What is LimeSurvey?

February 25, 2011 / Content Management Systems

If you do not have the special programming knowledge, but you are willing to create online surveys and questionnaires, then you have the best option to proceed. LimeSurvey is an open-source application distributed under the general public license version 2. This application is written in PHP and worked with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MS-SQL databases.

According to their official website, the latest and old versions of this application is freely available on  Sourceforge so if you want to choose any specific version, you can download it from the mentioned site. However, it is recommended that if you are using older versions of this application, you should upgrade it to the latest version.

You can create polls including branching, custom graphics using templates in HTML, various statistical results, and many more. Set them to either public or private access by using a one-time password, which will frequently change for each participant.

The pre-installed version of Limesurvey is available with your hosting account so you can install it either through a web control panel, such as cPanel with Fantastico/Softaculous. Lime Survey was also taken by third parties on different content management systems such as PostNuke, XOOPS, and Joomla.

Features List

  • No limits on surveys at the same time.
  • No limits to the number of questions in a survey. (Database is the only limit).
  • No limits to the number of participants in a survey.
  • Multiple-Language option
  • User-Management
  • 20 different question types with more to come
  • WYSIWYG HTML Editor
  • Quotas Management
  • Users can choose integrated pictures and movies into a survey
  • Availability of a printable survey version
  • User can set conditions for questions
  • Convenient editable answer sets
  • In-built  importable questions
  • Categorization of surveys
  • Unidentified and identified survey
  • Open and closed groups of participant surveys
  • Non-mandatory public registration for surveys
  • Sending of requests, messages, and one-time passwords by email
  • Option for participants to modify answers to continue survey at a later time
  • Cookie or session based surveys
  • Template editor for making over your own page layout
  • Extensive and simple administration interface
  • Possibility of back-office data entry
  • Enhanced options for import and export functions to text, CSV, PDF, SPSS, R, queXML and MS Excel format
  • Basic statistical and graphical analysis with export facility
  • Screen Reader Accessibility
  • W3C compliance
  • Supporting multiple languages in front-end and back-end
  • A elaborated manual is available in several languages.