Activating a survey takes it live: it stops being an editable draft and starts accepting real responses.

Before you activate

• Preview first. Click the eye icon and walk through the survey exactly as respondents will see it.
• Finalize your structure. While a survey is active, the + button is disabled — you cannot add questions or groups. Treat activation as freezing the questionnaire.
• Decide who may respond — anyone with the link, or only people with an access code (see below).
• Check your dates. If you set a start date in the future, visitors see an Error page reading "This survey is not yet started." Set it in the editor's Settings panel, under Publication & access → Start date/time.
• Set your data-recording options. These lock once the survey is active: Anonymized responses (under Participant settings), and Date stamp, Save IP address, Anonymize IP address, Save referrer URL and Save timings (under Notifications & data).

Activate the survey

Click the green Activate button at the top right of the editor — no confirmation dialog, one click activates the survey. A success panel appears ("🎉 Congratulations! Your survey has been activated.") showing your response counters, sharing options (access-mode dropdown, Copy link, QR code), and the buttons Edit survey, Deactivate, and Preview survey.

After activation

• Responses appear in Results → Responses, with quick charts (Bar, Pie, Radar, Line, Doughnut), and can be exported in various formats (HTML/PDF/Excel).
• The green Activate button turns into a red Deactivate button.
• On the free plan, the response counter in the top bar tracks collected responses against your plan limit.

Open vs. closed access

You can change the access mode at any time from the Share tab at the top of the editor → sharing overview. A dropdown offers exactly two options:

• Anyone with link (open access): "Anyone with the link to this survey can access." Ideal for public surveys shared by link, QR code (Download QR code on the Share tab), or social media.
• Link with access code (closed access): "Only participants with a personalized link or a general link with access code can access." Ideal for invited participant lists where each person answers once.

Stopping a survey

Clicking the red Deactivate button opens "Do you want to stop your survey?" with two options:

• Stop/pause survey (recommended for closing). Keeps responses and participant data available for analysis; participants lose access; an expiry date is set; survey edits stay limited.
• Deactivate survey. Use this to change questions or structure. Responses are archived and unavailable for analysis until reactivation, when you can re-import them. Warning: changing the structure before reactivating can permanently lose archived answers for changed or removed questions — export your responses before deactivating.

Rule of thumb: to close a survey, stop/pause it; deactivate only to restructure.

Using the classic editor?

The flow is equivalent. Click Activate this survey in the top toolbar. A settings window appears first — anonymized responses, save IP address, save timings, date stamp, save referrer URL — and these cannot be changed once the survey is active. Click Save & activate survey. The survey starts in open-access mode; use Switch to closed-access mode to require access codes managed in the Survey Participants section. In the classic editor, post-activation editing is restricted: you can still edit question and answer text, but you cannot change question types or add or delete questions, and array/multiple-choice questions cannot receive new answer options. The same stopping rules apply: prefer an expiry date; deactivation archives responses.