There’s nothing more irritating than investing a lot of time using a tool, only to realize its limited capabilities and functionality. This is especially frustrating when the tool is deeply rooted inside your organization and your team’s workflows. A lot of teams start out using Google Forms because Google is a reliable, household name. To be frank, Google Forms is a great tool if you need to quickly and cheaply build an online form and embed it on your website. And as a developer, I can confirm this is a much more attractive alternative to building a custom web form from scratch.However, it doesn’t take long to notice the tool’s shortcomings. Trying to do much more than build a form and review the incoming submissions is incredibly painstaking. Even attempting to simply view all of your submissions in a list view requires you to continually export the submissions to Google Sheets. Formstack offers a much more robust form building tool, allowing you to do so much more than just view and export your submissions. Here’s a few Formstack features you can utilize to quickly level up from Google Forms in order to create more powerful—and more automated—workflows with your online forms.
Data Routing & Integrations
Data routing and integrations are the backbone of any robust form builder. With Formstack, you can use logic to send your form submission data anywhere you want it. With just a few clicks, you can set your form to notify specific users when a form is submitted, send a custom confirmation email to the form submitter, and pass the submission data on to one (or several) of our 40+ native integrations. We integrate with the most popular Google apps, including Google Drive, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, and Google Sheets. Furthermore, our integration with Zapier opens the door to endless possibilities. We’ve seen users create amazing workflows with Formstack as their data capture tool.
Payment Processing & Robust Security
With Formstack, you can collect online payments with ease. We integrate with the largest payment processors out there, including Paypal, Stripe, Authorize.Net, Chargify, and Dwolla. You can create a secure and reliable payment collection process using your preferred vendor, and know that your data is secure. We are dedicated to providing all users with the highest levels of security, including 256-Bit SSL, form- and account-level data encryption, PGP email encryption, and more. We are also proud to be HIPAA and GDPR compliant.
Approvals
If you're using tangled email threads or random tools in order to get stakeholders to review and approve work, our Approvals feature can help you clean up the mess and streamline your day-to-day workflow. This is especially nice because it helps you stay informed and keep everyone in the loop on tasks and requirements, making it easy to track any process from conception to completion. This is one tool that you’ll never want to be without once you’ve started using it.
Workflows
One of the most robust tools we offer is an intuitive workflow tool, which allows multiple people in your organization to review, edit, and complete a single online form. It’s amazing how much more organized and efficient your team can be when you assign sections of a Workflow form to certain users. Moreover, the Workflows tool makes it extremely easy to track your team’s day-to-day processes, helping you quickly identify bottlenecks and boost your team’s productivity.
Google offers a great free form building option. But if you need anything more than basic form creation, Formstack is the best alternative. With team collaboration tools, workflow automation, and advanced features, our online form solution stands out as so much more than just a form builder.
