What you need to know

With so many survey tools available to use at UCSF, which one best fits your needs? Here are highlights of available tools and our recommendations.

You can also download a matrix comparison chart for more details.

Qualtrics

• Recommendation: Administrative surveys and academic research
• Highlights:
  • Compliance with HIPAA and FERPA
  • Enabled with MyAccess for single sign-on
  • Compatibility with mobile phones and tablets
  • Support for 48 languages
  • Checking for ADA compliance
  • Robust collaboration capabilities
  • Group panels allowing longitudinal studies
  • Action-based triggers
  • Robust reporting tools
  • Integration with Salesforce
  • Programmatic access via APIs
  • Robust vendor support

REDCap

• Recommendation: Single-site and multisite research studies
• Highlights:
  • Secure and HIPAA-compliant electronic data capture tool
  • Data hosted by UCSF
  • Compatibility with mobile phones and tablets
  • Programmatic access via API
  • Single-click de-identification for data export
  • Granular user-permission scheme and data access groups
  • Flexible data export capabilities into a variety of formats
  • Flexible data import capabilities
  • Active REDCap Consortium comprising 400+ institutions worldwide
  • Available for use by UCSF researchers and their external collaborators
  • Supports the use of data entry forms attached to a survey
    • This enables research teams to securely collect survey-respondent data on forms that are tied to individual survey respondents
  • Supports longitudinal databases
  • Offers data quality checking capabilities
  • Intuitive interface to build data entry forms and surveys in a self-service model
  • Monthly in-person and webinar training classes offered by UCSF

SurveyMonkey, SurveyGizmo, Zoomerang, and similar tools

• Recommendation: Personal surveys not related to UCSF business
• Highlights:
  • Free, feature-limited versions available (e.g., 10-question, 100-response limit per survey)