Microsoft Forms is a free online survey tool, part of the Office 365 suite.
Many people know it as the Microsoft equivalent of Google Forms – straightforward and generally pretty easy to use.
For busy HR folk it’s usually the most uncomplicated option for running employee engagement surveys – especially if their organisation is on a budget.
The thing is, Microsoft Forms lacks important features that are required for long-term commitment to improving workplace culture – for example sentiment analysis, benchmarking, and anonymity guarantees.
If you’re a UK business that’s serious about making your workplace a better place for your employees – you’re going to need employee survey software that is much, much more powerful than Microsoft Forms can offer.
Keep reading and we’ll show you why Stribe is one of the best alternatives to Microsoft Forms on the market – particularly for UK-base businesses.
Save a copy to see how Stribe compares to Microsoft Forms, Google Forms and SurveyMonkey.
Yes, Microsoft Forms is a free tool to create online surveys.
However paid alternatives to Microsoft Forms (like Stribe) offer many more features for in-depth employee insights and analysis that make your life easier.
Not always.
Microsoft Forms offers an anonymous survey option, however it’s up to the survey creator to make this decision – rather than the people completing the survey themselves.
At Stribe, anonymity is our top priority. Anonymity gives employees freedom to provide honest, authentic and meaningful feedback – and we will always stand by this.
Our guarantee is that Stribe is, and always will be, fully anonymous. Only employees will ever be able to reveal their own identity if they wish to.
Microsoft cannot fully guarantee UK data sovereignty.
Microsoft does operate data centers in the UK, but they cannot guarantee that all data stored on their platform, including UK data, will remain solely within the UK borders, meaning data may be transferred and processed overseas.
Why does this matter for employee surveys?
The UK has specific data protection laws which give businesses clear rules on how personal data should be handled.
As a UK-based business, you might prefer to store and process data in the UK for these reasons.
Stribe is a UK-based organisation, and we securely store and process all your user data in the UK.
We moved from Microsoft Forms to Stribe in 2024, and the difference has been night and day. Stribe makes it easier to run staff surveys, gives us deeper insights, and helps us spot patterns we would have missed before." 
At Stribe, anonymity is our top priority. Anonymity gives employees freedom to provide honest, authentic and meaningful feedback – and we will always stand by this.
Our guarantee is that Stribe is, and always will be, fully anonymous. Only employees will ever be able to reveal their own identity if they wish to.
It’s not uncommon for employee survey feedback to be a little ambiguous.
Often, HR managers are left scratching their heads wishing that they could ask more questions to understand details better.
When this happens, Stribe has a solution.
Admins can contact individuals off-the-back of independent feedback received in a survey and have a private conversation with that person to delve deeper in an anonymous messenger chat.
With this feature, the employee stays anonymous the entire time, and the admin is able to ask clarifying questions. It’s a win-win!
Microsoft Forms has no option to do this. You’re left in the dark without knowing how to respond or what action to take, because you don’t have the full picture.
Once your team’s demographic data is uploaded to Stribe, you won’t have to worry again about your reports being segmented. Stribe does all of that for you – all while keeping employee information anonymous.
This keeps your surveys nice and short (leading to better survey participation), because you aren’t wasting your employees’ time on questions like “What department do you work in?” or “Do you work from home or in the office?”
And even more importantly, it makes your survey data much more insightful!
Unless you specifically build a question in Microsoft Forms relating to demographics (e.g. gender, age, time at organisation, department, employment status etc.) – you won’t have segmented data in your results.
You would also have to do the analysis in a spreadsheet yourself manually.
Stribe's automation has saved us a huge amount of time compared to manually managing surveys and feedback.
While Microsoft Forms will provide some visual data and analytics for you – unfortunately it won’t be very in-depth and you’ll find yourself exporting spreadsheets and analysing employee feedback manually.
With Stribe, your employee engagement insights are served on a silver platter – easy to digest and easy to share. Including tools like benchmarking, sentiment analysis, key phrase extraction, word tiles, top trends, gaps in demand, and more – we’ve got the heavy-lifting covered for you.
Stribe connects to most of the HRIS systems you’re already using, saving you time on admin and making sure your team’s data is always up to date.
At Stribe, we’re here when you need us and you’ll always have the support of a dedicated customer success manager to support you along your journey.
Microsoft Forms has some how-to resources and troubleshooting information online – but you’re never going to be able to pick up the phone or Live Chat with a friendly human being that’s happy to help you with your surveys and employee engagement journey.
Believe it or not, there’s plenty more where that came from. If you’ve made it this far, check out our interactive demo.
About the author
Starting out her early career as a journalist, Jade Madeley is an accomplished content writer with 8+ years’ experience across business, personal finance, SaaS, human resources and employee engagement. Working with Stribe, she crafts insightful content that brings complex HR topics to life and drives meaningful action.
