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Your LimeSurvey version: LS Cloud 6.10.14
Own server or LimeSurvey hosting: LS hosting (paying SaaS customer, LimeSurvey Expert Subscription)
Survey theme/template: Fruity TwentyThree
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I love LimeSurvey for its depth and breadth of features. I have been an enthusiastic user for nearly 10 years and have recommended LS to lots of other users and companies.

However, there is one thing I cannot understand anymore: While all other aspects of LS get better and better with every major release (the new beta survey editor is another example, it looks extremely promising), the Statistics module has been completely neglected and doesn't seem to have received a proper upgrade in years.

The Statistics produced by LS are just not presentable anymore, and clients expect visuals that area easy to understand at a glance and look good. The LS statistics still look like we are in 2013. And unfortunately, key features are missing (like data labels by default, or an export to PDF that's actually readable by the average user without having to scroll through 30 pages of poorly formatted charts and tables).

That's why most users I know, including myself, only use LS for administering the survey, but they have to export/download the response dataset to Excel (or Stata or SPSS or R or whatever they prefer) to create their own visuals that (a) provide insights at a glance and (b) look good. The competition is just way better at doing this (Surveymonkey; but even the statistics generated by Microsoft Forms or Google Forms look better and more usable than what LS tries to get away with).

I now catch myself looking for every excuse not to use LS anymore because I don't have the time to create statistics that I can share with clients every time from scratch. Instead, I try to avoid multilingual surveys or complex conditions just so I can use another survey software that gives me better statistics. But I don't want that. I want to continue using LimeSurvey!

Please fix the Statistics and give me and many other users a reason to stay with their preferred LimeSurvey instead of having to join the competition!

Really appreciate you guys, you are doing amazing work!


 

I basically agree on anything you say about the "statistics" feature or "reporting" (because you can hardly use it for much more than simple reporting during fieldwork to see where the journey might be going").

But there are a couple of reasons why that is:

- Priorities: You probably noticed that there haven't been many features added since LS3. LS5 and even LS6 are mainly changes to the GUI.

- Resources: Limesurvey is a open source project and tiny compared to the examples you mentioned. Surveymonkey, Google and Microsoft Forms, etc. Not even comparing to the big more professional ones. So from what I can see, the main focus was or currently is on improvements to the GUI and everything else was on hold. Also, any additional feature takes a long time, because of the lack of resources.

- Target group: I have a feeling, that the target group are mainly universities and students, that often do not care that much about the reporting qualities of the data collection tool, because they will use other tools to analyze data anyway (more scientific background).

- Market of reporting tools is quite saturated. I guess the decision makers of LS expect people that use the Community edition to be quite open source savy and able to create their own reporting platform with the tools that are out there. I am not saying that I agree, I am just saying that this might be a reason.

- Lack of funding: Main source of income for Limesurvey is probably the SaaS (Limesurvey hosting), and a little bit through the comfort update. Unfortunately there are many companies and organizations out there, that only take and do not contribute. I know a lot of institutions and companies that use Limesurvey, but I highly doubt that they every made a donation and most probably don't even pay for the comfort update. I am sure that if there is a demand and some companies would sponsor this feature, we would have a simple but decent reporting tool. E.g. with a cross tab feature, nice looking graphs, etc. I would love to see a report creator where you can create a report to your liking for each survey.

Hi iceclimber81,

instead of using Excel for your statistics - you may take a look an the following two free projects that employ R as theit engine, but come along with a very easy to use GUI:
www.jamovi.org
and
jasp-stats.org