Choosing the Right Enterprise Form Builder for Your Business Needs

Form builder tools come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. In most cases they are so-called SaaS tools (software as a service), which means you use their product on their infrastructure as an online service. For many cases that’s perfect, because you don’t have to worry about the infrastructure behind all that and you can just focus on your form building. The usual suspects for online form builders are Typeform, Jotform, SurveyMonkey and Google Forms.

As said, those are ideal for straightforward form building, but when you’re looking for an enterprise form builder, your requirements are probably more advanced. Most likely around data security and privacy. As such, the SaaS form tools we mentioned above usually aren’t suitable anymore. Yet, building a full-fledged form tool completely on your own is almost an impossible job. Modern form tools require advanced solutions like form logic, responsiveness, notifications and integrations, which would take months or even years to develop in-house.

Luckily there are a few form builder solutions available that give you best of both worlds: the heavy lifting of building a form solution is already done by them and you can use that to implement this all in your own environment. This gives you all modern features you expect from a form tool, but with all control over implementation, data and privacy. Let’s dive a bit deeper in the world of enterprise form builders and what to expect from them.

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What is an Enterprise Form Builder?

Data collection has become a vital part of every modern enterprise business. Back in the days data collection was done via paper, but currently data is predominantly collected digitally. This helps organizations streamline their workflows, reduce manual errors, and improve overall productivity by digitizing and optimizing their data collection processes.

For enterprise business you can think of both internal and external data collection workflows. Internal you find applications across various departments, including human resources, finance, compliance, and operations. Examples of such internal forms are:

• Onboarding forms;
• Internal feedback forms;
• Employees growth/development forms;
• Expense forms;
• Transportation forms;
• Forms for internal processes.

External data collection includes all communication with your prospects and customers. That can be in the various stages of your relationship with your customers, like sales, support and feedback. Examples of external forms are:

• Intake form;
• Registration form;
• Screening form;
• Order form;
• Support form;
• Product evaluation form;
• Customer satisfaction form;
• Likert Scale Survey;
• Feedback form.

For enterprises those are important forms which can lead to valuable insights for the internal and external processes. And often such forms can contain privacy sensitive data, which you ideally have full control over. That’s why enterprise business can’t always rely on SaaS form builders: you store your collected data on their end, with all risks of data breaches or marketing goals.

With an enterprise form builder, you take control every step of the way. You build your forms inside your own digital environment and store all data on your own infrastructure. That way you have full ownership of the data and you can make sure that only the right people with the organization has access to that data.

Now that we know what an enterprise form builder is, let’s have a look at what to expect from such an integrated form builder.

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What to expect from an Enterprise Form Builder

When looking from a SaaS form builder perspective, there are a few important elements that you may want a more sophisticated solution for in an enterprise form builder, namely:

• You want to have full implementation control within your own enterprise software suite, instead of being dependent on third-party infrastructure;
• You want to have full data control over the collected data, instead of storing your data with third-parties;
• You want to customize the look-and-feel of your forms, ideally by totally white-labeling everything, instead of using the look-and-feel of the SaaS form tool;
• You want to be able to develop your own custom features, tailored to your own needs, instead of being limited by the features of an external form tool;
• You want to neatly integrate your form tool with other digital processes within your business, instead of sending data back and forth;
• You want the form tool to grow with your volume of forms and submissions, instead of paying for a limited amount of forms or submissions.

That results in a more detailed overview of what you expect from an enterprise form builder. We will highlight some of the aspects to look for in an enterprise form builder:

1. Smarts forms

Modern forms react to the answers that a respondent gives throughout the form. That way the form only asks the right questions. This is called form logic and makes the form feel more like a conversation instead of a boring form. This will boost your completion rates, as respondents only have to fill out the questions that are meant for them.

2. User-Friendly Interfaces

The interface of your form has to be user-friendly, so respondents are in no doubt of how to fill out the form. In the modern era that also means taking care of responsiveness for different screen sizes, like mobile, tablet and desktop. This will improve the usability of your form, making the data collection process more efficient and less time-consuming.

3. Customization Options

Every company has its own style, which is an important element on how your users/customers experience your company/brand. A form should reflect that feeling. Think of branding, fonts and color schemes. Ultimately white-labeling the full form solution results a tailored user experience, enhancing both efficiency and user satisfaction.

4. Integration Capabilities

The main goal of your enterprise form tool is to collect data. But data on its own isn’t what’s valuable; what you do with that data is the real value. Therefore, it is important that the collected data is seamlessly integrated with the different applications you use in your business, such as CRM software, project management platforms, or databases. This ensures a unified ecosystem, reducing manual data entry and minimizing the risk of errors.

5. Security and Compliance

Data security is non-negotiable in today's business landscape. With a form builder solution that is integrated in your own infrastructure, you get full control over everything related to security and compliance requirements. Think of data encryption, user authentication and audit trails. Additionally, you have to make sure that your form solution complies with industry-specific and location-specific regulations, such as GDPR or HIPAA, depending on your business sector and location.

6. Scalability

Make sure that scalability is secured from the get-go, so you are not faced with any surprises when it turns out your business grows and thus your form capacity has to grow. Ideally, you are not limited by the number of forms and/or responses. Make sure your back-end can accommodate an increasing volume of forms and data without compromising performance. A scalable enterprise form builder ensures that your organization can adapt to evolving requirements without the need for frequent system overhauls.

7. Cost Considerations

Different form tools come with different pricing models; often based on the number of forms and/or submissions. Evaluate pricing models, including subscription fees, user licenses, and any additional costs for advanced features or support. Strive for a balance between functionality and budgetary constraints to ensure the chosen form builder aligns with your financial considerations.

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Tripetto FormBuilder SDK: Your Enterprise Form Builder

Considering all the above, there aren’t many form builder tools that can help you with this. As we’ve seen before, most of the online form builders are SaaS-oriented and thus lack some of the important aspects for an enterprise form builder.

The Tripetto FormBuilder SDK is one of the form builder solutions that stands out from the SaaS offerings. SDK stands for Software Development Kit, which means you can integrate the form components developed by Tripetto, right into your own software. And that gives you full control over the technical integration, customization, data management, security and scalability. And because the components are developed by the team behind Tripetto, you still get all modern form features you expect, including all question types, form logic and responsive form layouts.

SDK Form Components

The SDK contains 3 core form components:

• Form Builder, which lets you build your forms like flowcharts on a storyboard;
• Form Runners, which executes your forms in 3 different layouts:
  • Autoscroll Form Layout, to present your questions one-by-one;
  • Chat Form Layout, to present your forms like a chat conversation;
  • Classic Form Layout, to present your form in a more traditional way.
• Form Blocks, which are the question types in your form builder and form runner.

The big advantage of these components is that they are all customizable to your own needs and specifications. On top of that, the components are extensible, which means you can develop your own custom features that are not available by default. This gives you the ideal starting point with the stock form components, but the freedom to develop anything else that you miss.

Development Time

Earlier we saw two options for an enterprise form builder: a SaaS solution which you can use right away (with the mentioned downsides) or developing your complete own form solution (with the overhead of development time and costs). The Tripetto FormBuilder SDK can be positioned in the middle of those two: you get the full feature set you expect from a form tool, plus, you can integrate all that in just a few hours to days inside your own software. That gives you the best of both worlds!

Implementation guides

We made some simple quickstarts with code snippets for each of the frameworks that you can use:

• React implementation
• Angular implementation
• Plain JavaScript implementation
• HTML implementation

All technical documentation on every aspect of the FormBuilder SDK is available in our SDK Docs.

Costs

Licensing of the Tripetto FormBuilder SDK is never based on the number of forms and/or submissions. The license is based on the components you use and the role that the form solution plays within your operation. So, the volume of your forms and submissions doesn’t influence your costs when your business grows.

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Conclusion

Choosing the right enterprise form builder is an important decision for your business. It’s important to prioritize the different aspects for your business. Think of form features, customization, integrations, security and scalability. In this article we have taken a look at some of those aspects, which hopefully help you with this decision.

One of the form solutions that is a great mix between the features of a SaaS solution and the flexibility of developing everything on your own is the Tripetto FormBuilder SDK. Testing the FormBuilder SDK for implementation is totally free. With guides for React, Angular, JavaScript and HTML your developers will instantly see how easy it is to start everything up.

Once you’re ready to deploy it to a production environment an SDK license is required in most (not all) cases. You can determine license requirements and pricing via our license request wizard. If you have any questions, please reach out to us via a live chat or schedule a call with us. We’re happy to answer any of your questions and go over your project right away to determine the license.