Overview

LimeSurvey is a long-established, self-hosted survey and questionnaire platform. It runs on your own server, so respondents’ answers never leave your infrastructure, and it imposes none of the response caps or per-seat pricing typical of commercial survey SaaS. The Community Edition is the full survey engine; an optional paid cloud service exists for those who would rather not run a server.

Key Features

• Wide range of question types — single and multiple choice, arrays, ranking, numeric, date, free text, boilerplate and file upload
• Conditional branching and relevance equations to show questions only when they apply
• Quotas to cap or balance respondent segments automatically
• Token-based participant management with invitations, reminders and opt-out tracking
• Assessments, scoring and grading for quizzes and evaluations
• Interface localisation in 80+ languages, with per-survey language switching
• Templates and themes, plus expert-built survey templates for common research tasks
• Built-in statistics and exportable results (SPSS, R, CSV, Excel, PDF)
• Official Docker images and a published PHP/MySQL schema for self-hosting

Why Use LimeSurvey?

It is one of the few survey tools that gives you complete ownership of respondent data while still matching the depth of commercial platforms: complex logic, quotas and token management are all present in the free Community Edition. Because it is GPL-licensed and actively maintained, institutions can audit and extend it rather than renting access.

Use Cases

• Academic and market research questionnaires with branching and quota control
• Internal employee surveys where personal data must stay on-premises
• Public consultations and community feedback forms
• Event registration and evaluation forms with tokenised invitations

Platform & Requirements

Self-hosted web application: PHP with MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL or Microsoft SQL Server. Runs from a standard LAMP stack or the official Docker image.

Licence

Open source — GNU General Public License v2.0 or later. The self-hosted Community Edition is free; the vendor also offers a paid hosted service.

Website

limesurvey.org · Source code on GitHub

QC: type: service; _twif_self_hostable: yes (server software you install and run yourself).