Top 10 survey software features you need to have in 2025

Survey software features can make or break the success of your research project.

They can elevate the level of engagement your survey receives, help you to reach more people, and provide visual deep-dive elements in your reports that deliver greater insights.

But what survey software features should you look out for when choosing a survey platform?

Here’s our pick of the best features you need to have.

Question Styles for engaging Survey Design

The first consideration of your survey is how it’s designed. It should be visual, engaging, and hold participants’ interest.

This is because the more they are engaged, the more likely you are to get quality responses and a higher response rate.

You can mix up the types of questions you use and style them so that the participant doesn’t get bored when responding.

Some of the key Question Styles include:

• Open-ended questions: giving participants the chance to give long-form feedback that will contain comments you might not have received otherwise. For example: “Do you have anything else you’d like to share?”

• Multiple-choice and multi-select questions: letting participants select multiple answers where relevant, helping to save time and provide more information. Such as: “Select which methods of travel you have used in the last month.”

• Images as responses: providing participants with images that represent their answers, which they can click to select. This provides a visual element that keeps the survey fresh. For example: a range of smiley faces in a customer satisfaction question about their most recent visit.

• Semantic questions: letting participants provide more detail in an efficient way by asking what extent they agree with a statement, ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree.

• Question carousels: displaying a range of questions and answer options in clickable cards that automatically rotate once an answer has been selected. Reducing the amount of scrolling a participant needs to do to complete your survey.

Check out our article on Survey Question Styles for more information.

Personalised surveys

Ensuring your survey is personalised to each participant is a great way to boost your response rates.

And you can use multiple survey software features to help you achieve this.

• Integrations: use connectors like API to populate the survey with information you already hold on each participant. For example, their name, date of birth, address, occupation etc.

• Answer Masking: use answers they have already given to ensure follow-up questions only include relevant answer options. For example, if they travel to work by car and train, other answer options won’t appear in a question about their preferred method out of car and train.

• Text Substitution (Piping): feed a previously given answer into a question. Such as “Why is Tesco your favourite supermarket?”

This helps to keep your survey relevant to each participant based on information they have provided, saving time and reducing survey fatigue.

Multi-language surveys: for wider audience participation

In today’s global world, you can’t just rely on the native language for your feedback.

In the 2021 census, English was the first language of 91% of residents in England and Wales. In the US, over 50 million people speak languages such as Spanish, Chinese, Filipino, French, Arabic and Russian.

[Sources: Office for National Statistics and Wikipedia]

This means only conducting surveys in English is seriously limiting the amount of people who can respond.

Your surveys should therefore be able to be read and responded to in multiple languages.

A modern survey software platform should be able to handle this for you.

Our platform – Snap XMP – lets you send surveys in multiple languages with just one link.

Check out our Multilingual Surveys page for more information.

Add custom branding to your survey

Custom branding helps to build brand recognition and gives your survey a familiar feel.

There are multiple ways you can customise your survey:

• Logo
• Colour scheme
• Custom URL
• Custom HTML (organisation website)
• Window size
• Additional buttons (print, restart, save)

This customisation is a great way to make your survey your own. It can also boost response rates if the participant is reminded exactly who they are completing the survey for.

Multi-channel survey distribution

Once you’ve designed your survey in an engaging way, it’s time to think about how you’re going to reach your participants.

There are many ways to get your survey in front of people.

• Email
• SMS
• Kiosk
• Tablet
• Mail (paper surveys)
• Social media
• QR codes

Not every method or channel is suitable for every audience, so it’s important to consider who you’re trying to reach.

For example, a healthcare survey can gain better responses if you survey people in a doctor’s waiting room. Therefore a tablet, kiosk, or paper survey would be most appropriate.

For a social housing survey where residents might not have internet access, hand-delivered paper surveys might work best.

And for an employee engagement survey, sending the survey by email would be the most efficient.

Check out our article on the Benefits of Combining Paper and Online Surveys to help you get the best results.

Paper survey scanning

Paper surveys are a great way to reach seldom-heard groups. Not everyone has an internet connection, whether due to economic reasons or living in rural areas.

This means mailing a paper survey can offer you a great chance of getting their feedback.

The downside to paper surveys is they can be difficult to analyse – as you need to manually go through every individual survey to read the results.

However, there are survey software providers that offer a solution. You can scan surveys and analyse them yourself, or your software provider can take care of all of this for you.

Saving you time, boosting response rates, and ensuring you get the insights from your data.

Learn more about Paper Surveys Scanning from Snap Surveys.

Offline surveys app that gives the online experience without a steady internet connection

When conducting interviews in the field, it isn’t guaranteed that your device will always be connected to the internet. This means you risk losing any data you collect.

But with the right survey software platform you can use an offline app to get online feedback.

You can design your survey and then download an app to use out in the field – which can be used on any device: such as smartphones, tablets, and kiosks.

Data automatically syncs once you get back online.

Helping you in-the-moment feedback that can easily be analysed within your survey platform!

Learn more about the Snap XMP Offline Interviewer app.

Analysis and Reporting

Once you’ve collected your data, now it’s time to make sense of it.

Survey software platforms offer an array of analysis tools to help you find the stories in your data – then present them in visual reports.

This includes summary reports that give you a top-level understanding.

You can quickly understand the responses to each question with numerical summaries. For example: “85% of respondents said your service was good”.

Then usually you can apply filters to focus on specific audience groups, refining insights without including irrelevant data like non-respondents.

With the right survey platform, you can also create deep-dive reports that let you drill down into your data.

You can even set up sophisticated reports that can run consistently over a set period of time – including benchmarking and context-based analysis.

These are automated batch reports that can include customised branding.

The better the reports, the greater the insights!

Data security

Protecting your participants’ data is a priority for anyone who runs surveys – therefore you need to do your homework on the data security credentials of your chosen survey platform.

There are some internationally recognised credentials that can help you identify a suitable platform.

This includes ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials Plus.

Any organisation with an up-to-date certificate for these certifications has been carefully vetted, meaning you can trust they will take great care of your data.

Another consideration is where a platform’s data centres are held, as you may want to know your data stays in a specific country.

For example, this is important for compliance with Europe’s GDPR regulations.

Customer Support

One survey software feature you shouldn’t overlook is the level of support you get from your provider.

While some platforms leave you to your own devices, the best providers make sure you have everything you need to get great results.

With any type of software, it’s inevitable you’ll have moments where you need help.

Therefore you should look for a platform that has the human touch – with a support team easily reachable by phone, email, and live chat.