The 12 best free survey tools and form builders in 2023

Online forms and surveys are some of the best ways to get the information you need from your audience. And whether you're creating a simple registration form or a detailed market research survey, you need an app to help you collect the information—and then do something with it.

There are countless form and survey tools available, and a lot of them cost a pretty penny. Here, we're looking at the ones you can get for free.

This year, I spent about a week testing several dozen free survey tools and form builders that you can use to keep that proverbial finger on the pulse—here are the best ones I found. Take a look, and see which one will work best for your forms and surveys.

The 12 best free survey tools and form builders

• Google Forms for the fastest form creation

• Microsoft Forms for Microsoft 365 integrations

• Tally for versatile pop-up forms

• Jotform for building forms from a template

• SurveyPlanet for question templates

• Cognito Forms for accepting payments on your forms and surveys

• youengage for creating interactive forms and surveys (that look good)

• Zoho Survey for short, business-oriented surveys

• forms.app for generating a form with AI

• Formbricks for product teams

• Fillout for Notion and Airtable users

• Zapier Interfaces for automation

What makes the best free survey maker or free form builder?

There's a small sea of form and survey software out there, and not all of it is built the same. Some are outdated platforms with confusing interfaces, as if the '90s never left the building. Others offer jaw-dropping feature sets, with an equally face-cramping price tag.

Most free survey apps and form builders will let you create a form or survey with basic input fields and show you the submissions, so you can sift through the data. More advanced solutions let you improve the look and feel of your forms, analyze your results, and add useful features such as skip logic, payment support, or access restrictions.

While I was testing each free online survey maker, here's what I was looking for:

• Free plan features. The more the word "unlimited" appears for forms, submissions, and questions, the better. If there are some limitations, they should be compensated by other features on offer, so you can create a survey for your specific use case.

• Ease of use. The best form builders have simple menus and user interfaces, clear instructions, and an overall intuitive experience.

• Design and templates. When designing a survey, you need to stay on brand, so I was looking for pleasing one-click themes and powerful design controls.

• Question types and logic. What kinds of information can you ask from your users? How do those fields work in practice? I kept my eye on the variety of question types as well as the logic available.

• Reports and analytics. There's no use in gathering data if you can't understand it. I paid attention to how reports and analytics worked in each free online form builder I tested.

To get a good feel for each app, I signed up, started a form or survey from a template, and then added all kinds of questions. I answered my own questions in all kinds of fun ways (it got old pretty quick, I assure you), got a feel for what it was like to take a survey from one of these apps, and then looked at how that data was laid out in the reports. Based on that testing, these eight free form and survey builders were the best—and each one is labeled for its strengths, specializations, or target audiences.

If you can't find what you're looking for below, you have a couple options:

1. Check out Zapier's lists of the best form builder apps and the best survey apps. Most of those options have a price tag, but they're not going to break the bank.

2. See if an existing app that already has forms attached to it. For example, Airtable, ClickUp, and Asana all have form-building features. If you're already paying for one of those apps, you might have what you need. 

One last note: If you have a WordPress website and are looking for form plugins for lead generation, you won't find those here. I do have a pick for pop-up forms, but WordPress is a whole different can of worms—a roundup for another day. In the meantime, take a look at our WPForms vs. Gravity Forms app showdown.

The best free form builders and survey apps at a glance

Best free form builder for the fastest form creation

Google Forms (Web)

Google Forms pros:

• Completely free

• Versatile

Google Forms cons:

• Cookie-cutter design

Google Forms: simple, straightforward, and fast. Anyone, no matter their skill level or experience with form software, can put together a new form quickly. The features are robust, and the pricing contains two of my favorite words: free and unlimited.

Unlimited forms, unlimited questions, unlimited submissions, and unlimited collaboration. If you have a Google account, you can access it for free. Each form you create counts toward your account's 15GB quota, but each one is really small, so you'd have to survey the whole world (and then some) to max out the storage limit.

The interface is simple and powerful, with the Google user experience you're used to. A small floating element on the right lets you start common actions like adding a new question or a new section. Because it's Google, when you type a new question, it tries to guess what kind it is. When I started typing "How do you rate…", Forms automatically updated the question type to linear scale. This is helpful for beginners and saves advanced users some time, so it's a win-win.

The design controls are decent, letting you pick a color scheme and fonts and add a header image. This is enough to stand out and to reach a pleasing end result fast. There are form templates and quiz support, and all the core reporting features are in place. And if you need skip logic, it's hidden but there: add some sections to your form, click the three vertical dots on a question, and choose what happens depending on the input.

Once you have your data, you can connect Google Forms to Zapier to be sure it gets to the right place. Zapier will automatically create tasks based on responses, send submissions to a Slack channel, or create new email subscribers based on submissions—no matter which apps you use.

Google Forms price: Free for unlimited everything

Best free form builder for Microsoft 365 integrations

Microsoft Forms (Web)

Microsoft Forms pros:

• Completely free

• AI features for form design and optimization

Microsoft Forms cons:

• Limited design control, despite the theme variety

If you're a native of the Microsoft software suite, you'll be pleased to know that Microsoft Forms is a thing. And what a great thing it is.

Microsoft Forms is also part of the unlimited everything club. You don't have to have an active Microsoft subscription to use it, but make sure you're logged in to your free Microsoft account when you visit the page (the website might take you to a subscription trial if you're not).

Last year, I named this app the best for analyzing your results in Excel, and that label remains true: in fact, there's even live sync of the submissions into Excel, so you don't have to wait around anymore to have the most up-to-date data. But there's more this year:

• You can now share a QR code in your PowerPoint files to run live polls on a presentation, great for quickly taking the temperature of a meeting and gathering feedback from an audience. The results are updated live in the PowerPoint slide.

• You can do a similar thing in Teams, with an added benefit of sending reminders to your teammates if they forget to fill out a form or respond to a poll.

• If you had a lot of forms created in Word documents or PDFs, you can convert them into a Microsoft Forms form.

• You can send your forms via Outlook in a nicely-formatted email.

This makes Microsoft Forms a pretty good companion to all your other Microsoft apps. Let's hope that the integration trend continues. And while I'm on the topic, Microsoft Forms itself doesn't integrate with Zapier, but Excel does, so you can use that as a base to trigger further automations. Here are some examples.

Microsoft Forms price: Free for unlimited everything. (Forms Pro is no longer available; it's now part of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice's software offering, starting at $200 per 2,000 survey responses per month.)

Best free form builder for versatile pop-up forms

Tally (Web)

Tally pros:

• Very generous free plan with some advanced features

• Elegant design

Tally cons:

• No reports or analytics

Someone lands on your site, interested to learn more about you and what you do. Wouldn't that be a great time to ask a couple of questions? With Tally, you can do so by adding a configurable pop-up to your website.

When you click to share, you can choose whether to embed the form, show it as a full page, or display it as a pop-up. Out of these options, the pop-up one lets you customize the most. It lets you control when and where it appears, whether you want a dark overlay, and the width of the box. You can even add an emoji for extra flair. This makes Tally great for adding pop-up forms to your website, no matter what you need the form for.

The app itself feels a lot like Notion, from the way the user interface works, to how each question is treated like a block, to the way you can add new blocks with a slash command. This design carries out to your forms, the elegance and minimalism being the main draws here. But if you want more advanced design control, you'll have to jump straight into CSS, as there's no way to control the look of the forms.

Tally also offers unlimited everything on its very generous free plan. The only big limitations are that there are no custom domains or white-labeling, and there's a 10MB file size cap for uploads and a hefty 5% processing fee for form payments (on top of the Stripe commission). You can throw these limits out of the window for $29 a month.

Paid plan or not, there aren't advanced reports or analytics, so you'll have to move your data to another app that can do it for you. Integrate Tally with Zapier and send over that data quickly and seamlessly.

Tally price: Free for unlimited questions, submissions, and forms; advanced features available on paid plans, starting at $29/month.

Best free form builder for starting from a template

Jotform (Web, iOS, Android)

Jotform pros:

• Lots of widgets and extensions

• Advanced design customization tools available

Jotform cons:

• Getting started with reports is a bit confusing

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.

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:

• Form editor has no live preview as you build your form

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:

• Good collection of templates

• Advanced skip logic

Cognito Forms cons:

• Not very flexible

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, 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. Here are some examples of how that might work.

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 free survey creator for building interactive forms and surveys (that look good)

youengage (Web)

youengage pros:

• Regular forms and live polls available

• Rich design themes

youengage cons:

• Relatively limited free plan compared to other apps on the list

youengage has all the tools you need to create beautiful forms without having to take a design course. It's just the right balance of power and simplicity, so you can put together an appealing survey without making endless tweaks. The free plan only gives you 100 submissions/month on your forms, but the $29/month paid plan is affordable if you need to scale with the platform.

What I like most about the form-building experience here is that it's organized in steps: build, design, configure, share, and analyze. Each step has the exact features it needs there. No bloat, no endless back-and-forth. Once you add all your questions and set the logic, you move on to the Design tab, where things get interesting: you can pick one of 41 themes, each with a background image and color scheme. There are solid colors, abstract patterns, and a whole set of looks and moods you can mix and match.

The preview feature in youengage is one of the best of the apps I tested. First of all, it's fast. When you click preview, the platform doesn't waste any time. And if you want to see the mobile or tablet version, you can see a framed image of the device, which is a nice touch.

There are basic analytics (how many times the form was completed, the completion rate, and time spent). You can also review results by previewing the form with the answers showing on the input fields, or by browsing a simple list.

youengage has an interesting extra for interactive marketing. You can create a live event with interactive polls and surveys, so your audience can submit their responses. There's a limit of 100 participants in the free plan, which should be good enough for you to test whether this works for your brand.

And, since youengage integrates with Zapier, moving data and configuring automation is easy. Here are some examples.

youengage price: Free plan includes 100 submissions/month and 100 live participants/event; paid plans start at $29/month.

Best free survey tool for short, business-oriented surveys

Zoho Survey (Web, iOS, Android)

Zoho Survey pros:

• Advanced input validation

• Enterprise-grade features

Zoho Survey cons:

• Very limited free plan compared to other apps on the list

Zoho Survey wears its suit and tie quite well. It has a solid feature set, including some advanced form restrictions that I hadn't seen anywhere else. And it's part of the Zoho suite of apps, which covers pretty much any area of your business.

Each survey can only have up to 10 questions, and you can only gather 100 responses per survey—but you can create as many surveys as you want. It isn't much, but the advanced features compensate for it.

Drag question types from the left menu, and drop and arrange them on the form. When you click on a question, a side window on the right appears with all the settings you can change about it, including show/hide rules and skip logic. With 30 form field types to choose from, there's a lot of flexibility on what you can ask. It includes Net Promoter Score, image selection, signatures, and file uploads. No idea what to ask? There's also a deep question bank to help you figure that out.

Once you're done adding the questions, take some time to explore the settings section. In addition to the traditional welcome and thank-you pages, Zoho Survey also allows you to add terms and conditions, add a save and continue later feature, and set a timer. Other unique features include adding a password to access the survey or restricting access by IP.

Zoho Survey does really well on reports, with full access to all responses on a list, graphics, and charts. You can also create custom reports to see data from a different angle or to present it to other stakeholders. You can even create a cross-tab report to see how data on a particular question is related to all others, so you can expose trends or related data points easily. Zoho has the best reporting and analytics features of any app on this list, and they're all available on the free plan.

You can do even more with Zoho Survey by connecting it to Zapier. Log new responses in a spreadsheet, add respondents to your email marketing tool, or anything in between. Here are some examples to get you started.

Zoho Survey price: Free plan includes 100 responses/survey and 10 questions/survey; paid plans start at $35/month.

Best free AI form builder

forms.app (Web)

forms.app pros:

• Good design controls

• Robust analytics

forms.app cons:

• Limited advanced features on the free plan

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. The feature is still in beta, but it's already pretty robust—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 extra 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.

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 survey tool for product teams

Formbricks (Web)

Formbricks pros:

• Completely free when self-hosted

• Advanced controls when deploying surveys

Formbricks cons:

• Can be tough to set up and start using

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; 100 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:

• Lots of question types

• Conditional logic and visibility available

Fillout cons:

• No analytics on the free plan

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.

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 as HubSpot or Microsoft Teams, and you can integrate it with Zapier to open up the possibilities to thousands more:

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.

Best free form app for automation

Zapier Interfaces (Web)

Zapier Interfaces pros:

• Trigger automations through forms

• Set up multi-screen forms to improve user experience

Zapier Interfaces cons:

• Still in development

Zapier is more than just the hub for all your automated workflows. There are new products on the horizon, and one of them is Interfaces, which lets you create (you guessed it) interfaces that you can use to add data to a database, run workflows, or access AI chatbots.

Interfaces is a bit different from the other form apps on this list. You can create simple forms either from scratch or from a small set of templates. Each form can be split among different screens, letting you add a message or an AI workflow to generate text based on what your user introduced in one of the input fields in between.

All your data will be stored inside Tables, another Zapier product that works like a no-code cloud database. While Interfaces has a generous free plan that doesn't limit submissions or the number of forms, each table can only hold up to 2,000 records at a time, so be sure to back up a few responses from time to time. While there, you can see a list of submissions and set up a few filters to look at the data.

The reason why Interfaces made this list is how it integrates with your Zaps (what Zapier calls automated workflows). You can add buttons at any point of your form sequence to trigger a Zap, making forms the starting point for automation and data transfer. For example, you can have a client onboarding form, and as your client fills out the input fields, you can trigger Zaps that set everything up inside your CRM, accounting app, knowledge base, and client portal—that's a lot of admin time saved.

Inspired? Check out how you can use Interfaces for forms and other use cases:

• How to create a lead capture form with Zapier Interfaces

• How to create a custom AI chatbot with Zapier Interfaces

• How to create a customer support portal with Zapier Interfaces

A note for transparency: I'm writing this article for the Zapier blog, but the Zapier team had no influence on me selecting Interfaces for the list. (In fact, last year, I considered it and didn't include it.) I tested it alongside all the other apps I considered, and it made the cut on its own merits.

Interfaces price: Free beta. Advanced Interfaces features available as an add-on to an existing Zapier plan for an additional $20/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 robust free plans 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.

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 2023.