Analytics tells you what happened. It does not tell you why, and the cheapest way to find out is to let people say so on the page where it went wrong.
What a widget gets that a survey does not
Context. A comment left on your pricing page arrives attached to that page. The same sentence in a survey response arrives attached to nothing, and you spend the next ten minutes guessing which screen the person meant.
The moment. People describe a frustration accurately while it is happening and vaguely a day later.
A much lower bar. Almost nobody starts a survey. A fair number will type one line into a box that is already on screen.
What it does not replace
Be clear about this before choosing: a feedback widget is not a survey builder.
If your job is to ask a defined set of questions to a defined audience and compare the answers, that is a survey, and a dedicated tool does it properly: targeting, branching, quotas, recruiting participants. Skomi has a widget and a public board. Useful, and a smaller thing wearing a similar name.
The honest split: a widget is for the feedback you did not know to ask for. A survey is for the answers you need from everybody.
The public board
Comments can stay private, or a topic can be published so other people can see and vote on it.
Two things worth knowing. A submission is never published automatically. Only a topic somebody chose to open is public, so a person writing to you privately stays private. And votes are kept for the life of the board, because a count that quietly reset would be worse than no count.
Getting it out of the product
Feedback that lives only in a dashboard gets read once. It can be pushed to a webhook as it arrives, or exported, so it reaches wherever your team actually decides things.
Two terms are worth having straight before you turn it on: a submission is what one person sent and is never published, while a topic is what you choose to put on a board. The distinction is the whole privacy model.
Related: one place for app and site analytics, do you need three analytics tools, and Feedback.