#1 most frequent
United States of America
62.2%7,750 installations of 12,456
What is Cognito Forms?
Cognito Forms, from the company of the same name in South Carolina, is presented by the vendor as an easy-to-use online form builder, allowing anyone to create, publish, and manage forms, with free and paid plans. With it, users can create unlimited forms including registration forms, payment forms, and surveys without coding. Forms can be embedded directly into a website, and form submissions can be viewed from any device, any time.
Categories & Use Cases
Videos
Top Performing Features
Standard reports
Includes canned reports that allow users to generate and share accurate survey results.
Category average: 8.2
Compliance
Supports privacy compliance and confidentiality standards, such as HIPPA.
Category average: 9.1
Custom logo/branding
Allows the user to include their company logo (rather than the survey vendor’s logo) and/or create a company template so that branding is consistent across multiple surveys.
Category average: 8.5
Areas for Improvement
Changes to live survey
Users can make changes to live surveys after they are published.
Category average: 8.3
Question design help
Includes educational material about question design for research, such as tips, recommendations, and information about best practices.
Category average: 8.3
Themes
Includes options for the look & feel of a survey, including different colors, fonts, layouts, etc.
Category average: 7.1
Who Buys & Uses Cognito Forms
#2 most frequent
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
9.9%1,229 installations of 12,456
#3 most frequent
Canada
5.7%704 installations of 12,456
The perfect form creator for any business
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Cognito Forms for internal forms such as daily profit / cost reporting, incident reports, employee reviews, interview forms as well as customer facing agreements / terms of service forms. It does everything we need it to do and love how it captures and sorts individual entries for easy review at a later date.
Pros
- Form building
- Data collection
- Reporting / submissions
Cons
- More options for form creating
- Advanced calculations fields
- Design
Return on Investment
- Efficiency
- Cost effective
- Branding
Usability
Cognito Forms is the business
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Cognito Forms for various instances including surveys, but most recently have incorporated it into a Employee Recognition and Rewards program. Cognito Forms allows for highly customisable workflows and really adds value where we would have needed to go and pay for a platform or specific software. We have been really happy with the results
Pros
- Branching Scenarios
- Workflows
- Surveys
Cons
- It isnt the most user friendly if you have someone who isnt experienced
- Learning curve is pretty high
- Should be easier to customise the formatting
Return on Investment
- 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
Usability
Alternatives Considered
Canva, Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Adobe Acrobat Sign and Adobe Analytics
Other Software Used
Microsoft 365, Microsoft SharePoint
Wonderful, but a maintenance headache
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We run professional certification programs for senior Architects, Data Scientists, and Technical Specialists. We use Cognito Forms to collect candidate information including descriptions of experience and demonstrations of skill. We have business rules regarding dates, levels of seniority, areas of expertise, etc. We also use Cognito forms for subject matter experts to record their reviews of the candidates' applications, and we use them to gather the findings of peer review boards that interview candidates. In addition, we use the forms' lookup and workflow capabilities to select the reviewers and route candidate forms to them
Pros
- Powerful conditional logic for controlling visibility, optionality etc
- Lookups to provide access to lists from other forms, plus filters to select valid entries
- Email based workflow, and the ability to open pre-filled forms from links in the email
- Responsive and knowledgable support by email
- The ability to structure a form into sections, and sections within sections, to group related fields together for naming and reference, and for copying/pasting within the form
Cons
- 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!
Return on Investment
- We've been able to get away from Word and pdf forms and build a functionality that is conditional on form content
- The speed of getting a good-enough version up and running to meet an immediate business need is outstanding
- The cost of improving a set of almost good-enough forms or propagating a change in business rules is depressing
Usability
Fantastic, flexible tool for data gathering and online contracts.
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Cognito forms to create online, custom forms to gather a huge array of client information. We also use Cognito forms for our client engagement letters as it allows us to custom tailor them for each client while also collecting payment through Stripe.
Pros
- Conditional logic
- Answer piping
- Iframe embedding
- Support is friendly and easy to work with to resolve issues on your specific form
- Zapier integration opens up endless possibilities to automate using the information from your form
Cons
- Calculated field syntax is extremely unwieldy and difficult to use if you are not a programmer
- Self-help material is nonspecific and difficult to extract usable information from
- The features that require a paid subscription seem arbitrary at times
- Submitted forms aren’t static. Changes to the form template reflect in submitted forms as well which is just dumb.
Return on Investment
- Increased control over cash flow
- Enhanced client experience
- Flexible, intuitive forms for client use
Usability
Cognito Forms Review
Pros
- Cost effective.
- Easy to use.
- Safe.
- Automates data collection.
Cons
- Implement payment platforms from outside the US specifically South Africa.
Return on Investment
- Safe us a lot of time doing client onboarding.
- Use it for data collection for business plan info collection.
Other Software Used
AWeber, Calendly, Nifty