Lightning Tools Lightning Forms vs. Typeform

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.

Typeform is definitely a leader in the online survey space and that's for a reason. Between logic mapping and the ease of use for the end user, it's a solid app. The unfortunate thing, however, is the price tag--particularly considering the protection you receive from bots. Typeform only allows a certain number of responses at certain package levels, ie: the lowest level, you get a very limited number of responses but in order to receive more responses before your survey is locked, you must upgrade. This is what ultimately lead us to cancel with them. When you post a survey on Typeform, that survey is automatically posted publicly on their website--making it widely available to bots. Typeform offers no easy form of protection like a standardized captcha that you can add to the survey in order to filter bots out. Instead, there are several "work arounds" that they advise users to do that have very limited degrees of success. A quick online search shows that Typeform knows this is clearly an issue, yet they have yet to build in a bot-prevention feature. Since their plan prices vary by number of responses, it seems that they have no incentive to limit the amount of bots filling out surveys I believe. Ultimately, we canceled because, although the app is powerful, it just seemed like their business practices were unethical in my opinion.

• 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.

• The calculator tool allows you to use numerical formulas to create logic within your form for specific behavior.
• Compatible with modern web browsers for both building a form and publishing, allowing it to work and look good on any device.
• Integration with products like Zapier allow you to use it as part of a larger automation in your company.
• Visually pleasing designs with use of themes, images and video to match your branding.

• 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.

• The pricing structure is a little steep, especially for the Pro+ plan. It would be nice if they had an a la carte option because there are some features we are paying for that we will never use.
• When creating forms, sometimes the cursor will inexplicably leave the field you are typing in and leave you with incomplete sentences.
• Even though we are paying for our use, we still have the Typeform branding on our forms, which I think should be removed once you upgrade from the basic plan.

Incentivized

We have had such success with Typeform, and it has been able to exceed our expectations for the range of products it offers

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.

Typeform takes a little bit of getting used to. Compared to Google Forms there are a lot more parts to the software and customizing the form isn't as intuitive. I have also found that embedding it into one smaller section of a webpage seamlessly can be a little tricky. But everything can be figured out eventually and the analytics are very good.

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 haven't used the support portion of Typeform, as everything was quite easy to use. I have never encountered a situation where I did not know what to do or how to fix something myself. Typeform is very easy to adopt within any organization, no matter if you understand tech or not.

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.

When looking for a feature rich & flexible / customizable solution, Typeform beats out everyone. However, for specific use cases (like NPS), AskNicely is a clear winner in terms of features, but is much too expensive. Typeform is also fun to use, especially compared to Wufoo which seems so out of date

Incentivized

• 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.

• Typeform has helped guide our Customer Success, Product, and Marketing teams in strategizing how to engage with customers better, and it has also given us a quick and easy way to do so! By collecting feedback and being able to share it across internal teams, we can coordinate our efforts to build our customers a better tool.
• Typeform has proved to be an elegant solution to one of our earlier vexing problems (previous survey tools that looked annoying, had extremely limited branding options/were not customizable, and didn't integrate well with the rest of our tool set) while not breaking the bank for us - it's a very reasonable price point and does WAY more than the previous tools we were paying just as much for.

Incentivized