Google Forms vs. Laserfiche

Google Forms is great for simple surveys, such as quick polls, but any logic beyond conditional pages is not supported. Google Forms is best used when the survey participants have and are permitted to use a Google Account to fill out the form; we ran into issues with hospital IT departments. I don't believe there's a better free tool out there than Google Forms, though.

Incentivized

Laserfiche is well suited to the submission of simple routine reports to create a record repository. We use it for routine transport reports, audit reports, and anonymous citizen complaints. It creates a simple chronological record of routine events that can be reviewed and easily stored and recalled. Because the reports are in PDF format, it is not well suited to anything that needs to be imported into a common database or amended after submission.

Incentivized

• Live results: When a user completes the form the results are added instantly.
• Easy to create: Google Forms has a simple interface that allows for a wide range of question types. Google will even try to guess the question type based on the question (but this can be overridden).
• Answers export to Google Sheets: It is easy to have each response to your form add a row to a Google Sheet, allowing for further analysis or processing.
• Ability to automatically collect email addresses within a domain: If you have a form that has been shared with users in your domain, you can set it to automatically collect the users' email addresses without them needing to type it in. Makes checking whether all students have completed the form easy.

Incentivized

• Laserfiche is easy to learn. Anyone, whether they have experience with IT or not, can learn how to use Laserfiche.
• Laserfiche Forms allows people to use the form without having each person needing to be fully licensed which saves money.
• Laserfiche Workflow and Forms can make processes quick, easy, and efficient, freeing up time so staff can get more work done.

Incentivized

• Sometimes finding the output -- a Google Sheet with all responses-- is a little difficult. It's also sometimes confusing to figure out how to get back into the Google Form Survey itself.
• As always, sharing among an institutional Google account and your personal Google account can be frustrating. You have to make a copy and can't share across the two different accounts very easily.

Incentivized

• While Laserfiche has some powerful development tools, it is difficult to manage configurations while promoting code across environments. For example, SQL connections and other environment specific resources have to be manually configured in each environment.
• Laserfiche forms are a newer addition to the product family and could use some product maturity. While easy to use for simple forms, once your forms become more complex, you need to accomplish tasks by heavy JavaScript coding.

Incentivized

I will definitely renew my use of Google Forms because I really like the ease of use and the number of tools that Google forms provide. I also love that I can administer a test in real-time and get results in a timely manner

Incentivized

We plan on renewing Laserfiche for the coming year but also have been considering a scanning and document management solution that can be purchased from our new accounting system company, we are implementing the accounting system this year. It will be a couple years before we make a decision to stay with Laserfiche or change.

Incentivized

Overall ease of use for staff, volunteers, and adult learners, and easy to get reports and to share reports via Sheets. As a free tool, it does more than expected. Easy to change the look and brand it to your organization, or just make it more fun, depending on what you want to use it for.

Incentivized

It has an intuitive design that feels very natural to any user that has ever used Outlook or Windows Explorer. There are multiple ways to perform every action in order to help users with various software experiences find the shortcuts and actions they seek quickly and effectively.

Incentivized

In the years I've used GoogleForms I've never ran into any issues with the reliability or availability. Google is a gigantic company with essentially limitless resources which makes it very easy to trust that I will continue to be able to enjoy the same reliability I've come to know and expect from GoogleForms

Incentivized

I am very satisfied with Laserfiche. I have found that certain larger jobs may are slow. This may also be related to our infrastructure environment. We have been able to tune Laserfiche to increase performance on larger jobs.

Incentivized

One of the things that comes as a benefit of the lack to create complex logic branching and truly custom design is that there isn't lot of room to bog down the software. GoogleForms has always loaded just as fast as my internet service and device would allow it. I'm not sure about front end integrations or integrations into the form itself, as I've never explored it, but on the backend, I've never had any issues with integrations channeling from GoogleForms from the GoogleForms's end of things.

Incentivized

Performance, of course, is largely dependent on the underlying environment. Laserfiche does its part with multi-threading, taking advantage of multi-core servers on scanning, workflows, and bots. A SQL-Server back-end is suitable for small to medium-sized company, but may not scale to large, where Oracle would be the better choice. Workflows can be poorly written and perform recursive work slowing down the system. It's better to run batch type workflows at night when possible.

Incentivized

We haven't used much official support for Google Forms. However, because it is so widely used, there are a ton of articles and guides available online to help administrators of varying technical abilities to work through problems that arise. Additionally, Google provides an official support forum where there are discussions with other users as well as Google developers that can help address issues if needed.

Incentivized

I have never had to wait for help from Laserfiche. If I cannot find the answer online, I can easily send an email to a customer support representative. I have always been helped the same day and my questions have always been resolved. The Empower conference is always a great learning opportunity and the online resources and webinars are top-notch.

Incentivized

Easily accessible 24/7 so am able to complete courseware whenever time allows: Commute to work; waiting for friends or family; at night while relaxing [with a delicious glass of wine!]; whenever and wherever time and circumstances permit. Courseware is well written and presented in an easy to follow and understand format.

Incentivized

Google Forms doesn't really require "implementation": simply log into GDrive and create a survey! You can configure settings per survey to, for example, automatically write responses to a GSheet.

Incentivized

Although both platforms offer similar functionalities, Google Form has a personal advantage and it is the impeccable integration with the different applications of the Google suite, this allows to make use of all of them in a transparent way, which in the work environment allows to perform work efficiently and without affecting the quality of it.

Incentivized

The core infrastructure of Laserfiche, and the end user experience, is vastly superior. OnBase has a TERRIBLE UI and administration console by comparison. The core architecture of OnBase is also more scattered, while all Laserfiche processes go through a single service. Overall, the Laserfiche product is easier and more intuitive to install, maintain, and use.

Incentivized

GoogleForms lacks the ability for complex logic branching and the ability to truly design it in a custom manner. It's pretty obvious when you land on a GoogleForm that it is in fact a GoogleForm. This rating solely reflects the lack of flexibility which in turn makes it something that wouldn't usually be scaled. That being said, if needing to scale a simple solution, GoogleForms would be up for the job.

Incentivized

• High positive impact and return of investment; easy to use and seamlessly integrated with current Google Drive and Suite
• Ability to create surveys on demand and quickly, saving time and energy
• Easy to train others in using Google Forms so that there is not a bottleneck of knowledge

Incentivized

• Laserfiche has increased the efficiency of our sales reps by giving making all of the historical sales deal information very simple and fast to retrieve.
• Laserfiche has increased our efficiency with our AP department and gave department heads the ability to approve invoices where ever they are.
• I would say the biggest ROI came with the transparency of the order process for new deals. Before there would be numerous phone calls made daily to find out where an order was within the process, and now you can simply look at all deals at any time.

Incentivized