The Differences Between Polls And Surveys

At SurveyRock, all account holders can now create a poll and embed it on their website or blog making it easy to collect and share general feedback.

Polls and surveys are two different methods that can be used to obtain feedback and opinions, with the main difference being a poll is one multiple-choice question and a survey allows you to ask multiple questions using a wide range of question types.

Surveys are more comprehensive than polls as they normally have many questions and can include ranking, textbox, multiple choice and open-ended questions. A survey is mainly used to gauge opinions on a broad topic or to gain detailed customer feedback, both of which generally require a series of questions. A poll is used to ask one simple question to get a general consensus.

A poll is quickly answered with an anonymous click of the mouse as its purpose is to get a basic opinion. A survey will usually ask the respondent to give some personal information and is more time-consuming.

Conducting a poll can take just a matter of hours or days while conducting a survey can take weeks or even months.

As the answers to polls are limited to the provided multiple choice options, the results are just a general overview. Surveys provide more detailed answers to the questions and give a more comprehensive picture.

When it comes to reporting, a survey takes more analysis to explore the findings while a poll can normally be summarized in a few sentences.