Checkbox

What it is

Checkbox is survey and feedback software, sold to organizations that collect answers from customers, employees, citizens and other stakeholders. Its home page headline reads "Built for research. Ready for every team," and describes secure survey software "for teams who need insights at scale," with unlimited responses and hosting in Australia, Canada, Europe or the United States. The company says it has helped thousands of organizations create and run company surveys since 2002, and that Checkbox has existed for over 15 years. The site lists an office address in San Francisco, CA, and it says hundreds of companies around the world trust the product.

The reader this fits is a research, compliance, HR or customer-experience team, often inside a government body, a bank, a hospital or a law firm, that needs a survey builder it can brand and host on its own terms. It also fits an IT lead who has been told the survey tool must run on the organization's own servers.

What you build and how

You build surveys and the campaigns that carry them. The company calls its editor a no-code, WYSIWYG tool and says it is "the most powerful on the market" for customization, which is a claim of the company's rather than a measured fact. The practical point is that the people who own the survey can add advanced logic, change the look and send campaigns without a developer. The plan lists name "All question types & advanced survey logic" as part of the cloud offer, so branching is built in rather than sold as an add-on.

Look and feel. Surveys can carry custom domains, email servers, logos and brand styling, so respondents see your organization rather than a third party. The cloud plan list adds custom subdomain and custom domain, and email invitations with custom branding. A white label deployment option is listed in the site's navigation.

Who gets the survey. A campaign manager delivers "personal, powerful, and targeted experiences through the channels that matter to your business." The cloud plan list names email invitations, SMS invitations and WhatsApp invitations. Dynamic user profiles sit beside it: you can update profiles with your own data, or let respondents update their own, so that a survey can be personalized and the data behind it stays accurate. The company ties this to "industry-leading security and permissions."

Reporting and data. The navigation names analytics and reporting as a feature area, alongside custom surveys, distribution and collection. The cloud plan list also names custom data retention policies, which matters when a policy dictates how long responses can be kept.

Integrations and API. Developers get a public REST API and webhooks on the cloud plan, and the on-premises plan lists a REST API and webhooks too. The site has a developers section with REST API documentation and on-premises docs, plus release notes. The pages do not name specific third-party integrations, so a team that depends on one should ask.

Hosting. This is where the product separates itself. Cloud hosting is "fully managed, always up-to-date, and available in four regions so your data stays close to home." Footer links also name Canadian, EU, Australia and MENA hosting pages. For organizations that cannot use a shared cloud, the on-premises option puts the software on your own servers, with your own domain and mail server, and Active Directory or LDAP integration. The company describes it as "complete data sovereignty."

Use cases and industries. The site groups its offer by sector. Government surveys gather feedback from citizens and civil servants. Legal teams use the tool to "automate critical compliance processes" from distribution to analysis. Financial services get a library of bank, insurance and financial services templates. Healthcare is described with "HIPAA and PIPEDA Ready" patient experience surveys. Education covers teacher engagement surveys, and pharmaceutical is listed as a further industry. Use-case pages cover academic research, market research, enterprise customer feedback and employee engagement.

What the pages state about plans, security and support

Pricing. The site publishes no prices. It says Checkbox "charges users a one-off annual fee," with "no credits or hidden costs," and the on-premises plan is marked "Custom pricing tailored to your organisation." A 1-minute quiz on the home page helps you find a fit. A Pricing link sits in the navigation, but the home page carries no figures.

Trial. There is a free 14-day trial of all features, hosted in the region of your choice, with no credit card required. That is a trial, not a free plan, and nothing on the site describes a permanent free tier.

Cloud plan contents. The cloud list reads: all question types and advanced survey logic; email invitations and custom branding; SMS and WhatsApp invitations; public REST API and webhooks; custom data retention policies; custom subdomain and custom domain; SAML SSO and full audit logs; SLA support and a dedicated account manager.

On-premises plan contents. It includes everything in the cloud enterprise plan, plus deployment on your own servers, complete data sovereignty, your own domain and email server, Active Directory or LDAP integration, a REST API and webhooks, your own mail server and domain, dedicated implementation support and custom pricing.

Compliance. The only named standards on the home page are HIPAA and PIPEDA, in the phrase "HIPAA and PIPEDA Ready" for healthcare surveys. Ready is the company's wording, and the pages do not list any security audit report. A team that needs one should ask for it.

Support. The company promises that any customer can reach a Checkbox expert with questions on branding, integrations, hosting or driving results, and that enterprise customers can set up Zoom calls for real-time review of surveys. The cloud list adds SLA support and a dedicated account manager.

What customers say. 3 testimonials appear. The founder of Makwa7 says the team wanted a system it could run on-prem because most survey tools were hosted externally. The founder of YOLO Communications says the company has used Checkbox for 10 years. The chief information officer of CX Group says Checkbox will remain its survey platform, praising its flexibility and low total cost of ownership.

The company's own comparison. In an April 2026 blog post on alternatives to Jotform, Checkbox writes that it suits regulated and enterprise environments because it offers self-hosting, broader governance control and strong healthcare positioning, and that it combines flexible hosting, on-premise deployment, advanced survey logic, branding control, integrations and compliance-friendly deployment. This is Checkbox describing itself on its own blog.

Who it suits and who it does not

Checkbox suits organizations where the survey platform is a governance decision. A health system that wants patient experience surveys, a public agency that needs citizen feedback hosted in a specific country, a firm that must keep respondent data on its own infrastructure, and an HR or research group that sends campaigns by email, SMS and WhatsApp all fit what the company describes. IT teams that want SAML SSO, audit logs and a mail server of their own will find those listed.

It is less obviously the right tool for a solo founder who wants a free form for a landing page. There is no published price, no permanent free plan, and the buying path runs through a trial, a quiz and a conversation with the company. The product is also a survey platform first, so a team that wants payments, approval flows or document generation inside a form builder will not find them on these pages. And because the integration list is not published, anyone who needs a particular CRM or spreadsheet connection should confirm it before committing.