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UX and product teams struggle with fragmented workflows when using traditional survey-only platforms like SurveyMonkey. Teams end up juggling multiple tools for surveys, usability testing, information architecture, and participant recruitment, creating data silos and ballooning costs.

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Optimal unifies the entire UX research workflow in a single platform with unlimited seats, integrated recruitment, and purpose-built UX tools.

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Beyond Surveys: Complete UX Research vs Single-Method Tool

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SurveyMonkey does one thing well: Surveys.  It's built for market research, employee feedback and event registrations. But most UX teams need additional methods to complete their research including: card sorting, tree testing, prototype testing, and usability studies. SurveyMonkey offers none of these, forcing you to purchase additional platforms.

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Optimal provides the complete UX toolkit. Surveys, card sorting,  tree testing, first-click testing,  prototype testing, and interviews, all in one platform with integrated analysis.

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17 years of UX expertise. Optimal isn't a generic survey tool adapted for research. Every feature is purpose-built for understanding user behavior and optimizing digital experiences, proven by companies like Netflix and Uber.

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Per-Seat Pricing vs Unlimited Seats

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SurveyMonkey's per-seat model creates scaling challenges. Every new team member who needs research access means another line item in your budget. As your research practice matures and more people across product, design, and marketing want to run studies, costs multiply. 

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Optimal's unlimited seat model changes the economics. Pay for usage, not headcount. Whether you have 5 researchers or 50 people conducting studies across product, design, and marketing teams, the cost stays the same. No budget negotiations when a new PM wants to run a study. No choosing between cost and collaboration.

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Hidden costs multiply with seat-based pricing. Beyond per-user fees, SurveyMonkey charges for responses beyond plan limits. A growing team means higher seat costs AND higher overage fees as research scales.

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Unlimited seats enable research democratization. When anyone can conduct research without impacting the budget, UX thinking spreads across your organization, without procurement approvals for each new seat.

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Participant Recruitment: Built-In vs Bring Your Own

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SurveyMonkey requires DIY recruitment. You get distribution tools (email, links, QR codes) but no participants. You must build your own panel or purchase SurveyMonkey Audience separately, with additional per-response fees that vary by audience type.

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Launch research in minutes with Optimal. Design your study, specify demographics, and recruit qualified participants immediately. No vendor coordination, no delays, no managing multiple relationships.

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Quality and reach matter. Optimal's recruitment includes quality checks and access to niche audiences (healthcare professionals, developers, executives) that require expensive custom recruitment through SurveyMonkey.

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Fully Managed or DIY Recruitment: Flexibility to Suit Your Needs. Optimal offers fully managed recruitment as well as DIY recruitment and an on-demand panel. Whether you prefer hands-on control or a completely managed process, we have you covered. With Managed Recruitment, our dedicated in-house team handles everything from briefing to delivery. The team sources from a global pool of vetted participants across multiple trusted providers and selects the panel to ensure that you can quickly connect with your target users. Need to refine targeting mid-project? No problem. We’ll refine your criteria seamlessly to keep your study on track, no matter the changes.With SurveyMonkey, you’re left to build your own panel or purchase SurveyMonkey Audience separately, with extra per-response fees based on audience type, which can quickly escalate costs.

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Advanced Targeting: Precision Recruitment for Your Exact Needs. At Optimal, we empower you with the ability to recruit precisely the audience you need, even for niche or hard-to-reach groups. Unlike SurveyMonkey Audience, where targeting is limited to preset criteria, Optimal Managed Recruitment gives you the flexibility to create custom, free-form targeting criteria. Whether you're seeking healthcare professionals, developers, or executives, we’ll ensure you get the exact participants required to deliver actionable insights.

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Transparent, All-Inclusive Pricing: No Hidden Fees, No Surprises. Optimal has no hidden recruitment fees or per-question charges. The cost of recruitment is all-inclusive, with no additional costs for screening questions or response limits. By contrast, pricing can quickly add up with SurveyMonkey’s additional costs for screening questions, question types, and length of surveys. As an example, for matrix/scale questions, each row of a question counts as a separate question, increasing the overall cost.

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Optimize Your Screeners: Expert Support for Better Results. Optimal's Managed Recruitment helps you optimize your screeners for free. Our team ensures that your screeners filter participants effectively and can even help you write them if needed. We optimize for quality and feasibility, ensuring the best-fit participants.

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Why Choose Optimal? 

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SurveyMonkey excels as a general-purpose survey platform, but UX and product teams quickly hit its limits. Per-user pricing and panel recruitment costs scales expensively, there are no UX-specific research methods, and recruitment requires separate coordination.

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Optimal delivers more value for less:

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• Unlimited seats vs per-user fees 
• Fully Managed or DIY Recruitment flexible options to meet your needs
• Complete UX toolkit including surveys, usability testing, card sorting, and more
• Purpose-built for UX with 17 years of research expertise

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For teams serious about understanding users and building better products, Optimal eliminates workflow complexity while providing significantly more capability per dollar.

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Ready to see the difference? Start your free trial.

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Optimal Surveys helps product, design and research teams capture the user insights that actually drive decisions—from feature validation to user journey optimization. Now it's getting even smarter.

Research shows that when surveys are customized, people give more thoughtful answers and are less likely to drop out.

‍That’s why we’re really excited to roll out one of our most requested survey features: Display Logic!
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This new capability creates truly dynamic surveys that eliminate irrelevant questions and reduce drop-off rates. Instead of moving users through generic questionnaires, Display Logic shows each participant only what matters to them, giving you higher-quality data and more targeted insights.

Combined with our existing branching logic, you now have complete control over creating survey experiences that feel personal, not repetitive.
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Why Dynamic Surveys Matters

Better data quality

When participants only see relevant questions, their answers are more thoughtful and accurate. More focused questions mean better insights.

More targeted insights

Use previous responses to drill deeper into specific topics—or skip over areas that don’t apply. You’ll uncover richer insights without extra noise.

Faster, more focused studies

Customizing the survey cuts out extra questions, keeps participants engaged, and helps them move through faster. Plus, a better experience means they’re more likely to take part in your future research.

What You Can Do with Display Logic

• Set multiple logic conditions for one question
• Show or hide questions or answers based on earlier responses from radio, Likert, and dropdown questions
• Apply logic across screeners, pre- and post-study questions, and survey questions

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Smarter Optimal Surveys

We've been doubling down on making Optimal surveys both user-friendly and best-in-class for delivering insights. To help you get the most out of your surveys, we’ve added AI Simplify to suggest clearer, more effective question wording to help you engage participants and get higher-quality data.

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We’ve also recently launched automated Insights for open-text responses. This feature takes the grunt work out of analysis by instantly surfacing key themes from open-text and matrix responses.

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These are just a few of the ways we’re shaping Optimal into one of the most thoughtful and effective survey tools out there. With powerful AI features like question writing and instant insights built right in, we’re making it easier than ever to go from idea to impact.

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Whether you're running usability studies, product tests, or market research, Optimal’s display logic and other survey tools help you create cleaner, more efficient surveys from start to finish. Start tailoring your surveys today to drive data-backed decisions.

Not yet using Optimal? Start your free 7-day trial and launch your first survey now.

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At Optimal, we believe in the transformative potential of AI to accelerate your workflow and time to insights. Our goal is simple: keep humans at the heart of every insight while using AI as a powerful partner to amplify your expertise. 

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By automating repetitive tasks, providing suggestions for your studies, and streamlining workflows, AI frees you up to focus on what matters most—delivering impact, making strategic decisions, and building products people love.

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That’s why we’re excited to announce our latest AI feature: AI-Powered Question Simplification. 

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Simplify and Refine Your Questions Instantly

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Ambiguous or overly complex wording can confuse respondents, making it harder to get reliable, accurate insights. Plus, refining survey and question language is manual and can be a time-consuming process with little guidance. To solve this, we built an AI-powered tool to help study creators craft questions that resonate with participants and speed up the process of designing studies.

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Our new AI-powered feature helps with:

• Instant Suggestions: Simplify complex question wording and improve clarity to make your questions easier to understand.
• Seamless Editing: Accept, reject, or regenerate suggestions with just a click, giving you complete control.
• Better Insights: By refining your questions, you’ll gather more accurate responses, leading to higher-quality data that drives better decisions.
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Apply AI-Powered Question Simplification to any of your survey questions or to screening questions, and pre- and post-study questions in prototype tests, surveys, card sorts, tree tests, and first-click tests.
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AI: Your Research Partner, Not a Replacement

AI is at the forefront of our innovation at Optimal this year, and we’re building AI into Optimal with clear principles in mind:
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1. AI does the tedious work: It takes on repetitive, mundane tasks, freeing you to focus on insights and strategy.
2. AI assists, not dictates: You can adapt, change, or ignore AI suggestions entirely.
3. AI is a choice: We recognize that Optimal users have diverse needs and risk appetites. You remain in control of how, when, and if you use AI.
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‍Ready to Get Started? 

Keep an eye out for more updates throughout 2025 as we continue to expand our platform with AI-powered features that help you uncover insights with speed, clarity, and more confidence.

Want to see how AI can speed up your workflow?

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Apply AI-Powered Question Simplification today or check out AI Insights to experience it for yourself!

Inspired by insights from Optimal users, we’ve reimagined study creation to bring you a beautifully streamlined experience with the new Study Flow tab.

With the new Study Flow, you’ll: 

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⚡ Enjoy faster study set up: Messages & instructions and Questionnaire tabs are combined in a single tab - called Study Flow - for faster editing and settings customization.

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✨ See it all at a glance: Easily visualize and understand the participant experience—from the welcome message to the final thank-you screen—every step of the way. 

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🎯 Duplicate questions: Save time and quickly replicate questions for surveys, screening questions, and pre- and post-study questions. 

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⭐ Experience enhanced UI: Enjoy a modern, clean design with intuitive updates that minimize scrolling and reduce mental load.

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🗂️ Collapse and expand sections: Easily navigate studies by collapsing and expanding sections, making it easier to build out specific parts of your study.

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This Study Flow tab is available across all Optimal tools, except for Qualitative Insights. 

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What’s next?

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We’re not stopping there. We have some significant improvements on the horizon designed to give you even greater flexibility and control.

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Advanced logic: Enhanced logic capabilities is one of our most highly requested features, and we’re thrilled to introduce new capabilities to help you build your ideal study experience – available for surveys and other tools. We will first introduce “display logic”, allowing for: 

• If answer is X for Question Y, then hide/show Question Z.
• If answer is X for Question Y, then hide/show specific answer options.

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Customizable sections: Organize your questions into different sections to build a better study experience for your participants. For example, segment your questions into relevant groupings, such as demographics or product usage. With custom sections, you can add new sections, rename, reorder, duplicate, and move questions between different sections.* 

*Note: Questions cannot be moved to/from the screening questions section.

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These upcoming features will empower you to create dynamic, tailored study experiences for different audiences with ease for more valuable insights. 

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Start exploring the new Study Flow now.

At Optimal Workshop, we're dedicated to building the best user research platform to empower you with the tools to better understand your customers and create intuitive digital experiences. We're thrilled to announce some game-changing updates and new products that are on the horizon to help elevate the way you gather insights and keep customers at the heart of everything you do. 

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What’s new…

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Integration with Figma 🚀

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Last month, we joined forces with design powerhouse Figma to launch our integration. You can import images from Figma into Chalkmark (our click-testing tool) in just a few clicks, streamlining your workflows and getting insights to make decisions based on data not hunches and opinions.  

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What’s coming next…

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Session Replays 🧑‍💻

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With session replay you can focus on other tasks while Optimal Workshop automatically captures card sort sessions for you to watch in your own time.  Gain valuable insights into how participants engage and interpret a card sort without the hassle of running moderated sessions. The first iteration of session replays captures the study interactions, and will not include audio or face recording, but this is something we are exploring for future iterations. Session replays will be available in tree testing and click-testing later in 2024.  

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Reframer Transcripts 🔍

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Say goodbye to juggling note-taking and hello to more efficient ways of working with Transcripts! We're continuing to add more capability to Reframer, our qualitative research tool, to now include the importing of interview transcripts. Save time, reduce human errors and oversights by importing transcripts, tagging and analyzing observations all within Reframer. We’re committed to build on transcripts with video and audio transcription capability in the future,  we’ll keep you in the loop and when to expect those releases. 

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Prototype testing 🧪

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The team is fizzing to be working on a new Prototype testing product designed to expand your research methods and help test prototypes easily from the Optimal Workshop platform. Testing prototypes early and often is an important step in the design process, saving you time and money before you invest too heavily in the build. We are working with customers and on delivering the first iteration of this exciting new product. Stay tuned for Prototypes coming in the second quarter of 2024.   

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Workspaces 🎉

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Making Optimal Workshop easier for large organizations to manage teams and collaborate more effectively on projects is a big focus for 2024. Workspaces are the first step towards empowering organizations to better manage multiple teams with projects. Projects will allow greater flexibility on who can see what, encouraging working in the open and collaboration alongside the ability to make projects private. The privacy feature is available on Enterprise plans.

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Questions upgrade❓

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Our survey product Questions is in for a glow up in 2024 💅. The team are enjoying working with customers, collecting and reviewing feedback on how to improve Questions and will be sharing more on this in the coming months. 

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Help us build a better Optimal Workshop

We are looking for new customers to join our research panel to help influence product development. From time to time, you’ll be invited to join us for interviews or surveys, and you’ll be rewarded for your time with a thank-you gift.  If you’d like to join the team, email product@optimalworkshop.com

This is a guest post from our friends over at Askable. Check out their blog.

Writing screening questions is an everyday part of life as a UXer or researcher of any kind, really. And at first glance, they seem straightforward enough. Draft up some questions that help to either qualify or disqualify people from taking part in your research, whether that’s a survey, an interview or something in between.

At Askable, we have seen thousands and thousands of screening questions. Some horrible and some amazing - and everything in between.

So here we go – 5 of the most common mistakes made when writing screening questions – oh and how to avoid them.

1. Using closed-ended questions too often

What’s the quickest way of knowing if someone went on a holiday in the last 6 months… You ask them, right? “Have you been on a holiday in the last 6 months – Yes or No?”. Duh.

But actually, a question worded in this way is signposting the answer you’re looking for, which may lead to false answers! And also, the answer doesn’t give you any extra information about that person’s travel habits, etc.

So, perhaps a better way to ask the question would be: “When was the last time you went on a holiday?” Provide multiple choices. This also gives you that added info, like if it was a month ago or 5 months ago, in this case.

2. Using open-ended questions at the wrong time

Open-ended screening questions can be great, but only for certain info. Avoid using them when you have strict criteria. But instead, use them for getting inside your applicant’s head a bit more. An example would be to ask as a follow up to the example above “Tell me about where you went on your last holiday”.

Open-ended questions are also fine when the answers could vary wildly. A good example is “What is your occupation”. There are simply way too many possible responses to have as a multi-choice.

3. Using industry jargon

How many people in the general public know what EV stands for? It’s Electric Vehicle by the way.

Or how about the term ‘Financial Services’? Are we talking about a bank or payments company or an accountant?

Work off the lowest common denominator, assume the applicant doesn’t know anything about your industry. Because often, they don’t or they think of it differently to you. When we live and breathe a topic, it’s all too easy to forget that others do not.

4. Too many screening questions

We often write too many screening questions for a number of reasons. Sometimes we do it because we forget that screening questions are just that – to screen. Not to survey! Don’t start adding questions in there that are actually part of your research.

Other times it can be because our criteria is just way too narrow. Whatever the reason, a good rule of thumb is to never have more than 15 and the less the better.

5. Not trusting the majority

We have learned this time and time again at Askable – most people are good and honest! We even have a saying now for it – “default to honesty”.

Don’t get overly concerned that your screening questions give too much away. Of course, keep it vague, but don’t go crazy. The 99% of people in our experience won’t take advantage of you. So serve the 99 and not the 1.

Wrap Up

Think about these next time you are writing up some screening questions, setting up your research or trying to figure out who it is you really want to talk with. Do this and you will be on your way to some seriously awesome and accurate insights!