What it is

LimeSurvey is a free and open-source online survey platform written primarily in PHP with a JavaScript and React front end. It lives in the web forms and survey ecosystem, and it positions itself as a self-hostable alternative to hosted services such as SurveyMonkey, Typeform, Qualtrics, and Google Forms. The project has been developed since 2006 and is used by businesses, academic institutions, teachers, students, governments, and financial institutes across more than 80 countries.

The concrete problem it solves is vendor lock-in and data control. Organizations that need unlimited surveys and questions, conditional logic, and multilingual collection often face per-response pricing or restrictions on where response data is stored. LimeSurvey provides the same core survey authoring and analysis workflow as a package that can be deployed on infrastructure the operator controls, which matters for teams that must meet GDPR requirements or keep sensitive responses in-house.

Key capabilities

• Unlimited surveys and unlimited questions, with more than 30 question types available.
• Conditional logic, skip logic, and question branching for adaptive survey paths.
• Multilingual surveys supporting more than 80 languages.
• A library of over 900 survey templates, plus branding controls for fonts, colors, logo, CSS, and JavaScript.
• Response collection and statistics, with advanced data analysis tools built in.
• RemoteControl API over XML-RPC and JSON-RPC, plus REST API and plugin integrations including SAML, LDAP, and SURFconext.
• Security and compliance features such as two-factor authentication, data anonymization, GDPR compliance, and WCAG 2.0 compliance.

Who uses it and how

• Businesses gather feedback from customers, employees, and stakeholders using public links, QR codes, or social sharing.
• Academic researchers and field study teams run structured questionnaires with branching and export results through plugins such as ExportR and ExportSTATAxml.
• Global organizations deploy multilingual surveys to reach audiences across many regions from a single installation.
• Privacy-focused teams use closed access mode with personal invite links and anonymization to collect sensitive data under GDPR.
• Administrators integrate authentication through SAML, LDAP, SURFconext, or AuthCAS, and extend behavior with question themes, survey themes, and audit log plugins.

Getting started

Download the latest stable release from the community downloads page, or use the development repository with the caveat that it may contain untested versions. Deployment requires a PHP-ready web server such as Apache 2.4 or later, nginx 1.1 or later, PHP 8.1.29 or later with mbstring and PDO drivers, and a database among MySQL 8.0, PostgreSQL 14, MariaDB 10.3.38, or MSSQL 2019. A hosted SaaS option is offered for those who prefer not to self-host.

When to use it — and when not to

LimeSurvey is a reasonable fit when the priority is avoiding vendor lock-in, controlling where response data lives, and matching the feature set of paid survey products without per-response fees. A self-hoster must operate a web server, PHP runtime, and a supported database, and should plan for the recommended extensions such as php-fpm, gd2, imap, ldap, zip, and zlib. The repository carries an unspecified license (NOASSERTION) and lists zero contributors in the registry metadata, so anyone evaluating it should confirm licensing terms and project activity directly before committing.