Forms are everywhere around us in the virtual world; for the users, it is a means to register for a website or provide feedback for the service or product you used. Both for customers and business owners, forms are a handy tool for many reasons, and they are designed to serve more than one purpose. As a result, utmost care should be taken to design online forms, and having an excellent form builder at your disposal will be an added advantage. Let’s learn something more in this regard.
Types of Forms on Websites
Online forms are of different types and are classified based on the intent and the type of information they capture from the user. Below are the most common types of online forms you will come across during your online journey.
Newsletter Signup
The form type contains one or two fields, typically name, and email. Users can sign up for the form to provide their consent to receive the content from the website.
Sales Contact
The sales contact form collects sales-particular information from the users having a high chance of making a purchase and quickly sends the data to the sales team.
Event Registration
Event managers use this form to manage the attendees and capture basic details, along with event-specific information like name, time, venue, event schedule, and more.
Customer Feedback
These are survey forms that are addressed to your customers who have tried your product or service. Fields, here, are mostly in the form of questions where users can express their views.
Online Order and Payments
These types of forms are found on e-commerce websites where customers have to provide the order and payment-related details before making the purchase.
Account Signup
This is the most common form type used to collect user data and permit them to create an account on the website.
Donation
Donation forms are used by organizations to collect donors’ information and payment details when they intend to make donations.
Best Practices for Form Designs
Here are some of the best practices you should keep in mind when designing a form for your website.
Choose such form builders that are easy to use and help design intuitive forms for the users to fill up quickly without having to seek external help. Ensure form design consistency across your brand’s website to look more professional. Use labels to be more clear and more accessible to the users. It is recommended to keep the logically related form fields like names, addresses, and payment info together and in line to avoid confusion and breaking user flow. Try to present clear errors on the form if the user commits a mistake during form filling. This should be done to avoid keeping the users guessing about what’s wrong.
Designing intuitive forms for your website is a crucial web designing segment that is sidelined by web designers commonly sidelined. Interestingly there are excellent form builders that help newbies and seasoned designers implement the correct form type, track data submissions and collect data. Choosing the best form builder from the tons of available options can be overwhelming. To save you the effort, we have conducted extensive research, tried and tested the tools ourselves, and listed the best form builder tools below.
Google Forms
Probably one of the simplest form builders and packed with powerful features, Google Forms provides one of the easiest ways to create an online form. This might be the best option for you if you are already accustomed to the other offerings by Google. If you think Google Forms are boring, you will be surprised to know that Google Forms offer a decent number of templates for you to choose from depending on the form you are using. Google Forms allow a fair degree of customization; you can choose from multiple question types, drag and drop the questions to reorder them and provide custom values in the list. It is also possible to pick your color palette, add images, and choose from multiple fonts, tweak the look and feel to suit your brand’s style. You also add customized logic that presents the next question based on the previously answered question. Google Forms are mostly used during surveys as it enables the users to analyze real-time responses as a pictorial representation.
Tally
Tally is another form builder worth a mention on the list owing to the simplest and quickest way it offers for creating online forms. It expects you to have absolutely zero coding knowledge, and its document-like design requires a low learning curve and is incredibly easy to master. While you can always switch to the premium version of Tally if you need to utilize some of its advanced features, the free version itself is armed with useful ones, which make the experience absolutely worthwhile. Tally allows unlimited form creation and submission in the free version, and you can also use the tool to collect payments and document submissions. You can also specify the form closing date and display a closing message before redirecting it to some other webpage if need be. Tally supports integration with platforms like Notion, Zapier, Airtable, Make, and Google Sheets. Some other free features are as follows:
Custom `Thank You’ page Email notifications Form logic Calculator Hidden fields Answer piping Close on submission limit
TypeForm
TypeForm is a popular form builder highly preferred because of its appealing form designs that encourage conversion. It understands that boring forms are a turn down for the audiences and the websites deter using poorly designed ones. The form builder is packed with a large number of pre-designed stylish templates, which you are free to choose from. TypeForm supports Google Analytics integration that enables you to analyze data in real time. Some of the unique features of TypeForm are as follows:
Forms can be customized to display one question at a time instead of all at once to improve the form completion rates. The form builder loves shortcuts and ensures that the entire form can be built using keyboard keys. Selecting multiple choice questions to type in dropdown everything is possible using just keyboards. The forms are responsive and mobile, which enables visitors on a mobile phone to easily fill out the forms without any difficulties.
JotForm
Available on the web, iOS, and Android, JotForm empowers you to create the type of form you need within a few minutes. These professional-looking forms can be built without writing codes and can be easily integrated into business apps with ease. The form builder is feature rich and allows the use of conditional logic to automate the workflows. You can also style your form as per your liking by modifying the logo, fonts, colors, and other elements. Jotform allows seamless online payments directly on the form and can be used in several scenarios, like e-commerce platforms, accepting online fees, and collecting donations. The analytics section delivers in-depth insights into the responses gathered, such as completion rate, and allows you to generate shareable reports directly from the platform. JotForm supports more than 150 integrations enabling you to automatically send the form responses to email marketing services, project management boards, CRMs, cloud storage apps, and more.
CognitoForms
Suitable for beginners as well as advanced users, CognitoForms is another form builder you can opt for to fulfill your form creation needs. The free plan itself offers handy features, but not to forget, the subscription plans are pretty affordable in case you are looking for a tool to create complex forms. The free plan supports unlimited form creation, and the template library is stuffed with more than a hundred free template designs. The Cognito forms are completely responsive and support more than 20 form fields in the free plan. You can easily tailor the template forms to match the branding of your organization. Interestingly, Cognito form builder supports more than twenty languages, including Chinese, Dutch, French, English, Spanish, Japanese, Polish, and Portuguese, supports 137 currencies, and is available in 121 countries allowing you to easily reach out to your audiences worldwide in their native language.
ZohoForms
ZohoForms are a part of the vast Zoho app family that includes CRM (customer relationship management), email, accounting, document editing, and other apps. The form builder fits well in scenarios where you have to conduct online surveys as it permits you to create and share forms online and set up email alerts to get notified whenever someone fills out the form. ZohoForms are scalable to meet the demands of all business sizes, and the clean and intuitive interface uncomplicates the complete form creation process. ZohoForms integrates perfectly with third-party apps such as Zapier, Google Drive, SalesForce, and other apps to facilitate free data flow for all types of businesses. This form builder greatly simplifies the data collection by automatically sending the form data into a custom database. Some of the notable features are:
30+ customizable templates and themes. Design custom thank you pages, tasks, and emails to redirect after submitting the response. Assign tasks and approvers and set access permissions as per your need. Set form rules and specific form fields to filter the unwanted data.
Wufoo
Wufoo is a cloud-based form-building software that empowers organizations to create online forms for different purposes, such as registration forms, application forms, surveys, contact forms, payment forms, and more. The powerful form builder tool is equipped with photo galleries, templates, form fields, and an easy-to-use interface that facilitate easy template customization and reporting. Wufoo is suitable for users lacking coding expertise as the drag-and-drop editor enables you to design forms for collecting data and submitting files without writing a single line of code. Wufoo has partnered with payment apps like PayPal, Stripe, and Authorize.Net to enable payment collection through the platform. The form builder offers Wix-powered stylish and modern templates that are easily customizable to reflect the look and feel of your brand or website. Wufoo allows you to pre-populate common demographic options for a multiple-choice field to set predefined choices for gender, age, employment, income, and education options, in a hassle-free manner if you are targeting a specific type of visitor.
123FormBuilder
As easy as the name suggests, 123FormBuilder, a secure form-building tool, enables you to create online forms as easily as chanting 1-2-3! The form builder is useful in infinite data collection use cases- for creating registration forms, order forms, application forms, surveys, and more. Featuring a no-code, drag & drop free form editor, vouchers to help collect data in a secure manner and improve your productivity by minimizing your efforts. The template library is packed with more than 2000 pre-designed form templates to help you get started, and you can tailor these forms to meet your personal demands. 123FormBuilder can handle a variety of use cases- event registration, payment collection, enrolling new users, conducting surveys, or collecting feedback from customers. The form builder supports integration with over 4000 digital tools like Wix, Shopify, Dropbox, Marketo, or HubSpot, enabling workflow automation in your organization and eliminating the need to manually import and export data.
Conclusion
The form builders we’ve mentioned above are the best picks so far. The best one for your organizational or personal use will be that which caters to your needs or objectives. You can compare the features of different form builders to pick the apt tool, and we’re positive you’ll find the perfect fit. You may also explore some WordPress Form Builders.
