LimeSurvey

LimeSurvey
Developer(s)	Carsten Schmitz, Jason Cleeland, others
Initial release	February 20, 2003; 21 years ago
Stable release	6.5.11 (May 6, 2024; 6 months ago) [±]
Preview release	none [±]
Written in	PHP, Javascript
Operating system	Cross-platform
Available in	Multilingual
Type	Customer service software; Survey software
License(s)	GNU General Public License v2
Website	LimeSurvey.org

LimeSurvey (formerly PHPSurveyor) is an open-source web-based survey application. Designed to be user-friendly, it enables users to develop and publish surveys, and collect responses, without doing any coding. While the software and rudimentary support is free, the developers use an optional donation system to help fund associated servers, support, and development.^[1]

Product history

LimeSurvey was registered as a SourceForge.net project called PHPSurveyor on February 20, 2003 and was originally written by the Australian software developer Jason Cleeland.^[2]^[3]

In 2004, during the 2004 U.S. presidential election, PHPSurveyor was used to gather data about voting irregularities. It identified over 13500 incidents in the first 10 hours of voting and was selected as part of their Election Incident Reporting System.^[4]

Starting in early 2005, Carsten Schmitz, a German IT project manager, started taking on some of the lead developer responsibilities, with the full project being transfered to him in 2006.^[5] On May 17, 2007 the project name was changed from PHPSurveyor to LimeSurvey in order to make software licensing easier by not including PHP in the name.^[6]

In 2009, LimeSurvey participated in the Google Summer of Code, a program encouraging students older than 18 years old to work on projects aimed at helping open-source projects. The student projects helped develop the interface and statistical modules of the upcoming LimeSurvey 2.0.^[7]. LimeSurvey once again participated in Google Summer of Code in 2010, with students developing a database storage engine for LimeSurvey 2.0, and implementing the much demanded "file upload question" type.^[8].

Features

Features include^[9]:

unlimited surveys, survey questions, and survey participants
multilingual surveys
user management
quota management
multimedia support
conditional survey questions
optional survey registration
survey template and WYSIWYG HTML editor
import and export support

The software is available in over 50 different languages.

Hardware/software requirements

Installation requirements include:

a hosting server with MySQL 4.1.0 or later, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 or later, or Postgres 8.1 or later
PHP 5.1.2 or later
mbstring (Multibyte String Functions) extension library
mysql5 or pgsql PHP library
a web browser that can render the application correctly

For more requirements, see the installation documentation.

Videos, screenshots, and other media

Screenshots of an older version 1.53 can be found here.

An online demo of LimeSurvey can be found here.

A list of tutorial videos is available on the LimeServer FAQ page.

Entities using LimeSurvey

Examples of entities that use LimeSurvey include:

Arizona State University, ARS Electronica, Austrian Vorarlberg State Government, GNOME Foundation, Instituto Tecnologico de Costa Rica, OpenOffice.org, Syracuse University, Ubuntu Server Team, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Universidade de Sao Paulo, University of Kiel, University of Sydney

A full directory of LimeSurvey users can be found at the LimeSurvey website.