Form Builder Checklist: What to Look for Before You Switch Tools

Choosing another form builder may seem like a minor move, but once you start the process, you will see just how important it is. Your entire business can depend on this particular platform, from capturing leads to creating surveys and even the customer onboarding process. Choosing badly means wasting your time and breaking integrations.

If you are looking at other solutions either because you have outgrown a simple builder, because costs are increasing, or because you are considering Jotform competitors, it is always wise to take a step back and go through a checklist first. This is how you can really pick the best form builder.

1. Speed to Launch

The first thing to try when working with a form building tool is its speed – whether you can get from a blank page to a finished form quickly, or if you need a developer and a lot of searching for templates.

Usually, most organizations begin searching for a new application due to their existing builder being too slow for their purposes. The ideal form builder is the one that allows a non-tech-savvy marketing specialist to implement his/her form/survey/quiz ideas without delay - right the next day after coming up with the idea. If you keep asking IT to add fields in forms all the time, your application does not serve your interests anymore.

2. Design Flexibility

Forms which appear to be clearly "stuck on" will decrease trust and conversions. People can tell when the form is not in line with your branding, and that will create friction right when you want their information.

Find those who allow font choice, color selection, layout choices, and even better, custom CSS. It’s important to consider multilingual capabilities and support for right-to-left languages as well if you conduct business across the world. The idea is to create a lead capture form that will feel organic as part of your product/website rather than something external added to it.

3. Logic and Branching

Static forms ask all the same questions irrespective of the responses. This is okay for a plain contact form, but the whole thing becomes useless very quickly in qualification and customization.

The ideal form-building tool that can help your small business or growing team would have the capability of building conditional logic forms. This is when you start realizing where the difference lies between simply filling out a form and utilizing a form as a real funnel builder. The more you build your form based on what’s happening at the moment, the more accurate your data becomes.

4. Integrations With Your Existing Stack

A form does not usually signify the end of the journey. What really counts is what will happen to the information once the user clicks on “submit.” Will it flow seamlessly into your CRM? Will it set off an email automation sequence? Will it integrate with your ads for retargeting purposes?

Before swapping tools, document all locations to which your form data currently needs to be sent and compare that to the list of integrations provided by the new form builder. Manual exports and CSV uploads are manageable with smaller volumes, but become a serious issue as volumes increase.

5. Pricing That Scales Fairly

The pricing of form builder products can actually be the primary cause why teams end up looking for alternatives. There may be many tools which may seem to be affordable at their entry level packages, but as soon as you scale up by adding members to the team or increasing the number of entries, there is a steep hike. Make sure that you thoroughly check the pricing section.

A good activity that can be done to determine some unexpected aspects is analyzing user feedback on the tool in question after they have been using it for a period of time.

6. Data Ownership and Compliance

When working in the field of health care, finance, and education, compliance is a must. Find out whether the platform provides for those standards that are obligatory for you to follow and whether the process of your leaving is smooth.

Putting the Checklist to Work

Each of the above criteria is insignificant when taken separately. An amazing design without logic cannot qualify any leads. A logic-filled builder that is weak in integration will still cause you to do your work manually. The best online form builder is that which takes into consideration all of these according to the task at hand.

If you’re interested in an analysis of how a few commonly used alternatives compare to Jotform, then you can find all that information in the comparison article on Jotform alternatives, which covers five options and the best use cases for each tool.