We’re mapping tenant hazards and urban heat with volunteers in South LA, many on low-end Androids and no signal, so we need reliable offline capture, bilingual forms, and easy photo/audio attachments. If you’ve run both QField (QGIS 3.34 with PostGIS) and Survey123 at volunteer scale (about 50 people in a 4-hour window), how did sync conflicts, data ownership, and costs play out for a small nonprofit focused on equity?
We ran 50+ volunteers in Watts: QField with one geopackage per team, preloaded MBTiles (about 250 MB), and UUIDs on features so we could append to PostGIS with zero conflicts; photos were smooth, audio was awkward in “no signal” zones. If you need slick bilingual + audio, Survey123’s XLSForm shines but you’ll pay in users/credits and data lives in AGOL (see https://doc.arcgis.com/en/survey123/create-surveys/xlsform-multilingual.htm); otherwise QField is cheaper and offline-proof — what matters more for you, audio or cost?
I’ve had better luck with Survey123 for bilingual labels and audio, but offline with volunteers only worked when we sideloaded small MMPKs (they’re bricks on low-end phones) and avoided per-user logins since named accounts add up fast; see https://doc.arcgis.com/en/survey123/browser/create-surveys/xlsform-multilingual.htm… On the QField side, a tiny tweak that paid off was setting the photo widget to downscale images and saving attachments to a relative folder, which kept merges to PostGIS quick later. If you need zero licensing friction, QField wins; if multilingual UX is paramount, Survey123’s XLSForm is smoother.
Quick tip from a similar push: QField was smoothest with a related media table and a form constraint like ‘photo_count > 0’ plus a project variable for team_id; merging to PostGIS with ogr2ogr -append meant no conflicts and zero vendor costs — fewer Sunday-night tears. If you lean Survey123, @scarlett_wil81’s point on audio is spot on, but flip ‘Only add new records’ and cap image size to keep low-end phones happy; consider sideloaded VTPKs instead of MMPKs.