The 12 best free survey tools and form builders in 2024

Jotform pros:

Jotform cons:

With a friendly and colorful user interface, Jotform helps you build exactly what you want by offering thousands of templates. Yep, thousands—from familiar categories like marketing all the way to niches like nail artistry.

The template overdose compensates for the free plan restrictions. On Jotform, you can receive 100 submissions/month (with a maximum storage of 500 in total), have 1,000 views on each form/month, and receive 10 payments through your forms. There’s also a 5-form limit and a 100-question limit. To take advantage of this free plan, you’ll need to export your results regularly and then delete them from the platform. I was a little hesitant to include Jotform on the list for that reason, but the templates pushed me over the edge.

Jotform is also really easy to use. Your form sits in the middle of the screen, showing you a preview of what the respondents will actually see. When you expand the right menu, you can add more elements to the form; by opening the left menu, you edit the form’s style. If you don’t want to mess with advanced controls, you don’t have to. But when you start gaining confidence, take some time to explore the menus, as there are a lot of design tools and settings you can change.

Jotform brings 29 form fields to the table, including unique ones like fill-in-the-blank and product list. You can also use widgets to perform more advanced actions: add checkboxes, embed PDFs, accept date reservations, or collect signatures with a Docusign integration. You can even accept payments by integrating with any of 32 different providers.

When you look to the top-left Jotform logo, you’ll notice a dropdown where you can switch between each of the Jotform apps. One converts responses to PDF. Another lets you see the form’s analytics or even build reports formatted as a PowerPoint presentation. These reports and analytics features are above average for this app category, so you’ll be able to take a deeper look into the data.

You can also connect Jotform to Zapier, so you can automatically create tasks, spreadsheet rows, contacts, calendar events, and more based on form submissions. Learn more about how to automate Jotform, or try one of these pre-made templates.

Jotform price: Free plan includes 5 forms, 100 submissions/month (500 submission storage total), 1,000 views/month, and 10 payments via form/month; paid plans start at $39/month.

Best free survey maker for using question templates

SurveyPlanet (Web)

SurveyPlanet pros:

• Solid analytics with detailed geographic information

• Unique features, such as randomizing answers in multiple-choice questions

SurveyPlanet cons:

SurveyPlanet brings together a great free plan, a polished user experience, and a useful question bank to help you articulate what you need to ask. And as a member of the unlimited everything club, SurveyPlanet doesn’t hold back on submissions, questions, or forms. You can create and receive as many as you need without limitations.

Everything is intuitive to use, but the real magic lives in the question bank. Pick question categories, and then tick all the subcategories that make sense. I picked Customer Feedback and then clicked to see Airline Passenger Feedback questions. “Was your flight for business or for pleasure?” Check off all the questions you’d like to add, and in they go.

SurveyPlanet offers nine question types, including the uncommon image choice. Each question type has some basic settings, such as minimum and maximum character counts for essay-type answers or randomizing options in multiple choice.

You can choose one of 16 free themes to style your form, and that’s about the only major customization option you have. The good news is that the base layout and interface look really good. And when you need to see the results, SurveyPlanet offers lists and graphs to show you what respondents said. You can also see the OS, browser, and location (down to the town’s name) for each form submission.

With such an extensive question library and a generous free plan, SurveyPlanet is a great place to start if you’re not quite sure what you should be asking.

SurveyPlanet price: Free for unlimited forms, questions, and submissions; paid plans start at $20/month.

Best free form builder for collecting payments on forms

Cognito Forms (Web, Windows)

Cognito Forms pros:

Cognito Forms cons:

When compared with other form apps that offer payments, Cognito Forms is the most generous: it only adds 1% on top of the payment platform’s commission. The free plan allows you to receive 500 submissions per month, but everything else is unlimited. This should be ok if you only sell via forms from time to time—but if it’s your main sales channel, consider upgrading to the paid plan sooner so you don’t get capped out.

You’ll notice that Cognito Forms’ interface isn’t as sharp as the competition. But the form-building features are robust, and the final result looks great for your users. You can edit fonts and input styles, add header and background images, and customize colors on your forms. It’s easy to put together something simple and appealing without much effort. 

You’ll get over 150 form templates to start from, and each template comes with preset questions and design. On top of that, there are 17 question types, including fields to add pricing and currency information. You can also configure advanced skip logic to show/hide questions or form pages, and even let respondents submit payments right away or later on.

The reports section is a bit lacking, as you only have access to a list of submissions. There are no data visualization features, so you’ll have to export the data and process it somewhere else. This reinforces the main use case of selling via forms, but it’s solvable by connecting Cognito Forms to Zapier, so you can automatically send your form data wherever you need it. Learn more about automating Cognito Forms, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

Cognito Forms price: Free plan includes 500 submissions/month with 1% commission for each sale through the platform; paid plans start at $15/month.

Best form builder for a free Typeform alternative

Youform (Web)

Youform pros:

Youform cons:

Typeform is amazing. The builder and form-filling user experience are so polished. But all it has for free is a limited trial, not a solution you can use in the short- to medium-term. If you rely on a superb form experience to kickstart your side hustle—but don’t have the bucks right now—Youform is a good choice to get you off the runway.

With Youform, you get free forms and submissions all the way—you’ll only pay if you want the Stripe integration, custom domains, or to replace the Youform branding with your own. This lite version of Typeform means that some parts of the experience aren’t as polished. You’ll notice there aren’t as many features as in its older sibling, but all the fundamentals are there: 15 question types with skip logic available, simple design controls to choose colors and fonts, and share via link or embed.

When replying to a form, everything looks consistent with the Typeform experience. Clicking an option triggers the familiar wave visual effect. The questions slide up smoothly when you answer. The only downsides are that it isn’t as fast to process some questions and there are no keyboard shortcuts to complete the survey without using your mouse. Only minor obstacles, considering how everything else is so well put together.

To make things easier on the admin side, Youform has a few key integrations. You can send the submissions to Google Sheets and analyze them there. Do you want to get a notification as soon as you get a new response? Connect Slack and see them stream in. But the last one is the most useful, even if it requires a little configuration: the webhook. Whenever a submission comes in, it gets forwarded to another app. Youform doesn’t integrate with Zapier yet, but Zapier can catch webhooks, so you can still automate what happens after each form submission.

Youform price: Unlimited forms and submissions; paid plans from $29/month.

Best free AI form builder

forms.app (Web)

forms.app pros:

• Good design controls

• Robust analytics

forms.app cons:

Lots of form apps are adding AI in one way or another, but forms.app takes the cake. Using it is as simple as using ChatGPT: you input a prompt explaining what kind of form you want and how many questions it should have. forms.app’s AI engine will draw up each question with the appropriate labels, question types, and order.

I wanted a customer feedback form with 10 questions, and I got it right away. Other than some minor issues with lowercase letters, the questions all made sense and were well-written. Just always be sure to review everything before publishing.

You don’t have to drop money to use these features, but unfortunately, forms.app’s free plan isn’t as generous as the competition: five forms with 100 submissions per month and 1,000 form views per month. For a couple of forms for an isolated project, it should do well. If you need more, the lowest paid plan goes for $25 per month, raising those limits to 25 forms and 1,000 submissions.

There are many reasons to upgrade to the paid plan. The app’s user interface feels great to use, plus there are a lot of question types, skip logic, and advanced design controls. AI is one bonus on top of an already strong platform, not just a shiny gimmick. And if you like saving time creating your form with AI, you can save some extra by integrating forms.app with Zapier. Here are some examples to get you started.

forms.app price: Free plan with 5 forms, 100 submissions per month, and 1,000 form views per month. Basic plan starts at $25/month.

Best free form builder for conversational AI forms

Formshare (Web)

Formshare pros:

Formshare cons:

There’s a new trend in town. Instead of creating fixed questions and answers, you can write a prompt detailing the objective of your form. AI does the rest: it figures out how to ask and generates the questionnaire on the spot. This is Formshare in a nutshell.

While other platforms are marking up the price for this new way of building and taking forms, Formshare goes the absolutely free way. There’s no price anywhere on the website. How long will this free plan last? There’s no way to tell. Before the team readjusts their business model, you can hop in and create as many surveys as you want and get as many replies as you need.

When creating a new form, you’ll notice that there are intents instead of questions. The first ones are generated by AI, but you can add new ones and choose the question type—look to the dropdown at the top-center part of the screen. You can then test the reasoning of your form in the preview window to see how the AI handles the entire session.

Every time a member of your audience takes the survey, the platform generates a questionnaire on the spot, as if they’re being quizzed by ChatGPT. Every time they reply to a question, it can dynamically update the next question to show that it heard what they said, adapting it on the fly. And, once the form is done, your audience can still ask a few questions about you and your business, so it doubles as a customer support tool.

The responses don’t flow in immediately. They only start being available in the Reports interface after the conversation becomes inactive, which is between five and ten minutes after the last message was sent. The other downside is that, since the entire form is AI-generated, there’s a bit of a waiting time until the model generates all the text for each question—a minor hit to the overall experience. Still, if you absolutely need this flexibility, it’s worth the wait.

Speaking of waiting, Formshare is currently working on its Zapier integration—while you wait for the thousands of app integrations, you can send your responses to Google Sheets for analysis.

Formshare: Completely free

Best free survey tool for product teams

Formbricks (Web)

Formbricks pros:

Formbricks cons:

Improving trial conversion, changing your subscription experience, evaluating content quality: this is a sample of the templates you can start from in Formbricks. From the names alone, you can see how it focuses on app surveys. This niche adds a few quirks to the app—for example, the fact that there’s a development mode and a production mode—but they’re easy to understand.

Customizing your surveys is easy. On the left side of the screen, you’ll be adding your questions with simple controls, letting you configure button behaviors and skip logic. On the right side, you’ll see a live preview of your survey as you build it both for mobile and desktop. There are only seven question types, but they should be able to cover most of your needs.

You can set them to pop up when the user navigates to a page, when a button is clicked, or when a condition is met—and even create your own actions or triggers. Most of the process is completely no-code, but if you need more in-depth control, you can have your developers create custom attributes and wire Formbricks and your app together. Speaking of no-code, you can connect Formbricks and Zapier together to add automation and data transfer between your apps.

There are two options for using Formbricks: you can use it in the cloud, leveraging the existing server infrastructure of the developers. This caps the submissions at 100, so you should only use it for infrequent surveying. The paid plan is a bit steep ($99/month), but all the limits are removed. The other option is self-hosting Formbricks yourself, which makes it a completely free solution.

Formbricks price: Free when self-hosted; 500 submission limit when hosted on the Formbricks cloud. Cloud Pro starts at $99/month.

Best free form app for Notion and Airtable users

Fillout (Web)

Fillout pros:

Fillout cons:

Notion doesn’t have forms, and the Airtable form experience is ok. If you need more advanced design and functionality, Fillout is the app to use. Easy, straightforward, and versatile, it’ll act as a great companion to both those apps—but it’s still strong if you decide to use it on its own. It’s growing with new features at a surprising pace, from performance improvements to a meeting scheduling module.

The free plan is one of the most generous on the list: 1,000 free submissions per month, everything else unlimited. The paid plan (at $19 per month) unlocks a few advanced features, such as reCAPTCHA support to drive away the bots, payment flows, and login forms, so users can come back again and update their information. All while bumping the total submission count to 2,000 per month.

Connecting with either Notion or Airtable takes a bit of getting used to, since you need to target the databases/bases and map which fields go where. Still, there’s a lot of handholding during the process, so despite the apparent difficulty, it’ll be really easy to start moving data around. Once one of your respondents clicks on the Submit button at the end of the form, you can see the results instantly on your platform of choice.

And these aren’t the only integrations. Fillout plays nice with a few other apps natively, including HubSpot or Microsoft Teams, and you can integrate it with Zapier to open up the possibilities to thousands more. Learn more about how to automate Fillout, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

Fillout is also dipping its toes in AI, offering a question generation feature. Look for the starry button on the top-left side of the screen, click on it, and write what you need to ask. Fillout will add that question to the form, with the appropriate text and question type ready to go.

Fillout price: Free plan offers up to 1,000 form submissions/month. Starter plan from $19/month.

Finding the best free survey software

Looking for a free survey app can be overwhelming (I know—I looked at almost all of them). Take advantage of the freeness to try out a few options, and see which one works best for your needs. Then you can ask anything you want in any way you want to, and share it easily with your audience. All this without breaking (or even touching) the bank.

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Originally published in September 2017 by Matthew Guay, this post has since had contributions from Jessica Greene, Emily Esposito, and Eric Ravenscraft. The most recent update was in August 2024.