LimeSurvey Review (2026): Open-Source Surveys from Hamburg

What is LimeSurvey?

Who is behind LimeSurvey

LimeSurvey is open-source survey software from LimeSurvey GmbH in Hamburg, Germany (Papenreye 63, registered at the Hamburg local court under HRB 137625), represented by Jory Nagel. The project is much older than the company: the Australian developer Jason Cleeland published it in 2003 as PHPSurveyor, it was renamed LimeSurvey in 2007, and long-term project leader Carsten Schmitz co-founded LimeSurvey GmbH in 2015 to coordinate development and sell services around it.

The code is public on GitHub under the GNU General Public License (version 2 or later) and has about 3,700 stars. LimeSurvey says it is trusted by 250+ universities and research institutions, and it has been used by public bodies such as the Austrian state of Vorarlberg and by open-source projects including Ubuntu and GNOME.

Where LimeSurvey hosts your data

LimeSurvey’s privacy notice names one hosting sub-processor, Hetzner Online GmbH in Gunzenhausen, and says the data is stored within Germany. The website and the account system both run on Hetzner’s network (AS24940) in Germany. The pricing page also mentions a choice of hosting regions – its FAQ lists Germany, Finland, the UK, the USA, Canada and Australia – so check which region your account uses. If you want full control, you can install the same open-source software on your own server.

Checked 25 Oct 2026. Hosting can change – report a change.

LimeSurvey pricing

LimeSurvey Cloud has a free plan and three self-service plans. Free gives you unlimited surveys and questions, 1 administrator, 10 MB of upload storage and 25 responses a month – once they are used up, nobody can answer until the next month. Basic costs $39 a month billed monthly (shown as about €35), with 1,000 responses a month and 250 MB of storage. Expert costs $432 a year ($36 a month) with 3 administrators and 10,000 responses a year, and Business $796 a year with 50,000 responses. Corporate plans are quoted on request. The page shows dollars, but checkout is always in euros, and if a subscription ends you fall back to the free plan and keep access to your responses.

Compared with SurveyMonkey, whose Advantage plan costs $39 a month billed yearly for 15,000 responses a year, LimeSurvey’s Expert plan is a little cheaper with three admins instead of one. Self-hosting the software is free.

Features and security

LimeSurvey is built for demanding surveys: a long list of question types (from rankings and sliders to equations and file uploads), conditions and branching, quotas, panel integration, predefined end URLs, anonymous surveys and multilingual surveys in more than 80 languages. Responses can be exported for analysis in other tools. On the compliance side, LimeSurvey offers a GDPR data processing agreement and calls itself a European company on its plan table. What it lacks is the polish of newer tools: the editor takes time to learn, and there is no built-in respondent panel like SurveyMonkey Audience.

What users say about LimeSurvey

On Trustpilot LimeSurvey has 2.5/5 from only 5 reviews (checked 25 October 2026), on a profile the company has not claimed. The reviews complain about subscription renewals, the paywall after the free plan’s response limit and a dated interface. With so few reviews, the score says little about the product as a whole.

Pros and cons

Verdict on LimeSurvey

Verdict: LimeSurvey is the most capable survey tool from Europe: German, open source, hosted at Hetzner and able to handle quotas, multilingual studies and complex logic that cost extra elsewhere. The price of that power is a steeper learning curve and a tiny free plan, so test it with a real survey before you commit. Best for: researchers, universities and teams with complex surveys. Not for: beginners who want a survey online in five minutes.

LimeSurvey is ranked #1 in Best European alternatives to SurveyMonkey and in Best European survey tools.

Similar European survey tools

LimeSurvey: FAQ