I’m looking for a tool/service - the likes of Google Forms - for creating forms and collecting data from hundreds of users, mostly for the purpose of applications/submissions. I want it to be robust enough, very elegant and, most importantly, extremely friendly to integrate it with the rest of the site’s design. I would say I’m looking for the Kirby of online forms.
Cognito Forms (seems very robust, I’m worried about heavy code)
Formsite (very elegant but seems less feature-rich, apparently you can’t go back to a saved form, although maybe precisely that makes it a more simple/elegant option)
(I discarded Typeforms, as cool as they look, for being to JS-dependant and over-animated for professional use.)
Anyone has tried any of them? Am I missing an important contender in my list?
Price is not so much an issue for our client. I’m more worried about finding a balance between feature-rich and simplicity. The client is keen on having it embedded into their website (not hosted in a subdomain), and it seems that’s only possible through an iframe or JS script. Some of these providers offer “custom CSS” (whatever they exactly mean by that), but I’ve had bad experiences in the past trying to style horribly ugly third-party markup with totally inconsistent class names and so on, so I kind of don’t trust the “custom CSS” advertisement anymore.
Any recommendations, not just of providers itself, but also of what features to look into?
FYI, I’ve already looked into using the Kirby Panel as a frontend form, but our client’s needs exceed what that option could offer by far (payments, integration with other platforms, import/export, upload of large files, etc.).
Your last paragraph sounds like you may need something a little more robust than a simple form-building tool. If you’re accepting payments, it sounds like you’ll need to consider a platform of your own!
Do you need to add/edit forms on the fly, or does the experience and technology revolve around one key action that your users are performing?
For what it’s worth: most of the requirements could be satisfied by FormKeep. You’d need to be responsible for validation and file uploads, but are otherwise free to define the structure of the data you send. On the other end of FormKeep, you can send your data to Zapier and push it out to whatever other services you like.
It’s possible (but potentially unreliable) to integrate Stripe or another payment processor into FormKeep submissions, and you’d need to acknowledge that the records would never really be tied together by any one piece of software. Overall, it sounds like you are looking for a custom ORM or database solution—maybe worth another conversation with the client about their needs, and come up with a couple options?
I’d love to say that Kirby is a good fit (and, it probably can do everything you’re looking to), but it of course depends on the amount of time you can invest in a custom solution vs. an off-the-shelf product!
Best of luck!
Edit: I hate to ask, but have you considered Squarespace? Pretty good parity with this list, albeit spread out across a few features… (commerce, forms, custom templates + scripts).
Thanks for the thorough response and the recommendations, @AugustMiller!
Well, at least Jotform (the client’s first choice) does accept payments out of the box. If we could style it well enough and be able to avoid the iframe scrollbar, that would do the trick. Kind of ugly solution but reliable and flexible.
Not exactly on the fly, but maybe bianual small changes to the form (every application round), for which the client wants to have control over.
Wow, FormKeep is great! That’s the kind of tool I was talking about (the Kirby of form-builders? hard to compare them…). The problem is it won’t allow the client to build the forms themselves, so I think for this particular assignment it won’t work, but I see us using it soon for other projects. Validation, like you said, would take a lot of effort, but I reckon there must be JS libraries/toolkits to help with that, right?
To give you more context: we’re a web design studio, focused on creative, cutting-edge frontend aesthetics, with not that complex backend programming. We’re self-taught programmers so a custom ORM is far out of reach. Integrating Stripe is however an option, especially since there’s Shopkit for Kirby, which we might be using anyway for a mini online shop.
I should have said we’ve already developed the site in Kirby. Now it’s a bit too late to move to another integral custom solution. It’s more about minimizing damages with embedding external services and guiding the client in not choosing a provider that would make our design job a nightmare.
You hate asking for the same reason I would hate using it.
Just stumbled upon the Uniform plugin. It seems with the webhooks method you can submit the form’s data to an external provider to store/process it. This has similar pros/cons as FromKeep, but it’s worth looking into.
Now it’s a bit too late to move to another integral custom solution. It’s more about minimizing damages with embedding external services and guiding the client in not choosing a provider that would make our design job a nightmare.