Care Centre vs SurveyMonkey

Care homes generally survey for two reasons: to understand how staff feel about their work, and how residents and their families feel about the care provided.

Care Centre provides both, with a relation-to-resident question so that resident and family responses can be reported separately. Surveys can be started from a template, copied from the previous year, or drafted by AI from a short description.

A survey belongs to an individual home, as do its report and its action plan, and results are compared with that home's own previous survey. Managers responsible for several homes move between them within the same login.

SurveyMonkey provides survey design and distribution for any purpose, with 400+ templates, collectors for email, web links, QR codes, embeds and social channels, AI assistance for building and analysing surveys, and 200+ integrations. Seats are purchased per user, from a minimum of three on team plans.

For organisations surveying many different audiences, SurveyMonkey provides the broader tool. Care Centre is more specifically structured around the three audiences a care home surveys, and around what follows the results.

A large proportion of care home employees have no work email address and no desk, which makes distribution as significant a consideration as survey design.

Care Centre provides every survey with a QR code and an A5 poster in five styles, intended for the staff-room noticeboard and communal areas, so that employees can answer on their own phones between handovers and relatives while visiting, together with a single web link. Where email addresses are held, scheduled email invitations can be sent from the staff list or a pasted list, with reminders to respondents who started and did not finish. Staff opening the app for their rota see a waiting survey in the Needs-you row.

SurveyMonkey provides email invitation, web link, QR code, embed and social collectors. According to its help documentation (read 14 September 2026), the email invitation collector requires individual email addresses, with a single response collected per address per collector, so group aliases and distribution lists are not supported; its QR code is a 256×256 PNG generated from a Web Link collector and is unavailable where the link uses custom variables, and a printed poster is not described. SMS and the offline SurveyMonkey Anywhere app are available on Enterprise only.

Where respondents have an inbox or can be sent a link, SurveyMonkey provides a flexible set of collectors. Care Centre is more specifically structured around reaching a workforce that is not at a desk.

Both platforms can run anonymous surveys, but they arrive at it in different ways.

Care Centre's staff surveys, resident and family surveys and pulse questions are anonymous to the home: it does not see who said what, and managers read a report rather than a list of respondents. There is no setting to enable for each survey. Polls published on the staff feed are named rather than anonymous, which is why the anonymous route within Care Centre is a survey or a pulse question.

In SurveyMonkey, anonymity is a setting on each collector. Its help page states that respondents' IP addresses are recorded by default and that, for email invitations, the email address, first and last name and any custom data are also recorded; that Anonymous Responses must be turned on in each collector in use; that the change applies to new responses only, because existing responses cannot be made anonymous afterwards; and that where respondent authentication is in use the survey is not anonymous, because the sign-in profile is tracked.

The distinction is largely one of approach: SurveyMonkey gives organisations control collector by collector, while Care Centre applies anonymity to every survey and pulse question as standard.

This is one of the clearer differences between the two platforms, and one in which SurveyMonkey is the stronger.

SurveyMonkey provides considerable depth in survey design: 90+ HR templates within a wider library, 25+ question types, skip logic, randomisation and multilingual surveys, together with a survey score that identifies structural problems in a questionnaire.

Care Centre provides ratings, scales, choices and comment questions designed to be completed on a phone, taken from a template, copied from the previous year's survey or drafted by AI from a description. It does not currently provide an equivalent range of question types, survey logic or multilingual options.

For organisations designing detailed or methodologically complex questionnaires, SurveyMonkey provides the more capable builder. Care Centre is designed around short surveys completed by a care workforce.

Both platforms analyse responses, including free-text comments.

Care Centre scores the sentiment of every answer and produces an AI report containing a summary, six categories, staff-level performance, the differences between leadership and frontline responses, the notable comments and the recommendations. Resident and family responses are reported separately. Results are compared with the same home's previous survey of the same type and reported as Improved, Declined or Consistent; a previous survey run on paper can be imported so that the comparison can still be made. The report prints to PDF and responses export to CSV. Care Centre compares a home with its own previous survey and does not benchmark one home against another.

SurveyMonkey provides text analysis that groups open-ended responses into themes and classifies them as positive, negative or neutral, an AI chat over results, crosstabs, statistical significance and exports to CSV, XLS, PDF and SPSS, together with multi-survey and longitudinal analysis and benchmarks aggregated from 30+ organisations: global benchmarks free on Question Bank questions and industry benchmarks paid, refreshed quarterly, available in English and excluding open-ended comments.

For organisations wanting to compare their results with those of other organisations, SurveyMonkey provides benchmarking that Care Centre does not. Care Centre's reporting is more specifically structured around a single home and its own results over time.

Care home managers are generally expected to show what changed after a survey, not only what it found.

In Care Centre, closing a survey opens an action plan. Each line records You said · We said · We did, together with what happened, who is responsible and a target date. The plan is written by a person rather than generated. Owners receive a weekly reminder when an outcome passes its target date, and the plan prints to PDF.

SurveyMonkey publishes guidance on employee-engagement action planning (read 14 September 2026). An action plan within the product, with owners, target dates and reminders, is not described in its published documentation.

For organisations already maintaining action plans in another system, this approach may be suitable. Care Centre keeps the plan attached to the survey that produced it.

An annual survey describes the previous year, and both platforms provide something shorter between larger surveys.

Care Centre's pulse asks one short question at a time, daily or weekly and in sequence, either at the clock-out terminal as a shift ends or in the Needs-you row of the staff app. Managers receive analysis by role, a trend over time and red flags. Pulse responses are anonymous to the home in the same way as survey responses.

SurveyMonkey describes pulse surveys as short surveys of 15 questions or fewer, sent frequently by email, Slack or Teams, with recurring invitations available on Enterprise.

The distinction is again one of reach: SurveyMonkey delivers pulse surveys to an inbox or a messaging channel, while Care Centre asks them on the terminal and app care staff already use.

Care Centre includes recognition and internal communication within the same staff app as its surveys.

Colleagues can be recognised from a phone, with recognition associated with organisational values, and the app identifies monthly champions. A single feed carries news, events, polls and priority posts requiring acknowledgement, and posts can be directed to the whole company, one home, one team or one individual. An action plan can therefore be published, a change announced and a contribution acknowledged in the same place the survey was answered.

Posts can include photographs, uploaded video and YouTube or Vimeo links, so a home can share an event, a celebration or news from the home with the whole team. Recognition can be given as a thank-you, a star, congratulations, a work-anniversary message or employee of the month, and chat messages can include photographs.

SurveyMonkey is a survey platform and does not provide recognition, a company feed or internal chat. Its integrations distribute surveys into the Slack and Teams channels an organisation already uses.

For organisations whose staff already work in Slack or Teams, that approach may be suitable. Care Centre is designed for workforces that generally do not.

Care Centre uses AI within survey drafting and analysis rather than operational decisions. It can draft survey questions from a description, score the sentiment of individual answers, write the survey report, compare a home's results with its previous survey and raise red flags within pulse results. It is deliberately not used to write the action plan, which remains the work of a manager, and it is not used in the rota, clock-in or payroll. According to Care Centre, customer data is not used to train the underlying AI model. AI credits are included in the price at £10 a month with CareSurvey, without rollover.

SurveyMonkey's published documentation (read 14 September 2026) describes Build with AI, which drafts a survey from a short prompt; question and answer genius; a survey score; Analyze with AI, which answers questions about results in a chat; and text and thematic analysis.

The distinction is largely one of purpose: SurveyMonkey's AI supports the design and analysis of surveys generally, while Care Centre's is applied to a care home's survey results and stops short of the action plan.

The platforms use different pricing structures. Care Centre is priced per registered bed, or per home for the CareSurvey add-on, rather than per user. Current pricing is:

• CareRota: £6 per bed per month
• CareHR: £6 per bed per month
• People Management Platform: £10 per bed per month
• CareSurvey: £89 per home per month
• Setup: £0
• Contract: monthly rolling with 30 days' notice

CareSurvey covers staff, resident and family surveys, pulse, the QR posters, the AI report, the comparison with the previous survey and the action plan, with every member of staff included and £10 of AI credits a month without rollover. It is also included within CareHR and the People Management Platform, alongside the rota, clock-in, payroll preparation, leave, HR and compliance, recognition, the feed, chat and maintenance. Staffing numbers therefore do not directly affect the subscription price: a 60-bed home with 80 employees is charged for 60 beds rather than 80 individual users.

SurveyMonkey uses a per-user subscription model with a free plan. Published UK prices, read 14 September 2026: Basic is free with 10 questions per survey; Standard Monthly is £75 a month; Advantage Annual is £33 a month, billed as £396 a year, and Premier Annual is £99 a month. Team plans are charged per user per month billed annually with a minimum of three users — Team Advantage at £20 and Team Premier at £59 — while Enterprise is on quote with a minimum of five users. Responses above a plan's limit are charged at £0.15 each.

For one person running occasional surveys, SurveyMonkey has the lower entry price and a free option. Care Centre's per-home and per-bed model is designed around a home in which every member of staff, resident and relative is a potential respondent.

Both platforms are cloud-based and designed to be relatively quick to implement.

Care Centre requires no dedicated hardware and no setup fee. Staff can use their own phones, standard Android tablets can be used within homes, and managers work in a browser. Configuration of homes, import of staff data — from a spreadsheet or a photograph of one — and live training for managers and staff are provided without an additional fee, and a first survey can be set up jointly, including its poster. Support is provided by a UK-based team working only with care homes, through in-app chat and email, without tiers or additional charges. The contract is monthly rolling, with a trial available beforehand.

SurveyMonkey takes a self-service approach: an account can be created, a template selected and a link sent without assistance. A help centre is provided, telephone support is included with Team Premier and Enterprise, and premium onboarding with Enterprise.

The choice here is between a more supported care-specific implementation and a platform designed to allow organisations to configure and get started themselves.