Cognito Forms vs. Formstack Forms

It's excellent for small sets of forms, from simple to highly complex It's not good at scale. With over 170 forms now, we desperately need some way to manage and maintain shared content once Cognito does not help. Their approach is that you can copy a working form (great) and modify it to create the next one. That's how we've got so many forms...

Formstack makes it easy to create a variety of forms. I have used it for event interest and registrations, email list sign-ups, and surveys. I have found it easy to customize, and easy to export data for import into other systems (e.g., CRM).

Incentivized

• New Hire Form - It announces the new hire and provides direction to several departments on their needs, computer, phone, security level, etc.
• Terminations - We use it to shut off security, badges, computers, track phone, electronics, etc.
• Temp Form - It provides an avenue to enter them into our payroll system for tracking hours, also, for the start and end dates.

Incentivized

• Formstack allowed us to customize the look and feel of our forms to match our branding. It was easy for our engineers to integrate the forms within our onboarding process to deliver a seamless experience.
• Formstack integrates well with HubSpot, our marketing automation platform of choice.
• Formstack offered us a lot of flexibility in the types/formats of questions we could deploy (open-ended text, multi-choice, single choice, etc.). This made it easy to get data the way we wanted and facilitated getting that data into HubSpot.

Incentivized

• We have families of forms with a mix of unique parts and common functionality. Cognito has no ability to copy a field or a section (set of fields) between forms. If you need to update the common functionality, you have to do it separately for each affected form.
• It seems that the (large and impressive) functionality has outgrown the capabilities provided to manage sets of complex forms that exploit this functionality - such as copying and pasting between forms or being able to define a section in one place and have it appear in many forms (#include)
• The documentation is incomplete - often have to discover how things work by trial and error
• A spell checker for content would be nice!

• Buggy Updates: Formstack tends to make on-the-fly updates that break features. We run into this about once a year
• Appearance: the forms are starting to look dated compared to some of the competitors (looking at you, Typeform)
• Dynamic Data: passing data from one field to another is not-exactly doable
• Paid Add-Ons: the price for Formstack is already an arm and a leg; the fact that they have additional monthly paid add-ons is frustrating
• User Limits: user accounts barely do anything outside of 'view/edit' permissions, thus the low volume allocated seems a bit greedy at $10/user/mo for more

Incentivized

Our user base has come to rely on Formstack to get forms done. The Formstack tools make it easy to start from scratch or copy an existing form to "quick start" a new, similar form. The price is right and frees up IT staff to do more transformative work.

Incentivized

We have been using Cognito Forms for over 5 years. We find it very easy use and it is part of the programs we use on a daily basis.

Incentivized

I give it this rating because Ali feel like just about anyone can use this. Now with 7 billion people in the work I understand that’s not the case but I feel like Formstack get it pretty simple where a majority of humans could use it and navigate through. The only reason I didn’t give it a higher rating is because I think Google Forms is a little easier to use and that it’s pretty much impossible for any product to get a 10 on usability in my opinion.

Incentivized

Very friendly and helpful, but typically takes at least one day to respond. However, when they do respond they dive right into the specific form I ask about and tell me exactly how to fix what I need help with

Incentivized

Formstack has awesome support! They are always quick to respond and genuinely care for their clients' success. They will work with you to find a solution or let developers know about your feature request. There are a few things on the feature request forum that I wish they would implement sooner, but I am at least grateful that they give clients a space to voice their ideas and take them into consideration.

Incentivized

We implemented on one of the earlier versions. Through continuous engineering improvements, the interface keeps getting easier and more intuitive. Therefore, later implementations keep getting easier and better.

Incentivized

I have not used any other programs like Cognito Forms. I have been with my company for almost two years. I very much like the ease of this system and its capabilities. I like knowing everyone is using the same thing. I do not foresee us making any changes to our current use of Cognito Forms.

Incentivized

Formstack just had more versatility. We had to start in a rush and they gave us what we needed to hit the ground running. They didn't delay or bog us down with complicated sales pitches, and didn't leave us in the dark on what to do. We didn't need to google how to use the program!

Incentivized

• We have used Cognito Forms in place of having to purchase a specific platform or software for Employee Engagement
• We have used Cognito Forms for great surveys and found the reporting pretty good too

Incentivized

• Positive - ability to analyze submission trends - e.g. when a marketing email is sent, looking at increased form viewing and submissions in relation to the sending of the campaign.
• Immediate response - those that submit forms receive immediate response that their form has been submitted.

Incentivized