SurveyMars vs Questant: Which Should Run Your First Surveys in Japan?

If you research customers in Japan, you have probably narrowed the field to two names: Survey Mars and Questant. One is a free global platform with AI-powered survey creation; the other is the self-service tool of MACROMILL, Japan's largest online survey company. This comparison is not about declaring a winner. It is about which platform fits the stage you are at — solo researcher, startup team, or established company — and what each one actually costs once your study grows past ten questions.

Both tools can produce a professional questionnaire in minutes, so the real differentiators are respondent access, pricing structure, and what happens after the replies arrive. We walk through each of those dimensions in turn.

The One-Table Verdict

Before the details, here is the decision in one table. Prices reflect the official sites at the time of writing and may change. We have deliberately left out features that both platforms handle equally well — such as basic question branching — and focused on the dimensions that actually flip a decision.

The Two Platforms in One Minute

Think of Survey Mars as an unlimited workshop and Questant as a factory with a free sample room: both make surveys, but they are built for different rhythms. One rewards constant iteration without a budget; the other rewards large, structured data collection with a national audience.

Survey Mars is a survey platform built around a simple promise: everything is free, with no limits on surveys, questions, or responses. Optional paid plans add branding removal and priority support, but the core tooling never gates on a paywall. Its AI questionnaire generator turns a one-line topic into a complete survey, and its AI reports summarize findings automatically. Because it supports Japanese among many languages, it works naturally for research aimed at Japan.

Questant is the self-service questionnaire software of MACROMILL Inc., Japan's premier online survey company, with more than 300,000 registered users. The tool itself is free to start: you create surveys, collect up to 100 responses on the free plan, and upgrade to annual plans when you need volume.

Its real differentiator is the MACROMILL panel: Questant can deliver your questionnaire to about 25 million Japanese consumers, with targeting by age, gender, region, income, interests, and more — even on the free plan, panel research is available as a separate, per-survey service. If your brief is "nationally representative Japanese respondents," Questant is the closest thing to a one-stop answer, and its strength is precisely where Survey Mars deliberately stays out of the way.

The Cost Reality: Free Versus Free-but-Capped

The single biggest difference between the two platforms is how the free tier behaves.

Questant's free plan is generous for testing and stingy for production: up to 10 questions per survey, up to 100 responses, results viewable on the web only, with no CSV download. Email invites are capped at 100 per day. Once your study needs more, you move to annual plans: the standard plan at ¥50,000 per year (excluding tax) unlocks unlimited questions, 3,000 responses viewable and downloadable per survey, and 10,000 emails per day; business at ¥150,000 and premium at ¥300,000 extend the ceilings to 10,000 and unlimited.

Questant also offers an ad-hoc option from ¥5,000 per survey for occasional paid use, which lasts three months — a useful middle path between the free plan and a full annual commitment. Note that panel research is priced separately from these tiers, so a national sample is an additional, well-defined cost rather than a hidden upgrade.

Survey Mars removes those ceilings entirely. You can build an unlimited number of surveys, each with unlimited questions, and collect unlimited responses without paying anything. The paid options exist, but they are cosmetic and support-related, not capacity gates. For a team whose budget is close to zero, this changes the calculus immediately: every yen you would spend on capacity can go to respondents instead.

Where Do Your Respondents Come From?

Cost is only half the story; the other half is finding people to answer. A beautifully built questionnaire is worthless until real respondents fill it in, and the two platforms have opposite philosophies about how to deliver them.

Questant's answer is the panel. Panel research runs on the MACROMILL panel of about 25 million Japanese consumers, and it is available even if you only have a free account. You specify the questions, the sample size, and the targeting, and Questant prices the job per question and per sample — for example, 10 questions × 100 people at about ¥10,000, or 30 questions × 1,000 people at about ¥300,000.

Screening surveys are available to extract narrow targets such as "recent buyers of a specific category." For a startup that needs statistically meaningful Japanese responses in days, this is the fastest route, and it remains cheaper than commissioning a full-service agency.

Survey Mars takes the opposite approach. It has no built-in panel; instead it gives you distribution tools — share links, QR codes, email invites, and web embeds — and lets you source respondents your own way. That is where Prolific comes in: Survey Mars can be paired with Prolific by pasting your survey link into a Prolific study, recruiting screened, paid respondents from a global pool with 300+ audience filters and representative sampling. The survey platform itself stays free.

For international research, or for Japan-focused studies that need a diverse, pre-screened audience rather than a national panel, this pairing is a genuine alternative to panel services — and one point worth highlighting: because the survey platform is free, your entire respondent budget goes into the sample itself.

Building the Survey: Types, Logic, and Templates

Both platforms cover the essentials, but their depth differs.

Questant offers 21 question types, 12 theme colors, more than 70 survey templates, and a database of 100+ pre-written questions. Logic features such as question branching and skip logic are available on paid plans, alongside options like password-protected start pages, image-upload question types, and randomizing questions or choices. Its question database is a quiet advantage for teams that do not want to write every item from scratch, especially for standard satisfaction or behavioral questions.

Survey Mars widens the range to 50+ question types, including NPS and image selection, with 1,500+ templates to start from. Its standout features are AI-based: the generator drafts an entire questionnaire from a single sentence, and conditional logic plus quota settings let you route respondents precisely. For teams that build surveys weekly, the AI generator and template library cut creation time dramatically, and the unlimited free allowance means experimentation costs nothing.

If you need a survey in ten minutes and want to iterate on wording without watching a meter, Survey Mars is the more agile workshop.

Analysis and Output: From Replies to Decisions

A survey is only useful when the data turns into decisions.

Questant displays results in real time on the web, with filters, cross-tabulation, seven graph types, and three display modes. Downloadable CSV and label-format data are limited by plan: none on free, 3,000 per survey on standard, 10,000 on business, and unlimited on premium. A dedicated crosstab software, QuickCross, is available on business and premium and produces reports without a separate statistics package.

If your workflow depends on exporting raw rows into Excel or SPSS-style tools, check your plan ceiling first — the free plan's web-only viewing is the main reason teams upgrade.

Survey Mars turns every response into charts automatically as replies arrive. Its real-time dashboard, live voting wall, and AI reports summarize insights without manual work; charts can be restyled, exported, downloaded, and even pushed into PowerPoint presentations. For frequent reporting to stakeholders, the automatic charting and export pipeline removes an entire stage of busywork, and because storage is unlimited, you can run long-horizon tracking studies without archiving pressure.

Language, Compliance, and Support

Questant is a Japanese-first product: the interface is Japanese, billing is Japanese, and its compliance posture follows Japanese practice, with SSL encryption on all surveys and IP-restriction options for both the survey page and the admin console. It also offers email support with priority handling on higher plans. For teams that operate entirely inside Japan and report in Japanese, this is not a limitation at all — it is the native environment.

Survey Mars is multilingual — including Japanese for both the interface and respondents — and adds an anonymous mode that removes personal identifiers and IP tracking with one click, oriented to GDPR-style privacy. This matters when your respondent pool crosses borders or when privacy is a stated research requirement. The trade-off is that Japanese-language documentation and support are not as deep as Questant's, so teams that need hand-holding in Japanese may prefer the local vendor.

Which One Should You Pick?

Every comparison like this eventually reduces to one question: where will your respondents come from, and what are you willing to pay for them? Both tools handle the mechanics of survey creation well enough that feature checklists rarely decide the outcome. Keep that lens in mind as you read the recommendations below.

There is no single answer, but there are clear patterns.

Pick Survey Mars when your budget is tight, your surveys change often, or your respondents come from your own channels, your customers, or an international panel like Prolific. You get unlimited building and professional analysis without paying for capacity.

Pick Questant when you need Japan's national representativeness — a panel sample that reflects the Japanese population by age, gender, and region — and you are willing to pay per sample. Its free plan is a fine place to prototype, and its panel service is the fastest way to reach Japanese consumers in volume.

A hybrid works too: build and manage questionnaires in Survey Mars for free, then source respondents through Questant's panel or through Prolific, and export results for final analysis. Many teams discover that the tool that builds the survey and the channel that finds respondents do not have to be the same platform.

A solo consultant running one study a month, for example, can keep Survey Mars as the workspace and buy a Questant panel job only when national representation is required — getting professional analysis everywhere and paying for respondents only where it matters.