15 Resources for Easily Creating Web Forms
Published in ToolsAlmost every website needs some type of form, whether it be a contact/feedback form, a registration form, a survey, or an order form. Despite the fact that forms are a necessity for just about every project, designers and developers can often be frustrated by the process of creating them, especially more advanced forms.
There are a number of resources available that have been created to make it easier for designers, developers, and website owners to quickly and easily create attractive, usable forms without the need to code. In this post we’ll look at some of the best options available.
The resources featured in this post include some free options and a number of paid options. Most of the paid options include a lot of features, and in many cases the ability to integrate your forms with PayPal or other payment gateways.
Resources for Creating Forms:
With FormSpring you can create standard contact forms, set up surveys, accept donations, manage event registrations and more. The form builder will allow you to easily create forms without the need for coding, and FormSpring helps you to manage the data that is collected through the forms (store in a database, export to Excel, or use the API). You can even use a payment integration feature. A free plan is available that allows 3 forms with 10 fields and 50 saved entries per month, and paid plans range from $14 – $159 per month.
Wufoo’s HTML form builder makes it easy to create contact forms, surveys, registrations, and online payments forms. You can choose from an existing template or customize it to meet your needs. Wufoo also includes some useful reporting tools to help you analyze the data that is being collected. A free plan is available that allows for 1 user, 3 forms, 3 reports, 10 fields, and 100 entries per month (with some limited features). Paid plans range from $9.95 – $199.95 per month.
Icebrrg can be used to create contact forms, registration forms, surveys, application forms, and more. Setting up a new form is easy, and you can view data from submissions, export the data to Excel, and set up payment integration. No free plan or trial is available. Prices range from $9 per month (10 forms and 500 entries per month) to $199 per month.
FormSite has over 100 pre-built forms that can easily be customized to meet your own needs. You can create contact forms, surveys, registration forms, order forms, and more. There is a free account available that allows you to manage 5 forms and 100 submissions per month. The lowest-priced ad-free plan costs $19.95 per month or $199.95 per year.
FormExperts includes more than 100 templates to help you create a variety of different types of forms. The online form builder allows to you easily create forms without any coding. You can set up autoresponders, custom “thank you” pages, format the emails that you’ll receive, and more. A free 10-day trial is available, and paid plans start at $7 per month. Plans that allow you to accept payments start at $17 per month.
MachForm helps you to create PHP forms without the need to code. It is a self-hosted solution option that stores all form submissions in a MySQL database. A single-site license costs $39 and an unlimited license costs $199.
Email Me Form is a free online service that helps you to create HTML and PHP forms. You can upgrade to a plus plan for $9.95 per form which means that you will not have to include a link back to Email Me Form, unlimited forms, and some other features.
FormLogix allows you to create a variety of types of forms (contact and feedback forms, surveys and polls, registrations, invitations, online payments, and more, without coding. A free trial is available for private use (only the account owner can submit forms) and paid plans are available in a few different types. You can pay per form ($3.99 per form per month for 12 months), per submission (starting at $50 for 100 submissions), or VIP ($125 for one month with unlimited use).
FormAssembly allows you to create a wide variety of forms, including contact forms, registration forms, and order forms. There is a free ad-supported plan that will allow you to try out the service. Paid plans range from $9 – $34 per month, or you can choose a pay-as-you-go plan.
With Visitor Contact you can create contact forms with a sticky contact button. Features include auto responders, the option to show a map of your location on forms, and the ability to export form data. A WordPress plugin is also available. Visitor Contract is a free resource.
Contactable is a jQuery plugin from theodin.co.uk that makes it simple to create contact and feedback forms.
WordPress Plugins:
For WordPress users and developers there are a number of plugins that will help you to create forms. Here is a look at some of the best.
Gravity Forms is a premium plugin for WordPress ($39 for single-site license) that makes it quick and easy to create forms for a variety of purposes. You can use the forms to create posts (for user-submitted content), create auto responders, and you can manage form submissions through the WordPress dashboard.
CForms II is a powerful contact form plugin that has a lot of features and options. You can use it to create “tell a friend” forms, set up auto responders and more.
Contact Form 7 is a very popular plugin and is a great choice for creating standard contact forms. It’s fairly easy to setup and create your own forms, and to insert them into a post or page. You can also customize the emails that you’ll receive when a visitor completes the form.
Fast and Secure Contact Form will allow you to set up general contact forms and protect them from spammers with CAPTCHAs and Akismet support.
Any Suggestions?
How do you create web forms? Are there other resources that you use aside from those listed here?
48 Responses
Wow, nice ones for creating superb web forms.
I use tectite which is basically free. If you want access to the form wizard it’s $80 or so for a year without limits on the number of forms, it has great support and while it’s not fancy the wizard makes configuring it really easy.
http://www.tectite.com/
I’m surprised you didn’t include the forms from Google Docs. Not the most elegant, but integrates well with spreadsheet operations.
http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=141062
~ Joseph
Nice post..I have been using Cform II and it really does serve the purpose, plus..it works with WordPress 2.9. Nothing like it…
Formspring is awesome I use it all the time contact forms and surveys for my websites.
Joseph and Deelea,
Thanks for the suggested resources. I’ll check them out.
Definitely a quality list here. Nice job.
Well great ways….contact forms is the best one..!
I’ve been using jotform.com for a while now, you can embed via iframe or copy the code straight on to your site, it’s cheap (free untill youhit a higher turnover of submissions) and it stores all submissions securely online with the option of sending someone a link or a customised download of results (in addition to to emailing hte results as well)
I’m a big supporter of Wufoo, but those last two examples look really interesting, I’m going to check them out now. Thanks for sharing!
Wow, this is probably your worst article ever!
Creating forms in php (or asp if your retarded) is easy and takes less than 10 minutes. If your a designer and can’t make one yourself pay a developer to make one. I doubt it would cost more than $20 these days.
Reasons you should NOT use ANY of the above forms:
1 – Privacy, let give all our important data to another company, so they can read/sell/data mine our data.
2 – Slow – Loading an Iframe on your page takes forever.
3 – Unreliable – Their servers go down and you have a blank page
4 – Impossible data mining – excel? come on databases are around cause they work 100 time better for data mining.
So basically what you are saying Nick is that you can create a form using ajax to locate the back end – confirm it hasn’t been an entry already – relay the information back up front and make it pretty in less than 10 mins?
I agree that a form isn’t a thing needed to be paid for, but the idea of the article I think anyway was to make a designers life easier. Well a designer isn’t always a coder, and I know a few businesses that want to update their forms as they evolve without coding. These are great examples for them.
I must say I agree a bit with Nick. Creating forms is a pretty basic and easy process, aside from some of the validation and ajax/js interface additions. I think the biggest issue with forms is making them look good aesthetically, which is the real advantage of using a 3rd party solution like these.
Maybe you can mention that appnito (from the Machform) has a generator for static forms with a clean look. Very nice tool that outputs form elements with a great design and good css/html code:
http://www.phpform.org/
Just adding form support to loggingit.com … Not quite there yet, but with some user feedback it should be really good.
I doubt very much any of your examples encrypt the form input — what the user enters. So the service provider can read it as much as the intended recipient.
Not so with loggingit .. the form data is encrypted, and only readable by whoever set up the form.
Try this one:
https://secure.loggingit.com/api/log/2389bedacfb6ccbc-41f33a7b18c6c686aef572d58d7259d9
(Header text, page title, and labels for the input field can be configured)
See you
Stephan
Thanks for the great post! I’ve tried Wufoo and Iceberrg but Caspio Bridge is my favorite. It has a simple point-and-click format but when I need a more customized solution, I still have the option to tweak it with almost any programming language. It saves me a ton of time: http://www.caspio.com/web-database-platform/web-forms-online.asp
Ni Nick,
I understand your point that forms are not that difficult, but there are situations where services like these are appropriate. A few examples:
- You need a simple form for accepting event registrations and collecting a fee.
- You want to allow clients to create forms whenever they need them and use them on their own site rather than paying you each time they need a change.
- You need to create a long, detailed form (I had one recently that would have taken hours to do manually, but I did in in a fraction of that time with Gravity Forms).
Iframes are not necessary with many of these options, so that’s not a good reason to ignore these forms. Some of them (such as the WP Plugins) are hosted on your own server, so that reason isn’t always relevant either. And advanced data mining is only necessary on a small percentage of forms that you would ever create, and I think a few of these options will allow you to export databases other than just to Excel.
nice info to create web forms.. thank you
Simfatic Forms is a desktop tool to make web forms. There is no subscription or monthly charge. http://www.simfatic.com
I use CformII and will give a try to the resources you mentioned above. Thanks for sharing.
Excellent disscussion!
Okay I also see your point where a third party form is valid some of the time (rarely).
Still sticking to my points of:
* Concern for privacy
* Over collecting data from your users and therefore annoying them
* Speed (performace)
I was unaware of the wordpress plugin, and I’ll totally check that out.
I’m also opposed to having the client edit their forms as in my opinion forms require the most amount of UI experience.
If your client creates a form that nobody fills out they aren’t going to blame them-selfs, they are going to blame something you did on the rest of the site. Weak point but true for most clients.
Hey Nick,
I think overcollecting data can apply whether you are creating forms manually or using one of these options, so I don’t really see how that is applicable. I agree with you that it’s not ideal to have clients editing forms, but there are situations where a client is working with a limited budget and they’re not going to pay a designer to setup a simple form with 3 or 4 fields that they could easily create themselves.
Jotform http://www.jotform.com/
100 submissions a month for free, no limit to the amount of fields, no limit to the amount of forms, and up to 10MB file uploads.
Thanks for including the prices too – this is exactly the guide I am looking for a for a new site. Formsite looks like a good option to cater for a range of different styles.
Awesome blog, as usual from you guys! Now what do you do with all the data that goes into the form? This is where a CRM application comes in.
Or if you’re running wordpress, then have a look at this to make your life super easy:
http://blog.thisispearl.com/2010/01/05/wordpress-crm-contact-form-plugin/
At some point soon we’ll be providing API connections to all these form building apps.
Chris
Nice. I def could have used this info months ago. I haphazardly discovered formexperts before and have been using that, but I knew there were probably better solutions out there. As for whoever mentioned Caspio, I had checked them out as well but found their pricepoint too high for me (I’m cheap, sorry) but had I given myself more time to fiddle around with their platform, it probably would have been a more flexible solution moving forward.
Thanks for sharing – is see same at – Twapt.net Mobile Form Builder helps you build forms, in just minutes, without any programming or design experience.
Your clients and visitors will be able to contact you anytime, anywhere, because your forms are accessible and can be filled from every mobile phone in the world.
Whether you want a contact form, a quick survey, an inscription form, employee reports, opinion polls, or any other input, using Twapt.net Mobile Form Builder – 5 minutes and you’re ready to go. Everywhere.
If you’re interested in using Google Forms for this purpose we’ve got an easy tutorial on our site that will show you how to style your form and create a custom confirmation page. Best of all it’s free!
Check it out here: http://www.morningcopy.com.au/how-to-style-google-forms/
Hi,
You can also add Omnistar Forms http://www.omnistarforms.com to this list.
Free online forms, with SSL
http://www.fospace.com
We actually use wufoo for our request form, it’s really useful! Thanks for posting, these seem great alternatives
Just trying to decide between a paid and a free option. I might give contact form 7 a go and see if that fills my needs. If not I’ll have a look at gravity forms I think…. Thanks alot….
Hello, fellows!
It is a great post)
Glad that I found it.
I think that http://phpforms.net/ is a must program for every web developer.
You’all may want to check out http://formfiesta.com is easy, unlimited, no branding, and only 14.99 per YEAR!
cheers!
Some good examples provided here. You want the contact form to be simple and super easy to complete and submit. However, it does not hurt to apply some unique design elements to make it stand out. After all, getting your visitors to fill out the form is what really matters!
Alex
Isadora Design | Web Design Services
Very helpful list! Thanks for assembling it! Coffee Cup (www.coffeecup.com) just released their Web Form Builder.