123FormBuilder vs. Lightning Tools Lightning Forms

If you have a lot of customer interaction with your site, where you need to collected specific, targeted, situational data, 123FormBuilder is an absolute winner. If your site is more information and perhaps leads to a software platform or other product or service, 123FormBuilder might prove unnecessarily robust for you. Something simpler and cheaper might make more sense for you. But in most cases where you're seeking to collect information from customers, I'd happily recommend 123FormBuilder.

Incentivized

Overall, there are many use cases for which Lightning Forms provides a slick, easy to develop and extremely useful solution. Request forms that need to be actioned and inspection forms are the scenarios that we have used them for so far, which have seen a lot of success. We have decided that other scenarios that are perhaps more sensitive, for instance forms that may contain special category data relating to our customers, are less appropriate given the permissions/licensing constraints of both SharePoint and Lightning Forms.

• Ease of constructing a form with requisite inputs
• Customizable look and feel options based on varying requirements in our case
• Logic based branching & validation

Incentivized

• Simple user interface - users of the forms intuitively aware of how/where to input information. This is in part due to being able to show or hide different questions or areas of the form, and making them required or not, based on previous answers.
• Low/simple code - building complex forms with automation and multiple dependencies or lookups is relatively easy once you get started. You have the power of JavaScript to use and do some quite clever things if you can get to grips with it - a lot of solutions are only a Google away.
• As it is based on SharePoint, it integrates perfectly with the rest of the M365 suite. Things like PowerAutomate enhance its functionality even further.

• Some employees are intimidated at first. After all, it is html.
• There is so much functionality that it can be easy for novices to get lost.
• Will there be more payment flexibility? parents use more of the bank to person payment options.

Incentivized

• The styling of the form can sometimes be slightly awkward to use depending on what you're looking to do. For instance, if I was looking to highlight fields that users have missed (left empty), I would need to set up a validation for that question and then set a style for that particular field for when it is invalid. When you have a large and complex form with lots of dependencies, this is awkward.
• Support for complex and niche issues is slightly lacking in my experience. I submitted a helpdesk ticket for help with a strange issue I couldn't figure out, which took several weeks to get a response to. Because it is niche, it's more difficult to find an answer by searching the internet. Luckily, knowing there is likely to always be a fix if you find the right place/use the right formula, I manage to resolve the issue with some trial and error.
• It is disappointing that Lightning Forms does not integrate with the MS Lists app. Having the ability to access the form through the list app would add in a lot of useful functionality, including a better experience for users when taking photos to add as attachments.

I like the product, but I am no longer in control of the project where this product was being used. However, I would definitely use 123ContactForm on future products

Incentivized

Easy to install and quickly explain to others how to use

Incentivized

It is very user friendly both to me who is building the content (with little background knowledge of coding etc., other than what I have picked up from using products like PowerAutomate, PowerBI, a bit of html etc.) and to end users of varying levels of IT proficiency. This has been extremely important as we have used the forms to make relatively large process changes, and need to have our users on board and seeing that it is actually easier than it was before.

I did not encounter any blackout issues

Incentivized

The interface was very good and easy to use. Everything loaded quickly and it was easy to integrate other products

Incentivized

Very neutral, did not have to use support a lot

Incentivized

Some support has been okay, but in one instance of a fairly complex problem, the support team were not able to provide me with a fix within a few weeks, before I was able to find a workaround myself.

I installed 123ContactForm myself and while I had some issues installing it I was able to visit their website and the troubleshooting information they provided in their faq section. They did offer other support if a user needed additional support, but I found the information provided on their website to be more than sufficient

Incentivized

123ContactForm was very easy to implement and the content provided by them supported the product very well and answered all of my questions

Incentivized

Compared to JotForm or Woofoo, 123ContactForm offers a much better interface and better flexibility than the other tools. I have used JotForm only to get stumped by their inability to push the limits of the form. As for Woofoo, the level of ease of use in terms of their interface leaves much to be desired. Any updates made to their form was down using a WYSIWYG, where with 123ContactForm you can make the updates while building the form

Incentivized

We were using Microsoft Forms, SharePoint Lists and PowerAutomate to attempt to do much of what we are currently doing. Functionality is very limited in comparison. The ability to make questions required based on previous answers was a massive improvement from normal SharePoint List forms and has greatly improved the quality of data. Also just the very visual display and customisation is much better.

It was easy to install and I believe that would make it easy to use across several websites

Incentivized

• 123ContactForm has been positive for my business. It has saved us money because we did not require any development I was able to do this myself.

• We changed the process by which site colleagues report repairs on behalf of customers. Instead of emailing them into a shared inbox, they now report them using a lightning form. We have seen a great improvement in the time taken for our team to log the repair issue from the time is arrives with them.
• We anticipate that streamlining our void property reletting process by using a SharePoint kanban board view with lightning forms (providing a single platform for all things void) will reduce avoidable days vacant and therefore reduce our void loss.