Blog

What Free Web Form Builders Can’t Do

Blog

What Free Web Form Builders Can’t Do

Blog

What Free Web Form Builders Can’t Do

Blog

What Free Web Form Builders Can’t Do

Blog

What Free Web Form Builders Can’t Do

Download PDFDownload PDF
Blog

What Free Web Form Builders Can’t Do

Heather Mueller
/
June 12, 2015
Blog

What Free Web Form Builders Can’t Do

MIN
/
June 12, 2015
About the Episode
Episode Highlights
Meet our Guest
Episode Transcript

If you run a WordPress or Drupal website or use a marketing automation tool, you probably have some experience building online forms—either through a free plugin or extra feature tossed in with other software services.The backend might look similar to this screenshot, which shows some of the code used to meticulously create a web form with a popular free online form builder*:

Free Form Builder Code

Oftentimes, these forms have confines to how they can be designed or branded. How can a platform that’s so critical to the success of your website result in a form that’s so easy to miss? This can be especially disheartening for the non-programmer who’s spent hours learning and fine-tuning each line of code, only to end up with an amateur-looking form and no easy way to organize the data when someone actually stops to fill it out.In these situations, your first instinct may be to hire a $100-an-hour professional web developer. Because, let’s face it: Free web form builders are often a letdown.Before you drop that kind of money on yet another contractor, it’s worth looking into what you could accomplish with a more robust form builder. The right platform will make it incredibly easy to create forms that convert like crazy, with features such as:

Custom Designs that Take Minutes to Create

Today’s advanced form builders are designed so you can drag and drop your way to polished, professional forms with little-to-no coding knowledge. You can customize virtually anything, from form backgrounds and buttons to fonts and overall designs, within a matter of minutes. While Cascading Style Sheets are often accessible for times you do want to go behind the scenes, they’re not typically required to get attention-grabbing results. (And at Formstack, we remove the mystery from form CSS.)

Drag and Drop

A robust form builder offers all kinds of easy drag-and-drop field and format options.=

Integrations that Make Virtually Anything Possible

Tired of manually adding addresses to your lists? Use email marketing and CRM integrations to automate the process. Need to increase orders? Use Conditional Logic and payment gateway integrations to get paid faster. Want to give people a way to fill out your forms faster? Pull from social media accounts to make things easier on time-crunched, mobile visitors.You can even link your forms to all of the most popular Google Apps to schedule appointments, register event attendees, create spreadsheets, and more.

Custom Themes You Can Use Again and Again

A form theme builder gives you the flexibility to stylize your form to fit your website’s branding—once again, without having to touch a single line of code. You can use it to quickly and easily customize backgrounds, colors, headers, fonts, and more.Whether you stylize a pre-made theme or create your own from scratch, the entire setup can be accomplished within an intuitive interface like the one below:

Theme Builder

Formstack’s theme builder makes it easy to create custom, branded forms. It will get amazing results, like the one you see here. And once you get your theme looking exactly how you’d like it, you can use it again and again as a template for additional forms.

Advanced Analytics

Have you ever spent hours creating a free online form, only to realize later that one little line of misplaced code rendered the whole thing unfillable? Or wondered if there’s one particular question that’s turning away people who would otherwise fill it out? Wouldn’t it be great if you could access data that points to why some visitors who start to fill out your form never hit the “submit” button? With an advanced form builder, you can. Partial Submissions let you capture customer information through forms even when they’re never completed. And Field Bottlenecks reveal exactly where people choose to abandon a form, so you can quickly fix issues.

partial_submissions_graphic
 With a monthly form building subscription, you can collect info on customers…even if they never submit your form.

Have a question about these and other form-building features? Start a conversation with a super savvy member of the Formstack team. We’re always happy to help solve your biggest web form-building challenges.*Company names have been intentionally omitted to protect innocent free web form builders.

Blog

What Free Web Form Builders Can’t Do

Blog

What Free Web Form Builders Can’t Do

Get the Report

Not a valid e-mail address

Great, thank ya!

You can now access the content.
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
Blog

What Free Web Form Builders Can’t Do

Panelists
No items found.
Introduction
Introduction

Great, thank ya!

You can now access the content.
Download NowDownload Now
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

If you run a WordPress or Drupal website or use a marketing automation tool, you probably have some experience building online forms—either through a free plugin or extra feature tossed in with other software services.The backend might look similar to this screenshot, which shows some of the code used to meticulously create a web form with a popular free online form builder*:

Free Form Builder Code

Oftentimes, these forms have confines to how they can be designed or branded. How can a platform that’s so critical to the success of your website result in a form that’s so easy to miss? This can be especially disheartening for the non-programmer who’s spent hours learning and fine-tuning each line of code, only to end up with an amateur-looking form and no easy way to organize the data when someone actually stops to fill it out.In these situations, your first instinct may be to hire a $100-an-hour professional web developer. Because, let’s face it: Free web form builders are often a letdown.Before you drop that kind of money on yet another contractor, it’s worth looking into what you could accomplish with a more robust form builder. The right platform will make it incredibly easy to create forms that convert like crazy, with features such as:

Custom Designs that Take Minutes to Create

Today’s advanced form builders are designed so you can drag and drop your way to polished, professional forms with little-to-no coding knowledge. You can customize virtually anything, from form backgrounds and buttons to fonts and overall designs, within a matter of minutes. While Cascading Style Sheets are often accessible for times you do want to go behind the scenes, they’re not typically required to get attention-grabbing results. (And at Formstack, we remove the mystery from form CSS.)

Drag and Drop

A robust form builder offers all kinds of easy drag-and-drop field and format options.=

Integrations that Make Virtually Anything Possible

Tired of manually adding addresses to your lists? Use email marketing and CRM integrations to automate the process. Need to increase orders? Use Conditional Logic and payment gateway integrations to get paid faster. Want to give people a way to fill out your forms faster? Pull from social media accounts to make things easier on time-crunched, mobile visitors.You can even link your forms to all of the most popular Google Apps to schedule appointments, register event attendees, create spreadsheets, and more.

Custom Themes You Can Use Again and Again

A form theme builder gives you the flexibility to stylize your form to fit your website’s branding—once again, without having to touch a single line of code. You can use it to quickly and easily customize backgrounds, colors, headers, fonts, and more.Whether you stylize a pre-made theme or create your own from scratch, the entire setup can be accomplished within an intuitive interface like the one below:

Theme Builder

Formstack’s theme builder makes it easy to create custom, branded forms. It will get amazing results, like the one you see here. And once you get your theme looking exactly how you’d like it, you can use it again and again as a template for additional forms.

Advanced Analytics

Have you ever spent hours creating a free online form, only to realize later that one little line of misplaced code rendered the whole thing unfillable? Or wondered if there’s one particular question that’s turning away people who would otherwise fill it out? Wouldn’t it be great if you could access data that points to why some visitors who start to fill out your form never hit the “submit” button? With an advanced form builder, you can. Partial Submissions let you capture customer information through forms even when they’re never completed. And Field Bottlenecks reveal exactly where people choose to abandon a form, so you can quickly fix issues.

partial_submissions_graphic
 With a monthly form building subscription, you can collect info on customers…even if they never submit your form.

Have a question about these and other form-building features? Start a conversation with a super savvy member of the Formstack team. We’re always happy to help solve your biggest web form-building challenges.*Company names have been intentionally omitted to protect innocent free web form builders.

Panelists
No items found.
Infographic

What Free Web Form Builders Can’t Do

Free web form builders only get you so far. Drag-and-drop your way to polished, professional forms with a subscription-based platform. No coding necessary.
Download InfographicDownload Infographic

If you run a WordPress or Drupal website or use a marketing automation tool, you probably have some experience building online forms—either through a free plugin or extra feature tossed in with other software services.The backend might look similar to this screenshot, which shows some of the code used to meticulously create a web form with a popular free online form builder*:

Free Form Builder Code

Oftentimes, these forms have confines to how they can be designed or branded. How can a platform that’s so critical to the success of your website result in a form that’s so easy to miss? This can be especially disheartening for the non-programmer who’s spent hours learning and fine-tuning each line of code, only to end up with an amateur-looking form and no easy way to organize the data when someone actually stops to fill it out.In these situations, your first instinct may be to hire a $100-an-hour professional web developer. Because, let’s face it: Free web form builders are often a letdown.Before you drop that kind of money on yet another contractor, it’s worth looking into what you could accomplish with a more robust form builder. The right platform will make it incredibly easy to create forms that convert like crazy, with features such as:

Custom Designs that Take Minutes to Create

Today’s advanced form builders are designed so you can drag and drop your way to polished, professional forms with little-to-no coding knowledge. You can customize virtually anything, from form backgrounds and buttons to fonts and overall designs, within a matter of minutes. While Cascading Style Sheets are often accessible for times you do want to go behind the scenes, they’re not typically required to get attention-grabbing results. (And at Formstack, we remove the mystery from form CSS.)

Drag and Drop

A robust form builder offers all kinds of easy drag-and-drop field and format options.=

Integrations that Make Virtually Anything Possible

Tired of manually adding addresses to your lists? Use email marketing and CRM integrations to automate the process. Need to increase orders? Use Conditional Logic and payment gateway integrations to get paid faster. Want to give people a way to fill out your forms faster? Pull from social media accounts to make things easier on time-crunched, mobile visitors.You can even link your forms to all of the most popular Google Apps to schedule appointments, register event attendees, create spreadsheets, and more.

Custom Themes You Can Use Again and Again

A form theme builder gives you the flexibility to stylize your form to fit your website’s branding—once again, without having to touch a single line of code. You can use it to quickly and easily customize backgrounds, colors, headers, fonts, and more.Whether you stylize a pre-made theme or create your own from scratch, the entire setup can be accomplished within an intuitive interface like the one below:

Theme Builder

Formstack’s theme builder makes it easy to create custom, branded forms. It will get amazing results, like the one you see here. And once you get your theme looking exactly how you’d like it, you can use it again and again as a template for additional forms.

Advanced Analytics

Have you ever spent hours creating a free online form, only to realize later that one little line of misplaced code rendered the whole thing unfillable? Or wondered if there’s one particular question that’s turning away people who would otherwise fill it out? Wouldn’t it be great if you could access data that points to why some visitors who start to fill out your form never hit the “submit” button? With an advanced form builder, you can. Partial Submissions let you capture customer information through forms even when they’re never completed. And Field Bottlenecks reveal exactly where people choose to abandon a form, so you can quickly fix issues.

partial_submissions_graphic
 With a monthly form building subscription, you can collect info on customers…even if they never submit your form.

Have a question about these and other form-building features? Start a conversation with a super savvy member of the Formstack team. We’re always happy to help solve your biggest web form-building challenges.*Company names have been intentionally omitted to protect innocent free web form builders.

If you run a WordPress or Drupal website or use a marketing automation tool, you probably have some experience building online forms—either through a free plugin or extra feature tossed in with other software services.The backend might look similar to this screenshot, which shows some of the code used to meticulously create a web form with a popular free online form builder*:

Free Form Builder Code

Oftentimes, these forms have confines to how they can be designed or branded. How can a platform that’s so critical to the success of your website result in a form that’s so easy to miss? This can be especially disheartening for the non-programmer who’s spent hours learning and fine-tuning each line of code, only to end up with an amateur-looking form and no easy way to organize the data when someone actually stops to fill it out.In these situations, your first instinct may be to hire a $100-an-hour professional web developer. Because, let’s face it: Free web form builders are often a letdown.Before you drop that kind of money on yet another contractor, it’s worth looking into what you could accomplish with a more robust form builder. The right platform will make it incredibly easy to create forms that convert like crazy, with features such as:

Custom Designs that Take Minutes to Create

Today’s advanced form builders are designed so you can drag and drop your way to polished, professional forms with little-to-no coding knowledge. You can customize virtually anything, from form backgrounds and buttons to fonts and overall designs, within a matter of minutes. While Cascading Style Sheets are often accessible for times you do want to go behind the scenes, they’re not typically required to get attention-grabbing results. (And at Formstack, we remove the mystery from form CSS.)

Drag and Drop

A robust form builder offers all kinds of easy drag-and-drop field and format options.=

Integrations that Make Virtually Anything Possible

Tired of manually adding addresses to your lists? Use email marketing and CRM integrations to automate the process. Need to increase orders? Use Conditional Logic and payment gateway integrations to get paid faster. Want to give people a way to fill out your forms faster? Pull from social media accounts to make things easier on time-crunched, mobile visitors.You can even link your forms to all of the most popular Google Apps to schedule appointments, register event attendees, create spreadsheets, and more.

Custom Themes You Can Use Again and Again

A form theme builder gives you the flexibility to stylize your form to fit your website’s branding—once again, without having to touch a single line of code. You can use it to quickly and easily customize backgrounds, colors, headers, fonts, and more.Whether you stylize a pre-made theme or create your own from scratch, the entire setup can be accomplished within an intuitive interface like the one below:

Theme Builder

Formstack’s theme builder makes it easy to create custom, branded forms. It will get amazing results, like the one you see here. And once you get your theme looking exactly how you’d like it, you can use it again and again as a template for additional forms.

Advanced Analytics

Have you ever spent hours creating a free online form, only to realize later that one little line of misplaced code rendered the whole thing unfillable? Or wondered if there’s one particular question that’s turning away people who would otherwise fill it out? Wouldn’t it be great if you could access data that points to why some visitors who start to fill out your form never hit the “submit” button? With an advanced form builder, you can. Partial Submissions let you capture customer information through forms even when they’re never completed. And Field Bottlenecks reveal exactly where people choose to abandon a form, so you can quickly fix issues.

partial_submissions_graphic
 With a monthly form building subscription, you can collect info on customers…even if they never submit your form.

Have a question about these and other form-building features? Start a conversation with a super savvy member of the Formstack team. We’re always happy to help solve your biggest web form-building challenges.*Company names have been intentionally omitted to protect innocent free web form builders.

Collecting payments with online forms is easy, but first, you have to choose the right payment gateway. Browse the providers in our gateway credit card processing comparison chart to find the best option for your business. Then sign up for Formstack Forms, customize your payment forms, and start collecting profits in minutes.

Online Payment Gateway Comparison Chart

NOTE: These amounts reflect the monthly subscription for the payment provider. Formstack does not charge a fee to integrate with any of our payment partners.

FEATURES
Authorize.Net
Bambora
Chargify
First Data
PayPal
PayPal Pro
PayPal Payflow
Stripe
WePay
Monthly Fees
$25
$25
$149+
Contact First Data
$0
$25
$0-$25
$0
$0
Transaction Fees
$2.9% + 30¢
$2.9% + 30¢
N/A
Contact First Data
$2.9% + 30¢
$2.9% + 30¢
10¢
$2.9% + 30¢
$2.9% + 30¢
Countries
5
8
Based on payment gateway
50+
203
3
4
25
USA
Currencies
11
2
23
140
25
23
25
135+
1
Card Types
6
13
Based on payment gateway
5
9
9
5
6
4
Limits
None
None
Based on payment gateway
None
$10,000
None
None
None
None
Form Payments
Recurring Billing
Mobile Payments
PSD2 Compliant

If you run a WordPress or Drupal website or use a marketing automation tool, you probably have some experience building online forms—either through a free plugin or extra feature tossed in with other software services.The backend might look similar to this screenshot, which shows some of the code used to meticulously create a web form with a popular free online form builder*:

Free Form Builder Code

Oftentimes, these forms have confines to how they can be designed or branded. How can a platform that’s so critical to the success of your website result in a form that’s so easy to miss? This can be especially disheartening for the non-programmer who’s spent hours learning and fine-tuning each line of code, only to end up with an amateur-looking form and no easy way to organize the data when someone actually stops to fill it out.In these situations, your first instinct may be to hire a $100-an-hour professional web developer. Because, let’s face it: Free web form builders are often a letdown.Before you drop that kind of money on yet another contractor, it’s worth looking into what you could accomplish with a more robust form builder. The right platform will make it incredibly easy to create forms that convert like crazy, with features such as:

Custom Designs that Take Minutes to Create

Today’s advanced form builders are designed so you can drag and drop your way to polished, professional forms with little-to-no coding knowledge. You can customize virtually anything, from form backgrounds and buttons to fonts and overall designs, within a matter of minutes. While Cascading Style Sheets are often accessible for times you do want to go behind the scenes, they’re not typically required to get attention-grabbing results. (And at Formstack, we remove the mystery from form CSS.)

Drag and Drop

A robust form builder offers all kinds of easy drag-and-drop field and format options.=

Integrations that Make Virtually Anything Possible

Tired of manually adding addresses to your lists? Use email marketing and CRM integrations to automate the process. Need to increase orders? Use Conditional Logic and payment gateway integrations to get paid faster. Want to give people a way to fill out your forms faster? Pull from social media accounts to make things easier on time-crunched, mobile visitors.You can even link your forms to all of the most popular Google Apps to schedule appointments, register event attendees, create spreadsheets, and more.

Custom Themes You Can Use Again and Again

A form theme builder gives you the flexibility to stylize your form to fit your website’s branding—once again, without having to touch a single line of code. You can use it to quickly and easily customize backgrounds, colors, headers, fonts, and more.Whether you stylize a pre-made theme or create your own from scratch, the entire setup can be accomplished within an intuitive interface like the one below:

Theme Builder

Formstack’s theme builder makes it easy to create custom, branded forms. It will get amazing results, like the one you see here. And once you get your theme looking exactly how you’d like it, you can use it again and again as a template for additional forms.

Advanced Analytics

Have you ever spent hours creating a free online form, only to realize later that one little line of misplaced code rendered the whole thing unfillable? Or wondered if there’s one particular question that’s turning away people who would otherwise fill it out? Wouldn’t it be great if you could access data that points to why some visitors who start to fill out your form never hit the “submit” button? With an advanced form builder, you can. Partial Submissions let you capture customer information through forms even when they’re never completed. And Field Bottlenecks reveal exactly where people choose to abandon a form, so you can quickly fix issues.

partial_submissions_graphic
 With a monthly form building subscription, you can collect info on customers…even if they never submit your form.

Have a question about these and other form-building features? Start a conversation with a super savvy member of the Formstack team. We’re always happy to help solve your biggest web form-building challenges.*Company names have been intentionally omitted to protect innocent free web form builders.

If you run a WordPress or Drupal website or use a marketing automation tool, you probably have some experience building online forms—either through a free plugin or extra feature tossed in with other software services.The backend might look similar to this screenshot, which shows some of the code used to meticulously create a web form with a popular free online form builder*:

Free Form Builder Code

Oftentimes, these forms have confines to how they can be designed or branded. How can a platform that’s so critical to the success of your website result in a form that’s so easy to miss? This can be especially disheartening for the non-programmer who’s spent hours learning and fine-tuning each line of code, only to end up with an amateur-looking form and no easy way to organize the data when someone actually stops to fill it out.In these situations, your first instinct may be to hire a $100-an-hour professional web developer. Because, let’s face it: Free web form builders are often a letdown.Before you drop that kind of money on yet another contractor, it’s worth looking into what you could accomplish with a more robust form builder. The right platform will make it incredibly easy to create forms that convert like crazy, with features such as:

Custom Designs that Take Minutes to Create

Today’s advanced form builders are designed so you can drag and drop your way to polished, professional forms with little-to-no coding knowledge. You can customize virtually anything, from form backgrounds and buttons to fonts and overall designs, within a matter of minutes. While Cascading Style Sheets are often accessible for times you do want to go behind the scenes, they’re not typically required to get attention-grabbing results. (And at Formstack, we remove the mystery from form CSS.)

Drag and Drop

A robust form builder offers all kinds of easy drag-and-drop field and format options.=

Integrations that Make Virtually Anything Possible

Tired of manually adding addresses to your lists? Use email marketing and CRM integrations to automate the process. Need to increase orders? Use Conditional Logic and payment gateway integrations to get paid faster. Want to give people a way to fill out your forms faster? Pull from social media accounts to make things easier on time-crunched, mobile visitors.You can even link your forms to all of the most popular Google Apps to schedule appointments, register event attendees, create spreadsheets, and more.

Custom Themes You Can Use Again and Again

A form theme builder gives you the flexibility to stylize your form to fit your website’s branding—once again, without having to touch a single line of code. You can use it to quickly and easily customize backgrounds, colors, headers, fonts, and more.Whether you stylize a pre-made theme or create your own from scratch, the entire setup can be accomplished within an intuitive interface like the one below:

Theme Builder

Formstack’s theme builder makes it easy to create custom, branded forms. It will get amazing results, like the one you see here. And once you get your theme looking exactly how you’d like it, you can use it again and again as a template for additional forms.

Advanced Analytics

Have you ever spent hours creating a free online form, only to realize later that one little line of misplaced code rendered the whole thing unfillable? Or wondered if there’s one particular question that’s turning away people who would otherwise fill it out? Wouldn’t it be great if you could access data that points to why some visitors who start to fill out your form never hit the “submit” button? With an advanced form builder, you can. Partial Submissions let you capture customer information through forms even when they’re never completed. And Field Bottlenecks reveal exactly where people choose to abandon a form, so you can quickly fix issues.

partial_submissions_graphic
 With a monthly form building subscription, you can collect info on customers…even if they never submit your form.

Have a question about these and other form-building features? Start a conversation with a super savvy member of the Formstack team. We’re always happy to help solve your biggest web form-building challenges.*Company names have been intentionally omitted to protect innocent free web form builders.

If you run a WordPress or Drupal website or use a marketing automation tool, you probably have some experience building online forms—either through a free plugin or extra feature tossed in with other software services.The backend might look similar to this screenshot, which shows some of the code used to meticulously create a web form with a popular free online form builder*:

Free Form Builder Code

Oftentimes, these forms have confines to how they can be designed or branded. How can a platform that’s so critical to the success of your website result in a form that’s so easy to miss? This can be especially disheartening for the non-programmer who’s spent hours learning and fine-tuning each line of code, only to end up with an amateur-looking form and no easy way to organize the data when someone actually stops to fill it out.In these situations, your first instinct may be to hire a $100-an-hour professional web developer. Because, let’s face it: Free web form builders are often a letdown.Before you drop that kind of money on yet another contractor, it’s worth looking into what you could accomplish with a more robust form builder. The right platform will make it incredibly easy to create forms that convert like crazy, with features such as:

Custom Designs that Take Minutes to Create

Today’s advanced form builders are designed so you can drag and drop your way to polished, professional forms with little-to-no coding knowledge. You can customize virtually anything, from form backgrounds and buttons to fonts and overall designs, within a matter of minutes. While Cascading Style Sheets are often accessible for times you do want to go behind the scenes, they’re not typically required to get attention-grabbing results. (And at Formstack, we remove the mystery from form CSS.)

Drag and Drop

A robust form builder offers all kinds of easy drag-and-drop field and format options.=

Integrations that Make Virtually Anything Possible

Tired of manually adding addresses to your lists? Use email marketing and CRM integrations to automate the process. Need to increase orders? Use Conditional Logic and payment gateway integrations to get paid faster. Want to give people a way to fill out your forms faster? Pull from social media accounts to make things easier on time-crunched, mobile visitors.You can even link your forms to all of the most popular Google Apps to schedule appointments, register event attendees, create spreadsheets, and more.

Custom Themes You Can Use Again and Again

A form theme builder gives you the flexibility to stylize your form to fit your website’s branding—once again, without having to touch a single line of code. You can use it to quickly and easily customize backgrounds, colors, headers, fonts, and more.Whether you stylize a pre-made theme or create your own from scratch, the entire setup can be accomplished within an intuitive interface like the one below:

Theme Builder

Formstack’s theme builder makes it easy to create custom, branded forms. It will get amazing results, like the one you see here. And once you get your theme looking exactly how you’d like it, you can use it again and again as a template for additional forms.

Advanced Analytics

Have you ever spent hours creating a free online form, only to realize later that one little line of misplaced code rendered the whole thing unfillable? Or wondered if there’s one particular question that’s turning away people who would otherwise fill it out? Wouldn’t it be great if you could access data that points to why some visitors who start to fill out your form never hit the “submit” button? With an advanced form builder, you can. Partial Submissions let you capture customer information through forms even when they’re never completed. And Field Bottlenecks reveal exactly where people choose to abandon a form, so you can quickly fix issues.

partial_submissions_graphic
 With a monthly form building subscription, you can collect info on customers…even if they never submit your form.

Have a question about these and other form-building features? Start a conversation with a super savvy member of the Formstack team. We’re always happy to help solve your biggest web form-building challenges.*Company names have been intentionally omitted to protect innocent free web form builders.

If you run a WordPress or Drupal website or use a marketing automation tool, you probably have some experience building online forms—either through a free plugin or extra feature tossed in with other software services.The backend might look similar to this screenshot, which shows some of the code used to meticulously create a web form with a popular free online form builder*:

Free Form Builder Code

Oftentimes, these forms have confines to how they can be designed or branded. How can a platform that’s so critical to the success of your website result in a form that’s so easy to miss? This can be especially disheartening for the non-programmer who’s spent hours learning and fine-tuning each line of code, only to end up with an amateur-looking form and no easy way to organize the data when someone actually stops to fill it out.In these situations, your first instinct may be to hire a $100-an-hour professional web developer. Because, let’s face it: Free web form builders are often a letdown.Before you drop that kind of money on yet another contractor, it’s worth looking into what you could accomplish with a more robust form builder. The right platform will make it incredibly easy to create forms that convert like crazy, with features such as:

Custom Designs that Take Minutes to Create

Today’s advanced form builders are designed so you can drag and drop your way to polished, professional forms with little-to-no coding knowledge. You can customize virtually anything, from form backgrounds and buttons to fonts and overall designs, within a matter of minutes. While Cascading Style Sheets are often accessible for times you do want to go behind the scenes, they’re not typically required to get attention-grabbing results. (And at Formstack, we remove the mystery from form CSS.)

Drag and Drop

A robust form builder offers all kinds of easy drag-and-drop field and format options.=

Integrations that Make Virtually Anything Possible

Tired of manually adding addresses to your lists? Use email marketing and CRM integrations to automate the process. Need to increase orders? Use Conditional Logic and payment gateway integrations to get paid faster. Want to give people a way to fill out your forms faster? Pull from social media accounts to make things easier on time-crunched, mobile visitors.You can even link your forms to all of the most popular Google Apps to schedule appointments, register event attendees, create spreadsheets, and more.

Custom Themes You Can Use Again and Again

A form theme builder gives you the flexibility to stylize your form to fit your website’s branding—once again, without having to touch a single line of code. You can use it to quickly and easily customize backgrounds, colors, headers, fonts, and more.Whether you stylize a pre-made theme or create your own from scratch, the entire setup can be accomplished within an intuitive interface like the one below:

Theme Builder

Formstack’s theme builder makes it easy to create custom, branded forms. It will get amazing results, like the one you see here. And once you get your theme looking exactly how you’d like it, you can use it again and again as a template for additional forms.

Advanced Analytics

Have you ever spent hours creating a free online form, only to realize later that one little line of misplaced code rendered the whole thing unfillable? Or wondered if there’s one particular question that’s turning away people who would otherwise fill it out? Wouldn’t it be great if you could access data that points to why some visitors who start to fill out your form never hit the “submit” button? With an advanced form builder, you can. Partial Submissions let you capture customer information through forms even when they’re never completed. And Field Bottlenecks reveal exactly where people choose to abandon a form, so you can quickly fix issues.

partial_submissions_graphic
 With a monthly form building subscription, you can collect info on customers…even if they never submit your form.

Have a question about these and other form-building features? Start a conversation with a super savvy member of the Formstack team. We’re always happy to help solve your biggest web form-building challenges.*Company names have been intentionally omitted to protect innocent free web form builders.

If you run a WordPress or Drupal website or use a marketing automation tool, you probably have some experience building online forms—either through a free plugin or extra feature tossed in with other software services.The backend might look similar to this screenshot, which shows some of the code used to meticulously create a web form with a popular free online form builder*:

Free Form Builder Code

Oftentimes, these forms have confines to how they can be designed or branded. How can a platform that’s so critical to the success of your website result in a form that’s so easy to miss? This can be especially disheartening for the non-programmer who’s spent hours learning and fine-tuning each line of code, only to end up with an amateur-looking form and no easy way to organize the data when someone actually stops to fill it out.In these situations, your first instinct may be to hire a $100-an-hour professional web developer. Because, let’s face it: Free web form builders are often a letdown.Before you drop that kind of money on yet another contractor, it’s worth looking into what you could accomplish with a more robust form builder. The right platform will make it incredibly easy to create forms that convert like crazy, with features such as:

Custom Designs that Take Minutes to Create

Today’s advanced form builders are designed so you can drag and drop your way to polished, professional forms with little-to-no coding knowledge. You can customize virtually anything, from form backgrounds and buttons to fonts and overall designs, within a matter of minutes. While Cascading Style Sheets are often accessible for times you do want to go behind the scenes, they’re not typically required to get attention-grabbing results. (And at Formstack, we remove the mystery from form CSS.)

Drag and Drop

A robust form builder offers all kinds of easy drag-and-drop field and format options.=

Integrations that Make Virtually Anything Possible

Tired of manually adding addresses to your lists? Use email marketing and CRM integrations to automate the process. Need to increase orders? Use Conditional Logic and payment gateway integrations to get paid faster. Want to give people a way to fill out your forms faster? Pull from social media accounts to make things easier on time-crunched, mobile visitors.You can even link your forms to all of the most popular Google Apps to schedule appointments, register event attendees, create spreadsheets, and more.

Custom Themes You Can Use Again and Again

A form theme builder gives you the flexibility to stylize your form to fit your website’s branding—once again, without having to touch a single line of code. You can use it to quickly and easily customize backgrounds, colors, headers, fonts, and more.Whether you stylize a pre-made theme or create your own from scratch, the entire setup can be accomplished within an intuitive interface like the one below:

Theme Builder

Formstack’s theme builder makes it easy to create custom, branded forms. It will get amazing results, like the one you see here. And once you get your theme looking exactly how you’d like it, you can use it again and again as a template for additional forms.

Advanced Analytics

Have you ever spent hours creating a free online form, only to realize later that one little line of misplaced code rendered the whole thing unfillable? Or wondered if there’s one particular question that’s turning away people who would otherwise fill it out? Wouldn’t it be great if you could access data that points to why some visitors who start to fill out your form never hit the “submit” button? With an advanced form builder, you can. Partial Submissions let you capture customer information through forms even when they’re never completed. And Field Bottlenecks reveal exactly where people choose to abandon a form, so you can quickly fix issues.

partial_submissions_graphic
 With a monthly form building subscription, you can collect info on customers…even if they never submit your form.

Have a question about these and other form-building features? Start a conversation with a super savvy member of the Formstack team. We’re always happy to help solve your biggest web form-building challenges.*Company names have been intentionally omitted to protect innocent free web form builders.

Heather Mueller
Heather is a website copywriter and digital content strategist who loves helping brands generate leads through the power of the written word—especially when using Formstack. Connect with Heather on Twitter @heathermueller.
More Articles
Meet The Host
Content Marketing Manager
Connect
Lindsay is a writer with a background in journalism and loves getting to flex her interview skills as host of Practically Genius. She manages Formstack's blog and long-form reports, like the 2022 State of Digital Maturity: Advancing Workflow Automation.