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Formbricks

The free alternative toTypeform,Tally

🟡 Intermediate⏱️ ~25 min to installYou save €35/mo

Formbricks is your form workshop: you build a questionnaire from a catalogue of templates, share a link, and answers come in with their stats. So far, that is Typeform. What it adds is the question asked AT THE RIGHT MOMENT: you drop a small script on your site or in your app, and trigger a specific question for a specific visitor, right as they do something. Why did you cancel your trial? What was missing on this page? And the difference that matters: it all runs at home, with no response cap. Typeform stops collecting at 100 responses a month on its free tier, and charges €35 a month to go further.

Formbricks — aperçu
13kView on GitHub ↗

Versus Typeform: the match

  • Price

    Formbricks

    €0, you pay your server

    Typeform

    €35 to €111/mo

  • Responses

    Formbricks

    No limit

    Typeform

    100 a month on free, then by tier

  • Your answers

    Formbricks

    In your database, at home

    Typeform

    On their servers

Typeform ↗

How to install it (even from zero)

An app with its own database: run it on your machine to try, then on a server once you use it for real.

  1. 1

    Install Docker Desktop

    Download it from docker.com, install, open it once. It will run Formbricks and its PostgreSQL database.

  2. 2

    Paste this prompt into Claude (Code or Desktop)

    It fetches the project from the official repository, starts it and checks you can create your account:

    Installe Formbricks sur ma machine (l'outil open source de formulaires et d'enquêtes, repo GitHub formbricks/formbricks) avec Docker, en suivant la documentation officielle formbricks.com/docs/self-hosting/deployment. Crée le dossier de travail, écris le docker-compose.yml avec un volume qui conserve mes réponses entre deux redémarrages, génère les secrets demandés, lance-le et vérifie que l'interface répond et que je peux créer mon compte administrateur. Explique-moi ensuite comment créer mon premier formulaire. Explique chaque étape simplement, je débute.

Review the GitHub repository and check whether it is safe to install given my machine and my infrastructure. Ask me as many questions as possible, using widgets, to clarify my request and be as precise as you can.
  3. 3

    Your first form, then your first link

    Start from a template rather than a blank page, change the questions, publish. You get a link to send, exactly like Typeform.

  4. 4

    The day you want to ask inside your site

    Drop the small script it gives you into your site or app, and choose when the question appears. That is what Typeform cannot do.

What you actually do with it

Qualify a lead before the call

A form sent before a meeting: budget, context, what they already tried. You arrive knowing the case, and the call is for selling, not for discovering.

Understand why they leave

A question asked the moment someone cancels or drops off midway. Feedback given in the moment beats ten questionnaires sent a week later.

Your clients' contact form

You set it up for a client, they build their own forms, and their answers stay on their server. One more deliverable, with no subscription running behind.

Project health, at a glance

Before installing an open-source tool, one question matters: is the project alive? These scores are computed from public GitHub data. They are not made up.

95/100

Excellent

Very active, well-maintained project: go ahead with confidence.

Activity
100

Is the code moving? (commits in the last 30 days)

Maintenance
100

How fresh is the latest update? Fresher is better.

Community
86

Stars and contributors: people around means help and fixes.

Maturity
90

Project age. Old enough to be solid, still alive.

Momentum
100

Current pace versus its usual pace: speeding up or dozing off?

The repo in numbers

GitHub stars
13k
Forks
2.5k
Contributors
313
Commits
6k
Project age
4.3 yrs
Last commit
today
Size
464.2 MB
License
Other

Built with

  • TypeScript 97.5%
  • Shell 1%
  • JavaScript 0.8%

Scores computed automatically from the GitHub API (last-30-days activity, update freshness, community size, project age). Refreshed daily.

Loucash’s take

8/10

Careful what you come looking for. If you just want a nice shareable form, it is fine, but lighter tools do that too. What makes Formbricks interesting is the second half: asking a specific question, to a specific person, at the moment they do something on your site. That is where useful answers come from, and it is what Typeform does not do. Worth knowing before you start: the project bills itself as a Qualtrics alternative, not a Typeform one. It is bigger than you expect if you want a simple contact form, and installing it needs a real database. On licensing, the core is AGPL, so you can self-host and use it for your business owing nothing; only a directory reserved for their enterprise offering sits under another licence. Nothing that concerns normal use. My advice: take it for the well-timed survey, not to replace a three-field contact form.

It’s for you if: You pay for Typeform and keep hitting its response cap, or you want to understand what your customers think at the moment they act.

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