Typeform is a great form-building tool that allows you to create beautiful forms within minutes. However, it does struggle with a few limitations.
- If you’re collecting payments inside your forms, you’re limited to using Stripe since Typeform only integrates with Stripe’s payment processor. If you prefer PayPal, you won’t be able to collect payments and have it go into your PayPal account.
- Typeform doesn’t have a signature functionality, so you can’t collect signatures from users inside your form. You’ll have to connect with and pay for a third-party application.
- While Typeform does allow you to build a form using AI, you can’t have the AI analyze your form data and suggest areas for improvement to boost completion rates, like you would with more advanced form builders.
- Lastly, we found many users complaining that Typeform is simply too expensive. The cheapest plan is $25 and if you want to get rid of the Typeform branding on your form, you’ll have to sign up for the premium plan, which costs $50 per month.
So, to help you make the right buying decision and choose the form builder that matches your needs, we’ll discuss five Typeform alternatives. Since we’re writing this guide, we thought we’d first review our online form-building tool, FormBuilder.
Note: Even though FormBuilder is our tool, we aimed to make this review as objective as possible. FormBuilder isn’t perfect, but we believe we offer the best AI features to help you build a form and analyze the analytics to see where users are dropping off. We also have a lead recovery feature that most form builders do not, where you can see what users typed into your form even if they didn’t submit it, allowing you to recover abandoned leads. So, if you want to give FormBuilder a shot, sign up for a free trial.
1. FormBuilder: Best AI form building features
This is how FormBuilder solves the challenges presented by Typeform:
- Advanced AI form analytics
- Automatic abandoned lead recovery features
- PayPal integration and e-signature blocks
- Affordable pricing plans
Advanced AI form analytics
Although Typeform does have AI features that’ll allow you to build beautiful forms from scratch using just a few prompts, it lacks AI analytics features. Typeform won’t analyze at what stage of your form readers bounce and how long they stay on your form and provide you with feedback to improve completion rates.
You’re left on your own to study your form’s analytics, and A/B split test various questions, page layouts, and designs to see which converts best. Many customers feel like they are going in circles when using this approach, so we designed FormBuilder with an AI to analyze your form data.
This way, when you log into your FormBuilder analytics dashboard, you’ll find all your form statistics as well as recommendations that AI made when analyzing your form. This gives you a clear, step-by-step process that you can follow to improve completion rates.
For example, if the AI sees that most of your users are bouncing before a certain question, and this question is double the length of all the other questions, it’ll recommend splitting it into two. Or, if users bounce before your e-signature field, it’ll recommend making your e-signature field optional.
Automatic abandoned lead recovery features
In addition to helping boost form completion rates, FormBuilder has advanced abandoned lead recovery features that can recover any leads who didn’t complete and submit your form.
FormBuilder does this by allowing you to access what users typed into your form, regardless of whether they submitted it or not. This is something that most form builders, including Typeform, don’t allow.
So, for example, if you ask for a user’s full name and email address first and they bounce after filling in these fields, you can use this information to email them and prompt them to submit their form.
According to our research, this can boost form completion rates by up to 80 percent.
PayPal integration and e-signature blocks
Besides the lack of AI form analytics and automatic lead recovery features, a more fundamental problem with Typeform is that it doesn’t offer you the option to collect payments via PayPal, nor can you add e-signature blocks to your form to collect user signatures.
This is a problem because if you’re collecting payments, you’re restricted to Stripe. If you don’t have a Stripe account or just prefer using an alternative payment processor, you won’t be able to collect payments with Typeform. Also, if you’re collecting user signatures, you’ll need to connect your Typeform account with a third-party application like Adobe, which costs extra.
With this in mind, we built FormBuilder with more flexible payment options and signature features. You can use either Stripe or PayPal to collect customer payments. If you want to collect user signatures, you can drag and drop one of our e-signature blocks onto your form, and you’re good to go.
Affordable pricing plans
The final pain point we want to discuss is pricing. Typeform’s cheapest plan is $25 per month, which is quite expensive compared to most online form builders. Moreover, this plan will still contain Typeform branding, so if you want to remove this, you’ll have to upgrade to the paid plan, which is $50 per month.
A core value we had when founding FormBuilder was that we wanted to make our application accessible to anyone, so our starter plan only costs $15 per month and doesn’t come with any branding. If you want to publish more forms, you can always upgrade to the pro plan, which only costs $30 per month.
2. Best free Typeform alternative: Google Forms
If you’re looking for a free Typeform alternative that still offers good form-building features such as conditional logic, custom form design, and third-party integrations, Google Forms is a good option.
Although it’s free, Google Forms is a staple for many business owners, freelancers, and other types of professionals because the platform makes it easy to create beautiful forms and embed them on your website within seconds.
However, it’s worth noting that Google Forms has similar limitations to Typeform. For instance, you can’t collect payments inside your Google Form. You’ll either have to paste a link to your website’s checkout page (which increases form abandonment) or connect to a paid third-party plugin.
You also can’t collect signatures inside your form as Google Forms doesn’t have a signature functionality. If these factors are deal breakers for you, you might want to consider FormBuilder instead.
3. Best for Microsoft users: Microsoft Forms
Alternatively, if you’re already subscribed to Microsoft 365 and are looking for a “free” tool that blends the advanced features of FormBuilder and the barebones nature of Google Forms, consider Microsoft Forms.
Microsoft Forms is more advanced than Google Forms because it offers users more flexibility in the form creation process. You can utilize more in-depth conditional logic features, customize your form with 100+ template designs rather than Google Forms’ 17 templates, and use the Microsoft AI called Copilot to build a form for you.
But like with Google Forms and most Typeform alternatives, Microsoft Forms doesn’t have AI analytics features that’ll analyze your form statistics for you and provide you with insights, nor does it allow you to see what users typed into your form if they didn’t submit it, making it impossible to recover abandoned leads.
4. Best for building surveys: SurveyMonkey
If you’re looking for a form builder that offers features specifically related to survey building, SurveyMonkey is for you. SurveyMonkey has hundreds of survey templates related to different industries as well as potential questions you might want to ask users.
Once you’ve collected form responses from users, you can generate various types of charts and graphs, such as pie graphs, bar graphs, line graphs, and scatter plots. This helps you better understand the information you’re collecting from users and ensure you can communicate these findings to stakeholders, employees, and colleagues.
We also like that SurveyMonkey allows you to compare your survey data against industry benchmarks, so you can get some context on whether the form’s bounce rate or time on page is good or needs improvement.
5. Best for WordPress users: WPForms
If you’re looking for a form builder to embed contact forms, registration forms, and job application forms on your WordPress website and don’t want to use a third-party application, consider WPForms. This form builder is installed on your WordPress dashboard, so when you create a form, you can instantly publish it on your website.
The form creation process is also straightforward. You’ll find an editor inside this application where you can drag and drop certain fields from the left-hand side onto your form, and when you’re happy with your form, all you have to do is publish it.
And like most form builders, it offers good spam protection like reCAPTCHA and hCAPTCHA. It even lets you create your own custom CAPTCHA using a math question, protecting your website from spammers.
But as we keep saying, WPForms doesn’t allow you to use AI to analyze your form data. You also can’t recover abandoned leads by seeing what email address users typed into your form and emailing them to complete your form.
If these limitations are deal breakers for you, you might want to stick with FormBuilder.
Use the power of AI to build a form with FormBuilder
If you’re interested in utilizing the features we mentioned above to build beautiful forms and easily embed them on your website, consider signing up for a free FormBuilder trial.