Create Your Own Hosted Online Survey With LimeSurvey

By: Karan Goel | 4th August 2010

A few weeks ago while I was looking for a self-hosted alternative to create an online survey. I came across a great open-source and free script called Lime Survey.

I found LimeSurvey to be the best way to create self hosted surveys and questionnaires. Today, I will be focusing on using the self-hosted survey creation tool.

Before I get started, I would suggest that everyone to take a read of their documentation. If you ever run into a problem or not sure what option to select or how to do something, the documentation wiki will help you out.

LimeSurvey currently offers:

• Unlimited number of surveys at the same time
• Unlimited number of questions in a survey (only limited by your database)
• Unlimited number of participants to a survey
• Multi-Lingual Surveys
• User-Management
• 20 different question types with more to come
• WYSIWYG HTML Editor
• Quotas Management
• Integration of pictures and movies into a survey
• Creation of a printable survey version
• Conditions for questions depending on earlier answers (Skip Logic / Branching)
• Re-usable editable answer sets
• Ready-made importable questions
• Anonymous and Not-Anonymous survey
• Open and closed group of participant surveys
• Optional public registration for surveys
• Sending of invitations, reminders and tokens by email
• Option for participants to buffer answers to continue survey at a later time
• Cookie or session based surveys
• Template editor for creating your own page layout
• Extended and user-friendly administration interface
• Back-office data entry possibility
• Survey expiry dates for automation
• Enhanced import and export functions to text, CSV, PDF, SPSS, R, queXML and MS Excel format
• Basic statistical and graphical analysis with export facility
• Screen Reader Accessiblity