The best website survey tool for CRO is the one that asks the right visitors one short question at the moment they hesitate, then lets you act on the answers.
For most small and mid-size sites, Hotjar Surveys or Survicate covers on-site and exit-intent surveys well.
Zigpoll suits Shopify stores that want post-purchase answers, PostHog suits product teams already using its analytics, and Qualaroo is the cheapest paid route to targeted nudges.
This guide compares the five using each vendor's own pricing pages and docs, as of November 2026. We have not run these tools ourselves.
What we add is evidence from our database of real A/B tests, where survey answers turned into winning page changes.
Disclosure: we may earn a commission if you buy Lucky Orange through our links. We have no affiliate relationship with the five tools reviewed below.
| Tool | Survey channels | Pricing model | Free tier | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hotjar Surveys (Contentsquare) | Website pop-ups, feedback widgets, links | Monthly responses; Growth from $79/month | 100 responses/month | Sites that also want heatmaps and replays |
| Survicate | Website, in-product, mobile SDK, email, QR | Plan tiers; Growth $114/month billed annually | Free plan, 25 responses/month | Teams surveying across web, app and email |
| Qualaroo | Website and in-app nudges, email | Plan tiers from $19.99/month billed annually | 50 responses total | Budget-conscious targeted nudges |
| Zigpoll | On-site pop-ups, Shopify post-purchase, email, SMS | Plan tiers from $29/month billed annually | 50 responses/month | Shopify stores |
| PostHog Surveys | In-app popovers, feedback button, hosted, API | Pay per response after free allowance | 1,500 responses/month | Product and SaaS teams on PostHog |
On-site vs exit-intent vs in-app surveys
An on-site survey appears while a visitor browses, usually after a delay, a scroll depth, or on a specific page.
It is good for asking "What's stopping you from buying today?" on a product or pricing page.
An exit-intent survey fires when the cursor heads for the browser's close button or address bar.
It catches people at the point of leaving, which is the question most CRO teams want answered.
The catch: exit intent depends on cursor movement, so it generally works only on desktop.
Survicate's help docs show how to set up the trigger.
On mobile, use a time delay or a post-purchase survey instead.
An in-app survey runs inside a logged-in product, triggered by events such as finishing onboarding or hitting a plan limit.
SaaS and app teams use these for churn reasons, feature feedback, and NPS.
All three are one step in a research process.
Surveys tell you what visitors say; heatmaps and session replays show what they do.
Our customer research guide covers how these fit together before you write a test.
Hotjar Surveys
Hotjar is now part of Contentsquare, and hotjar.com/pricing redirects to Contentsquare's pricing page.
Surveys sit under the "Voice of Customer" product there.
As of November 2026, the free plan includes 100 responses a month and 3 feedback widgets.
Growth starts at $79/month for 500 to 100k responses with unlimited widgets, and Pro is custom-priced.
Hotjar offers exit-intent surveys plus templates for common questions.
The main draw is having surveys next to heatmaps and session replays, so you can watch the sessions of people who gave a particular answer.
Downsides: the free response cap is low for a busy store, and pricing for surveys is separate from session analytics, so the total cost climbs if you want both.
It is not built for complex in-app research in a logged-in product.
Not for: teams that need surveys across email, mobile apps and kiosks. See our Hotjar review for more.
Survicate
Survicate is a multi-channel survey tool. According to Survicate's pricing page, every plan includes email surveys, website pop-ups, in-product surveys, a mobile SDK, QR codes and kiosk mode.
As of November 2026, there is a free plan with up to 25 responses a month, a Starter plan billed monthly from $89/month, Growth from $114/month billed annually (250 responses a month, with overage fees), Pro from $349/month, and Enterprise from $569/month.
Growth and above include AI categorization and sentiment analysis, and Pro adds advanced display logic.
The exit-intent trigger is a setting under Configure > Triggers.
Downsides: the Growth plan's 250 monthly responses is tight for high-traffic sites, and the AI features most useful for analyzing open-ended answers are not on Starter or the free plan.
Not for: a single-site store that only needs one exit poll. A cheaper tool will do that job.
Qualaroo
Qualaroo, owned by ProProfs, calls its targeted on-site questions "Nudges."
Qualaroo's pricing page lists, as of November 2026, a free plan capped at 50 responses in total, Essentials at $19.99/month billed annually, Business at $49.99/month billed annually, and Enterprise from $149.99/month (annual only).
Paid plans list unlimited responses. Business adds targeting, exit-intent surveys, heatmaps and session replay, and Enterprise adds advanced targeting, sentiment analysis and HubSpot and Salesforce integrations.
Downsides: the free plan's 50-response limit is lifetime, not monthly, so it's only a trial.
Among paid plans, exit intent starts on Business, and sentiment analysis and CRM integrations sit on Enterprise.
Not for: teams that want deep product analytics alongside surveys.
Zigpoll
Zigpoll is popular with Shopify stores because it supports post-purchase surveys as well as on-site pop-ups, email, SMS and shareable links.
Zigpoll's pricing page shows, as of November 2026, a free Lite plan with 50 responses a month, then paid tiers from Standard at $29/month billed annually ($39 billed monthly) up to Premier at $399/month (unlimited responses), with 25% off for annual billing.
All plans include unlimited surveys and team members.
Post-purchase surveys matter for CRO because buyers tell you what nearly stopped them.
Several tests in our database started with exactly that kind of answer (see below).
Downsides: surveys pause when you hit the free plan's monthly cap, and the tool is mostly built around ecommerce, so SaaS teams get less out of it.
Not for: logged-in SaaS products. Read our Zigpoll review or the wider list of post-purchase survey apps.
PostHog surveys
PostHog Surveys is part of PostHog's product analytics suite.
PostHog's surveys page lists popover surveys, a feedback button, hosted surveys and full API access, with targeting by URL, person properties, events or feature flags.
Responses link to session replays, so you can see what each respondent did.
As of November 2026, the first 1,500 survey responses each month are free, then pricing starts at $0.10 per response and drops with volume.
That free allowance is the most generous in this list.
Downsides: it assumes PostHog is installed, and the setup is aimed at developers and product teams.
Marketers who want a point-and-click exit poll on a Shopify store will find it heavier than needed.
Not for: non-technical ecommerce teams. See our PostHog review.
If you'd rather keep surveys, heatmaps and recordings in one cheaper tool, Lucky Orange also includes surveys.
Lucky Orange's pricing page lists unlimited surveys and announcements, with plans from $32/month paid annually for 3,500 monthly sessions, as of November 2026. More detail is in our Lucky Orange review.
For longer, form-style surveys sent by link, Typeform is a common pick (Typeform review).
Questions that work
The tool matters less than the question. Short, open-ended questions shown at the right moment get answers you can test against.
- Product page, after a delay: "Is there anything stopping you from buying this today?"
- Exit intent on cart or pricing: "What made you decide not to continue?"
- Post-purchase: "What almost stopped you from ordering?" and "What made you choose us over other options?"
- In-app, after a key action: "What were you hoping to do that you couldn't?"
- NPS follow-up: ask the 0-10 question, then "What's the main reason for your score?" The follow-up is where the useful text is.
Avoid leading questions ("How much did you love our checkout?") and long multi-page surveys on the live site.
One question with an optional second follow-up is usually enough.
Code the open-ended answers into themes and count them before you decide what to test.
From answers to tests
Survey answers give you hypotheses, not results. The step that pays off is turning the most common objection into a page change and testing it.
Our database has several examples where practitioners did exactly that:
- Kasper Dolk added benefit bullets to a product page hero that answered survey objections, a result credited at +$763,679.14 profit/year.
- Oliver Kenyon placed three survey-based reassurance lines above a collection page grid, worth $44,890/month.
- Kasper Dolk also tested a "how you'll feel" timeline section on a product page, drawn from customer survey objections, for CVR +14%.
- Survey insight doesn't guarantee a win. Clean Commit tested a more visible free-shipping threshold, prompted by post-purchase survey answers, and got +2.4% conversion, inconclusive.
@oliverkenyon
@kasper_dolk@kasper_dolk@kasper_dolk@kasper_dolk
Clean CommitA simple workflow: run one survey question for two to four weeks, group the answers into themes, write a hypothesis for the top theme ("Visitors worry about X, so stating Y near the add-to-cart button will lift conversion"), then A/B test it.
Our guide to writing an A/B test hypothesis covers that step, and you can browse more research-led results in the test database.
For a wider view of research tools, including user testing and message testing, see our roundup of customer research tools.