Knoted
For anyone pricing a feedback kiosk
HappyOrNot alternatives when you have one location
Most alternatives lists in this category are useless in the same way. They put eight logos in a table, give every one of them four stars, write "pricing available on request" in the price column, and leave you exactly where you started.
So here is a different sorting rule, and it turns out to be the most useful one available: find out which vendors will tell you a price at all. I checked four of them in August 2026. Two publish a number. Two will not give you one without a call. If you run a single location, that split tells you more about which of them wants your business than any feature grid will.
Fair warning before we go: I make a competing product, a printed QR sign called Knoted. I have tried to be straight about where a terminal beats it, because there are real cases where it does.
Who publishes a price, and who does not
All of this was checked on the vendors' own sites in August 2026. Prices move, so verify before you commit to anything.
HappyOrNot: no published price. Every path ends at a quote request. What they do document is the structure: a one-off setup fee plus an annual subscription priced on how many feedback collection points you run, across three editions. They are also explicit that you are not charged by response volume, survey count, users, or reporting access, which is a genuinely good property. There is more detail in my piece on what a HappyOrNot terminal actually costs, including why the hundred-dollars-a-month figure you will find online is an unverifiable citation from 2018.
Worth knowing before you assume this means hardware: alongside the terminals they also sell Smiley Sign, which is printed signage rather than a machine. Posters, stickers, table talkers and table tents, with an NFC tag to tap and a QR fallback, answered on the customer's own phone. It is priced the same way as everything else in the range, which is to say quote-only, demo-gated, and on the setup-fee-plus-annual-term motion. So if a printed sign is what you want, they will sell you one; they just will not tell you what it costs or let you buy it by yourself.
Zonka Feedback: no published price either, as of August 2026. Their pricing page asks you to get a custom quote, and states that pricing is based primarily on your number of responses. There is a fourteen-day free trial. Worth knowing that the tiered figures still circulating for Zonka on third-party blog posts are stale; the page does not carry them any more.
Ombea: publishes a starting figure. Thirty five dollars a month for a small smiley terminal, on a hardware-as-a-service basis, meaning you never buy the hardware and you are not responsible for maintaining it. They are equally clear that the real number moves with how many touchpoints you run.
SurveyStance: publishes the most detail of the four. Sixty nine dollars a month per kiosk with an iPad and stand included, month to month, cancel any time, with unlimited responses and unlimited surveys. There is also a software-only option at thirty nine dollars a month if you would rather supply your own tablet.
The pricing basis matters more than the headline number
This is the part the logo tables never cover, and for a single busy location it is the difference that actually bites.
Look at what each vendor counts. HappyOrNot counts collection points and explicitly does not count responses. Zonka counts responses. SurveyStance counts neither and caps nothing. Those are three different bets on how your business behaves.
If you have one location that gets a lot of footfall, response-based pricing is the one to be careful with, because a terminal in a busy doorway is a machine for generating responses. Succeeding makes the bill grow. Point-based pricing has the opposite shape: expensive to add a second and third sign, indifferent to how busy each one gets. Neither is dishonest. They just suit different businesses, and you are the one who knows which you are.
Software-only is the option nobody mentions
If you have an old iPad in a drawer, and a lot of businesses do, the software-only tier changes the arithmetic. Thirty nine dollars a month and a tablet you already own is a materially different proposition from a setup fee plus an annual contract, and it is the cheapest way into a real touchscreen kiosk that I found.
The catch is the one everybody skips: an iPad on a counter needs a locking stand, a power run to wherever you are putting it, and someone to notice when it has drifted off the survey app or run flat. That is not free, it is just not on the invoice. Somebody in your building becomes responsible for it, which in a small business means you.
Month to month is worth more than a discount
For one location, the contract shape deserves more weight than the monthly figure.
A setup fee plus an annual term asks you to commit before you know the thing you most need to know, which is whether your customers will use it at all. Month to month lets you find out for one month's money. If you are choosing between a slightly cheaper annual deal and a slightly dearer monthly one, and you have never run a feedback channel before, the monthly one is usually the better buy even though it looks worse on a spreadsheet.
The quote-only vendors are quote-only partly because their sales motion is built for multi-site buyers with a CX budget. If you ask for a single-unit price and the conversation gets vague, you have learned something useful: you may be below the floor where you are a good customer for them, and being a small customer of a company that does not want small customers is its own kind of expensive.
When a terminal is the right answer anyway
Three situations, and I would buy one myself in all of them.
High footfall, where volume is the product. A four-button press costs a second and needs no phone, so a terminal in a supermarket exit or a hospital corridor collects at a rate written notes never will. If what you need is a continuous satisfaction trend rather than a diagnosis, that is exactly what the hardware is for.
Places where a phone is awkward or not allowed. Secure sites, industrial floors, clinical areas. A QR code assumes a device in a pocket and permission to use it, and both assumptions fail in real buildings.
Multi-site operations with someone accountable for the number. Once there is a person whose job is the dashboard, the per-point subscription starts looking like a reasonable price for staff you do not have to hire, and the managed tiers are frankly selling you that person.
The honest limit of all of them is what a button press contains. You get a score, and on the touchscreen models a category. You rarely get the reason. You will learn that Thursday evenings dip at the north door, which is genuinely useful, and you will not learn that the dip is a queue forming when a till closes, or one member of staff, or a broken hand dryer. I went through that trade in more detail in feedback kiosks versus a printed QR sign.
The cheapest way to find out what you need
Whichever way you are leaning, there is a test worth running first, and it costs the price of printing.
Make a Google Form with two questions, generate a QR code pointing at it with any free generator, print it, and put it where your customers actually stand. Leave it a month and read what comes in. If nothing arrives, you have learned something important about your placement or your customers without signing anything. If notes do arrive, you now know what your customers want to tell you, and you are in a far better position to judge whether a subscription is worth it. The digital suggestion box guide walks through the whole build.
That test is roughly what I sell, with the annoying parts fixed. Knoted mails you the printed sign, emails you the moment a note lands, sends a weekly digest, and puts a different code on each sign so you know whether a note came from the counter or the restroom. Flat rate, and a 30-day money-back guarantee from the day the sign arrives, no questions asked. The current rate is on the pricing section.
It collects far fewer responses than any terminal on this page. Each one has a sentence in it. If you need a satisfaction trend across forty sites, buy the terminal, and I would rather tell you that than sell you the wrong thing.
Common questions
What is the cheapest HappyOrNot alternative?
Of the four I checked in August 2026, the lowest published figures were Ombea at thirty five dollars a month for a small terminal on a hardware-as-a-service basis, and SurveyStance at thirty nine dollars a month software-only if you supply your own tablet, or sixty nine dollars a month with an iPad and stand included. HappyOrNot and Zonka do not publish prices, so they cannot be ranked on this at all without requesting a quote.
Why will some vendors not publish a price?
Because quoting per customer suits a sales motion built for multi-site buyers, where the deal size justifies a call and the configuration genuinely varies. It is not necessarily a trick. But it does mean that if you are a single location asking for a single-unit price, a vague answer is information: you may be below the size where you are a good fit, and that is worth knowing before you invest more time.
Do I need the hardware at all?
Only if you need volume or your customers will not have phones out. A terminal buys you a high response rate and a trend line. A printed sign buys you fewer responses that each contain a reason. Note that print does not mean leaving this category: HappyOrNot sell printed NFC and QR signage themselves as Smiley Sign, and Ombea and SurveyStance both bundle software-only tiers. The real question is not hardware against print, it is whether you can buy the thing on a published price without a sales call, and whether what you need is a score or an explanation.
What should I ask on a quote call?
What the setup fee is, whether the term is annual or multi-year and what happens at renewal, exactly what counts as a collection point, whether the hardware is owned or rented and who replaces a broken unit, what adding a fourth location costs as an actual number, and whether there is a minimum below which you are not a viable customer. The last one saves everybody time.