Frequently Asked Questions
- Can I build my surveys directly in Samply?
- Samply focuses on scheduling and sending mobile notifications that link to your existing online surveys or experiments, so survey creation and hosting stay in your preferred external platform. If you prefer an integrated environment with a built-in, modern survey builder, encrypted data storage, and advanced participant management, you can also consider the separate platform SMAAT.
- When is Samply alone enough for my study?
- Samply by itself is usually sufficient if you already use another survey or experiment platform and are satisfied with its features, you mainly need notification scheduling, and you want to keep all questions and response data in that external system while using Samply only for prompts and participation tracking. In this case, you can continue to use Samply exactly as described in the tutorial without additional tools.
- When might I want a more integrated solution in addition to Samply?
- In some projects, it is helpful to design surveys, manage participants, and handle data in one place, especially if you want a built-in, mobile-optimized survey builder instead of linking out to external surveys, need more fine-grained control over encryption and access to stored data, or manage multiple studies and participant groups and would like more advanced tools for invitations, grouping, and monitoring. For these scenarios, an integrated platform such as SMAAT can reduce the number of separate tools you need to combine around Samply.
- What is SMAAT and how does it relate to Samply?
- SMAAT is a separate platform developed to complement Samply for researchers who prefer an all-in-one environment. While Samply focuses on notifications that link to external surveys, SMAAT provides a web dashboard and mobile app that combine survey design, participant management, and secure, encrypted data handling, with a free entry-level plan and additional paid plans for larger projects (see https://smaat.eu/ for details).