Show HN: Formbricks – Open-source alternative to Typeform and Sprig (opens in new tab)

That's a great idea, thank you :-)

Branching and contextual surveying is a little different than linear questions in a form even though both might be presented in a form.

The plumbing of a survey engine could provide some pieces for presenting and maybe storing questions and answers but the order of presentation might be the layer to build.

Dynamic questions can be expressed in many ways, whether it’s literally specified, or more generally specified. If they’re more generally specified, relevancy can be an issue.

What would a chat interface be different in your mind? A chat interface face alone might be able to connect to the api of a paid surveying tool that could handle your dynamic question queueing needs.

I’m a little engaged in directly in this area around online education if you want to discuss your need further offline

Thank you! "Time Till Open Source Alternative" is a pretty interesting concept!

The Formbricks admin interface is not yet optimized for mobile use. We will address this with the redesign in the next 1-2 months :-)

No, it requires Javascript. Our goal is to avoid survey fatigue and not annoy users, so by default a user will only be shown a survey once a week, and only surveys they haven't answered or seen before and closed before.

Also since it can be self-hosted, it can be served from the same domain as the application within the survey. We also see the surveys as part of the application and a necessary part for the maintainers to provide their service.

> I know folks that are very privacy conscious that are used to and hate cookie popups and will treat formbricks as just another cookie popup and will adblock

they will do the same without javascript then, why would a privacy conscious person reply to a survey - the opposite of privacy?

That's also one reason for highly targeted and contextual in-app micro-surveys that help you only ask a few users 1-2 relevant questions without generating survey fatique :-)

Also this month we organized a hackathon around Formbricks where, thanks to the great support of over 100 contributors, we developed many of the link survey features requested by the community. We also developed features that improve the customizability and overall look of link surveys. For example, video backgrounds is one of them: https://github.com/formbricks/formbricks/pull/1515

We are also currently working with a talented designer who is helping us build a great open design system for Formbricks, making sure that Formbricks surveys have a recognizable look and work consistently across the app #opensourcedesign :-) We will likely be able to launch this within the next 1-2 months

:-D thank you! We will start working on the mobile SDKs soon and Flutter + React Native are highest on the list! Please also feel free to submit a feature request for this on Github; perhaps a contributor would like to take it up sooner.

It’s impressive how quickly it has grown.

Happy to have you!

We are currently working on an improved version of the formbricks-js sdk that is optimized for public websites. It is expected to be released next week and will allow you to trigger surveys on different parts of your app with code & no-code triggers.

Thank you! For us, the decision to go open source wasn't about having a competitive advantage, it was more about the open source community that we love being a part of. But of course there are pros and cons to being open source. Being open source can be an advantage in this highly competitive SaaS game because it allows you to spread your (free) product much more easily around the world as developers and companies tinker with it. It also allows us to have a much shorter feedback loop with our users and community, which is crucial for an early startup. In addition, as an open source product, you are the first choice for privacy-conscious customers such as government agencies that want to host themselves.

The main downside, of course, is that building a commercial product is also harder in the sense that you're competing with your own free product, and it's often hard to find the line between free and paid without losing on both ends.

:-) thank you! :-)

form.io is more focussed on letting companies build form applications quicker. It's not a survey tool per se :)

When we started, we were focused on building an open source alternative to Typeform. But as we continued to talk to users and watch them implement our solution, we realized there's a huge need for in-app insights similar to what Sprig offers, but as an open solution. With highly targeted in-app micro-surveys, you can learn a lot about your users without annoying them and creating survey fatigue by asking less and only the right users.

That's why we've expanded our infrastructure to support in-app surveys, which have become the main part of our application over time.

But there's still a need for an open survey toolbox that's easy to use and allows you to easily send surveys via link or email. Since the infrastructure for these two is almost the same, we are still building this together with our open source community and promised to always keep the link survey features open and free for everyone to celebrate their great work and contributions.

We have been in the feedback & survey market for many years now, and especially with the new privacy regulations (e.g. GDPR) and the new rise of Open Source, we often wondered why there was no easy to use Open Source solution that you could embed into your own technical infrastructure and also customize the way you need.

So we built a first MVP as a hobby project and got such a great response from the open source community and early customers that we decided to go all in at the end of last year .