Open source form builders and survey tools

Four kinds of form and survey tool

“Forms” covers very different jobs, and the open source projects here specialize more than the proprietary leaders do.

• Form builders handle everyday forms: contact and lead forms, registrations, orders and applications, often with payments, file uploads and integrations. OpnForm is the closest to a general Google Forms or Typeform replacement, and HeyForm offers the Typeform style of one question at a time, along with payment and signature fields.
• Survey and research platforms focus on the questionnaire itself: complex branching and calculations, participant lists with invitations and reminders, quotas, anonymity and exports to statistics software. LimeSurvey has done this job for many years; SurveyKing combines surveys with auto-graded exams.
• Experience and product feedback tools show surveys on a website or inside an app to chosen user groups, for NPS, satisfaction or research questions. Formbricks is built for this, and also runs ordinary link surveys.
• Field data collection platforms collect structured data on mobile devices, often offline, for research, health and humanitarian programs. KoboToolbox and ODK Central both use the XLSForm standard.

If you already run Nextcloud, Nextcloud Forms adds simple questionnaires to it, with results saved as spreadsheets in your own Files.

Where the answers are stored

Form responses are often personal data: names and emails, and sometimes health, opinions or details about employees. Under the GDPR, a hosted form service processes those answers on your behalf, which makes it a processor. Article 28 lets you use only processors that offer sufficient guarantees, and requires a contract covering, among other things, instructions, security, sub-processors and what happens to the data when the contract ends. Article 9 adds stricter conditions for special categories such as health data, political opinions or religious beliefs. Self-hosting removes the form vendor from that chain, although your hosting provider may still be a processor.

If you prefer a hosted plan, check the region. Formbricks Cloud is hosted in Germany, KoboToolbox runs a separate EU server, LimeSurvey Cloud lets you choose among several countries, and ODK Cloud offers US, European or Indian storage. Typeform and SurveyMonkey list data center choice as an Enterprise feature. On Google Workspace, data regions are available only on certain paid editions. None of this is legal advice; check the details with your data protection officer.

Open source, open core and response limits

The license column shows the main license, but a few projects keep some features in paid code. Formbricks keeps teams and roles, SSO, two-factor authentication and branding removal in a separately licensed enterprise directory. OpnForm keeps SSO, team roles, white-labeling and more than two users per self-hosted instance under an Enterprise license. SurveyKing sells a separate Pro edition that is not in its repository. LimeSurvey, HeyForm, KoboToolbox, ODK Central and Nextcloud Forms have no paid tier in their code.

A practical difference from the proprietary services is volume. Typeform and SurveyMonkey plans include a set number of responses per month or year. SurveyMonkey’s free plan shows only a limited number of responses per survey and deletes hidden over-limit responses after a year. The self-hosted editions here do not cap responses, though the hosted plans of some of them do.

What to check before you choose

1. The job. Lead and order forms, conversational forms, research surveys with participant management, in-product feedback, or offline field collection.
2. Logic and question types. Branching, piping, calculations, quotas, matrices, NPS, file upload, payment and signature fields. Nextcloud Forms, for example, has no branching at all.
3. Self-hosting effort. LimeSurvey runs on ordinary PHP hosting and SurveyKing in one container, while Formbricks, KoboToolbox, ODK Central, OpnForm and HeyForm are multi-service Docker stacks.
4. Security features. Encryption (ODK Central can encrypt submissions with your own key), anonymous responses, SSO and roles, and which edition includes them.
5. Getting data in and out. CSV and spreadsheet export, SPSS, R and Stata export in LimeSurvey, OData in ODK Central, APIs and webhooks. None of the projects here documents an importer for Typeform, Google Forms or SurveyMonkey forms, so plan to rebuild the forms you rely on; XLSForm files, by contrast, move between KoboToolbox and ODK.

Projects not listed

Typebot, a conversational form and chatbot builder, uses the Functional Source License, which is source-available and only becomes Apache-2.0 after a delay, so it is not listed. OhMyForm and TellForm are open source but no longer maintained. Yakforms, the software behind Framaforms, is developed on Framagit rather than GitHub, which this directory does not track yet. Form.io and SurveyJS are developer components for building forms into your own applications rather than ready-to-use tools, and SurveyJS keeps its visual Creator under a commercial license.