Lightning Tools Lightning Forms vs. Typeform

We've used lightning forms on literally dozens of our SharePoint sites now and it's just excellent, especially because it doesn't interfere with our ability to governance and administer the sites

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.

• Simple user interface - users of the forms intuitively aware of how/where to input information. This is in part due to being able to show or hide different questions or areas of the form, and making them required or not, based on previous answers.
• Low/simple code - building complex forms with automation and multiple dependencies or lookups is relatively easy once you get started. You have the power of JavaScript to use and do some quite clever things if you can get to grips with it - a lot of solutions are only a Google away.
• As it is based on SharePoint, it integrates perfectly with the rest of the M365 suite. Things like PowerAutomate enhance its functionality even further.

• 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

• The styling of the form can sometimes be slightly awkward to use depending on what you're looking to do. For instance, if I was looking to highlight fields that users have missed (left empty), I would need to set up a validation for that question and then set a style for that particular field for when it is invalid. When you have a large and complex form with lots of dependencies, this is awkward.
• Support for complex and niche issues is slightly lacking in my experience. I submitted a helpdesk ticket for help with a strange issue I couldn't figure out, which took several weeks to get a response to. Because it is niche, it's more difficult to find an answer by searching the internet. Luckily, knowing there is likely to always be a fix if you find the right place/use the right formula, I manage to resolve the issue with some trial and error.
• It is disappointing that Lightning Forms does not integrate with the MS Lists app. Having the ability to access the form through the list app would add in a lot of useful functionality, including a better experience for users when taking photos to add as attachments.

• 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

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

Incentivized

It is very user friendly both to me who is building the content (with little background knowledge of coding etc., other than what I have picked up from using products like PowerAutomate, PowerBI, a bit of html etc.) and to end users of varying levels of IT proficiency. This has been extremely important as we have used the forms to make relatively large process changes, and need to have our users on board and seeing that it is actually easier than it was before.

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

Some support has been okay, but in one instance of a fairly complex problem, the support team were not able to provide me with a fix within a few weeks, before I was able to find a workaround myself.

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

We were using Microsoft Forms, SharePoint Lists and PowerAutomate to attempt to do much of what we are currently doing. Functionality is very limited in comparison. The ability to make questions required based on previous answers was a massive improvement from normal SharePoint List forms and has greatly improved the quality of data. Also just the very visual display and customisation is much better.

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

• We changed the process by which site colleagues report repairs on behalf of customers. Instead of emailing them into a shared inbox, they now report them using a lightning form. We have seen a great improvement in the time taken for our team to log the repair issue from the time is arrives with them.
• We anticipate that streamlining our void property reletting process by using a SharePoint kanban board view with lightning forms (providing a single platform for all things void) will reduce avoidable days vacant and therefore reduce our void loss.

• 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.