Organising an event and want to know whether potential participants are coming and if they have any dietary requirements? Or running an open call where makers can apply with their email address, phone number and a motivation letter as an attachment? Online form tools such as Google Forms are often used for this. But which tool do you choose if you don’t want to rely on a big tech company? And how do you make sure your audience’s data stays safe?
Many organisations use Microsoft Office 365 or Google Workspace in the office. Both platforms also include a tool for creating your own forms. And what makes these tools ridiculously handy on top of that is that the results flow into an online spreadsheet in real time, where you can immediately run your analyses. Still, there are major objections to using these two companies’ forms.
First of all, you’re exposing your audience (the people filling in the forms), usually without asking, to these companies’ hunger for data. Most people are probably happy to send you, as an organisation, some information. That’s usually in their own interest. But it’s questionable whether they’re okay with that information also being stored by these companies. Quite apart from the content, these companies also process user data such as IP addresses, visit times and browser details. Filling in the form may serve a good cause, but sharing your personal information with these companies still leaves a bad taste. And as the organisation sending the form around, that’s on you.
Secondly, by using these companies’ tools, you’re also advertising them. It’s a clever strategy by Microsoft and Google to state clearly at the bottom of their forms that they were made with their tools. Without realising it, you’re contributing to their marketing strategy, sending their advertisement around your network or audience along with your form. Using the tool, combined with the blatant branding, means your organisation ends up promoting Microsoft’s and Google’s tools. There are, of course, far nicer or better products to advertise. Here are a few examples:
European alternatives
Without listing them one by one: there are countless European alternatives for forms on the market. Whatever the type of form or niche, there’s a provider for it.
We can expect European providers to comply with the GDPR, although we can’t guarantee that for every party. Some have additional certifications meant to build trust that your target group’s or audience’s data is handled with care.
Most European companies offering forms do so for a fee. That model gives such a company less reason to sell on the data that can be collected through the forms. Still, before you start using a tool, it’s wise to read the privacy terms to get a picture of how data is processed and what options there are for exporting all your data. Or to find out how long data may be kept after you decide to leave the provider.
Want more control over that? Then take a look at open source solutions you could host yourself. With an open source solution, you can always check (or have someone check) what really happens to the data and how secure it is, and you can move to a different provider more easily, should you ever need to.
Below is an overview of widely used open source tools for creating online forms and surveys.
Nextcloud Forms
Does your organisation work not with Office 365 or Google Workspace, but with the open source package Nextcloud? Then you’re in luck. Nextcloud Hub also includes a forms tool. It’s a handy tool for simple forms. Don’t expect advanced options for showing or hiding questions based on answers to other questions, or for adapting the design or language. But for a simple inventory or internal survey, the tool will probably do the job, and if you already have it at hand: why not?
Do make sure to wait until all the responses are in before running an extensive analysis in a linked Nextcloud spreadsheet. Interim analyses and formulas, which you might have added on a separate tab, will be overwritten.
Want to give it a try? Fill in a Nextcloud form
Grist Forms
Are you a true data junkie who can’t imagine a survey without a pivot table or statistical significance? Then Grist, with its accompanying Forms tool, might be just the thing.
Grist is an application best described as a cross between a spreadsheet, a database and a forms tool. Real-time collaboration and live data are at the heart of this package. Besides being able to use your survey data within Grist, Grist also has a powerful API that lets you integrate the data into other business systems. Grist for advanced users, so to speak…
You can use Grist directly via a (free or paid) account at https://getgrist.com, but the software is also open source, so you can host it yourself or have it hosted. Especially if you process a lot of sensitive data, it can be important to stay in control of who has access to it. Partly because of its advanced features, and partly because of how sovereign you can be when working with Grist, the package has also been included in ‘La Suite’, the collaboration environment developed by the French government to work independently of big tech.
Grist doesn’t have advanced routing options, and the layout isn’t very flexible either, unless you dive into the source code.
Want to give it a try? Go to our Grist form
LimeSurvey
LimeSurvey is an old hand. It’s been around for well over ten years and is used by a large number of organisations, from universities to various public institutions. Because it’s been in development for so long and has such a wide variety of users, LimeSurvey has something for everyone.
LimeSurvey comes in two flavours: a SaaS version, fully hosted and maintained by the maker, and a community version (CE = Community Edition) that you can download and put on a server yourself.
LimeSurvey is very comprehensive and works very well in large organisations, where different departments with their own needs can set up the tool as they wish. For example, it has extensive group and account management for setting the permissions of the different people using the tool. LimeSurvey also includes an extensive system for creating custom design themes. This lets you match your surveys seamlessly to your organisation’s existing house style. You can customise a great deal, such as colour, logo or font, but it does require some knowledge of CSS and HTML templating.
When it comes to ‘routing’ and smart flows, LimeSurvey also offers almost everything you could ever need. You can skip questions or make them mandatory based on earlier answers, and there are options for all kinds of custom validation rules. Overkill for a simple invitation or RSVP, of course, but if you’re using it for serious data collection and value consistent data, this can be an important feature, although the learning curve for using all the features can be fairly steep.
LimeSurvey can also encrypt responses and store them in such a way that system administrators can’t fish them out of the database. That can be a good measure if privacy or data protection is important. Unfortunately, the data is only encrypted on the server, and not already in the web browser, as with BlockSurvey (which isn’t included in this overview because it isn’t open source). Especially if you’re going to use LimeSurvey within your organisation and host it on your own server, there’s a lot you can do with it. Do make sure your system administrator sets up a powerful server for LimeSurvey. The large number of options and the architecture require quite a lot of memory and a fast SSD.
Want to give it a try? Try out a LimeSurvey
Formbricks
Formbricks is an ‘Experience Marketing suite’, as they call it themselves. Not a traditional survey system, but actually designed for building feedback forms into websites and apps. You know the ones: little forms that pop up in the bottom right-hand corner asking whether everything is to your liking. But besides this format, Formbricks also lets you create regular surveys that you can easily share via a link or embed on a web page. Formbricks stands out from the tools described above in its user-friendliness and is clearly aimed at marketing departments and non-technical users. It looks good, runs smoothly and is easy to customise and integrate. The tool can also easily be set up for multiple departments or teams that want to manage their own surveys.
Formbricks can be hosted for you, but you can also put it on a server yourself. Unlike true free software, Formbricks has an open core licensing model. The core is available under an AGPLv3 licence, but some Pro features require a paid Enterprise licence. Fortunately, the community version is already very well equipped and highly usable.
In Formbricks, each question is on a separate page, which also lets you define simple conditions for skipping certain questions. There are lots of question types available that you can use for marketing purposes. For example, a star rating ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐, emoji 😊 or an NPS (Net Promoter Score).
Although options are limited here too, you can easily customise the layout of your forms by changing the colour or adding logos.
