Cognito Forms vs. Lightning Tools Lightning Forms

It's excellent for small sets of forms, from simple to highly complex It's not good at scale. With over 170 forms now, we desperately need some way to manage and maintain shared content once Cognito does not help. Their approach is that you can copy a working form (great) and modify it to create the next one. That's how we've got so many forms...

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.

• New Hire Form - It announces the new hire and provides direction to several departments on their needs, computer, phone, security level, etc.
• Terminations - We use it to shut off security, badges, computers, track phone, electronics, etc.
• Temp Form - It provides an avenue to enter them into our payroll system for tracking hours, also, for the start and end dates.

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.

• It isnt the most user friendly if you have someone who isnt experienced
• Learning curve is pretty high
• Should be easier to customise the formatting

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.

We have been using Cognito Forms for over 5 years. We find it very easy use and it is part of the programs we use on a daily basis.

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.

Very friendly and helpful, but typically takes at least one day to respond. However, when they do respond they dive right into the specific form I ask about and tell me exactly how to fix what I need help with

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 have not used any other programs like Cognito Forms. I have been with my company for almost two years. I very much like the ease of this system and its capabilities. I like knowing everyone is using the same thing. I do not foresee us making any changes to our current use of Cognito Forms.

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.

• We've been able to get away from Word and pdf forms and build a functionality that is conditional on form content
• The speed of getting a good-enough version up and running to meet an immediate business need is outstanding
• The cost of improving a set of almost good-enough forms or propagating a change in business rules is depressing

• 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.