When you think of forms, the first thing that comes to mind may be collecting email addresses or customer feedback. Those are solid use cases, but forms are a great tool for other reasons: you can help customers submit support tickets, sign them up for an event, or even help your employees request new hardware for their departments.

Having an excellent form builder will help you create the forms you need to handle all these use cases—and more—while staying true to your brand image, keeping track of submissions, and understanding how to improve data collection as you go.

With so many online form builders to choose from, it's hard to know where to start. So I started for you: I considered over 100 form builders and did in-depth testing on dozens of them. From all that research and testing, here are the 12 best tools to build your online forms.

The 12 best online form builder apps

• Google Forms for quickly creating powerful forms for free

• Jotform for building a form from a template

• Feathery for advanced logic

• Typeform for conversational forms

• Formless for a formless AI experience

• Fillout for building a form with AI

• Zapier Interfaces for automation

• Microsoft Forms for real-time sync with Excel

• Zoho Forms for teams and approval flows

• QuestionScout for powerful reports

• Paperform for creating order forms

• Formstack for regulated industries and advanced analytics

What makes the best form-building software?

Form apps let you build a form you can share with others, including a range of question types and input fields that allow you to gather any kind of information you need. At the bare minimum, these platforms will let you line up all your questions, share them quickly, and see a simple list of responses. More advanced form software includes analytics features, form access controls, and powerful reporting to give you more control and insight into each submission.

As I was testing, here's what I looked for in each form builder app:

• Ease of use. The best form builder apps should be easy to pick up and intuitive to use, without having to read the entire help center.

• Design and customization. Whether you're looking for consistent branding across channels or a more creative solution to drive engagement, your forms app should give you the tools to do so.

• Ease of distribution. Can you get your form out there with a couple of clicks? Are there integration options to help you share your form to other platforms?

• Powerful analytics tools. Here, I was looking at analytics (the metadata generated for your forms) as well as the quality and variety of reports (for the content your respondents enter on the form).

• Extra features. I valued anything that improves the user experience, adds further integration and automation opportunities, or gives you better insight into the data collection process.

I signed up for each form maker and created a couple of forms, using templates as a base. I filled them out with sample data, and then ran some reports to see how detailed they were. When there were unique features, I also tested those to see if they were easy to use and if they added value to the experience—no one loves paying for useless stuff, right?

Before I dive in, a few other notes:

• This list focuses on the best online form builders to get the job done, regardless of price. If you're looking for free options, take a look at Zapier's roundup of the best free survey tools and form builders.

• If you want a specialized tool for surveys (which generally means things like question banks and analytics), then be sure to check out the best survey apps.

• If you use WordPress and are looking for a form builder plugin, take a look at Zapier's list of the best WordPress form plugins.

• If you're already using database or project management tools like Airtable or Asana, you might already have form-building features built in. Give them a quick test to see if they match your needs before you spring for a new app.

The best online form builders at a glance

Best free online form builder for quickly creating powerful forms

Google Forms (Web)

Google Forms pros:

• Very easy to use

• Part of the Google software suite

Google Forms cons:

• Lacking advanced conditional branching features

Google does it again. If you need to put together a useful form quickly, Google Forms is your best bet for getting the job done within the hour.

Building a form in Google Forms is easy and intuitive. Start typing your questions, and Google Forms can guess which question type it is, saving you a precious few seconds over choosing it from the dropdown menu. Even if this is your first time building a form, the result will look great. The simple controls help you stay on track and save time, but they prevent you from creating something unique if that's what you're looking for.

When you're done, simply click the Send button, and choose to send it via email (either a link to the form or the entire form embedded in the body), copy a link to share manually, or embed the form as HTML on your site. When the responses start trickling in, you can see them in a list of aggregated data or individually, along with a collection of charts appropriate to the question type. If you're a spreadsheet wizard, you can take this data to Google Sheets and look for deeper connections there.

In addition to that Sheets integration, you can also pre-fill a form to save your respondents some time, collaborate with others on your form, and browse a collection of add-ons on the Google Workspace Marketplace.

Save even more time by connecting Google Forms with Zapier to send your form data to other apps in your tech stack. Learn more about how to automate Google Forms, or get started with one of these pre-built workflows.

Google Forms price: 100% free

Best online form builder for starting from a template

Jotform (Web, iOS, Android)

Jotform pros:

• Plenty of widgets and question types

• Advanced code customization available

Jotform cons:

• Free plan has limits on forms, submissions, views, and storage

Do you suffer from form builder's block? Dread the blank (form) page? Jotform users don't. With a massive form template library at your disposal, you can pick one of the thousands of templates available, from general use cases all the way to previously-unheard-of niches.

You can customize almost everything about your form's design in the visual editor. And if that still doesn't meet expectations, there's an advanced editor to go deeper into it. Still not satisfied? Click on the CSS editor, and code all you want. It's one of the most flexible apps on the list as far as design features go.

When sharing your form, Jotform offers all the same options as the competition, along with unique ones, like sharing as a fillable PDF, embedding an interactive feedback button on your website, and downloading the entire source code if you want to have your developers add a couple of extra features to it.

As for extras, Jotform integrates with a wide range of payment platforms, lets you add widgets to your forms—such as embedding Instagram posts or gathering signatures with Adobe Sign—and you can even create an app from your forms, which your respondents can download and keep on their phones.

You can do even more with Jotform by connecting it to Zapier and sending the data you collect to where it needs to be. Learn more about how to automate Jotform, or take a look at these examples to get you started.

Jotform price: Free plan available; paid plans start at $39/month

Best form software for advanced logic

Feathery (Web)

Feathery pros:

• Intuitive no-code controls

• Create flows to improve connections between your apps

Feathery cons:

• Steep learning curve

Feathery stands out in the crowded form-building landscape with its advanced logic capabilities. More than simple data collection forms, it'll let you build what it calls flows: core processes of an app or web service, helping you connect scattered databases, simplify login processes, and perform data checks as your audience interacts with the form.

These features bring Feathery almost into the app-building territory. If your IT department has a massive backlog, you can get your hands dirty and knock a few critical problems out of the park. And later on, IT can come in and add their own code to tweak your original solution and connect it to the bigger data infrastructure.

And since we're on the topic of improving productivity, you can integrate Feathery with Zapier and connect to it all the other apps in your tech stack. Learn more about how to automate Feathery, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

In addition to the Zapier integration, Feathery will help you leverage Stripe for online payments or Plaid to pull bank information directly into your form. There are detailed tutorials for each integration, giving you the confidence to copy and paste API keys and test the connections yourself. You can then set up how data should be pushed and pulled on a no-code flow designer, where you set the rules of what happens when the user ticks a box, fills a field, or chooses a specific option.

Feathery was built for product teams, but it's equally good for the tech-forward who want to create powerful shortcuts for data and logic in a fraction of time—and for a fraction of the cost, too.

Feathery price: Free plan available; paid plans start at $50/month.

Best form app for conversational forms

Typeform (Web)

Typeform pros:

• Awesome user experience

• Step-by-step help available for embedding your forms

Typeform cons:

• Very limited free plan

Typeform is synonymous with conversational forms: forms that show questions card by card, one at a time. The user experience is so polished and powerful that your form respondents can ditch their mouse and reply to forms using only their keyboard.

The builder interface is equally elegant, uncluttered, and easy to use. There are a lot of visual assists and tooltips to guide you as you build, and it's nearly impossible to make a form that doesn't look great. You can start from 100 form templates and style them with more than 50 design themes. And you can tweak the design by switching up the question card layouts, fonts, icons, and alignments.

When the responses start piling up, you can see them as the classic submissions list, view charts based on question type, and generate rich reports that you can share via link. One unique option is the ability to tag submissions, letting you organize them by your own categories, or even attach tasks if a response needs you to do something about it. Other analytics include conversion rate, time to complete, and where people usually give up on filling out the form.

A handy extra you'll find in Typeform—and one that speaks to its focus on aesthetics—is the ability to add your brand kit to the platform. Your forms will stay consistent no matter where you share them.

You can connect Typeform to Zapier, making sure all your Typeform data gets to where you want it, and even sending out automated follow-ups. Learn more about how to automate Typeform, or try one of these pre-made templates.

Typeform price: Free plan available; paid plans start at $29/month

Best online form builder for a formless AI experience

Formless (Web)

Formless pros:

• New data collection experience for your respondents

• Easy building process

Formless cons:

• Slight delay between questions can lead to user drop-off

Formless, a product by Typeform, breaks the structure with an AI-driven experience. No need for juggling question types, input fields, or form sections. Instead, you'll be using prompts most of the time.

Start by adding the purpose of the form to anchor the AI on the task at hand. Then, pick which tone of voice best fits your brand. There's an indicator of how chatty each of them is—and it's no wonder that sassy and energetic types generate more words, right?

With the personality locked in, the next important step is Journey. Here, you'll list all the topics you want to ask about. The coolest part is how you can write every aspect of your question in English, and Formless will understand what the question type is, dynamically offering it to your respondents—conditional logic included. For example, if you say "if the customer talks about product A instead of product B, ask why they didn't choose product B," Formless will apply that rule in the conversation—no extra configuration required.

Since this is almost a chat experience, this form can double as a simple customer support tool. You can train the AI with snippets or documents to add information about your products and services. Whenever a user asks a question at any time, they'll get an instant answer. And if your AI form hasn't finished all the Journey questions, it'll find a way to tie it back in and get to the end.

After a conversation is inactive for 8 minutes, you'll get the new data in your Analytics tab. And if you love drilling into voice of customer data, head over to conversation transcripts to mine questions and the writing style of your target audience. You can move these insights into your other work apps too. Just connect Formless to Zapier, and start automating.

Formless price: Paid plans start at $59/month

Best online form builder for building a form with AI

Fillout (Web)

Fillout pros:

• Extremely versatile

• Payment forms available via Stripe integration

Fillout cons:

• Good security standards but doesn't have any certifications

Love traditional forms but not the building process? Take the artificially intelligent shortcut with Fillout, a simple form builder with a generous free plan and a great range of integrations.

When starting a new form with AI, you can either use a prompt, drop a URL, or upload a PDF. AI is also involved in styling: pick an image, and the engine will apply that vibe to the form. Once you click to generate, the form pops into the screen with on-point AI-generated questions, with the correct types and basic settings applied—just don't forget to mark the required ones. Need to add a few more? Click the magic stars icon on the top-left, enter a prompt, and see them pop into your form.

Beyond the AI features, designing a good-looking form is easy, as the controls strike a good balance between simplicity and power. You can edit typography, colors, and the basic layout. The interface itself has a set of colorful buttons to help you distinguish each question type, something that helps guide your eyes and understand what you can do on each screen.

Once you're done editing your form, you can polish it a bit more before sharing. You can add and customize cover and ending pages to give your audience a better user experience. If you want to sell something, you can add a payment page to make the transaction on the form. And when you upgrade to one of the paid plans, you'll be able to add a scheduling page (you'll need to connect Calendly) or even a login page, so your respondents can create accounts and access protected information.

And while Fillout has a deep integration with Notion, Airtable, and Google Sheets, you can also connect it to Zapier, adding support for thousands more apps. Here are some examples of how it works.

Fillout price: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $19 per month.

Best online form builder for automation

Zapier Interfaces (Web)

Zapier Interfaces pros:

• Good for building internal tools around data collection

• Simple but powerful controls and settings

Zapier Interfaces cons:

• Less customizable designs than other options

You're not a machine. Why would you be doing repetitive work day in and day out? You're better than that: start automating your data collection workflows, so you have more time to work on strategy. The best app for that is Zapier Interfaces.

Interfaces is more of an app builder than a form platform, which explains its extra powers. Unlike other apps on this list, you can add multiple pages to each of your projects. Then, inside each of these, you can drag and drop customizable components both for gathering and displaying data.

As you build out your forms, you'll realize that your submissions need a place to live. That place is Zapier Tables, an automation-first data source with a generous free tier. While you can use Tables to view data, you can quickly build a private Interfaces page to display that data and create filtered reports, ready to share with your team.

Once you get a form ready to collect responses, it's time to integrate it with the apps you use for work. And here, there are so many setup options that it's really up to how you configure your Zaps. You can move the data from Tables into an analytics app to get a big-picture view; you can pull data from your CRM to enrich each submission; you can run a simple decision-making tree using the conditional steps to see which clients are a best fit for your business. Here are a few examples to get you started.

• Create a customer support portal

• Create a free offer download form

• Create a lead capture form

Configure once, reuse endlessly. And if you've got a tinkering itch like I do, you can keep improving these screens and Zaps over time. Interfaces is much more modular than other options in this list, meaning you can add or remove components and connections as your needs evolve. It can either be the main system on your tech stack or a support for streamlining parts of your work processes.

Zapier Interfaces price: Free plan available. Pain plans start at $20/month.

Best free online form builder for real-time sync with Excel

Microsoft Forms (Web, Windows)

Microsoft Forms pros:

• Easy to use

• Has a few advanced features for free

Microsoft Forms cons:

• Limited integration outside the Microsoft ecosystem

Microsoft Forms isn't a household name like many other Microsoft apps, true. But this free online form creator is intuitive, and it plays well with Excel, offering real-time sync: any time a new submission is saved, it gets passed to your connected spreadsheet right away. Like Google Forms, it focuses on getting a good form in the hands of your audience as fast as possible.

It definitely feels like a Microsoft product, so if you've been using Microsoft apps for a long time, you'll get the gist of the navigation quickly. Adding your questions is easy, and you can edit the settings on any of them by hovering and clicking the appropriate button in a WYSIWYG editor. If some of your answers require specific inputs—e.g., only let people over 65 years old submit the form—you can set up these input validation settings on each question.

When you click the Style button, you'll be able to see AI-powered theme suggestions. Click on a color or background image below, and the themes will update based on that choice. Some even have animated backgrounds, giving a touch of life to your form—beware of those with fast-moving graphics, though.

Microsoft Forms is free, but you need to log in to your free Microsoft account before visiting the link (it might ask you to subscribe to a Microsoft 365 plan if you're not already logged in). If your budget allows it, consider trying out Microsoft Copilot Pro for Forms: it lets you generate and customize forms with the power of AI.

Microsoft Forms price: 100% free

Best online form builder for teams and approval flows

Zoho Forms (Web, iOS, Android)

Zoho Forms pros:

• In-depth submission reports

• Wide range of integration options

Zoho Forms cons:

• Steep learning curve for advanced features

Zoho Forms is part of the Zoho software suite, which means it thinks at an organizational level. You can add your coworkers or other stakeholders to the app and share forms with them quickly, tracking submissions and requests in a single place.

If you work at a large company, you know that some requests may have to be approved by multiple people. Zoho Forms gets this. It lets you create approval flows, a set of rules on how to escalate requests. Let's say you have an asset request form, like the one you see in the screenshot above. If there's more than one manager involved in the decision-making process, you can route the request form through the direct supervisor first. If that supervisor approves, it goes to the next manager in the hierarchy, and so on—until it's green-lit or refused. 

You can pick from 65 form templates. Once you tweak the questions to your needs, there are 41 themes to make it look good (and on brand). Zoho Forms comes with a dedicated form visual editor, where you can edit pretty much anything in your form's layout.

The reports section is also robust, letting you see a list of results and allowing you to build your own reports by setting question/answer filters and showing/hiding questions. In addition to tracking IPs and geolocation, you can also track source traffic through UTM, URL parameters, and Google Analytics.

To streamline things even more, you can connect Zoho Forms with Zapier, so your form responses end up where you want them. Learn more about how to automate Zoho Forms, or get started with one of these templates.

Zoho Forms price: Free plan available; paid plans start at $12/month

Best form app for powerful reports

QuestionScout (Web)

QuestionScout pros:

• Easy to apply design themes to all your forms

• Detailed onboarding tutorial

QuestionScout cons:

• Setting up reports can be complex

QuestionScout supports you from creating your first question right up through hitting send. The app has a range of tutorials that explain everything in succinct blocks. It's never wordy, boring, or overwhelming, and you can set up the same kind of help for your form respondents by customizing tooltips and error messages.

I liked this support, but what drew me in most was the reports section. Remember the submissions list that all form-building apps have? Here, you can set up your own filters and create multiple views of your data, either with list or chart views, much like you would in a database app like Airtable or Notion. These views are saved, so you can always see that angle with a click of a button.

It goes one step further: you can create cross-tab reports. This means that you can see the relationship between the answers to two different questions. Let's say you're running an employee feedback form, and you want to see how the following answers are related:

1. How long have you been working at our company?

2. How meaningful do you find your work? Rate from 1 to 5.

With a cross-tab report, you can see if your employees find work more meaningful after they've been with you for a long time, or if your company has a good onboarding process that makes new hires feel that what they do matters. Setting up these views and analyzing them takes time—and requires some skills in statistics—but it's possible to do in QuestionScout without plugging the data into another app.

Start from more than 40 form templates and design themes, and keep them as they are or break them completely with the full customization available on the visual editor. The sharing options are in line with the basics, with sharing via link, QR code, email, or via Facebook/X/LinkedIn.

As for notable extras, QuestionScout lets you connect analytics tools and payment platforms to enable shopping on your forms. And when you're ready to publish your first form, connect QuestionScout with Zapier to send that data wherever you need it to be.

QuestionScout price: Plans start at $5/month

Best online form builder for creating order forms

Paperform (Web)

Paperform pros:

• Great design out-of-the-box

• Connects with Google's and Facebook's analytics tools

Paperform cons:

• Interface takes some getting used to

Paperform in three words: beautiful, clean, and sleek. The most attractive possibility here is how you can create and manage forms to take orders and make sales.

When you create a form, add a Products section, then input what you're selling. You can add the name, SKU, image, price, minimum and maximum quantities, as well as the total available stock. You can even import your product list as a CSV file to save some time.

There's coupon support and custom pricing rules if, for example, you want to add an extra to each sale to offset the payment platform costs. Paperform integrates with Stripe, Braintree, PayPal Business, and Square to help you process those transactions.

Creating a new form is like creating a document. You add blocks with headers, images, or descriptions, and then the input fields. As you build, you see exactly what your users will see in the end result. To change the settings on a block, just hover over it and click the cog.

Paperform has the basic reporting features and analytics, and it integrates with Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel to help increase your sales based on that intel. You can connect it to even more tools by using Paperform's Zapier integration to get your data where you need it. 

Paperform price: Plans start at $24/month

Best online form builder for regulated industries and advanced analytics

Formstack (Web, iOS, Android)

Formstack pros:

• Form accessibility checker

• A/B form testing available

Formstack cons:

• Limited design freedom

If you work in an industry that has to respect strict procedures and tight data-handling policies—including everything from GDPR to HIPAA—Formstack will help you gather data while staying compliant.

If you don't want to start from zero, you can pick one of the 40+ form templates, and then select one of more than a dozen design themes to make it easy on the eyes. If you're not happy with the combo, the form's design features are fully customizable with a visual editor, or by using CSS. And when you're ready to send it out, sharing is fast. You can get a link or QR code, use a WordPress shortcode, share via Facebook, or embed it on your website with JavaScript—simply copy and paste the script, and you're good to go.

In addition to a responses list and the ability to browse individual submissions, you can also configure charts to see the data visually. The analytics even let you see where respondents were on the map when they responded along with the IP addresses, operating systems, and browsers used to access the form. You'll also get the conversion rate: how many folks completed the form compared to how many viewed it.

Formstack offers a few interesting extras too. First is an add-on called Conversion Kit, which lets you run A/B tests with your forms and integrate analytics platforms such as Google Analytics. Another one I liked is that Formstack lets you know if your form is easily readable by accessibility tools (Section 508 Compliance standards). With so many people using assistive technology, this can help you create new connections with people that were previously excluded from rich web experiences.

By connecting Formstack to Zapier, you can make sure all your Formstack submissions get to the right place, no matter where you keep your data.

Formstack price: Plans start at $50/month; HIPAA compliance only on Enterprise plans

What's the best form software?

Any of these picks should be able to serve you across use cases, so you won't have to couple it with another platform to do what you need to do. My suggestion is to pick a few that stand out based on my descriptions and give them a try. There aren't any demos or complicated onboarding processes to get started, so you'll be able to figure out quickly which form app fits you best.

Read more:

• The best no-code app builders

• Follow up on contact forms faster with automation

• Automatically add form submissions to a spreadsheet

• How to create Google Docs templates based on form responses

Originally published in June 2014 by Matthew Guay, this post has also had contributions from Jessica Greene and Eric Ravenscraft. The most recent update was in April 2024.