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CSPro versus Survey Solutions

Posted: March 5th, 2020, 6:48 am
by AriSilva
Does anybody have any experience or anything written comparing CsPro vs Survey Solutions?
Advantages and disadvantages?
Best
Ari

Re: CSPro versus Survey Solutions

Posted: March 5th, 2020, 8:49 am
by htuser
Dear Ari,
Greg informed me about Survey Solution when this project was in his early stage. So i contacted them more than 6 years ago, since i needed a better CAPI platform able to overcome CSPro limitations. But i was disappointed since, compare to CSPro, Survey Solutions is far, truly far less flexible, less powerful.
The designers of Survey Solutions always say that CSPro is an Expert oriented CAPI platform, theirs no. Please see this presentation from them:https://slideplayer.fr/slide/12869970/

A CSProuser will be always unconfortable with Survey Solutions because they don't give us the power of a programming language, no IDE, no compiler etc. Also, no specialized data processing tools and language such as:
- CSPro batch edit data;
- Excel2CSpro;
- Very exhaustive paradata;
- User friendly Data Viewer;
- Reformat, compare, tabulate data tools;
- No way to live process data in a DBMS (Until now, CSPro support data processing in MSSQL Server and MySQL through https://github.com/IstatCooperation/CSPro2sql, but i think that, for the next 7.4, support of relational database will be native);
etc.
such as in CSPro.

You'll be often blocked and asked theirs developers team things that are long ago solved or very easy to be solved and designed in CSPro.
For example, see theses discussions:
https://forum.mysurvey.solutions/t/crea ... macro/1909
https://forum.mysurvey.solutions/t/desi ... ion/1185/8
https://forum.mysurvey.solutions/t/opti ... uages/2222
https://forum.mysurvey.solutions/t/writ ... tly/2411/2
https://forum.mysurvey.solutions/t/proc ... ystem/1520

On their forums, you'll see lot of request that a CSPro user will never ask because solved long ago or can be implemented very easily through the CSPro Programming Language.

However, they have several features/functionalities that are not yet implemented in CSPro such as:

- Multiples questions on screen (CSPro's block is implemented on an User unfriendly fashion and doesn't allow to solve the multiples questions by screen limitations. Except for CSPro, All other CAPI platform know allow multiple questions by screen...);
- Voice recording;
- Collect spatial data lines, polygon (Area question type) directly on Map;
- Recognize/read barcode and QR code; (Will be Implemented in 7.4)
- Capture signature;
- Upload file;
- HMTL formatting in all components of the software/ HTML tags to format the question text;
- Questionnaire completion report;
- API able to export the data to custom formats (e.g. SQL-like databases). (Possible with CSPro2SQL, but Will Be implemented natively in 7.4)
- Powerful dashboard for supervisors to monitorings survey etc ( CSPro support dashboard through : https://github.com/IstatCooperation/CSProDashboard, but we would like to see this embedded in CSWeb...);
- Paradata able to provide informations such as:
a) unanswered questions per interview;
b) skiped questions;
- Web interview (CAWI: I also think this will be solved for CSPro , maybe in the next year);

Other users can add or invalidate my ideas.

Best,

Re: CSPro versus Survey Solutions

Posted: May 26th, 2020, 2:49 am
by RussMarange
You can even export data to Spss and export it to Microsoft SQL Server via ODBC, I have been preparing my data cleaning syntax in T-SQL for the past 6 Years

Re: CSPro versus Survey Solutions

Posted: May 26th, 2020, 7:21 am
by shafique arif
One thing which I have recent learnt that you can NOT use WorldBank anymore if your project/survey is not for WorldBank. That means you need to setup your own server and have to maintain it which will be expensive and not everyone can afford it