SurveyMonkey: How Its Polls Handle Multiple Responses, Cancellation and Organiser Rules
SurveyMonkey is a survey and polling platform from the company of the same name, used to gather responses through web links, email invitations and embedded forms. A free tier exists for smaller surveys, while paid plans add features. The vendor's own help pages document how its collectors behave, how the one-response default works, and how a subscription can be ended.
Written by BuyPollVotes editorial desk | Last checked
One answer per browser: the default rule
SurveyMonkey's default is one answer per person: multiple responses are switched off for most collectors, so a survey records a single entry per browser or email address. The vendor's help pages state this plainly, and it matters to anyone weighing a poll on the platform, because the tally you see is not a certificate that each entry came from a distinct human. A shared family computer, a workplace kiosk or a library terminal can hold one entry and block the next person entirely.
The rule lives at the collector level, not the account level, and that is the structural point most quick summaries miss. The vendor also documents the edge of its own wall: someone on a different browser or a different device can answer a Web Link survey again even when repeats are switched off, and a browser set to wipe its storage between visits behaves the same way. For an organiser, that is the honest read. The mechanism discourages casual repeats on one machine, and the organisers of real contest votes add their own enforcement on top, as the section on incentives shows.
- Email invitations are tighter than links: each contact on the list can answer once.
- IP Restrictions let the owner allow or block a list of addresses, rather than capping entries per address in some fixed way.
- The acceptable-use policy forbids reaching the service through any method other than the interfaces and instructions the platform provides, with suspension or termination as the stated consequence.
Canada offices and the Ottawa address
The company keeps a Canadian presence it documents itself. SurveyMonkey Canada Inc. lists an Ottawa office at 200 Laurier Ave W on the fourth floor, and the careers material describes office hubs across the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Ireland, India and Costa Rica, with remote staff on top of the buildings. For a reader comparing platforms on features, this says little; for anyone who needs the entity behind the brand in a Canadian context, it is the address the company publishes.
A Canadian reader looking for more than that will not find it in the help centre. The office pages are short, and the substance of how a poll behaves does not change by country.
- The careers page names hubs in San Mateo, Portland, Canada, the Netherlands, Ireland, India and Costa Rica, alongside remote team members.
- The Canadian entity is listed as SurveyMonkey Canada Inc., with the Ottawa address published on the company's own office locations page.
Cancel and auto-renew: what the help pages allow
Paid users can turn off auto-renew at any time, which downgrades the subscription when the paid period ends. The help text states it in one line: canceling auto-renew prevents the charge at the next billing date, or the next invoice for accounts that pay that way. The change sits in the account settings, and the same rule covers a Team Primary Admin as much as a lone upgraded user.
What the pages do not document is a refund schedule for time already paid, so a reader should not assume money comes back when a plan is downgraded mid-cycle. The downgrade arrives at the end of the paid time, and that is where the documented promise stops.
- Canceling auto-renew prevents the payment method from being charged at the next billing date.
- For those who pay by invoice, canceling stops the next invoice from being issued.
- Team Primary Admins, as well as individual upgrades, can turn off auto-renew under the same rule.
Against Microsoft Forms: the split reviewers cite
Side-by-side comparisons keep landing on the same split. SurveyMonkey is cited more often for its advanced features and customisation, while Microsoft Forms is favoured for its integration with Microsoft 365 and the ease of its setup. Both platforms rate highly, so the choice is less about quality than about which workplace a poll has to live in.
For an organiser weighing the two for a contest vote, the deciding questions are practical ones: who needs to answer, on what devices, and which tally the organiser can actually verify. The comparison material does not settle that for anyone, because the organiser's own rules and the audience's habits decide it. A workplace already inside Microsoft 365 will feel the pull of Forms; a research-shaped poll with branching and customisation will feel the pull of the other side.
Incentives, prizes and who fills the form in
Publishers and organisers hold their contest votes on the platform and write their own enforcement. Business Record states plainly that it may disqualify ballots breaking its one-ballot-per-device policy and its ban on automated entries. The Foothills Focus goes further in two directions: tampering it judges duplicated or fraudulent leads to disqualification, and businesses, organisations or individuals that fill out incentives or submit ballots for other people are out, whether or not the person named consented.
Read together, the practical picture is blunt. The vendor supplies the tooling and the default settings; the organiser supplies the disqualification. A batch of entries added by a third party, however it arrives, sits inside exactly the discretion those organisers reserve for themselves, and the person whose name is on a filled-in entry has no protection from the rule either. That is the honest answer to anyone weighing the risk: the tool records, the organiser judges.
- Business Record reserves the right to disqualify ballots that do not adhere to its one-ballot-per-device voting policy and its ban on automated entries.
- The Foothills Focus states that tampering with the voting process it determines to be duplicated or fraudulent will be disqualified.
- The same publisher rules out filling in incentives or submitting ballots on behalf of employees, customers or anyone else, with or without their consent.
Why the monkey came back
The name is a deliberate choice, not an accident. The company announced it was returning to its classic SurveyMonkey brand name, saying it wanted a name that captures its ability to bring the best of humanity and technology together. Anyone who met the shorter, quieter wordmark in between will notice the monkey restored across the product and the help pages, which is why searches about the name still turn up both eras in the wild.
Slow sessions and outages: what is documented
Neither slowness nor downtime has a documented cause in the vendor's help material cited here, and inventing one would help nobody. The completion-issue page does name one concrete trap: a login prompt can appear after a respondent follows a link to build a survey or takes a Contribute survey, and that interstitial looks a lot like a broken page to the person answering. Beyond that single documented case, a sluggish session usually reflects the device or the connection on the answering side.
- The login prompt is documented for links to build a survey and for Contribute surveys specifically.
- No cause for general slowness and no downtime schedule appear anywhere in the material behind this page.
| Setting or collector | What the vendor documents |
|---|---|
| Default collector | One entry per browser or email address, with multiple responses off by default |
| Web Link or Website | The owner can allow repeat answers from the same browser |
| Email Invitation | Each contact on the list can answer once |
| IP Restrictions | The owner can allow or block a list of IP addresses |
How to do it
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Open the collector options
In your survey, pick the collector whose link you share and open its options panel, since each collector carries its own answer rules.
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Switch on multiple responses
Turn the multiple responses setting on, and a Web Link or Website collector will then accept more than one answer from the same browser.
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Save the change and resend
Save the setting and share the same link again; email invitations keep their one-answer-per-contact rule no matter what the link collector does.
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Tighten access if the audience needs it
Turn on IP Restrictions when the vote must stay inside a known audience, allowing or blocking a list of addresses the owner chooses.
Common questions
Why is SurveyMonkey so expensive?
SurveyMonkey prices its paid tiers for businesses that need the advanced features and customisation reviewers keep citing, not for casual poll makers. Side-by-side comparisons describe the platform as the option people name for advanced features and customisation, with Microsoft Forms preferred for simple setup and Microsoft 365 integration. A tool sold to teams and researchers carries a business budget with it, and the free tier is the fallback for everyone else. If the cost is the obstacle, the comparison page on this site covers what each competitor gives away.
Can you use SurveyMonkey for free?
Yes, a free tier exists, and the vendor describes its plan options on the pages of its own site. The free level suits small polls and short surveys; the paid levels exist because organisations need the advanced features and customisation that reviewers cite when they compare the platform with Microsoft Forms. Full plan caps and limits are a subject of their own, so the pricing pages of the vendor are the place to confirm current details before you commit a contest to any tier.
How does SurveyMonkey stop multiple responses?
By default, multiple responses are switched off for most collectors, so a survey accepts one entry per browser or email address. Email invitations are tighter still: each contact on the list can answer once. The vendor also documents the edge of its own wall, because a person on a different browser or device can answer a Web Link survey again, and a browser set to clear its storage between visits behaves the same way. So the default shapes honest behaviour without certifying that each entry came from a distinct person.
How do you switch on multiple responses in SurveyMonkey?
Open the collector whose link you share and turn on the multiple responses setting. For a Web Link or Website collector, that lets one browser answer more than once, which the vendor's help pages describe directly. Email invitations do not follow the same path, since each contact keeps a single answer regardless. IP Restrictions remain available separately, letting the owner allow or block a listed range of addresses when the audience needs tightening.
Why is SurveyMonkey so slow?
The vendor's help material names no cause for slow sessions, and it would be wrong to invent one. The one documented trap on the completion side is a login prompt that can appear after someone follows a link to build a survey or takes a Contribute survey, which reads like a frozen page to the person answering. Beyond that, a sluggish session usually sits with the device or the connection on the answering side, and reporting it through the vendor's own support channels is the documented route.
Does SurveyMonkey pay?
No, SurveyMonkey is a survey platform, not a reward scheme. Any incentive a respondent sees belongs to the organiser of that particular poll, and organisers write their own rules about it. The Foothills Focus, for one, states that businesses, organisations and individuals are not permitted to fill out incentives or submit ballots on behalf of other people, with or without their consent, and that doing so means disqualification. So the pay question is answered by whoever set up the vote, never by the tool itself.
Why is SurveyMonkey down?
The documentation behind this page records no outage schedule and no downtime cause, so a live interruption is something to confirm on the vendor's own status notices rather than here. What the help pages do document is one confusion that looks like downtime: a login prompt can appear after a link to build a survey or take a Contribute survey, and a respondent who expected a question instead sees an account wall. That is an access step, not an outage, and it resolves once the prompt is dealt with.
Are SurveyMonkey and Mailchimp the same company?
No, they are separate companies that integrate with each other. The vendor describes a combined effort between the two that lets users email surveys through Mailchimp, and its own update page presents them as two names working together rather than one business. Anyone weighing the pair for a poll should treat them as tool and channel: the survey platform collects answers, the email service carries the invitation, and neither stands in for the other in the tally.
Where these facts come from
- help.surveymonkey.com. help.surveymonkey.com/en/surveymonkey/send/allowing-multiple-responses/.
- help.surveymonkey.com. help.surveymonkey.com/en/surveymonkey/send/allowing-multiple-responses/.
- surveymonkey.com. surveymonkey.com/mp/legal/acceptable-uses-policy/.
- surveymonkey.com. surveymonkey.com/about/office-locations/.
- help.surveymonkey.com. help.surveymonkey.com/en/surveymonkey/solutions/surveymonkey-brand-update/.
This page does not sell votes and will not explain how to get past a survey's own walls. The vendor's help pages document no per-device vote cap, no downtime schedule and no payout scheme for respondents, so none is described here. Nothing on this site can promise that any entry is untraceable, and an organiser's published rules about incentives and repeat entries always take precedence over anything written here. No prices are quoted, because the vendor's plan pages change without notice.
X prohibits coordinating with or compensating others to inflate engagement metrics, and it names Polls among the features covered. The Pet Industry Business Awards name the consequence in their own contest: a business may be investigated, lose votes or be disqualified on reasonable evidence of purchased votes. No seller can stop an organiser from doing that.
Slido says it is alerted when an event gets an unusually high number of votes in a very short time, and Crowdsignal says its built-in measures detect patterns of potentially abusive voting. Ordinary participation arrives spread across the voting window, from different people at different moments. Nothing on this site is a method for getting a vote past a check, and a vote that a tool blocks does not count.
Organiser rules differ: the RSPCA Pet of the Year Awards allow extra votes through donations on their official mechanism, while OpenTable Australia treats a vote cast in exchange for money or a reward as null and void. Both are contest rules, not statutes, and whether payment is lawful where you live is a question for a lawyer. Orders are refused for any contest whose rules ban paid votes, and for political ballots.
Votes ordered for a poll that never appear on its count are refunded after the poll closes. A refund never covers an organiser's decision: Localsearch may void all votes for a disqualified nominee, and Mentimeter says a user whose access it cancels under its Acceptable Use Policy is owed no refund or compensation. No result is promised.