SurveyXact and DiBL represent two different lenses on the same group of people. SurveyXact is a measurement lens: individuals answer in private, data accumulates, patterns emerge. DiBL is a participation lens: the group makes choices together in real time, and you see how they actually think, not how they report thinking afterwards. There is also a practical problem with post-event surveys: send one on Monday after a Friday workshop and 15-20% of people respond. Run DiBL during the workshop and you get 100% participation, because the data is the session. And when the session surfaces a gap, DiBL lets you address it immediately: generate options with a word cloud, rate them as a group, and leave with a prioritised list. No second session required. SurveyXact is the dominant survey platform across Scandinavia. Two thirds of Danish municipalities use it, as do large portions of the Swedish and Norwegian public and private sectors. Every five minutes, a new survey is completed on the platform. When an organisation needs to know what its employees, citizens, or customers think, SurveyXact is usually already in the room. DiBL gives you a different kind of insight into the same people. Instead of asking them to report their views privately after the fact, DiBL puts them in a situation and captures what they actually decide, live, together. A facilitator opens a scenario, participants respond on their own devices, their choices reveal how the group is divided, and the facilitator uses that live data to drive the conversation. The room finds out in real time that 60% chose one path and 40% chose another. That gap becomes the learning. There is also a practical problem with post-event surveys: send one on Monday after a Friday workshop and you will typically hear back from 15-20% of attendees. The people with strong opinions respond; the people in the middle, who are often most important to reach, do not. DiBL data is different. Because the activity is the session itself, participation is 100%. Everyone's choices are captured in the moment, not chased afterwards. And when the session surfaces a gap, you do not need to schedule a second meeting to address it. DiBL's word cloud and rating tools let participants generate ideas and collectively prioritise them right there in the room, so you leave with a prioritised list, not a set of actions deferred to a future date. The research on what moves professional behaviour points in the same direction. People change how they act through practice and reflection, not through answering questions about it. The live data DiBL generates is not just more complete than a post-event survey: it is produced through the kind of active engagement that actually creates change. Individuals answer privately, usually asynchronously. Results accumulate as data: distributions, averages, open-ended responses. You get a picture of what the group reports thinking, filtered through reflection and social desirability. Response rates for post-event surveys typically run 15-20%. The data you get represents the people who chose to respond, not the full room. The group makes choices together in real time. You see how they actually decide, not how they say they would decide. The facilitator sees the room divide, highlights the split, and uses it to drive the debrief. Participation is 100% because the data collection is embedded in the session itself. And when a gap surfaces, you address it immediately: generate ideas with a word cloud, rate the options as a group, and leave with a prioritised list. No follow-up survey, no deferred second session. A Scandinavian public sector organisation runs an annual employee survey through SurveyXact. The results come back showing that staff understand the organisation's sustainability commitments at an abstract level, but feel uncertain about how to apply them in day-to-day decisions: when a supplier offers a cheaper but less sustainable option, when project timelines conflict with environmental assessment requirements, when a citizen's needs and the organisation's carbon targets point in opposite directions. The survey has done its job: it identified a gap between stated values and practical confidence. The instinct is to send another survey after the next training day, to check whether anything changed. But a post-event survey sent on Monday to people who attended on Friday typically gets 15-20% back. The 80% who did not respond are the question. This is where DiBL enters. The same sustainability scenarios that showed up in the survey data become the branching dilemmas in a DiBL workshop. Participants face the supplier decision, the timeline conflict, the citizen priority trade-off. They make their choices live, so there is no response-rate problem: every person in the room has registered a decision. The facilitator sees in real time that the room split 55/45 on the supplier question, highlights the divide, and the debrief happens around that specific gap. But the session does not end at identifying the gap. Once the dilemma has been worked through, the facilitator opens a word cloud: "What would actually help you make the right call in this situation?" Participants contribute ideas live. Then a rating round: everyone ranks the top suggestions. Within minutes, the group has collectively identified and prioritised the most useful support mechanisms. No second meeting required, no action items that drift. The output of the workshop is already in the room. SurveyXact identified the problem at scale. DiBL addressed it and resolved the next steps, in the same session, with full participation. The following year's survey measured the shift. Both platforms collect participant responses. What happens after the response is where they diverge completely. SurveyXact features based on publicly available product information as of June 2026. For collecting structured data from many people asynchronously, SurveyXact is the right tool. Employee satisfaction surveys, 360-degree leadership assessments, citizen feedback on municipal plans, longitudinal NPS tracking: all of these belong in SurveyXact. Its data infrastructure, GDPR compliance, and reporting capabilities have been built over 20 years and are not easily replicated. DiBL does not try to. The distinction is simple: when you need to hear from a large population in their own time, use SurveyXact. When you need to see how a group actually thinks and decides together in a room, use DiBL. The most effective learning programmes use both. SurveyXact to diagnose the need at scale. DiBL during the event itself, where you get 100% participation and real-time insight into how the group actually decides. Measuring well-being, engagement, and job satisfaction across an organisation, with trend data over multiple years. Pre- and post-workshop knowledge checks. Tracking whether attitudes have shifted after an intervention. Collecting structured feedback from residents, service users, or external stakeholders at scale, asynchronously. Multi-rater feedback surveys for managers and leaders. Requires anonymity, structured data collection, and longitudinal tracking. Situations where there is no single right answer: welfare dilemmas in social work, sustainability trade-offs in municipal planning, legal grey areas in compliance training. Scenarios where leaders practice difficult conversations, resource allocation under pressure, or organisational change decisions, with group debrief on why the room divided. Moving beyond culture decks to live workshops where employees navigate situations that test the stated values and surface where the organisation's real priorities lie. Capabilities that cannot be measured into existence: facilitation, conflict resolution, clinical judgment, strategic thinking. These require practice in a safe environment, not another questionnaire. Engaging employees with new strategies, reorganisations, or policy changes through structured scenario play, not passive information delivery. Want to see what a DiBL session looks like? Browse 30 ready-made scenario templates across ethics, leadership, sustainability, compliance, and more. Can DiBL replace SurveyXact? No, and it is not designed to. SurveyXact is Scandinavia's leading platform for collecting knowledge at scale: employee satisfaction, NPS, 360-degree surveys, and compliance evaluations. DiBL is a facilitation platform for live workshops where participants make decisions, debate perspectives, and experience consequences. Many organisations use both: SurveyXact to measure before and after, DiBL to deliver the learning in between. Does SurveyXact support branching scenarios or live facilitation? SurveyXact has conditional logic within surveys, such as skip logic and question branching based on individual responses. But it is built for data collection, not live facilitation. There is no facilitator role, no group dynamics, no real-time session control, and no way to split a room by answers and run a live debate. DiBL is built specifically for that kind of experience. We already have SurveyXact. Do we need DiBL? If your organisation runs training workshops or live events, yes. There is also a practical problem with relying on post-event surveys: response rates for follow-up surveys typically run 15-20%. DiBL captures data during the session itself, so participation is 100% because the data collection is the activity. Beyond the data, DiBL is the intervention itself: the live session where participants engage with dilemmas, make choices, and change how they think. SurveyXact tells you what people say they think. DiBL shows you what they actually decide when it matters. Is SurveyXact or DiBL better for municipalities and public sector organisations? Both are widely used in the Danish public sector, for different purposes. SurveyXact is used for citizen surveys, employee satisfaction, and evaluation across most Danish municipalities. DiBL is used for competency development workshops, ethics and dilemma training, and facilitated sessions on complex topics like sustainability or welfare reform. The question is not which to choose, but when to use each. How does DiBL compare to SurveyXact's e-learning and quiz features? SurveyXact includes quiz and e-learning functionality, primarily for knowledge checks and compliance training delivered asynchronously. DiBL's learning experiences are designed for live, facilitated group sessions where participants make collective decisions, debate perspectives, and navigate branching scenarios together. The same DiBL content can also be published for self-paced use, but the design assumption is active group engagement rather than individual knowledge transfer. Browse 30 ready-made scenario templates and see what a DiBL session looks like in practice, or book a walkthrough to see how it works alongside your existing survey tools.
SurveyXact tells you what people think, after the fact.
What if you could watch them decide, and capture it?
By Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, PhD · 25 years in learning design and educational technology · April 2026
The short version
Two lenses on the same group of people
Two lenses, two kinds of insight
SurveyXact: the measurement lens
DiBL: the participation lens
Case example
From measuring sustainability attitudes to facilitating sustainability decisions
Feature-by-feature comparison
SurveyXact
DiBL
Core purpose
Knowledge and opinion collection at scale: surveys, evaluations, satisfaction tracking, 360-degree assessments
Facilitated learning experiences: branching scenarios, group dilemmas, live workshops where choices have consequences
How responses work
Answers accumulate as data for analysis and reporting. The respondent does not see what others answered in real time
Choices trigger branches, reveal group distributions, or split participants. Word cloud and rating tools let groups generate and prioritise ideas live, in the same session, without a follow-up step
Facilitator role
Survey administrator: design, distribute, collect, report. No live facilitation function
Active session conductor: control pacing, reveal responses, highlight choices, manage group splits, drive the debrief
Group dynamics
Individual responses aggregated. Groups are a unit of analysis, not a live social dynamic
Groups can be split by answers, assigned roles, or given different information. The room's dynamic is part of the design
Branching and scenarios
Conditional skip logic available within a survey. Not designed for live scenario delivery or consequence tracking
Full branching with variables, conditional paths, and accumulated consequences across a live session
Delivery mode
Primarily asynchronous: respondents complete surveys in their own time via email, SMS, or digital post
Primarily synchronous: a facilitator-led live session. Same content can also be published for self-paced use
Nordic market presence
Dominant across Scandinavia. Used by two thirds of Danish municipalities, and widely used in Swedish and Norwegian public and private sectors
Growing across Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Strong in public sector training, leadership development, and compliance
GDPR and data security
Market-leading GDPR compliance. Data hosted in own data centres. Used by the Danish Data Protection Agency itself
GDPR compliant. Session data handled responsibly. For sensitive longitudinal data collection, SurveyXact remains the stronger choice
Reporting
Comprehensive: dashboards, cross-tabulation, custom reports, trend data over time
Session-level data available for review. Not designed as a longitudinal data platform
Best for
Measuring knowledge, sentiment, and satisfaction before and after an intervention
Delivering the intervention itself: live workshops that change how participants think and act
Where SurveyXact wins
Where each tool fits
SurveyXact is the better choice for...
Annual employee surveys
Training evaluation
Citizen and stakeholder input
360-degree leadership assessments
DiBL is the better choice for...
Ethics and dilemma workshops
Leadership and management development
Culture and values integration
Complex skills training
Change management sessions
Common questions
From measuring learning to delivering it
