18 Tools That Save Partial Submissions & Incomplete Surveys
Looking for a survey tool that will collect and display data from participants who quit your survey before completing it? I did a deep dive on 18 popular survey tools to figure out which ones offer Partial Completion functionality, whether they offer it for free or on a paid plan, and any limitations you should know about before picking which survey tool to use for your next research project.
This guide covers:
1. Why people drop out of surveys
2. Surprising advantages of using partial completion data
3. Which tools offer partial submissions or incomplete survey capture
Why do people drop out of surveys before completing them?
Most people assume that survey participant drop-off is caused by survey design problems — it was too long, too difficult, or just too boring to complete. While this is sometimes the case, there are a bunch of common external factors that can cause people to start but not complete your survey:
They were distracted or another commitment took their attention away from your survey. The reality of most survey drop-off is that your participant’s attention was pulled elsewhere by a colleague, family member, or just an everyday circumstance (like their train or bus arriving at its destination). There’s no way to universally combat distraction like this — that’s why it’s important to pick a survey tool that captures partial completion data.
They intended to return and complete your survey later but forgot. Many survey tools include functionality that allows participants to resume their survey later on (usually if they still have their existing session or browser cookies intact), however it’s difficult to get someone to resume a survey once they’ve left it for a long period of time. If they never return, you’ll want a survey tool that will eventually save their partial answers as incomplete submissions after a given timeframe (usually somewhere from 24 hours to 30 days).
An often overlooked issue in survey design is that the participant reached a page of your survey that led them to believe they had completed it, so they closed their browser session before they reached the actual “finish page”. These people didn’t realize they had not completed your survey! If you use a tool that lacks partial completion capture and you have an unnoticed design flaw like this in your survey, you risk irrecoverably losing significant data.
The Surprising Advantages of Incomplete Survey Capture
Aiming to capture as much data as possible is the best approach to ensure that external factors like these do not negatively impact the end result of your research. Additionally, there are a bunch of unexpected and unique research opportunities that are unlocked when you use a tool that captures partial completion data:
Imagine you’re trying to rank a list of 50 options. You can use a voting format like pairwise comparison, which breaks that list into a series of head-to-head votes for each participant. Without incomplete survey capture functionality, you would have to set the number of votes per person really low to minimize dropout — maybe 5-15 pair votes for each person. With incomplete survey capture, you can just put this voting section at the end of your survey, tell people to vote on a minimum of 10, and then allow them to quit once they get bored of voting or reach the end. Regardless of when they drop off, the partial completion functionality will mean that you capture everyone’s votes in your final result. This also works for other series-based voting methods like MaxDiff or Conjoint Analysis.
When you’ve got a low research budget and can’t afford to offer participants any incentive (eg. vouchers, direct payments, lottery entry), you’ll likely have a lower percentage who will complete your survey and a higher drop-off rate. In these cases, picking a tool that can collect every bit of data possible is essential. In many cases, paying for a tool with partial completion functionality is still much cheaper than the cost of incentivizing every survey participant.
Collecting partial completion data from survey participants who quit can help you to identify bottlenecks in your survey design where a high drop-off rate is occurring. This can help you tailor your survey as you go, fix design issues, and improve its completion rate for the next batch of participants.
Which Survey Tools Collect Partial Completion Data?
I did a deep dive into the pricing pages, help centers, and technical documentation (and I even messaged some of their customer support agents), to figure out which of the 18 most popular survey tools offer partial completion functionality —plus how much they cost and whether they have any important limitations to know about.
1. OpinionX
OpinionX is a survey tool for ranking people’s preferences and comparing how each group of people ranked things differently. It’s used by tens of thousands of organizations (Disney, LinkedIn, Google) to research customer priorities and inform product decisions, using OpinionX’s range of ranking methods like pairwise comparison, maxdiff analysis, conjoint analysis, and more.
Does it offer Partial Completion? Yes! ✅ OpinionX captures partial completion data for all participants on all surveys, regardless of free tier or paid plan status.
Once a participant completes any question in your OpinionX survey, their data is automatically saved. If they quit or leave the survey idle for more than 24 hours, all the questions they’ve answered up to that point will be saved as an “Incomplete” profile. By default, the results page only shows data from participants who completed the entire survey — to include incomplete participants, just switch on the “Show Incompletes” toggle at the top of your results overview page. Here’s an example:
⬆️ Turning on the “Show Incompletes” toggle on OpinionX
As you can see in the screenshot above, every survey comes with a mini dashboard that tracks the percentage of participants who successfully complete your survey (Completion Rate), how many people started but quit mid-survey (Incompletes), an “Average Duration” time tracker, and an easy-to-use toggle for viewing or hiding incomplete submissions.
OpinionX’s free tier offers unlimited surveys with unlimited participants, unlimited questions in each survey, and unlimited teammates in your shared workspace. The Ask tier ($13/month) unlocks premium customizations like survey branching or required questions, and the Analyze tier ($25/month) unlocks advanced analysis like segmentation filtering and automated crosstabs. While all surveys on OpinionX capture incomplete submissions, only surveys on the Analyze tier or higher can use the “Show Incompletes” toggle that includes this data during results analysis.
Getting started on OpinionX is really easy — create a free account today and you can have your first survey up and running in just 5 minutes. There are no time limits to the free plan and you don’t need to use a credit card either, just jump straight into setting up your first survey!
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2. Typeform
Typeform is a popular tool for building customized forms and data-collection questionnaires.
Does it offer Partial Completion? NO ❌
Although customers have been asking Typeform for years to add functionality to capture incomplete surveys, as of August 2024 there is still no timeline or public plan for Typeform to add this any time soon. Instead, if you wish to capture partial data, Typeform recommends breaking your survey up into multiple separate forms using their premium “completion redirect” feature to bridge participants to the next form in your overall survey. This obviously makes analyzing your results much more difficult though, as data is split across many separate projects.
In March 2024, Typeform did roll out a feature called “Partial Save Point”, which could be added to any one point in the survey as a way to capture data up to that point. The feature was initially available only to users on their Pro plan or higher, but it was taken down shortly after launch and has not been available to use since.
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3. Google Forms
Google Forms is a free basic form builder that allows you to make simple questionnaires on the Google Docs suite of tools.
Does it offer Partial Completion? NO ❌
Google Forms does not offer partial completion capture, it does not have any “save and continue later” feature, and there are no plans for any of this functionality to be added to Google Forms in the future either. The only solutions are either to break your survey into multiple separate forms to create forced save points, or to use an external tool for $3500/year that adds this functionality to Google Forms for you.
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4. Jotform
Jotform is a no-code online tool for building custom forms, pages, and questionnaires.
Does it offer Partial Completion? NO ❌
Despite years of people asking for incomplete survey capture functionality (literally years, check out these examples: 1, 2, 3, 4), Jotform does not offer partial survey completion. They do have a “Save & Continue Later” feature, however even if a respondent uses this, their partial data is automatically deleted after 2 months if they do not return and complete their session.
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5. Alchemer
Alchemer (formerly SurveyGizmo) positions itself in the survey market as an alternative to SurveyMonkey and Qualtrics — it’s affordable like SurveyMonkey and offers a broad range of features while being less complex than Qualtrics.
Does it offer Partial Completion? Yes, via paid plan only 💲
This one was pretty tricky to find information about. Alchemer has a help center article titled Understanding Response Statuses which includes an option named Partial for respondents that “clicked the Next button on at least the first page but have not yet reached the Thank You page.”
I couldn’t find anything in the product or elsewhere that showed this functionality in action, so I contacted their customer support team who said that “it is available on our Professional and Full Access licenses”. The Professional tier starts at $1075/user/year and Full Access starts at $1895/user/year. Both are limited to just 3 seats, after which you must upgrade to a custom enterprise package. All pricing plans come with a response limit and the Professional tier excludes a bunch of research methods like MaxDiff and Conjoint behind additional paywalls.
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6. Microsoft Forms
Microsoft Forms is a simple form builder that comes as part of the Office 365 suite of tools, such as Microsoft Teams and Excel.
Does it offer Partial Completion? NO ❌
On Microsoft Forms, there's no concept of participants starting the form but then not fully completing it, and therefore there is no way to see when people drop off or to access the data they input before they abandoned the survey.
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7. QuestionPro
QuestionPro is a general-purpose online survey builder that covers most of the same functionality of tools like SurveyMonkey, Alchemer, and Qualtrics.
Does it offer Partial Completion? Unclear… 🤷♂️
Drop-off participants and incomplete capture are mentioned in passing in a couple of QuestionPro’s documents, but in the end I couldn’t figure out what functionality is actually available here and which pricing plan it is on. In the end, I contacted customer support on two different occasions to try figure this out — they said the functionality is available, but they could not show me anything to confirm this (documentation links or product screenshots), so I’m still none the wiser really. QuestionPro does offer general statistics related to drop-off on the free “Essential” plan along with dropout analysis on the paid plans to understand where in the survey users are dropping out. I didn’t find anything that clarified their functionality for partial data capture.
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8. SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey is a market leader in online survey platforms, offering a wide range of questionnaire functionality that is used by millions of users around the world.
Does it offer Partial Completion? Unclear… 🤷♂️
SurveyMonkey has sooooooo many blog posts and product docs, but most of it is frustratingly vague and indirect, making it unnecessarily hard to figure out what they do and don’t offer! This document says that participants on SurveyMonkey will be assigned a “Partial” status tag if they start but do not complete your survey. However, upon further reading, it seems that this is specifically for survey invitations to show you they have accepted the invite and started the survey, but it cannot show you what their partial data is.
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9. Zoho Survey
Zoho Survey is an online survey builder that is part of the broader Zoho suite of products. It’s mostly used by teams that already work in the Zoho Office suite, as otherwise it is pretty similar to other products on this list.
Does it offer Partial Completion? NO ❌
Zoho Surveys has a “Save and Continue Later” feature that allows participants to return and complete the survey at a later time. However, capturing data from partially completed sessions where the participant has abandoned the survey is not possible, with or without the Save & Continue Later feature.
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10. Tally
Tally.so is a no-code form builder. It is quickly becoming a popular alternative to products like Typeform, Google Forms, and Jotform as a way to collect structured info like event registration forms and onboarding questionnaires, as Tally’s pricing options are much more budget-friendly than Typeform or Jotform.
Does it offer Partial Completion? Yes, via paid plan only 💲
Tally offers Partial Submissions on its paid plan ($25/month or $250/year). Unlike OpinionX, partial submissions on Tally only works once you upgrade and turn the setting on — it won’t apply retroactively to anyone who has already taken the survey prior to that. Partial Submissions on Tally don’t work with integrations or notifications, they aren’t shown on the overview “Summary” tab, and it only applies to “form” fields.
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11. Paperform
Paperform is an online form builder for automated forms, eSignatures, scheduling and booking management, surveys, bookings, and payments.
Does it offer Partial Completion? NO ❌
Paperform has quite a silly implementation of this functionality. While it does capture partial completes, it automatically deletes them after 30 days. Also, if someone returns and completes their submission, they will still be marked with the “partial” status record “so that you can keep track of which partial submissions have gone on to be submitted”. This functionality is available on “some plans” of Paperform, which seems to be the Pro and Business tiers but not the entry-price Essentials plan. Overall, this is not fit for purpose within the context of usage that I am researching for this blog post.
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12. SurveyLegend
SurveyLegend is a Swedish company that offers an online survey tool with a specific focus on mobile-friendly responsive online questionnaires using their drag-and-drop no-code builder.
Does it offer Partial Completion? Unclear… 🤷♂️
I found two obscure references to partial submission data on SurveyLegend — a review on GetApp from 2023 that mentions their inability to remove partial data from their analysis to focus only on full completions, and a similar review from 2022 that mentions the same struggle under the “Cons” section of their comment. Neither were positive references to this functionality and I couldn’t find anything else in relation to this, so I’m really not sure if SurveyLegend actually offers this feature.
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13. SurveySparrow
SurveySparrow is an online survey tool that offers conversational surveys with a chat-like interface, offline survey capabilities, and quiz creation.
Does it offer Partial Completion? NO ❌
This one is a little confusing! SurveySparrow lists collect partial submissions as a feature on all pricing plans, however when you dig into the explanation of this feature, it says “Partial submissions allows to skip the questions and submit the surveys”. Unfortunately this is not the functionality we’re looking for — this just allows participants to submit the survey even if they skip some questions.
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14. SurveyKing
SurveyKing is an online survey builder tool that specializes in offering fully anonymous surveys (k-anonymity).
Does it offer Partial Completion? NO ❌
I couldn’t find anything related to partial submissions or incomplete data capture for SurveyKing, despite an extensive search, leading me to believe that it is not available on this product.
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15. Qualtrics CoreXM
Qualtrics is the market-leader survey platform, offering an advanced experience management platform with over 100 question types and complex technical analytical tools. It is one of the most expensive research platforms and is aimed at large organizations with professional researchers.
Does it offer Partial Completion? Yes ✅
In the Responses section of your survey settings on Qualtrics, you’ll find a section titled “Incomplete Survey Responses” where you can decide whether you want incomplete responses to be recorded or automatically deleted, how long after starting should a survey session be saved as “incomplete”, and whether that time period should be measured from starting the survey or last activity.
While this functionality is available on Qualtrics’ free tier, it is worth noting that on Qualtrics your account is locked pending a paid upgrade once you exceed 3 surveys, 30 questions per survey, or 500 responses across all surveys combined. Paid plans are expensive — they start at $5,000/year without including the extra fees that start once you pass 1000 respondents (not per survey, but for your entire workspace indefinitely). Don’t be fooled by the initial free plan, this is an expensive tool.
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16. Sogolytics
SogoSurvey is an online survey builder by Sogolytics, which offers some unique features like customizable dashboards, sentiment analysis, and the ability to create personalized survey experiences. It’s mostly focused on employee feedback and engagement use cases.
Does it offer Partial Completion? Unclear… 🤷♂️
Each time a participant hits the “Next” button in a premium-tier SogoSurvey, their data is saved — however, I couldn’t find any clarification as to whether this partial data is available for analysis or functions as more of an “Autosave and Continue Later” type of feature.
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17. Survicate
Survicate is an online survey builder that includes formats like NPS surveys, AI analysis, and a bunch of native integrations.
Does it offer Partial Completion? Yes ✅
Survicate offers Partial Completion on their free tier and all paid plans. However, the free tier offers only 25 respondents per month (including partial completion ones) and just 1 active survey — it’s more like a free trial rather than an actual free tier. Survicate’s paid plans start at $1188/year for just 250 respondents per month.
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18. Pollfish
Pollfish is an online survey tool that comes with access to an audience of +250 million respondents around the world that you can pay to complete your surveys. It’s particularly focused on selling to customers in market research and advertising sectors.
Does it offer Partial Completion? NO ❌
While Pollfish is a leading platform used by hundreds of thousands of organizations, there is absolutely no reference online to any incomplete session capture or partial submission functionality of any kind existing on their platform.
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⬆️ Incomplete surveys are autosaved on all OpinionX surveys (including for free users)
Of all the tools explored here, OpinionX is the best option for a survey tool that offers partial submission collection. Both its free tier and paid plans collect and store data from every survey session. The free tier offers unlimited everything (surveys, participants, questions, teammates), and upgrading to unlock the partial completion data inside OpinionX is still cheaper than almost every tool on this list.
Give OpinionX a test run today by creating your own survey or playing around with OpinionX’s sample surveys.
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About The Author:
Daniel Kyne is the Co-Founder of OpinionX, a free research tool for stack ranking people’s priorities — used by thousands of product teams to better understand what matters most to their customers. OpinionX comes with a bunch of research methods for measuring people’s preferences — including automatic capture of incomplete survey sessions. Try it now!