Buyer's guide
Fifteen tools in five categories, compared on the nine questions a planning department, a consultancy or a parish council actually asks before buying: what residents can draw, what comes out, where the data lives, how it is priced, whether there is a free tier, and how you start. Every cell names the public page it was read from and the date. Mapsurvey is one row among the others, with its gaps stated.
How to read this guide
Who it is for. Someone who has to pick a tool for a project where the public, or a field team, puts things on a map: a cycle-network consultation, a call for sites, a neighbourhood plan, a heat survey, a volunteer census of street trees. You have a budget line, a procurement rule or two, a GIS person who will want the data back, and no time to read fifteen pricing pages.
What we did. On 6 October 2026 we read each vendor's public pages (product page, documentation, and for UK vendors the G-Cloud marketplace listing) and wrote down what they state for nine criteria. Where a page does not say, the cell says Not published, and the source is the page we read: that is a finding, not a gap in our homework, and it is the question to put to the vendor. The sources list under the table shows every page per vendor with the date.
What we do not do. We publish no other vendor's price. Most of them do not publish one, and a figure from a quote or a review site is a rumour that goes stale silently. We state the pricing model, the free tier or trial and its conditions, and whether a rate is listed anywhere public. We publish no market-size or market-share figures, and no claim we could not source to a page you can open.
Who writes it. Mapsurvey, the developer of one of the tools in the first category. That is a conflict of interest, so the rules above apply to our own row too, and the section where Mapsurvey falls short is not small print.
Five categories
Most comparison pages line up tools that do different jobs. These five groups do five different jobs; the table further down puts them on the same criteria so the differences are visible rather than argued.
Public-participation GIS (PPGIS) tools: the survey is the product and the map is the main question. Respondents place points, draw routes and outline areas, answer follow-up questions about each, and the result is a spatial dataset.
Who buys them: Planning departments, transport and mobility consultancies, universities running PPGIS research, and parish or town councils that need one map survey rather than a participation portal.
This is Mapsurvey's own category. What a planning team or a research group does with such a tool is on the pages for urban planners and for researchers.
Participation suites that run a council's whole engagement programme — project pages, surveys, ideas, forums, participatory budgeting — with a map tool among many. The map is usually a pin-drop with a comment.
Who buys them: Local and regional governments buying a standing portal, usually through procurement and with a named customer-success manager; consultancies that run engagement for them.
If this is the category you are procuring in, our community engagement platform page describes the product side and the citizen engagement platform page answers the local-government procurement questions.
Mobile apps for trained staff and volunteers collecting observations offline: GPS points, traces and shapes with attribute forms and photos, synced to a server. Built for enumerators, not for anonymous residents following a link.
Who buys them: Ecology and archaeology teams, utilities, humanitarian organisations, and anyone already standing inside the Esri or QGIS ecosystem.
Field apps and participatory tools overlap on geometry and export and differ on who holds the phone: a trained collector with an account and an offline basemap, or an anonymous resident who followed a link. If both are true of your project (a volunteer census, say), you will be choosing between a field app with a public form and a survey tool with a good phone layout.
Free software a city installs and operates itself (or pays a partner to host): proposals, debates, voting and participatory budgeting, with an address geocoded to a point on a map. Drawing is not the point.
Who buys them: Cities with an IT department or a civic-tech partner, and governments whose procurement rules favour open source.
Everyday form tools where a location is one field among many: a pin or an address, no drawing, no spatial export. Enough for 'where do you live', not for 'where is the problem'.
Who buys them: Teams that already pay for the form tool and need one address per response.
Nine criteria
These are the columns of the table below. A tenth column, Verified, shows the earliest date among the row's sources; the title of every cell names its page.
The table
Scroll sideways on a phone; the tool name stays put. Hover a cell for its source. Green is the author's row.
| Tool | What respondents can draw | Export formats | Open source / self-hosting | Hosting region and GDPR posture | Pricing model | Free tier or trial | Public results page | How you start | Languages | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mapsurvey Mapsurvey | Points, lines and polygons, each with follow-up questions | GeoJSON, GeoPackage, Shapefile, KML, CSV and Excel | Yes, AGPLv3; Docker stack on your own servers | Hosted in the United States (Render, Oregon); self-host anywhere for EU residency; no formal accessibility audit yet | Published: free, or one flat workspace price | Free plan, unlimited surveys and responses, no time limit | Yes, a public results page per survey, no account needed | Self-serve sign-up; the developer answers questions directly | 75, translation included | 2026-10-06 |
| Maptionnaire Mapita Oy, Helsinki vs Mapsurvey in detail | Points, lines and areas (polygons) | Shapefile, GeoJSON, Excel with coordinates, PNG map image | No; proprietary SaaS | AWS, US and Ireland data centres; GDPR, ISO 27001 certified, WCAG 2.1/2.2 AA | Annual subscription priced by organisation size (three tiers), or a fixed 12-month single project; quote only | Two-week sandbox, free, cannot publish a live project | Public project pages and auto-updating reports on the Communicate tier and above; none on the entry tier | Talk to sales or book a demo; onboarding included | Multilingual questionnaires with a built-in translation tool and AI translation; count not published | 2026-10-06 |
| PARTIMAP K-Monitor, Budapest | Points, lines and areas | XLSX report; map elements as KML | Yes, GPLv3 on GitHub | Operated by K-Monitor in Budapest; residency and GDPR statement not published | Free; no subscription or licence fee | Everything is free | Not published | Self-serve registration | Hungarian, English, German, Spanish, Lithuanian, Romanian | 2026-10-06 |
| Go Vocal Go Vocal (formerly CitizenLab), Brussels | Pins, lines and polygons; Shapefile upload for context layers | 'Export all data at any time' and an API; a unified format described as importable in GIS tools; file formats not named | Free Edition under AGPLv3 to self-host; the commercial edition is SaaS only | UK and EEA on the G-Cloud listing; GDPR, ISO 27001 and WCAG 2.2 AA stated | Per licence per year; a rate is listed on UK G-Cloud, otherwise quote | Free Edition to run yourself; a trial environment through sales | Resident-facing project pages and a report builder | Schedule a demo; three-phase onboarding with the vendor | 27, with automatic translation of residents' input | 2026-10-06 |
| Open Point (Social Pinpoint) Open Point, Melbourne vs Mapsurvey in detail | Pin a comment on the map; line or polygon drawing not published | XLS, CSV, PDF or GeoJSON from Social Map reporting | No; proprietary SaaS | AWS, 'in the nominated country and data centre you live in'; WCAG target level AA, VPAT for WCAG 2.2 on request | By request: a solutions team reviews the project first | Not published | Contributions shown publicly on the map; voting in five modes | Book a demo | Not published | 2026-10-06 |
| Citizen Space Delib, Bristol | Pins, lines and routes, shapes and polygons; validation areas | XLSX, DOCX, PDF, JSON, GeoJSON, Shapefile | No; proprietary SaaS | UK and EEA, storage location chosen by the customer; ISO 27001; WCAG 2.1 AA, moving to 2.2 | Per instance per year; a rate is listed on UK G-Cloud, otherwise quote | Time-limited branded sandbox for internal testing | Yes: published respondent data on interactive maps, with moderation and redaction | Book a demo | Not published | 2026-10-06 |
| Commonplace Zencity (acquired Commonplace in 2025) | Pin-drop on the Community Heatmap; line or polygon drawing not published | CSV | No; proprietary SaaS | United Kingdom; WCAG 2.1 AA | Per licence; a rate is listed on UK G-Cloud, otherwise quote | Four-week trial of the basic features; mapping excluded | Not published | Schedule a demo | Not published | 2026-10-06 |
| EngagementHQ Granicus | A pin drop with a photo and a short survey; drawing by participants not published | CSV, Excel, PDF | No; proprietary SaaS | 'Regional hosting to meet data governance needs worldwide'; United Kingdom on the G-Cloud listing; WCAG 2.2 AA | A rate is listed on UK G-Cloud, otherwise quote | 'Limited trial subject to scoping' | Not published | Book a demo | Not published | 2026-10-06 |
| MetroQuest MetroQuest, Vancouver (Social Pinpoint since 2023) vs Mapsurvey in detail | Map markers on an interactive map screen; drawing not published | Not published | No; proprietary SaaS | Not published; the tool itself is described as not ADA accessible, with PDF and Word versions offered instead | Annual subscription; 'Get Pricing' form, no rate published | Not published; sample surveys to try | Not published | Pricing form; six weeks' lead time to build a survey reported by TxDOT | English plus one additional language by manual translation | 2026-10-06 |
| ArcGIS Survey123 Esri | Point (geopoint), line (geotrace) and polygon (geoshape), or one Map question | CSV, Excel, KML, Shapefile, File Geodatabase from the Data page | No; proprietary, included with ArcGIS Online or Enterprise | ArcGIS Online region chosen at purchase: United States, EU or Asia-Pacific | Included with an ArcGIS Online or Enterprise subscription; rates not on the product page | 21-day trial | Publicly shared surveys can be answered without signing in; results in web maps and dashboards | Sign up for the trial yourself, or contact sales | Multilingual surveys; count not published | 2026-10-06 |
| KoboToolbox Kobo Inc. (non-profit) | Point (geopoint), line (geotrace) and area (geoshape); only points show on the built-in map | CSV, XLS, GeoJSON (points, lines, polygons), KML (points only) | Yes, AGPL-3.0 on GitHub | Global server, or an EU server hosted in Ireland and Germany; DPA for EU organisations | Free Community plan; paid plans by submission volume, rates listed on the site | Community plan: 5,000 submissions a month and 1 GB of storage, automatic after sign-up | Not published | Self-serve account on the server of your choice | Not published | 2026-10-06 |
| Mergin Maps Lutra Consulting | Points, lines and polygons with QGIS-built forms, offline | Not published on the pages read; data lives in the QGIS project | Yes, open-source Community Edition on GitHub for self-hosting | Cloud service; 'choice of data residency' on the Enterprise plan; GDPR statement not on the pricing page | Per contributor per month, rates listed on the site; Enterprise by quote | 14-day trial; free Academic and Non-Profit plans; Community Edition self-hosted | Publish a QGIS project online and share it by URL | Self-serve 'Start for free' | Not published | 2026-10-06 |
| Decidim Decidim Association, Barcelona | A proposal or meeting address geocoded to a point on a map; drawing not published | Proposals as CSV, JSON and Excel, with address and coordinates since release 0.26 | Yes, AGPL-3.0; Ruby on Rails, you install it | Self-hosted, so wherever you put it; map tiles and geocoding from HERE, an OpenStreetMap-based provider or your own servers | Free software; hosting partners are not priced on the site | Everything is free; the cost is running it | Public participation site with accountability and results modules | Install it yourself ('First steps') or through a partner | Twelve listed on the features page, community-translated | 2026-10-06 |
| Consul Democracy Consul Democracy Foundation | A proposal placed as a point on the map when geolocation is enabled; drawing not published | Not published | Yes, AGPL v3; you install it | Self-hosted, so wherever you put it; certified partners offer implementation | Free to use and modify; partner services not priced on the site | Everything is free; the cost is running it | Public participation site with voting and participatory budgeting | Install it yourself or through a certified partner | Not published | 2026-10-06 |
| Jotform Jotform Inc. | One location per response: a draggable pin, address or coordinates (Google Maps API key required); no drawing | CSV, Excel, PDF | No; proprietary SaaS | GDPR and CCPA support; data residency on the Enterprise plan only | Per plan per month, rates listed on the site; Enterprise by quote | Starter plan: 5 forms and 100 submissions a month, with Jotform branding | Not published | Self-serve sign-up | Not published | 2026-10-06 |
| Google Forms Google | No map or location question type; an address is typed as text | Responses to a linked Google Sheet | No; proprietary SaaS | Not published | Part of Google Workspace; plan rates on a separate pricing page | Not published | Not published | Self-serve with a Google account | Not published | 2026-10-06 |
Every cell was read from the vendor's own public page on the date in the Verified column; the sources list below names the pages. 'Not published' means the page read does not state it. Pricing cells carry the model and where a rate is listed, never a figure, for any vendor but Mapsurvey. A vendor who finds a cell wrong can write to the developer and it is corrected on every page that uses it.
Being fair
Mapsurvey is a map-based survey tool, not a participation portal, and the table shows the cost of that choice as plainly as the benefit. On the pages we read, these are the things the others do that we do not:
What we do instead is narrow and complete: points, lines and polygons with a follow-up question on each, a public results page, six GIS and spreadsheet export formats, 75 languages, a free plan without a time limit, and the developer answering the mail. If your project needs the portal, buy the portal; if it needs the map, this is the row to try first.
Sources
Compare in detail
The pages below take one vendor's row and set it against ours criterion by criterion, with the same sourced cells, plus the honest list of cases where the other tool is the better fit.
Mapsurvey is independent and founder-led. Email the developer with a 'does it do X?' question, a migration from one of the tools above, or a correction to a cell in this table, and you will get an answer from the person who can change the product and the page.
Email me — I answer personallyPricing
Not a trial and not a sandbox: the whole collection and analysis product, with no cap on surveys, respondents or team members.
One workspace, any number of users, surveys and responses. No per-project, per-seat or per-response metering, so a consultancy can run every engagement of the year on one line item.
Pro is in early access: the workspace price is fixed, the feature list is being finished with the first customers, and existing accounts keep what they have. If a grant or a council budget needs an invoice rather than a card, write to us.
FAQ