PRODUCT OVERVIEW

SurveyCTO is a powerful, field-tested platform that allows you to collect high-quality data using mobile phones, tablets, or computers—even when you’re offline.

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SurveyCTO platform overview: Collect your best data

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CREATE EXACTLY WHAT YOU NEED

SurveyCTO was built to be powerful, scaleable, and flexible. Create forms and modular workflows with complex branching logic, non-linear navigation, randomized elements, multimedia and GIS capabilities, linkages to previous survey rounds, and form version control. If you can imagine it, our platform can do it.

Below are some of our most powerful features. Click here to explore them all.

  • DESIGN COMPLEX FORMS EFFORTLESSLY

    Create forms directly in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, or with our drag-and-drop form designer, and jump seamlessly between them.

  • PREVIEW AND TEST IN-BROWSER

    Use our testing interface to efficiently and rigorously test your forms.

  • USE INNOVATIVE AND MEDIA-RICH QUESTION TYPES

    Enhance your survey with audio, photos, videos, signatures, device sensor data, and GPS positions, boundaries, and paths.

  • UPDATE FORMS SEAMLESSLY

    Deploy new or revised forms to mobile devices and the web with a simple upload or click of a button.

  • MONITOR DATA QUALITY IN REAL TIME

    Perform random field audio audits, watch for outliers and suspicious distributions, review and correct raw data before publishing, and receive nightly reports.

  • PRE-LOAD AND STREAM DATA

    Pre-load existing data into your forms, as well as stream incoming data straight into other forms.

  • VISUALIZE YOUR DATA

    Use the built-in Data Explorer for instant visibility of your aggregate data, as well as the ability to drill down to individual submissions.

  • DOWNLOAD THE APP FROM THE GOOGLE PLAY STORE OR APPLE STORE

    Use SurveyCTO Collect on any Android or iOS mobile device to fill out and test your forms.

  • INTEGRATE YOUR DATA OR DOWNLOAD IN MULTIPLE FORMATS

    Route your data to hundreds of external systems thanks to integrations with Google Sheets, Zapier, and OpenFN, plus RESTful and webhook APIs. You can also download your data in multiple formats to use with other tools.

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ACCESS AND MONITOR YOUR DATA INSTANTLY

See your data right away. Learn—and adapt—more quickly by skipping the costly, time-consuming, and error-prone task of entering and cleaning data by hand.

  • BENEFITS OF DIGITAL OVER PAPER

    If you haven’t yet switched from paper to digital data collection, we’ve adapted resources from Oxfam UK to demonstrate the opportunities of going digital.

    Read more

  • HOW IT WORKS

    SurveyCTO’s intuitive design allows you to seamlessly design complex forms, conduct rigorous tests, collect data online or offline, monitor incoming data for quality, and learn from that data. You can use our powerful built-in tool for monitoring and visualization and also integrate with external platforms of your choice.

    Read more

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KEEP YOUR DATA SECURE

Protect your data, your subjects, and your reputation. SurveyCTO is GDPR compliant and supports multiple layers of encryption and redundancy—from your device all the way to our secure servers. Read about our commitment to privacy.

  • INDUSTRY-LEADING ENCRYPTION

    SurveyCTO always encrypts Internet communications with SSL technology, which means your data is always secure in transit. For premium security, SurveyCTO can also encrypt all your data at the point of collection, using your own 2048-bit encryption keys. That way, not even SurveyCTO engineers can see your data.

  • SILOED ACCESS AND CUSTOMIZED USER ROLES

    SurveyCTO allows you to add and remove teams as your project needs change, as well as customize user access to forms and data. You can also manage user access with single sign-on (SSO) support, a central authentication system that allows for secure access changes in the case of device theft or team restructuring.

  • DEVICE-SIDE DATA REDUNDANCY

    SurveyCTO stores all collected survey data on the device’s removable memory card and backs it up on the device’s internal memory. That way, if a device fails, the data is safe on the memory card, and if a memory card fails, it’s safe on the device.

  • SERVER-SIDE DATA REDUNDANCY

    SurveyCTO is designed with multiple layers of data redundancy in mind, ensuring that data is recoverable from your server (and from SurveyCTO’s desktop application). All servers are mirrored 24×7 across multiple Amazon Web Services (AWS) locations and backed up every minute.

  • SAFE SHARING

    SurveyCTO allows you to control which fields to share or publish—and which to keep safely encrypted with your own private encryption key. With SurveyCTO, data security isn’t an all-or-nothing affair.

  • COLD ROOM COMPUTER SUPPORT

    For your most sensitive data, SurveyCTO makes it easy to shuttle encrypted data to a cold room computer, on which it can be safely decrypted. That way, your data is never exposed on an Internet-connected computer.

  • IRB COMPLIANCE

    SurveyCTO provides data security that satisfies the most sophisticated and demanding institutional review boards (IRBs).

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TRUST OUR PLATFORM

Once you have built, tested, and deployed a form, we know that it has to keep working—without fail. You can count on SurveyCTO’s best-in-class software stability, reliability, and support team, staffed with professional researchers like you.
  • SOFTWARE STABILITY

    SurveyCTO is built on fixed, stable Linux servers that we maintain and won’t change over time. Every subscription has its own virtual server that includes the SurveyCTO software, as well as matching versions of the Android and desktop software components.

  • CODE CONSISTENCY

    The mobile apps and web forms have an identical code base. What you see online is what you get in the field.

  • SYSTEM RELIABILITY

    Around-the-clock server uptime with 24×7 monitoring and multiple level backstopping means that you never have to worry about outages or performance issues.

  • 24×7 PROFESSIONAL SUPPORT

    Submit a support request and receive a prompt response from our expert research and data collection professionals. No question is too small.

  • EXTENSIVE CAPACITY-BUILDING RESOURCES

    Take advantage of our online training course, over 230 help articles, sample forms, video tutorials, and user forums.

  • SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS MODEL

    We are a mission-driven company funded by—and accountable to—our users, as opposed to donors or VCs. This enables us to be financially sustainable while continuously developing new features and products for our users—without any gaps in support or service.

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JOIN OUR COMMUNITY OF USERS

Thousands of users in more than 165 countries rely on SurveyCTO. Read some of their profiles to learn how they power their data collection needs in health, economics, agriculture, education, governance, and other sectors.

Start a free trial to see how
SurveyCTO can be a solution for you.

SurveyCTO is based on Open Data Kit (ODK), the most widely-used open source platform for data collection. We added hundreds of improvements, hosting, documentation, and support, in order to increase its reach, usability, and power. Learn about how we compare to other platforms.