Nextcloud Forms

What Nextcloud Forms does

Forms is the questionnaire app for Nextcloud, maintained by Nextcloud GmbH and community contributors and listed as a Featured app in the Nextcloud App Store. Its own description sums up the approach: only the essentials, no mass of options. It is aimed at the jobs people often do with Google Forms inside an organization: event sign-ups, internal polls, feedback and simple data collection.

The question types are checkboxes, radio buttons, dropdowns, short and long text, date, time, file upload, linear or Likert scales, color, ranking and grid (a matrix of radio buttons, checkboxes or number fields). Short answers can be validated as an email address, phone number, number or regular expression; choice questions can offer an “other” answer, shuffle their options and set minimum and maximum selections; dates and times can be limited to a range or ask for a range.

A form can collect anonymous answers, allow one or several submissions per person, let respondents edit their answers later, expire on a date, and be closed or archived. Owners can show a custom thank-you message in Markdown, send a confirmation email to respondents, lock a form while editing it, clone forms and transfer ownership.

Sharing and results

Sharing works the Nextcloud way. You can share a form with specific users or groups, open it to every account on the instance, or create a public link for people without an account; administrators can let users choose a custom link token. Public links can be turned into an iframe embed code, which can report its height to the parent page, to put the form on another website. Collaborators can receive permission to edit the form, view results or delete responses.

Results appear as a summary with charts and as a list of individual responses. They export to CSV in the same layout Google Forms uses, or to ODS and XLSX. A form can also be linked to a spreadsheet in Nextcloud Files, and since release 5.4.0 that file is kept in sync as new responses arrive. Developers get a documented REST API, and the Nextcloud webhook system can send a FormSubmittedEvent to an outside service, for example an automation tool.

Self-hosting Nextcloud Forms

Forms is not a standalone application. You install it from the app management screen of an existing Nextcloud server, and it uses Nextcloud’s accounts, groups, sharing, Files, notifications and search. The current release supports Nextcloud 33 to 35, with older Forms releases kept for older servers. Running Nextcloud means PHP (8.3 to 8.5 for Nextcloud 35), Apache or nginx, and a MySQL/MariaDB or PostgreSQL database, with SQLite recommended only for testing.

The app is licensed AGPL-3.0-or-later. A few files carry AGPL-3.0-only or permissive headers, and there is no closed or paid edition of Forms; Nextcloud GmbH sells support subscriptions for the server as a whole.

Hosted version

Nextcloud GmbH does not host Forms itself. Its sign-up page points to independent Nextcloud providers with free and paid accounts, and states that those accounts belong to the partner rather than to Nextcloud. Whether Forms is enabled depends on the provider.

Limitations

Simplicity has a cost. The documented data structure has no conditional logic or branching, no page sections, and no quiz scoring, so a long survey where questions depend on earlier answers needs LimeSurvey or Formbricks. There are no payment fields, design themes or ready-made connectors to CRMs or chat tools; outside of Nextcloud you connect through webhooks or the API. And if you do not already run Nextcloud, setting up a whole collaboration server just for forms is more than most teams want; OpnForm or HeyForm are lighter in that case.

Who it suits

Nextcloud Forms suits schools, associations, public bodies and companies that already use Nextcloud and want internal surveys, registrations and feedback forms without sending answers to Google, with results landing directly in their own Files.