We have been working on this open source survey toolbox for more than a solid year. We started as a pure open source alternative to Typeform to allow anyone to run surveys, learn more about their users and control the data and infrastructure.
Over time, more and more of our users wanted to survey their users inside their software product and get a much higher conversion rate by asking short and highly targeted questions to better understand their users and improve their product.
To help them, we have rebuilt Formbricks from the ground up to support both in-app surveys and link surveys - all open source and easy to self-hosted.
We would love to hear your feedback and see how we can help you better understand your users.
May I suggest having some premium themes in the paid plan as an incentive to upgrade?
Please do keep the option to build a customised theme in the self-hosted version, though. Some people might even want to contribute back to the project because of that.
I’m curious if there is a way to build forms on the fly in response to user responses?
I want to create a chat interface but instead of doing that from scratch, can a form builder become a starting point?
The way I understand it, a form consists of a series of fixed questions. What if the questions were dynamic but restricted to short answer type? This would make creation of chat interfaces so simple and beautiful.
Branching and contextual surveying is a little different than linear questions in a form even though both might be presented in a form.
The plumbing of a survey engine could provide some pieces for presenting and maybe storing questions and answers but the order of presentation might be the layer to build.
Dynamic questions can be expressed in many ways, whether it’s literally specified, or more generally specified. If they’re more generally specified, relevancy can be an issue.
What would a chat interface be different in your mind? A chat interface face alone might be able to connect to the api of a paid surveying tool that could handle your dynamic question queueing needs.
I’m a little engaged in directly in this area around online education if you want to discuss your need further offline
One of the best open-source form services I have ever used is Typebot (1). The way it works and how users interact is awesome, I've been told many times that my forms are awesome. I am not in any way affiliated to this project, but I think it deserves some attention!
I know folks that are very privacy conscious that are used to and hate cookie popups and will treat formbricks as just another cookie popup and will adblock, download a blocklist, or use a PiHole to remove intrusive popups automatically.
No, it requires Javascript. Our goal is to avoid survey fatigue and not annoy users, so by default a user will only be shown a survey once a week, and only surveys they haven't answered or seen before and closed before.
Also since it can be self-hosted, it can be served from the same domain as the application within the survey. We also see the surveys as part of the application and a necessary part for the maintainers to provide their service.
> I know folks that are very privacy conscious that are used to and hate cookie popups and will treat formbricks as just another cookie popup and will adblock
they will do the same without javascript then, why would a privacy conscious person reply to a survey - the opposite of privacy?
Most of the time, survey forms can be boring and monotonous. Apart from making an awesome product that works smoothly, do you also plan to have a design strategy to make your surveys stand out?
That's also one reason for highly targeted and contextual in-app micro-surveys that help you only ask a few users 1-2 relevant questions without generating survey fatique :-)
Also this month we organized a hackathon around Formbricks where, thanks to the great support of over 100 contributors, we developed many of the link survey features requested by the community.
We also developed features that improve the customizability and overall look of link surveys.
For example, video backgrounds is one of them: https://github.com/formbricks/formbricks/pull/1515
We are also currently working with a talented designer who is helping us build a great open design system for Formbricks, making sure that Formbricks surveys have a recognizable look and work consistently across the app #opensourcedesign :-)
We will likely be able to launch this within the next 1-2 months
Yes please do more to explain to people how much time something will take. I have lost count the number of times I start to answer a survey (cuz I'm happy to provide feedback) but after 3-4 questions, I'm thinking "yeah I don't have THIS much time") and give up.
Another idea would be to let the survey creator know the current length/time to complete the survey, and if it's getting too long, show them advice on how to make it shorter, and show them that they will lose participants otherwise.
:-D thank you!
We will start working on the mobile SDKs soon and Flutter + React Native are highest on the list!
Please also feel free to submit a feature request for this on Github; perhaps a contributor would like to take it up sooner.
We are currently working on an improved version of the formbricks-js sdk that is optimized for public websites.
It is expected to be released next week and will allow you to trigger surveys on different parts of your app with code & no-code triggers.
Thank you! For us, the decision to go open source wasn't about having a competitive advantage, it was more about the open source community that we love being a part of.
But of course there are pros and cons to being open source. Being open source can be an advantage in this highly competitive SaaS game because it allows you to spread your (free) product much more easily around the world as developers and companies tinker with it.
It also allows us to have a much shorter feedback loop with our users and community, which is crucial for an early startup.
In addition, as an open source product, you are the first choice for privacy-conscious customers such as government agencies that want to host themselves.
The main downside, of course, is that building a commercial product is also harder in the sense that you're competing with your own free product, and it's often hard to find the line between free and paid without losing on both ends.
When we started, we were focused on building an open source alternative to Typeform. But as we continued to talk to users and watch them implement our solution, we realized there's a huge need for in-app insights similar to what Sprig offers, but as an open solution.
With highly targeted in-app micro-surveys, you can learn a lot about your users without annoying them and creating survey fatigue by asking less and only the right users.
That's why we've expanded our infrastructure to support in-app surveys, which have become the main part of our application over time.
But there's still a need for an open survey toolbox that's easy to use and allows you to easily send surveys via link or email. Since the infrastructure for these two is almost the same, we are still building this together with our open source community and promised to always keep the link survey features open and free for everyone to celebrate their great work and contributions.
We have been in the feedback & survey market for many years now, and especially with the new privacy regulations (e.g. GDPR) and the new rise of Open Source, we often wondered why there was no easy to use Open Source solution that you could embed into your own technical infrastructure and also customize the way you need.
So we built a first MVP as a hobby project and got such a great response from the open source community and early customers that we decided to go all in at the end of last year .
Over time, more and more of our users wanted to survey their users inside their software product and get a much higher conversion rate by asking short and highly targeted questions to better understand their users and improve their product. To help them, we have rebuilt Formbricks from the ground up to support both in-app surveys and link surveys - all open source and easy to self-hosted.
We would love to hear your feedback and see how we can help you better understand your users.