Likelihood to Recommend Formstack makes it easy to create a variety of forms. I have used it for event interest and registrations, email list sign-ups, and surveys. I have found it easy to customize, and easy to export data for import into other systems (e.g., CRM).
Read full review App Engine is such a good resource for our team both internally and externally. You have complete control over your app, how it runs, when it runs, and more while Google handles the back-end, scaling, orchestration, and so on. If you are serving a tool, system, or web page, it's perfect. If you are serving something back-end, like an automation or ETL workflow, you should be a little considerate or careful with how you are structuring that job. For instance, the Standard environment in Google App Engine will present you with a resource limit for your server calls. If your operations are known to take longer than, say, 10 minutes or so, you may be better off moving to the Flexible environment (which may be a little more expensive but certainly a little more powerful and a little less limited) or even moving that workflow to something like
Google Compute Engine or another managed service.
Read full review Pros Allows for unique situations. As a school, we don't have the luxury of being cookie cutter. Neither do our forms. Support. If we don't know how to do it, their support team has been very helpful and actually attempts to understand the issue on hand. User friendliness. In our field we have a phrase: "what if you get hit by a bus?" With Formstack, you can "get hit by the bus" and someone else can jump in and still keep things running (this is used as a phrase for illness, not termination). Read full review Quick to develop, quick to deploy. You can be up and running on Google App Engine in no time. Flexible. We use Java for some services and Node.js for others. Great security features. We have been consistently impressed with the security and authentication features of Google App Engine. Read full review Cons Setting up our multi-step form took some getting used to. Some of the branching logic configuration wasn't as intuitive as would be ideal. Since we were pushing data directly into Hubspot, I found it cumbersome to deal with data storage limits within Formstack. I would get frequent notices that new responses were not being stored in Formstack and that I needed to upgrade or delete data. I got tired of that. More/easier support for custom fonts would have been a huge plus. We were able to customize the form's appearance, but had to make some concessions in that regard. Read full review There is a slight learning curve to getting used to code on Google App Engine. Google Cloud Datastore is Google's NoSQL database in the cloud that your applications can use. NoSQL databases, by design, cannot give handle complex queries on the data. This means that sometimes you need to think carefully about your data structures - so that you can get the results you need in your code. Setting up billing is a little annoying. It does not seem to save billing information to your account so you can re-use the same information across different Cloud projects. Each project requires you to re-enter all your billing information (if required) Read full review Likelihood to Renew Our user base has come to rely on Formstack to get forms done. The Formstack tools make it easy to start from scratch or copy an existing form to "quick start" a new, similar form. The price is right and frees up IT staff to do more transformative work.
Tim Roe Project Manager, Web Services
Read full review App Engine is a solid choice for deployments to Google Cloud Platform that do not want to move entirely to a Kubernetes-based container architecture using a different Google product. For rapid prototyping of new applications and fairly straightforward web application deployments, we'll continue to leverage the capabilities that App Engine affords us.
Read full review Usability I give it this rating because Ali feel like just about anyone can use this. Now with 7 billion people in the work I understand that’s not the case but I feel like Formstack get it pretty simple where a majority of humans could use it and navigate through. The only reason I didn’t give it a higher rating is because I think
Google Forms is a little easier to use and that it’s pretty much impossible for any product to get a 10 on usability in my opinion.
Read full review Google App Engine is very intuitive. It has the common programming language most would use. Google is a dependable name and I have not had issues with their servers being down....ever. You can safely use their service and store your data on their servers without worrying about downtime or loss of data.
Read full review Support Rating The agents in the original group, especially the ones in cahoots with the developers, are really solid and know what they're talking about--I'm looking at you, Collin. The 'Tier 1' support agents that typically reply to the tickets are really spotty. If you have an overly technical question, i.e. bugfix, or describe a feature from a few years back that randomly disappeared, these agents typically will give you what feels like a generic reply and not know what you're talking about.
Read full review Good amount of documentation available for Google App Engine and in general there is large developer community around Google App Engine and other products it interacts with. Lastly, Google support is great in general. No issues so far with them.
Read full review Implementation Rating We implemented on one of the earlier versions. Through continuous engineering improvements, the interface keeps getting easier and more intuitive. Therefore, later implementations keep getting easier and better.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Drupal is a much more customizable platform, however you must have someone build the forms first and then you can work with them if you do not have the programming knowledge. If you have any changes to make, it can sometimes be both a time consuming and difficult process. Formstack is much more efficient if you do not have an in house programmer.
Read full review We were on another much smaller cloud provider and decided to make the switch for several reasons - stability, breadth of services, and security. In reviewing options, GCP provided the best mixtures of meeting our needs while also balancing the overall cost of the service as compared to the other major players in Azure and AWS.
Read full review Return on Investment Positive - ability to analyze submission trends - e.g. when a marketing email is sent, looking at increased form viewing and submissions in relation to the sending of the campaign. Immediate response - those that submit forms receive immediate response that their form has been submitted. Ryan Spear Associate Director of Admission Operations
Read full review Effective employee adoption through ease of use. Effective integration to other java based frameworks. Time to market is very quick. Build, test, deploy and use. The GAE Whitelist for java is an important resource to know what works and what does not. So use it. It would also be nice for Google to expand on items that are allowed on GAE platform. Read full review ScreenShots