How FormHoney works
Lay the form out, share the link, watch the answers arrive, and take the data away in whatever format you need — in any language, checked for profanity on the way in, and charted into a report on the way out.
The four steps
Design it on a page, not in a list
Most form builders give you a vertical stack of fields and a preview that looks nothing like the result. FormHoney gives you an A4 sheet with rulers down the side. Drag a control onto it and it stays where you put it — two fields side by side, a heading spanning the width, a signature box in the corner. Everything snaps to a grid, so it lines up without fiddling.
There are 21 controls: text, headings, small print, labels, images, video and groups for the content; text boxes, email, website, number, date, slider, signature and file upload for entry; and yes/no, checkbox, drop-down, radio buttons, multi-select lists and checkbox groups for choices. New accounts get a working example of every one of them, so there is something to pull apart on day one.
Because the layout is measured in millimetres on a real paper size, the thing you designed is the thing that appears on screen, the thing that prints, and the thing that lands in a PDF. There is no second layout to keep in step.
You do not have to start from nothing either. Every account can open a library of 900 ready-made forms covering 30 trades — from shift production reports and raw material inspections to keyholding callouts, medication reviews and lost property returns. They are not blank templates with a heading on: they are laid out, with the right questions, the right controls and the rules already set. Copy one into your own project and change the parts that are yours.
Decide who can open it
Every form gets an unguessable link. That is often enough — but you can also ask for the respondent’s email address before the form opens, and add a passcode on top. Get the passcode wrong too many times and the form closes for half an hour.
You choose the wording people see when they open the link, and a form can be scheduled to open and close on given dates.
Let the form do the thinking
Questions can appear, disappear, enable, disable or become required depending on earlier answers. Ask whether someone drives, and the licence questions appear only if they say yes. The rules run in the browser so the form feels responsive, and again on the server when it is submitted — so an answer belonging to a question that was hidden never reaches your data, however the form was filled in.
Formats are checked as someone moves through the form rather than saved up for the end. Addresses, postcodes, phone numbers and reference codes are tidied where the intent is obvious — sw1a1aa becomes SW1A 1AA — and anything genuinely missing is listed in one dialogue at the point of submitting.
Take the answers away
Every response is stored as structured data, and each one keeps a snapshot of the question labels as they were at the time — so results stay readable after you redesign the form. Export to CSV, Excel or Word, or print the completed form to PDF exactly as designed — and see the whole set charted and summarised in the analytics report described below.
A copy can be emailed to you, to a different address, or to nobody at all. That is your choice per form, and it is an addition to the stored record, never a replacement for it.
And three things most form builders leave to you
Offer it in their languageNew
A form written in English can be offered in any of more than four hundred languages. You write it once, in your own words; readers switch with one tap and the whole form follows — every label, hint, placeholder, choice, validation message and the submit button. Languages written right to left turn the form round with it.
The whole form goes to be translated together, in one request, not one label at a time, which is why it takes seconds rather than minutes. Your own wording is always kept: a translation is laid over it, never in place of it, so a form can be switched back at any moment.
You can see it before anyone else does. In the designer, a chooser shows the form in any language you have added, so you can check that a caption still fits its box before a respondent meets it — German runs long, Welsh runs longer. Decide you prefer the translated version and you can make it the form itself, with your original kept as a translation of it.
Answers come back in whichever language they were written, exactly as they were given. When you read them, the questions beside them can be shown in whatever language suits you — so a colleague who does not read Welsh can still work through Welsh responses. Nothing a respondent typed is ever rewritten.
Keep profanity out of your dataNew
Answers can be checked for profanity before they are recorded, not after. You decide what happens when something is found: refuse the answer and tell the person which question to fix, or quietly clean the wording and keep everything else they wrote.
Apply it to the questions you choose, or to every text box on the form in one switch — including questions you add later, which are covered from the moment they are dropped on the page. The check is deliberate about evasion, so sh1t is caught where shit would be.
If the checking service cannot be reached, answers are still collected rather than lost, and the ones nobody managed to check are listed for you on the results page. A form that silently stopped checking would be worse than one that says so.
See what the answers add up toNew
A list of responses tells you what was said. It does not tell you what it means. Build measures from your answers — a count, an average, a percentage, broken down by any question — and FormHoney picks a chart that suits the shape of the data.
Or choose it yourself from 22 kinds: bar and column, line and area, pie and doughnut, stacked and 100% stacked, radar, treemap, heatmap, waterfall, funnel, histogram, box and whisker, scatter, bubble, gauge and a single big figure. The ones that will not work for your data are still listed, each saying what it would take — a chart picker that silently hides options teaches nobody anything.
Arrange the measures into a report laid out on A4, put your own logo where you want it, reorder or hide any section, and number the pages. Print it, save it as PDF, or send it on. Every figure in a chart is also written out in a table beneath it, so the report is readable by someone using a screen reader and still means something in black and white.
What it costs
There is a free plan that is meant to be used rather than outgrown in an afternoon: 50 responses a month across 3 forms. Free forms carry adverts and a small FormHoney mark, which is what pays for a free tier that size. Paid plans remove both and raise the limits; you can pay monthly, annually for two months less, or take a single month with no commitment.
If a paid plan lapses, nothing is deleted. Your forms keep collecting under the free limits until you pick things up again.
Your data
Responses belong to whoever made the form. Everything is scoped to its owner on every request, uploads are checked by content rather than trusted by filename, and files attached to responses are stored outside the web root and served only after an ownership check. Signing in needs a password, a quick human check and a code from an authenticator app.