Item: Cognito Forms
Rating: 8
Author: Russell Barnett, EA, CTS

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 and Cons

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

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

Key Insights

Do you think Cognito Forms delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cognito Forms's feature set?

Yes

Did Cognito Forms live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Cognito Forms go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cognito Forms again?

Yes

Usability

Non calculated fields are easy to use. Calculations can be a nightmare to get working due to complex and unintuitive syntax, as a non-programmer

Support Rating

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited for securely collecting information for our tax and accounting clients

Easy embedding makes the forms look very polished and customized

The UI is polished and easy to jump into

The paid subscriptions are not particularly cheap however

Tge syntax used for calculations is unintuitive difficult to work with for non-programmers. Using a syntax more similar to excel formulas would have made this instantly accessible to a huge swath of users.

Fantastic, flexible tool for data gathering and online contracts.

Overall Satisfaction with Cognito Forms