Formstack Forms vs. Sawtooth Lighthouse Studio

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

Anyone wanting to design and analyze advanced studies, particularly those that incorporate discrete choice modeling (such as MaxDiff and / or Conjoint) should be using Sawtooth Lighthouse Studio. The capabilities and flexibility offered by this platform for these choices is far beyond any other platform I am aware of. It is less appropriate where you need the survey tool to 'play well with others.' Two examples: 1) pulling in live data streams so they can be cleaned and visualized. 2) Integrating into any service where an API call is appropriate such as adding / removing people from a mailing list, incentive management tool, or qualitative community tool.

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

• Powerful programming capabilities
• Advanced analysis
• Fantastic customer and technical support
• Good documentation

Incentivized

• 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

• They could focus on integrating API type functionality
• I would love if the data came out labeled
• I am not a fan of the 'limited' time a study can stay up. This causes issues with longitudinal studies.

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

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

It is incredibly powerful, very rhobust and has fantastic support. The only reasons I'm not giving it a higher rating are 1) There is a very steep learning curve when it comes to designing more complex studies. 2) It is difficult to get Sawtooth Lighthouse Studio to 'talk' to other systems as the Perl upon which it is built is not really designed to work with API calls, etc.

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

I cannot explain how great the support team is. They are prompt and very thorough in their responses.

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

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

While QuestioPro has the capability to build surveys and even do some advanced analysis, it is less powerful (and less intuitive) than Sawtooth Lighthouse Studio. It cannot handle studies with the complexity we are used to designing. The CMNTY Platform was initially sold to us as a combined Quant / Qual platform, but we found very quickly that the quant side of it is extremely limited.

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

• Our business is survey data so we rely heavily on sawtooth
• The advanced design and analytics are incredibly useful
• Negative - I wish it would work natively with API calls

Incentivized