Formcrafts vs Typeform

Format and usability

Formcrafts and Typeform approach form layout differently. Typeform focuses on creating one-question-at-a-time conversational forms. Formcrafts, on the other hand, allows for flexible layouts, which can be used to create traditional forms, conversational forms, and multi-step forms.

Here are the different formats in Formcrafts:

Which format is best for your form? It depends on the use case. Here are some guidelines:

1. Traditional forms are best suited for short forms, calculation forms, and forms where users need to see all the fields at once. Like a dead-simple contact form.
2. Multi-step forms are best suited for long forms, application forms, and forms where you want to group questions logically. Like a business loan application form or risk assessment questionnaire.
3. Conversational forms are best suited for short forms, surveys, and quizzes. Situations where the user wants to give you their time. Like a customer satisfaction survey.

Typeform does not allow multiple questions on the same step (with the exception being their contact info and address fields). You are restricted to a conversational layout, which has several major drawbacks:

• Long forms like application forms, are not suitable for conversational forms. They can contain over hundreds of fields, and the conversational format can add minutes to the form fill time.
• Editing answers in conversational forms can be cumbersome. Users have to go back through all the questions to find the one they want to edit. For a form with over 20 fields, this could mean hitting the back button 20 times.
• No logical grouping. Multi-step forms allow you to group questions logically. For example, you can group personal information, address, and payment details in separate steps. This is not possible in conversational forms.

Form templates

Formcrafts and Typeform offer a wide range of form templates - covering application forms, surveys, lead generation forms, and more. The best way to understand Formcrafts' and Typeform's different approaches to UX and design is by looking at their form template galleries:

Typeform has an opinionated design, with a focus on using large images (which will also degrade form performance on mobile). The problem is that this design philosophy does not age well, and lacks versatility.

On the other hand, a minimal and functional design is truly timeless. Formcrafts believes that good design is one that gets out of the way. Formcrafts' templates cover a wide range of use-cases and varying complexities, from short one-question-at-a-time surveys to complex multi-step application forms. While you can also create complex application forms in Typeform, it feels forced.

I encourage you to try out the form templates in both Formcrafts and Typeform to see which one fits your needs better.

Free plan

Typeform offers a free version limited to 10 responses a month, across all forms. This is a low number, and most people will end up using it on testing! Formcrafts offers 100 responses per month on the free plan. There are also other differences which make the free plan on Typeform less attractive:

Paid offerings

Let us compare how the paid plans in Formcrafts and Typeform stack up by comparing the mid-tier plan, which costs $59 per month.

Formcrafts offers a much higher response limit, and has a more generous storage and file upload limit. Typeform offers 3 collaborators, while Formcrafts offers 2.

The other two things of note here are the lack of save-and-resume and custom CSS in Typeform. Save-and-resume is a feature that allows users to save their progress and continue later, which is vital for long forms. Custom CSS gives you full control over the look and feel of your form.

Responses and reporting

Formcrafts and Typeform offer a tabular interface for viewing responses, but they differ in functionality and features. Formcrafts' interface allows for filtering, searching, and sorting responses. You can also export responses.

Typeform also offers filtering and search, but lacks the ability to sort responses by a specific field.

Lastly, Formcrafts response view is more intuitive and easier to read:

Formcrafts and Typeform offer form analytics, including specific reports for survey fields. However, the depth of reports in Typeform is different from Formcrafts:

Notice the big difference? Formcrafts offers a timeseries analysis. In Formcrafts you can:

• View the frequency of each score
• View the share of each score
• View the average rating, for each month
• See a trend-line of changes

Key features

Conditional logic

Conditional logic allows you to perform actions based on user input, like showing or hiding fields, or skipping pages. Formcrafts and Typeform both offer conditional logic, but Formcrafts' implementation is more powerful.

Formcrafts' conditional logic offers features not found in Typeform:

• Support for condition groups
• Using logic to "set value" of fields
• Using logic to change the option list
• Using logic to disable the form

Math calculations

Math calculations in Formcrafts are very powerful, and can be used to create quizzes, payment forms, calculators, estimators, planners, quotation forms, and much more. Apart from being able to perform basic math operations, Formcrafts even supports using functions.

Functions are not supported in Typeform, which limits the complexity of the forms you can create.

Here is an example on how you can calculate age using a date field in Formcrafts:

Performance

Slow forms will lower your conversion rate, lose you money, and hurt your brand. It's 2024; you do not have to settle for sluggish performance. Let us be specific:

0.5s delay will likely cause a 20% drop in traffic (1).

53% of visits are likely to be abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load (2).

Formcrafts' biggest focus has always been performant design. Your forms should be beautiful and packed with features, while being fast.

To give you an idea of how fast Formcrafts is, I created a contact form in Formcrafts and Typeform with same fields and measured their performance. Here are the results:

Do these results hold up when tested using industry-standard third-party tools? I tried the test using Google PageSpeed:

PageSpeed simulates slow 4G speeds on a mobile device. Formcrafts loads in 1s while Typeform takes a whooping 8.9s. Even under slow network conditions, Formcrafts is 9x faster.

Unbiased reviews

Most software review websites offer incentives in return for reviews. Finding unbiased reviews is hard. Formcrafts and Typeform offer a HubSpot integration, and have reviews on the HubSpot App Marketplace. By policy, HubSpot does not allow incentives for reviews.

Even though Formcrafts has fewer reviews, the reviews are more positive overall compared to Typeform. Reviewers noted the value, ease of use, functionality, and support as the main reasons for their high ratings.

Company background

Formcrafts is based out of Canada. It is a small company, and completely bootstrapped. Not having raised any venture capital allows Formcrafts to focus on the product and customers, rather than short-term growth.

Typeform is venture-funded, and a large company with over 300 employees.

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Conclusion

While there are some similarities between Formcrafts and Typeform, they target different audiences. Formcrafts offers higher flexibility, and is better suited for most use-cases, specially since it allows you to build forms using a conversational, traditional, or multi-step layout. It is also faster, more affordable, and offers more features.

FAQs