remove Branding | ✅ Included | 💰 Higher tiers |
| Multi-Page, Logic, Answer Piping | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes (tier-dependent) |
| Webhooks & Public API | ✅ Included | ⚠️ Plan-dependent |
| Research Panels & Benchmarks | ❌ No | ✅ Yes, its real strength |
| EU Hosting, GDPR, No Cookies | ✅ Yes | ⚠️ Enterprise options |
SurveyMonkey pricing and limits as of July 2026. Plans vary by region and are changed often; check their site for current details.
Honesty helps you pick faster: if you're a research team that needs access to respondent panels, statistical benchmarks against industry data, or enterprise compliance programs, SurveyMonkey (and its Momentive suite) is built for exactly that. Formly doesn't sell you survey respondents. It gives you the fastest way to build and run your own forms and surveys.
For everyone else (founders, marketers, product teams, operators), a flat $29/month with unlimited responses covers what the survey giant charges hundreds for.
One plan: Pro at $29/month, or $24/month billed annually, with unlimited forms and submissions. Cancel anytime.
Yes: rating and linear-scale questions, multi-page flows, logic, and answer piping are all built in. Describe the survey and the AI assembles it.
Yes. Export to CSV, push each submission anywhere with webhooks, or pull responses via the REST API (or let your AI agent do it).
No. Team collaboration is included in the plan, so you can invite your team to shared workspaces without per-user pricing.
Describe your survey, publish it, and read every response: no caps, no overages, no seats.
