Google Forms is the most popular form builder in the world, particularly because many students use it, but more and more businesses are leaving it because, frankly, it’s too basic. Google Forms lacks security, conditional logic, the ability to accept payments, customizations, development tools, and many other features that all businesses need, and worst of all, it looks truly awful, especially on mobile screens.

The biggest reason why no one recommends using google forms (or Microsoft Forms, for that matter) in their businesses is that it’s “file-based” (spreadsheets), not “data-based,” and that’s a big NO-NO if you care about your data!

So if you are looking for the best alternative to Google Forms, you’re in the right place. In this article, we review two alternatives to google forms. One is Typeform (great for surveys), and the other one in Formaloo (great for organizations & work-related forms).

Quick Comparison

Before going into many details, here is a quick guide to choosing the best form builder for your business:

Google FormsTypeformFormalooBest forSmall Surveys & QuestionnairesSurveys & PollsQuizzes, Apps & Advance FormsDesign and CustomizationExtremely limitedFull CustomizationFull CustomizationTemplates10+200+200+Form TypesSimple Forms (Not Very Mobile-friendly)Beautiful Step by step forms (Mobile-friendly)Simple Forms (Mobile-friendly)Beautiful Step by step forms (Mobile-friendly)Website WidgetsWeb App BuilderNoNoYesMobile App BuilderNoNoYesKanban View, Grid View, Table View, Map View & Calendar ViewNoNoYesCustomer SupportNoYes
(Paid)YesAccess Management (Collaboration)NoYes(Paid)Yes(Free)NPS, CSAT & CES SurveysNoYesYesAccept PaymentsNoYesYesCalculator for quizzes & paymentsOnly for quizzesYesYesBranching and Conditional LogicNoYesYesAutomated WorkflowsNoYes(limited)Yes(Full)Remove branding?NoYes(limited)YesAPI & WebhookNoYesYesDevelop Business Application?NoNoYesCustom DomainNoNoYesCustom Email TemplatesNoNoYesCustom CSS & JSNoNoYesContact ManagementNoNoYes(CDP)Offline Surveys & FormsNoNoYesMobile Application?NoNoYes(iOS, Android)WordPress & Shopify Plugins?NoNoYesPresentation Mode (Live Surveys, Lessons, Polls, Q&As, etc.)NoNoYesAnswer-sheets, FlashCards & LessonsNoNoYesCheat Prevention systemNoNoYesAudience Scoring, Segmentation & Data-MiningNoNoYesGDPR CompliantNoYesYesHIPAA CompliantNoNoYesOn-premise Option (Self-hosted)NoNoYesAutofill forms + Data AnalyticsNoNoYesAdvance fields like Custom validations, OEmbed & Email Verify fieldsNoNoYesAcceptable answers & CheckpointsNoNoYesRelational database options & Lookup fieldsNoNoYesPricingFreeFree for up to three forms + only 10 monthly responses, with paid options starting from $35/monthFree for 5 forms & apps + unlimited monthly responses, with paid options starting from $9/month

Let’s take a closer look at where every one of these 3 tools is best.

Pricing

As mentioned, Google Forms is 100% free for anyone with a Google account. You can use it to build as many surveys as you need, ask as many questions as you want, and collect responses from as many people as you want. But as you can see above, the lack of features is painful and make Google Forms useless for many businesses.

Typeform also has a free plan, but it’s very limited. You can create only 3 surveys on the free plan, and you can only get a maximum of 100 responses. If you need more, you need to upgrade, but if you have many forms or want to get more than 1,000 responses, Typeform can become very expensive!

This is the worst thing about Typeform, as a tool mostly used for surveys. Also, their business model is based on you having a limited audience, and if your audience is big enough, you must have a lot of money! You can’t use Typeform to collect data from your customers, students, and event attendees without breaking your bank account! You’ll end up spending thousands of dollars a year!

On the other hand, Formaloo is designed to collect a large amount of data regularly. As Formaloo is used mostly for creating work-related forms and custom business applications, collecting more data means no extra charge at all!

Formaloo offers a free plan, which includes an unlimited number of forms & unlimited monthly responses. Formaloo paid plan includes more features and advanced options, but you have no limits on collecting data.

So if you’re doing a survey for a small audience (less than 1,000 people), Typeform can be perfect and not too expensive. If you have an audience of more than 1,000 people or if you use forms regularly in your business (for example, if you’re an SME, university, school, or an event organizer), Formaloo is the obvious choice and far less expensive.

Design and Customization

Google Forms is extremely limited and, except for the color of your forms, also doesn’t give you much wiggle room in terms of design customization.

On the other hand, both Typeform & Formaloo offer full customization of their forms. You can literally customize anything you want on both of these platforms.

All Google forms are almost identical as a result of this lack of customization:

Typeform, on the other hand, offers a “Step by Step” approach to forms. You can see only one question on each page, and when you answer it, you will go to the next page and the next question. This approach makes your surveys very focused and easy to fill. It also looks very beautiful on mobile screens:

Although this design is perfect for surveys, it’s not so useful for business forms or quizzes access to the full form and speed of data entry is important.

Formaloo offers both at the same time. Additionally, you can select to have the simplicity of single-page forms or the beautiful design of multi-step forms. Best of all, it can also be embedded in any part of your website and portals as well!

Here is an example of an embedded single-page form:

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Here is an example of an embedded Multi-step form:

Of course, you can have all of these forms on a full page, as widgets, or even in your emails!

New Form Type: Widgets

Formaloo takes the customizations to the next level. Not only can you use your forms as the traditional forms, but also you can create custom widgets on your websites.

You can create & embed NPS surveys, CSAT surveys & even custom forms like issue tracking and bug report systems as widgets in your website pages and customize them however you want.

The Formaloo widgets combined with the “Admin-only” & “Hidden” advance fields of Formaloo can be used to do powerful automatic data collection and analytics with your audience. Formaloo supports automatic data collection and URL parameters and even provides Formaloo SDK to automate data collection between various services in your organization.

Develop Applications without any code

Formaloo’s main point is that you can do anything with your forms and database, even developing full-fledged mobile applications, code-free!

For example, this app is built by Formaloo App Builder without any code in 28 minutes!

Formaloo enables you to create a full-fledged educational app like this for your organization, university, or even your classroom.

Here are some of the features that you can enjoy with Formaloo:

• Auto-update feature: Add/edit/remove lessons without the need to update the app!
• Unlimited Contents: Add unlimited lessons, flashcards & presentation
• Interactive Quiz Maker: Create & Embed live quizzes for your audience
• Categories & folders: Easily organize your contents in different ways
• Access Management: Add your co-workers and manage their access

Check here to meet Formaloo’s no-code app builder:

Access Management and Collaboration Options

Both Formaloo & Typeform offers far more collaboration options than Google Forms.

Formaloo & Typeform users get a number of collaboration features. You can set granular permissions to give different users the ability to view, edit, or comment on surveys. Team members can leave comments on both survey previews and results, and you can send notifications to team members to let them know you made a change or left a comment.

While Typeform won’t allow your team to edit or add the responses, Formaloo gives you full power over your databases, and you can manage who has access to what exactly.

Collaboration in Google Forms is less flexible. You can add collaborators, but the only permission you can set is Edit. There’s no view-only option, and it doesn’t support comments. It also doesn’t send notifications when changes are made, and unlike some of Google’s other tools like Docs and Sheets, Google Forms doesn’t keep a history of changes that you can review.

If you’re collaborating as a team, Google Forms’ collaboration tools won’t be enough at all. If you’re collaborating with a team or external partners—or if you have complex review and approval workflows— Formaloo’s access management system is the obvious choice.

Field Types, Rules, and Scoring

Formaloo has more rules available and offers more robust automated scoring than Typeform and Google Forms.

Formaloo offers more options than Google Forms when it comes to field types and questions. In addition to the basic question types you’ll find in all three tools—multiple-choice, short answer, dropdowns, and checkboxes—Formaloo offers advanced fields such as barcode scanner, video, two-step authentication, geo-location, NPS & CSAT, product & payment-acceptance fields (via Stripe & Paypal), and advance matrices.

All tools also have options for randomizing the order in which respondents see questions, which is helpful when using the tools to build quizzes. But Google Forms only offers an overall randomization option. Formaloo & Typeform provide more granular randomization options, letting you randomize only a specific page or certain questions.

Also, Formaloo provides the Calculator: a powerful tool to score your questions, create quizzes, have multiple formulas and customizations, and even create customer order baskets and connect them to your payment gateways!

Formaloo Calculator helps you create advanced quizzes in minutes. Also, with features like answer sheets and flashcards, educational institutes can manage their whole class within one Formaloo.

Templates

Both Formaloo and Typeform offer more than 200 templates but Google doesn’t offer more than just about 10 templates.

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Formaloo & Typeform both offer a lot of templates—organized by industry and purpose—for everything from market research surveys to employee exit interviews. These templates each contain questions that are vetted by experts, and the questions are presented in an order that maximizes response quantity and quality.

Branching, logic jumps, and Conditional Logic

Formaloo offers more branching and conditional logic options than any other platform.

Conditional logic in surveys boils down to if/then statements. For example, “If the user selects Highly satisfied, then the survey ends and displays a thank-you page.” Or “If the user selects anything less than highly satisfied, send the user to question What could we do better?“

With this feature, it’s like you have multiple forms within one single form. You can use these logic conditions to create full business apps, and smart surveys, automate your workflows, or even clean your data.

Collecting Responses

All three let you send your survey via email, grab a link to post anywhere on the web, or embed the forms onto your website.

But Formaloo offers a lot of other features that Google Forms or Typeform doesn’t. You can create chatbots and connect them to your apps such as Slack, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp, embed your survey into a mobile app, or even collect responses offline using Formaloo’s Mobile-form feature and sync them when you’re back online.

Also, many businesses use Formaloo as their database in their back-end. With Formaloo SDK & API, event developer is able to use Formaloo in their code and save time on developing new products and applications. Check out some samples of what Formaloo can do as a back-end service on Formaloo’s Github page.

Data Analysis and Reporting

In this field, it’s no contest. Formaloo wins data analytics as it is their primary focus. Both google forms and Typeform only offer simple charts for responses,

Formaloo offers Formaloo Customer Data Platform, or CDP for short. It means it automatically analyzes every piece of data you have for your benefit.

Formaloo CDP is powerful, self-serve customer analytics to help you convert, engage, and retain more users. Use your own data to analyze your customers and your business and even predict the future.

Formaloo CDP automatically shows you who are your best customers, who are leaving you for your competitors, and most important of all, how to profit more from each and every customer. Fully automatic without the need to write any code or any help from data scientists.

With our Customer insight and analytics, you can empower and visualize your customers, your data, and your community. In a nutshell, you will see what your business needs and what your customers need, even if they don’t tell you.

Formaloo also provides automatic autofill, which means Formaloo can automatically fill out data for users and reduce the form size and response time. This feature is so useful when you’re creating an internal business application, and you have a lot of repetitive data.

Google Forms vs. Formaloo vs. Typeform: Which App Should You Use?

If price is a concern, you’re better off going with Formaloo. To explain, while Google Forms & Typeform have free plans, they’re extremely limited, and unless you’re making very basic surveys and don’t anticipate many responses, it won’t get you far.

If the design is a key consideration, Formaloo or Typeform are your better bets. Their surveys are much more customizable, and frankly, they look more professional than those created in Google Forms. Formaloo is also a stronger option for advanced users who need quantitative analysis for large amounts of data—or for users who feel that they can leverage options like templates and industry benchmarks.

So again, if you’re doing a survey for a small audience (less than 1,000 people), Typeform can be perfect and not too expensive. If you have an audience of more than 1,000 people or if you use forms regularly in your business (for example, if you’re an SME, university, school, or an event organizer) Formaloo is the obvious choice and far less expensive.

If you’re a developer, the obvious choice is Formaloo, with the full power of Formaloo SDK, API, Webhook, and 3,000+ integrations with other apps.

So that If you’re a data scientist or doing advanced market research, Formaloo is the far better choice because you have access to Formaloo Customer Analytics & Customer Data Platform.

You’re an educational institute like a university or school, or even if you’re a teacher, Formaloo Quiz Maker, with features like answer sheets, lessons, flashcards, presentation mode, and a calculator, can make your life so much easier.

If you’re an event organizer, just check Formaloo live and presentation mode. Have live Q&As, Surveys, and analyze the data. of your attendees is too valuable to miss.

And finally, if your team is looking for a tool to develop internal business applications with no code, Formaloo is your best bet. Give it a try; it’s free.

After all, If you have any questions, check out Formaloo’s support page to find ways you can contact us.

Visit our YouTube channel for more helpful tutorials and resources.