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Cognito Forms

Score8.3 out of 10

32 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Cognito Forms?

Cognito Forms, from the company of the same name in South Carolina, is presented by the vendor as an easy-to-use online form builder, allowing anyone to create, publish, and manage forms, with free and paid plans. With it, users can create unlimited forms including registration forms, payment forms, and surveys without coding. Forms can be embedded directly into a website, and form submissions can be viewed from any device, any time.

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features Cognito Forms has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 32 ratings of Cognito Forms's features
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Top Performing Features

  • Standard reports

    Includes canned reports that allow users to generate and share accurate survey results.

    Category average: 7.9

  • Compliance

    Supports privacy compliance and confidentiality standards, such as HIPPA.

    Category average: 8.8

  • Custom logo/branding

    Allows the user to include their company logo (rather than the survey vendor’s logo) and/or create a company template so that branding is consistent across multiple surveys.

    Category average: 7.8

Areas for Improvement

  • Changes to live survey

    Users can make changes to live surveys after they are published.

    Category average: 8.4

  • Question design help

    Includes educational material about question design for research, such as tips, recommendations, and information about best practices.

    Category average: 8.2

  • Themes

    Includes options for the look & feel of a survey, including different colors, fonts, layouts, etc.

    Category average: 7.3

Reviews

What users are saying about Cognito Forms.
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The perfect form creator for any business

Incentivized
Aaron Lawson
Director in Customer Service at Atlas Junk Removal Inc. (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Cognito Forms for internal forms such as daily profit / cost reporting, incident reports, employee reviews, interview forms as well as customer facing agreements / terms of service forms. It does everything we need it to do and love how it captures and sorts individual entries for easy review at a later date.

Pros

  • Form building
  • Data collection
  • Reporting / submissions

Cons

  • More options for form creating
  • Advanced calculations fields
  • Design

Return on Investment

  • Efficiency
  • Cost effective
  • Branding

Usability

Cognito Forms is the business

Incentivized
Verified User
Professional in Human Resources (201-500 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Cognito Forms for various instances including surveys, but most recently have incorporated it into a Employee Recognition and Rewards program. Cognito Forms allows for highly customisable workflows and really adds value where we would have needed to go and pay for a platform or specific software. We have been really happy with the results

Pros

  • Branching Scenarios
  • Workflows
  • Surveys

Cons

  • 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

Return on Investment

  • We have used Cognito Forms in place of having to purchase a specific platform or software for Employee Engagement
  • We have used Cognito Forms for great surveys and found the reporting pretty good too

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Canva, Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Adobe Acrobat Sign and Adobe Analytics

Other Software Used

Microsoft 365, Microsoft SharePoint

Wonderful, but a maintenance headache

James de RaeveView profile
GM India and VP Certification at The Open Group (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We run professional certification programs for senior Architects, Data Scientists, and Technical Specialists. We use Cognito Forms to collect candidate information including descriptions of experience and demonstrations of skill. We have business rules regarding dates, levels of seniority, areas of expertise, etc. We also use Cognito forms for subject matter experts to record their reviews of the candidates' applications, and we use them to gather the findings of peer review boards that interview candidates. In addition, we use the forms' lookup and workflow capabilities to select the reviewers and route candidate forms to them

Pros

  • Powerful conditional logic for controlling visibility, optionality etc
  • Lookups to provide access to lists from other forms, plus filters to select valid entries
  • Email based workflow, and the ability to open pre-filled forms from links in the email
  • Responsive and knowledgable support by email
  • The ability to structure a form into sections, and sections within sections, to group related fields together for naming and reference, and for copying/pasting within the form

Cons

  • We have families of forms with a mix of unique parts and common functionality. Cognito has no ability to copy a field or a section (set of fields) between forms. If you need to update the common functionality, you have to do it separately for each affected form.
  • It seems that the (large and impressive) functionality has outgrown the capabilities provided to manage sets of complex forms that exploit this functionality - such as copying and pasting between forms or being able to define a section in one place and have it appear in many forms (#include)
  • The documentation is incomplete - often have to discover how things work by trial and error
  • A spell checker for content would be nice!

Return on Investment

  • 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

Usability

Fantastic, flexible tool for data gathering and online contracts.

Incentivized
Russell Barnett, EA, CTSView profile
CEO in Finance and Accounting at SIlicon Valley Tax Coach (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Cognito forms to create online, custom forms to gather a huge array of client information. We also use Cognito forms for our client engagement letters as it allows us to custom tailor them for each client while also collecting payment through Stripe.

Pros

  • Conditional logic
  • Answer piping
  • Iframe embedding
  • Support is friendly and easy to work with to resolve issues on your specific form
  • Zapier integration opens up endless possibilities to automate using the information from your form

Cons

  • Calculated field syntax is extremely unwieldy and difficult to use if you are not a programmer
  • Self-help material is nonspecific and difficult to extract usable information from
  • The features that require a paid subscription seem arbitrary at times
  • Submitted forms aren’t static. Changes to the form template reflect in submitted forms as well which is just dumb.

Return on Investment

  • Increased control over cash flow
  • Enhanced client experience
  • Flexible, intuitive forms for client use

Usability

Cognito Forms Review

Incentivized
Willem Smit
Managing Director in Professional Services at Business Hunters Int. (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • Cost effective.
  • Easy to use.
  • Safe.
  • Automates data collection.

Cons

  • Implement payment platforms from outside the US specifically South Africa.

Return on Investment

  • Safe us a lot of time doing client onboarding.
  • Use it for data collection for business plan info collection.

Other Software Used

AWeber, Calendly, Nifty

Usability