Gorilla

What Gorilla is

Gorilla is a no-code experiment builder for academic researchers, teachers and students who run studies online or in the lab. The site's headline pitch is "Making good science easy for 30,000+ researchers at 1,000+ Universities," and the home page describes an easy-to-use graphical interface where no coding is necessary. Its slogan on pricing is "Build for free. Pay for data collection."

For this directory the part that matters is the Questionnaire Builder, which the company describes as the way to "quickly create surveys and self-report measures for your experiments." But Gorilla is a family of six builders, and the company is pointed about that: "With Gorilla you can build entire experiments, not just questionnaires." A reader who arrives from a forms list should know the questionnaire tool sits inside a research platform, not a general business form product.

What you build and how

Questionnaires. The Questionnaire Builder is pitched as a way to create "rich surveys and self-report measures." The company lists a wide range of question types, including Likert scales, matrix grids and ranking, and says you can configure scoring, branching, randomization and conditional questions. Each of those has its own description on the questionnaire page:

• Branching skips whole pages based on participant responses, so you collect what you need and give participants a thoughtful experience.
• Randomization covers page order, question order and multiple-choice option order, to minimize bias.
• Conditional logic hides irrelevant questions and stimuli, or prompts participants for a more detailed response.
• Custom response values let you add values to anything from radio buttons to Likert scales, which gives you a head start on analysis.
• Scoring adds custom score calculations to a questionnaire without code.
• The Store saves certain participant responses so you can retrieve and show them later in the study.

The company also says you can build entire questionnaires by combining materials other scientists have created. Its Open Science section describes reading a paper, accessing the protocol and cloning it for replication "in just three mouse clicks." Preview cards on the page show validated instruments such as the Perceived Stress Questionnaire, the Big Five Inventory (BFI), the Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale (GAD-7) and the Brief Resilience Scale (BRS).

Tasks and experiments. The Task Builder builds reaction-time tasks, and the home page says the platform can "collect validated millisecond-level data." The Experiment Builder is for designing "your experiment flow visually." On the home page, the visual design section says you can drag and drop to design your experiment, add text, images, videos, audio and more, visualize randomization, counterbalancing and branching, and create between-subject, within-subject, RCT and longitudinal designs. A CONSORT diagram shows your attrition automatically. The page also advertises "over 2,000 tasks and experiments ready to use," with sample tasks such as a digit span memory task, a Thatcher face task and a visual search task that the company says is easy for humans and hard for bots, which makes it useful for data quality.

The other builders. The Game Builder builds "gamified research tasks to increase motivation and sustain attention." The Shop Builder builds "a realistic experimental shop to study consumer decision-making." Multiplayer makes tasks "playable by multiple participants to study group behaviour."

Recruitment and sharing. Gorilla says it integrates with Prolific, CloudResearch, Sona Systems and other recruitment platforms. You can also create a link to share via email or social media, or collect data from participants in the lab. The company's pitch is large, diverse samples "in hours, not months."

Collaboration, versions and code. Researchers can share work for review, delegate experiment admin, and create shared libraries of pre-approved resources. A Version Control feature saves work automatically, and the company says you cannot break it or lose your work, and can change a study even after launch. A Code Editor is available for people who want to extend the tools with their own scripts without running a server, while the company keeps the product positioned as no-code.

Analysis. The home page frames a study as 4 steps: design, control, recruit and analyze. For the last one it promises well-structured CSV output in long form or short form that loads into Excel, SPSS, R or another stats package, and the questionnaire page adds XLSX downloads and says questionnaire answers combine easily with task data. Dr Jason Chan of Iowa State University is quoted there saying "The data output is really good and easy to work with."

Pricing, compliance and support

The pricing model is described in words. The home page says you can "build, preview and pre-test your experiment" on the free plan, with on-demand support and dozens of sample tasks to clone and customize for replication, plus free 5-minute tutorials. Once you are satisfied, you "choose from academia-friendly pricing tiers, to host and start collecting data," with group savings for labs and departments. The tiers themselves sit on a separate pricing page, and a demo can be booked with the team.

The security and compliance block reads as a list of claims by the company. Gorilla says it is approved by 300+ universities worldwide, hosted in the EU, penetration tested, offers two-factor authentication (2FA), is conformant with WCAG 2.1 Level AA with a VPAT available, and is fully GDPR and BPS (The British Psychological Society) compliant. It also says application to your Internal Review Board (IRB) or Ethics Committee is easy.

Support is described as a team of Gorilla experts who are academics themselves. The company says its qualified support team responds "usually the same day," and offers guided self-teaching, an onboarding webinar library and step-by-step documentation.

The site carries several researcher testimonials. Dr Daniel Richardson, a senior lecturer at UCL, says each year's course is "collecting data from around 1,500 participants." Dr Kirsty Graham of St Andrews says that when an experiment spread through social media, "at one point we had 17,000 participants." Dr Suzanna Forwood of Anglia Ruskin University writes that she launched a study, went to lunch and "came back to 400 participant responses." A researcher at Potsdam University calls Gorilla "my second home for three years." These are the company's chosen quotes, not independent reviews.

Who it suits and who it does not

Gorilla suits academic labs, university teaching programs and students who need validated questionnaires, branching and scoring alongside reaction-time tasks in one study. The ready-made sample tasks span attention, executive function, language, memory and perception, from the classic Flanker and Stroop tasks to an audio naming task, and a separate Gorilla for Industry section covers use outside universities. A team that wants to replicate a published protocol, or collect from a recruitment panel like Prolific, will find that workflow built in.

The free plan lets you build and pre-test before paying, and paying is only for data collection, which is friendly to students and small projects. Labs and departments can look for the group savings the company mentions.

It is a poor match for a business that wants a lead form, an order form or a customer feedback survey. The pages frame everything around participants, studies and ethics review, and the pricing is structured around hosting data collection. Data collection is the paid part, so a large study's cost depends on the tier you choose. Researchers who want full custom code can add scripts, but the company describes the product as no-code first.