In a discussion titled “What survey tool do you use?” within the Community Building category, per_coh initiated the thread by asking for recommendations, mentioning their usual reliance on Google Forms and SurveyMonkey, and inquiring about UXR tools like Useberry and Maze. Ralf_Stockmann recommended LimeSurvey as a self-hosted alternative to ensure data sovereignty, noting that their organization, the German State Library, keeps all data on internal servers. When per_coh asked for clarification on the differences, Ralf_Stockmann explained their extensive use of a FOSS stack, including LimeSurvey, Discourse, and Nextcloud, to avoid external providers. Stephen added that LimeSurvey is available as both open source and commercial hosting. Additionally, merefield suggested using Discourse Topics with Polls for simple, public surveys, and linked the official surveys plugin documentation here.
Hi everyone, reaching that point where we need to decide what we’ll use to do customer surveys.
Usually my easy go-to is Google Forms, and if I need more functionality I’ll dip into SurveyMonkey.
I’d love to know what you use.
Also, some folks are looking at UXR tools and the names Useberry and Maze came up. Would love to hear your thoughts and experiences.
As the German State Library, we have to make sure no data leaves our own servers. Thus, we use
instead of SurveyMonkey (and Discourse instead of Atlassian Confluence 
.
Hi @Ralf_Stockmann thanks for that. Could you explain how you mean this? How are they different from other providers? I couldn’t find a good answer in their FAQs.
LimeSurvey is both an open source app and available with commercial hosting (like Discourse).
Check https://manual.limesurvey.org/ for more info.
Thanks @Stephen , I’ll have a look.
And I’m sure it goes without saying, but for small, simple, “public” surveys you can consider Discourse Topics with Polls? 
We generally do not use external providers but exclusively our own data center. Over 800 virtual machines and 4 petabytes of storage 
Our FOSS-Stack (excerpt):
It’s probably long overdue to link the official surveys plugin here?