Google Forms vs. Typeform

Appropriate Scenarios

• Data collection
• Formative assessment
• Survey/questionnaire
• File uploads (Can be limited to particular sizes or file types).

Inappropriate Scenarios

• Lessons where you need instant feedback to answers rather than waiting for the whole form to be completed.
• File Uploads where not all of the users have Google accounts.

Incentivized

Typeform is definitely a leader in the online survey space and that's for a reason. Between logic mapping and the ease of use for the end user, it's a solid app. The unfortunate thing, however, is the price tag--particularly considering the protection you receive from bots. Typeform only allows a certain number of responses at certain package levels, ie: the lowest level, you get a very limited number of responses but in order to receive more responses before your survey is locked, you must upgrade. This is what ultimately lead us to cancel with them. When you post a survey on Typeform, that survey is automatically posted publicly on their website--making it widely available to bots. Typeform offers no easy form of protection like a standardized captcha that you can add to the survey in order to filter bots out. Instead, there are several "work arounds" that they advise users to do that have very limited degrees of success. A quick online search shows that Typeform knows this is clearly an issue, yet they have yet to build in a bot-prevention feature. Since their plan prices vary by number of responses, it seems that they have no incentive to limit the amount of bots filling out surveys I believe. Ultimately, we canceled because, although the app is powerful, it just seemed like their business practices were unethical in my opinion.

• Capture of information from clients and/or consultants for real-time analysis.
• Knowledge evaluation for our work team, the predefined templates allow the creation of tests and knowledge tests that are very didactic and easy to grade.
• The acquired data is cleanly integrated with google spreadsheets allowing for fast and accurate analysis.
• The form completion notifications are customizable and do their job well.

Incentivized

• Working in Typeform is automatic and intuitive. It's easy to find the surveys we're looking for and to manage or edit them (duplicating, creating, removing surveys, as well as putting them in folders). I didn't have to "learn" how to use it; when creating a new survey, the app just flows in a way that you know what the next step is and how to get there. The appearance of the app is clean and beautiful, without losing the details you need to customize.
• Like I said above, while Typeform is simple and automatic, it doesn't skimp out on all the customization and tweaks you need to create a fitting survey for your exact use case. They have a wide selection of custom questions you can ask in your survey (from a simple 'Yes/No' to an 'Opinion Scale' to even payment collection) and many different settings for those questions (make it required, add a description/image/video, etc.).
• You can also customize the look and feel of each individual Typeform, and save each appearance as a template setting to use again! This has really helped us make Typeform our own by adding our own branding to it.
• Typeform makes it so easy for users to respond to surveys. They have a clean, beautiful experience that flows and no one has issues submitting responses. Typeform has an Intercom integration, which is perfect as we use Intercom with our customers, so it's easy to just issue a Typeform survey with our in-app chat to get quick and numerous responses.

Incentivized

• Edit view limits the questions as seen by viewers. The view function is nice to toggle between to see what the question will look like, but the edit view of some questions (like checkboxes) is confusing for the editor.
• It would be wonderful to be able to assign responses to go to specific users. The user needs to go into the responses section and select the option to receive notifications, versus the owner of the form being able to do that.
• Having a dependency feature for questions (in addition to sections) would be very helpful, so that if a question is answered a certain way, another question appears.

Incentivized

• Greater form customization, though I understand that by giving users more control, that might impede overall intuitiveness from a respondent's standpoint.
• Better reporting and data export.
• Logic jump is great, but the way it's designed could be clearer—I wish there was a way to see an indent of the questions that would only be asked under certain conditions within the preview itself, not just the form map.

Incentivized

I will definitely renew my use of Google Forms because I really like the ease of use and the number of tools that Google forms provide. I also love that I can administer a test in real-time and get results in a timely manner

Incentivized

We have had such success with Typeform, and it has been able to exceed our expectations for the range of products it offers

Incentivized

The interface is simple and intuitive. The first time you use Google Forms, it has a built in tutorial that goes through all the basics. Most people can pick up how to use it with minimal support. There are some advanced features that require a bit more work but there are plenty of videos and directions online. Google has a great support section that is easy to follow

Incentivized

Typeform takes a little bit of getting used to. Compared to Google Forms there are a lot more parts to the software and customizing the form isn't as intuitive. I have also found that embedding it into one smaller section of a webpage seamlessly can be a little tricky. But everything can be figured out eventually and the analytics are very good.

Incentivized

In the years I've used GoogleForms I've never ran into any issues with the reliability or availability. Google is a gigantic company with essentially limitless resources which makes it very easy to trust that I will continue to be able to enjoy the same reliability I've come to know and expect from GoogleForms

Incentivized

One of the things that comes as a benefit of the lack to create complex logic branching and truly custom design is that there isn't lot of room to bog down the software. GoogleForms has always loaded just as fast as my internet service and device would allow it. I'm not sure about front end integrations or integrations into the form itself, as I've never explored it, but on the backend, I've never had any issues with integrations channeling from GoogleForms from the GoogleForms's end of things.

Incentivized

I have not had to use Google Forms support - it's always worked as expected. However, with other Google products, I've always been able to find a plethora of resources for answering questions or dealing with issues. The benefit of Google is how widely adopted its products are and how robust its support is.

Incentivized

I haven't used the support portion of Typeform, as everything was quite easy to use. I have never encountered a situation where I did not know what to do or how to fix something myself. Typeform is very easy to adopt within any organization, no matter if you understand tech or not.

Incentivized

Google Forms is easy to use and affordable. The biggest benefit, however, is that our organization already uses other Google products heavily. Because of this Google Forms was our top choice. Some smaller departments in our organization still use other solutions, such as SurveyMonkey, but as a whole it has been helpful to standardize on a single product.

Incentivized

Google Forms is really useful for creating basic forms when you don't want to pay to create them. I have found Typeform to be much easier to use than Google Forms, and more user-friendly, even in the basic plan. That was enough to get me to switch to Typeform before we even looked at upgrading to the pro plan. Now, we have features that I don't think are available on Google Forms.

Incentivized

GoogleForms lacks the ability for complex logic branching and the ability to truly design it in a custom manner. It's pretty obvious when you land on a GoogleForm that it is in fact a GoogleForm. This rating solely reflects the lack of flexibility which in turn makes it something that wouldn't usually be scaled. That being said, if needing to scale a simple solution, GoogleForms would be up for the job.

Incentivized

• Google Forms provides us a vehicle to gauge faculty and student response to our online courses and their features in real time so that we can keep our courses updated for students and faculty who facilitate them.
• Since Google is free, provides storage space, and provides Shared Drives (at least in our institutional account), using Google Forms helps us manage our data. We support over 400 courses with thousands of sections so Google Forms helps us manage the data coming out of these courses, mostly student and faculty feedback about what is working and what is not.
• We encourage our faculty to use Google Forms to survey their students for prior knowledge, for interest inventories, and the like. It's incredibly nimble and useful for collecting data quickly and presenting results in easy-to-understand charts and graphs.

Incentivized

• Typeform has played a major role in allowing us to fully automate our training intake process for more organized training request management that leads into our project management workflow.
• Typeform has allowed us to rapidly develop solutions using online forms for feedback, product quizzes, and registrations.
• Typeform's low cost means that it pays for itself after a single project each year. No question about renewing each year.