HornetForms blog

10 form templates to steal this week

info@hornetforms.com (The HornetForms team) — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A blank page is great for writing a novel. For a contact form, it's mostly a place to stare at while your coffee goes cold.

HornetForms comes with 21 built-in templates, and you're very much allowed to steal them. That's what they're for. Pick one, change what doesn't fit, publish. Below are ten of our favourites, what each one is for, a couple of tweaks that make it yours, and one pro tip each.

To use one, create a new form and choose a template from the list. You get an ordinary form you can edit like any other, so nothing below is locked in.

For leads and customers

1. Contact us

What it's for: the classic. Name, email, a topic dropdown (Sales, Support, Partnerships, Other) and a message.

Make it yours:

Pipe the name into the thank-you page with @: "Thanks, @Name! We'll be in touch."
Pipe the topic into the subject line of your notification email, so your inbox reads "New Sales message from Sam" at a glance.

Pro tip: set Reply-To on your notification email to the respondent's email answer. Then you just hit reply, and the answer goes straight to them.

2. Quote request

What it's for: qualifying project enquiries. It asks for services needed, a budget range, a desired start date and project details.

Make it yours:

Add a file upload question so people can attach a brief or a sketch.
Use logic on the budget question: if someone picks the lowest range and you can't help, jump to a friendly ending that points them somewhere useful instead of leaving them waiting.

Pro tip: need a price on the spot? Add a calculated field. Our logic, piping and calculations guide builds a full catering quote step by step.

3. Product feedback

What it's for: learning which product people use, how they rate it, which features they rely on and what you should build next.

Make it yours:

Prefill the product from the link, like ?product=Product%20A, so people who come from inside that product skip a question. Prefill for choices matches the option labels.
Add a logic rule: if the rating is low, show an extra "What went wrong?" question. Happy users get a shorter form.

Pro tip: embed it as a slider or a floating launcher inside your app, so feedback is one click away instead of buried in an email.

For feedback and surveys

4. Net Promoter Score

What it's for: the famous "how likely are you to recommend us?" question on a 0 to 10 scale. The template already has logic built in: low scores get "What could we do better?" and high scores get "What do you love about us?".

Make it yours:

Pipe the score into the follow-up's description with @, so a detractor reads "You gave us a 5. What could we do better?" People appreciate being heard, literally.
Add a hidden field such as customer or plan filled from the link, so you can filter results by group later.

Pro tip: add a logic rule that redirects promoters, after they submit, to wherever you'd love a kind word, like your review page. Strike while the honey's warm.

5. Employee satisfaction survey

What it's for: a quick pulse check. Three statements rated from "Strongly disagree" to "Strongly agree", plus an open question.

Make it yours:

Turn on password protection and share the password in your team chat, so only your team can open it.
Add a calculated field that averages the three scores, so each response comes with a single number you can sort by.

Pro tip: the template says responses are anonymous, so keep it that way. Don't add a name or email question, and don't use hidden fields that point back to individuals. Trust is easier to keep than to win back.

6. Bug report

What it's for: reproducible bug reports. A summary, severity, steps to reproduce, expected vs actual result, the URL where it happened, and up to three attachments.

Make it yours:

Add hidden fields like version or browser, filled from the link in your app, so you don't have to ask.
Use logic: when severity is "Critical", show an extra question asking for the best way to reach the reporter quickly.

Pro tip: send every report to your issue tracker or team chat with a signed webhook. HornetForms doesn't have native integrations for those tools, but anything that accepts an HTTP request can receive the submission.

For events and people

7. Event registration

What it's for: signing up attendees with a ticket type and an optional dinner. Dietary requirements only appear for people who said yes to dinner (the logic is already there).

Make it yours:

Turn on email verification for the email question (a Pro feature), so you know every confirmation will actually arrive.
Customise the respondent confirmation email with the event details. With a verified email (Pro), it can include their answers too.

Pro tip: set a response limit when you know your capacity, so the form closes itself when the room is full. No awkward "sorry, we oversold" emails.

8. RSVP

What it's for: a two-page RSVP. If a guest says they can't make it, the form skips the details page and goes straight to the end.

Make it yours:

Pipe the guest's name into the heading of page two: "Great, @Your name! Who's coming with you?"
Add a calculated field for the total headcount, so each response shows the number of seats it needs:

@Number of guests + 1

Pro tip: print the form's QR code (you'll find it in the Share tab) on paper invitations. Your less-online relatives will thank you. Possibly.

9. Workshop sign-up

What it's for: registering participants with their experience level, a preferred session and what they hope to learn.

Make it yours:

Add logic: if someone picks "Beginner", show a short paragraph with setup instructions to do before the session.
Pipe the chosen session into the thank-you page, so people see "You're booked for Session B" in writing.

Pro tip: embed the form as a popup on your workshop page, with a "Save my seat" button that opens it. Fewer clicks, more sign-ups.

10. Job application

What it's for: two short pages. Contact details and a portfolio link first, then the position, a CV upload (PDF or Word, up to 10 MB), motivation and an earliest start date.

Make it yours:

Add a hidden field source and use different links per job board, like ?source=jobboard, to see where your best candidates come from.
Turn on partial submissions (a Pro feature), so candidates can save their progress and come back. Writing "why do you want to join us?" sometimes takes a coffee break.

Pro tip: set automatic deletion of responses (a Pro feature) after a retention period that suits your hiring process. Old applications don't hang around forever, and you don't have to remember to clean up.

The other 11

We picked ten, but there's more on the shelf: Newsletter sign-up, Demo request, Support request, Order request, Customer feedback, Website feedback, Event feedback, Market research survey, Course evaluation, Volunteer sign-up and Time-off request.

Workspaces can also save their own forms as templates, so your team can reuse a form you're proud of. Steal from yourself; it's the most ethical kind.

Go on, take one

All 21 templates are free, along with logic, piping and calculations, on a Free plan that stays free forever. The features page has the full tour, and the pricing page shows what's coming in Pro and Business. Sign-ups are invite-only for now, so join the waitlist and we'll send you an invite as soon as there's room. Your first form is probably closer to done than you think.

Spam protection that doesn't annoy humans

info@hornetforms.com (The HornetForms team) — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Put a form on the internet and it takes roughly five minutes for the first bot to show up. It doesn't want your newsletter. It wants to tell you about a miracle crypto opportunity, in 400 identical responses, at three in the morning.

The classic fix is a captcha: make everyone prove they're human by squinting at blurry photos of bicycles. It works, sort of. It also annoys every real person who fills in your form, and some of them simply give up.

We wanted something better: layers of protection that bots trip over and humans barely notice. This post walks through each layer in HornetForms, what it's good for and when to switch it on.

Layer one: the quiet stuff (always on)

Every public HornetForms form has three protections built in. You don't have to set anything up, and your respondents won't see any of them.

A honeypot field. Each form has an extra field that's hidden from people but visible to bots that fill in everything they can find. A human leaves it empty because they never see it. A bot happily types into it and gives itself away.

A minimum fill time. Real people need at least a few seconds to read a question and type an answer. Bots often submit a form the instant the page loads. If a submission arrives impossibly fast, HornetForms knows something's off.

Here's a nice detail: when a bot trips the honeypot or the time check, it gets a cheerful "success" message back, and nothing is saved. The bot thinks it won, moves on, and never learns what gave it away. Petty? Maybe a little. Effective? Yes.

Rate limits. HornetForms limits how many submissions can come from one visitor to one form in a short time, and how many a single form accepts overall. This stops someone from flooding a form, whether it's a script or just a very enthusiastic person with a lot of free time.

For most forms, these three layers are all you'll ever need. Contact forms, feedback surveys and event sign-ups usually stay clean with just the quiet stuff.

Layer two: Cloudflare Turnstile (per form)

Some forms attract more determined bots: a popular giveaway, a public sign-up, anything that rewards automation. For those, you can switch on Cloudflare Turnstile in the form's settings.

Turnstile is Cloudflare's replacement for the traditional captcha. Instead of asking people to identify traffic lights, it runs its checks in the background and shows a small widget on the form. No picture puzzles; at most, someone might be asked to tick a box.

A few things worth knowing:

It's per form. Turn it on only where you need it. Your quiet little feedback form doesn't have to carry the weight of your busiest sign-up page.
It's checked on our server. The token from the widget is verified when the form is submitted, not just in the browser.
It stacks. Turnstile adds to the honeypot, time check and rate limits. It doesn't replace them.

Turnstile is a service by Cloudflare, so the widget talks to Cloudflare when it loads. If you list the services your forms use in your privacy notice, add it there.

Layer three: prove you are who you say you are

Bots aren't the only problem. Sometimes the "spam" is a real person who mistypes their email or uses a fake one. For that, HornetForms has a few tools that check identity rather than humanity.

Email verification (Pro). You can require respondents to confirm one email question with a 6-digit code. HornetForms emails the code, the respondent types it in, and only then can they submit. Codes expire after 10 minutes and only a few attempts are allowed, so guessing isn't an option. This is great for anything where a working email matters: registrations, applications, account-like flows.

One response per person. Pick a question that identifies someone, like their email, and HornetForms will refuse a second completed response with the same value. The check happens on the server, so it can't be dodged by opening a private window. It ignores capital letters and stray spaces, and compares phone numbers in international format, so "Sam@Example.com " and "sam@example.com" count as the same person. There's also a softer "one per browser" option if you just want to discourage casual repeats.

Password protection. For private forms, set a password. Until someone enters it, they see only the form's title, not your questions. Wrong guesses are rate limited too. Handy for internal surveys, member-only forms or anything you share in a closed group.

Which layers should you use?

A quick cheat sheet:

Your form	What we'd switch on
Contact or feedback form	The defaults are enough
Public sign-up or waitlist	Defaults + Turnstile, maybe email verification (Pro)
Giveaway or contest	Turnstile + email verification (Pro) + one response per person
Event registration	Email verification (Pro), so confirmations actually arrive
Internal team survey	Password protection
Vote or poll	One response per person, plus Turnstile if it's public

The general rule: start with the defaults and add a layer only when you see a problem, or when the form is obviously a bot magnet. Every layer you add asks a little more of your respondents. Email verification (Pro) means a trip to their inbox; a password means they need to know it. Worth it when it matters, overkill when it doesn't.

Respecting privacy while you're at it

Spam protection is often where privacy quietly goes out the window. We tried to be careful here.

The honeypot and time check run on our own server, with no third-party scripts.
Rate limits use a hashed version of the visitor's network address rather than storing it in plain form.
Turnstile is opt-in, per form, so you decide when a third party is involved.
Our form analytics are cookieless and don't store IP addresses, so protecting a form doesn't mean tracking the people who fill it in.

Keep the bees, lose the bots

The quiet layers are on for every form in HornetForms, and the rest are a switch away. If spam has been bugging you, the features page has the full list, and our post on why we built HornetForms explains why respondents' time matters so much to us. Turnstile, password protection and one response per person are all on the Free plan, which stays free forever (see the pricing page), and sign-ups are invite-only for now, so join the waitlist. It has a honeypot, naturally.

Conditional logic, answer piping & calculations, explained

info@hornetforms.com (The HornetForms team) — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

"Conditional logic" sounds like something you'd need a computer science degree for. It isn't. It's mostly the form equivalent of a good waiter: don't ask about dessert before the main course, don't offer wine to someone who just said they're driving, and remember people's names.

In this guide we'll build one real form together and use most of the "smart" features HornetForms has along the way. Our example: a small café that does catering, and wants a quote form that doesn't make anyone do maths in their head.

Meet Bean There, a fictional café with very real sandwich ambitions. Their quote form needs to:

Ask for a name and an email.
Ask how many guests are coming and whether they need a coffee bar.
Only ask about coffee details if they said yes.
Work out an estimated price automatically.
Remember where the visitor came from (an Instagram ad, a flyer, the website).
Politely turn away events that are too big for a small café.
Send happy customers to a booking page afterwards.

In HornetForms you write this like a document: type /, pick a question type, give it a label. Page one gets "Your name" (short text) and "Email" (email). Page two gets "How many guests?" (number) and "Do you need a coffee bar?" (multiple choice: Yes / No), followed by "Which drinks?" (checkboxes).

Now let's make it smart.

Conditional logic: show, hide and jump

Logic in HornetForms is a list of simple rules: when something is true, then do something. Open a question's logic (there's even a shortcut, Alt+Shift+L) and add a rule.

Show and hide. Nobody who said "No" to the coffee bar wants to pick drinks. So:

When "Do you need a coffee bar?" is "Yes", show "Which drinks?"

That's it. The drinks question is hidden until it's needed, and if someone changes their answer back to "No", it disappears again.

Jump. Bean There can't host 300 people, however much they'd like to. Instead of letting someone fill in the whole form only to get a polite "sorry" email two days later, we can tell them right away:

When "How many guests?" is greater than 80, jump to the ending "Too big for us".

A jump can go to another page or straight to an ending. More on endings in a minute.

A tip from experience: add rules one at a time and check each in the Preview tab before adding the next. Logic is easy; logic you wrote at 11 p.m. without testing is where the bugs live.

Answer piping: use what people told you

Piping means putting an earlier answer into later text. In HornetForms you type @ in a question label, description, heading or paragraph and pick the answer you want to insert.

So the heading on page two can say:

Lovely to meet you, @Your name! Tell us about your event.

When Sam fills in the form, they see "Lovely to meet you, Sam! Tell us about your event." Small touch, big difference. It feels like a conversation instead of a tax return.

Piping works in more places than you'd expect:

Question labels and descriptions
Headings and paragraphs
Endings (the thank-you screens)
Redirect URLs, where the values are URL-encoded for you
The subject line of your own notification emails, so your inbox says "New catering request from Sam" instead of "New response #47"

Calculations: let the form do the maths

Here's the part Bean There is most excited about. Add a calculated field called "Estimated total" and give it a formula. Use "Insert field" to drop the guest count in, and it shows up as @How many guests?. The formula:

round(@How many guests? * 12.5)

Formulas support +, -, *, /, parentheses and a handful of functions: round, floor, ceil, abs, min and max. That's enough for most real-world pricing. For example, a minimum order of 150:

max(150, round(@How many guests? * 12.5))

Now pipe the result into a paragraph on the last page: "Your estimated total is @Estimated total." The respondent sees a live number while they fill in the form.

One detail we're quietly proud of: the server recalculates every calculated value when the form is submitted. So the number you see in your responses is the real result of the formula, even if someone gets creative with their browser's developer tools.

The same feature powers quizzes: give each correct answer a point with a calculation and show the score at the end.

Hidden fields: know where people came from

Bean There advertises in three places and wants to know which one works. Add a hidden field called source. Respondents never see it, but it's filled from the address of the link:

https://forms.hornetforms.com/f/catering?source=instagram

Put ?source=flyer on the QR code on the flyer, ?source=instagram in the ad, and so on. Every response now carries its source, and you can filter your responses by it. Hidden fields can be piped like any other answer, so you could even greet people with "Welcome, @source friend!". Maybe don't, though.

Endings and redirects: finish in the right place

A form doesn't have to end with one generic "Thanks!". HornetForms lets you add up to 20 named endings besides the default thank-you page, and logic decides which one people see.

For Bean There we need two:

"Too big for us": a friendly note saying the event is larger than the café can handle, with a recommendation to call for ideas. The jump rule from earlier sends people here.
The default thank-you page: "Thanks, @Your name! Your estimate is @Estimated total. We'll confirm within a day."

And for the happy path, a redirect can send people somewhere else after they submit, like the café's booking page. Redirect URLs can be piped too:

https://beanthere.example/book?name=@Your name&guests=@How many guests?

HornetForms URL-encodes the values for you, so a name like "Sam & Alex" won't break the link. (In the editor, those @ bits are real answer chips you insert, not typed text.)

What we built

Let's recap. One catering form that:

Hides questions that don't apply
Turns away oversized events before anyone wastes time
Greets people by name
Calculates a price, and double-checks it on the server
Tracks which ad or flyer brought each visitor
Ends in the right place and hands people over to booking

None of it needed code. If you want a head start, the built-in "Quote request" template is a good base to add this to. We picked ten more in 10 form templates to steal this week.

Try it yourself

Logic, piping, calculations, hidden fields and endings are all part of HornetForms today, and they're all on the Free plan, which stays free forever. See the details on the features page and what's coming in Pro and Business on the pricing page. Sign-ups are invite-only for now, so join the waitlist and we'll let you in as soon as we can. Bring your own sandwiches.

Multilingual & right-to-left forms without the headache

info@hornetforms.com (The HornetForms team) — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The usual way to run a form in three languages is to build it three times. Then you change one question in the English version, forget the other two, and a month later discover that your Spanish respondents have been answering a question that no longer exists. Your responses end up in three separate piles, and merging them becomes someone's least favourite afternoon.

HornetForms does it differently: one form, many languages, one pile of responses. This guide explains how it works and shares a few tips we picked up along the way.

Good to know: form translations will be part of the Pro plan, which is coming soon. On the Free plan, the parts of a form your respondents see (buttons, validation messages and so on) are available in 12 interface languages, so you can already run a form in, say, French or Japanese, and a form written in a right-to-left language gets a proper right-to-left layout. The rest of this guide explains how translations work on Pro and how right-to-left works everywhere.

One form, many languages

Every HornetForms form has a form language: the language you write it in. You set it in Settings → Language. English is the default, but you can pick from 42 languages.

On Pro (coming soon), you'll be able to add up to 10 translation languages in the form's Translate tab. Each one is a translation of the same form, not a copy. That matters for two reasons:

Answers stay together. Responses are stored against the same questions and options whatever the language. Your responses table, summaries, filters, exports and Insights combine every language automatically.
You can still tell them apart. Each response remembers which language it was filled in, so you can filter by language or see it as a column in your CSV exports (and Excel exports on Pro).

Things like logic, formulas, hidden field names and the design are shared across all languages. You translate words, not the plumbing.

Translating: AI, CSV or your own keyboard (Pro)

On Pro, the Translate tab shows the source text next to an editable translation, grouped the same way as the form: each page, the thank-you page, endings and settings texts. You can filter for strings that are Missing or Outdated, search, and everything autosaves.

There are three ways to fill it in, and you can mix them:

Type it yourself. Fine for short forms, or if you speak the language.
Translate with AI. One click fills in missing and outdated strings for a language. It never overwrites translations you or your translators wrote, and AI translations get a small badge so you know which ones a human hasn't touched yet.
Export a CSV for your translators. Each language exports to a spreadsheet-friendly file. Your translator fills in the translation column, you import it back, and HornetForms checks every value and tells you about any lines it couldn't use. Importing never deletes anything.

Here's the part that saves the most headaches. When you change a question in the source language, its translations are marked Outdated. They keep working until you update them, but you'll see exactly what needs another look. No more Spanish questions that no longer exist.

Translations are part of the published version, too. Editing a translation shows "Unpublished changes" and goes live when you publish, just like any other edit. Your live form never changes halfway through a sentence.

Interface texts, sorted

A form isn't just your questions. There are buttons ("Next", "Submit"), validation messages ("This question is required"), the password screen and the confirmation emails.

HornetForms ships these interface texts for 12 languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Arabic and Hebrew. Pick one of those as your form language (Free) or as a translation language (Pro) and the buttons come along automatically.

For other languages, the interface falls back to English unless you translate those texts yourself in the Translate tab's Interface group (Pro). A handful of things, such as the password screen, the closed-form page and the emails, always use the built-in packs, so check those if your language isn't in the list of 12.

Confirmation emails to respondents (and, on Pro, email verification messages) are sent in the language they used.

How respondents get the right language

Once a form has translations (Pro), how does someone in Lyon end up with the French version? HornetForms checks, in order:

The link. A link with hf_lang in it always wins.
A saved draft. If someone saved their progress and comes back, they get the language they started in.
Their browser. If "Detect the respondent's browser language" is on (it is by default), the browser's preferred language is used when the form offers it.
The form language, as a fallback.

A language link looks like this:

https://forms.hornetforms.com/f/your-form?hf_lang=fr

You don't need to build those by hand. The Share tab gives you a link and a QR code per language.

The language switcher. On a translated form (Pro), respondents can also switch language themselves with a small switcher on the form. It's on by default and appears once the form has at least one published translation. Switching keeps their answers and their place in the form, so nobody has to start over because the browser guessed wrong.

Embeds. If you embed a form on a website, add data-hf-lang to pick the language. Handy for multilingual websites: the German page embeds the German form.

<div data-hornetforms-embed="your-form" data-hf-lang="de"></div>

Right-to-left, done properly

Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Urdu are written right to left, and a form that just right-aligns the text doesn't quite cut it. Choosing one of these languages (as the form's own language on any plan, or as a translation on Pro) switches the whole form to a right-to-left layout, so text, options and buttons all run in the right direction.

Some details that are easy to miss:

Keyboard navigation follows the direction. Arrow keys on rating scales, radio groups, the signature pad and the date picker move the way a right-to-left reader expects.
Numbers use Latin digits when entered, so your number questions and calculations keep working the same in every language.
Custom CSS gets hooks. If you style your forms with custom CSS (also Pro), you can target right-to-left forms with .hf-form[dir="rtl"] and specific languages with :lang(ar), :lang(he) and friends.

A form with both English and Arabic simply switches direction when the respondent switches language.

Tips for multilingual forms that actually work

A few things we learned the fun way:

Keep labels short. German and Finnish are famous for long words, and a label that fits nicely in English can wrap onto three lines elsewhere. Short labels translate better everywhere.
Avoid idioms and jokes in the source text. "Hit us up" and "piece of cake" confuse both people and machines. Puns are great in blog posts; they're less great in a question about allergies. (We're aware of the irony.)
Check dates, numbers and currencies. Formats differ by country. If you ask for a price, say which currency. If a date matters, give an example.
Have a native speaker review the AI draft. AI translation is a fast first pass, not a final check. Ask someone who speaks the language to read the form once, ideally in the Preview tab, so they see it in context.
Test the right-to-left version yourself. Open the language link, click through every page and look at the thank-you page. It takes two minutes and catches the odd surprise.
Re-check after edits. Use the Outdated filter in the Translate tab after changing the source text, then publish.

Give it a try

Interface texts in 12 languages are part of the Free plan today. The features page lists everything else, and if your form needs logic too, our guide to conditional logic, answer piping and calculations pairs nicely with this one. Form translations are part of the Pro plan, which is coming soon; the pricing page has the details, and the Free plan stays free forever. Sign-ups are invite-only for now, so join the waitlist and we'll send an invite when we can. Merci, gracias, danke.

HornetForms vs Typeform vs Tally: an honest comparison

info@hornetforms.com (The HornetForms team) — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Comparison posts written by one of the companies being compared have a reputation, and it's not a great one. They tend to end with "and that's why we win at everything", usually right after a table full of green ticks on one side and sad red crosses on the other.

We'll try to do better. This post explains how three form builders approach the job, what HornetForms is good at, and when you'd honestly be happier with Typeform or Tally.

A few ground rules we set ourselves:

Everything we say about Typeform and Tally was checked on their own websites as of October 2026. Products change quickly, so check their sites before you decide.
We don't quote competitor prices or limits. Those change too, and their pricing pages explain them better than we can.
When we're not sure about something, we say "see their site" instead of guessing.

Three different ideas of what a form is

The biggest difference between these tools isn't a feature list. It's the idea behind them.

Typeform: the conversation

Typeform is the tool that made "forms that feel like a conversation" famous. Its well-known style shows people one question at a time, with smooth transitions and a strong focus on design. Its own homepage talks about conversational logic and interactive forms.

Typeform has also been around long enough to build a large ecosystem. As of October 2026 its integrations page lists native connections to tools such as HubSpot, Salesforce, Slack, Mailchimp, Notion and Calendly. It also has a free plan to start with; the details are on its pricing page.

Tally: the document

Tally took a different route. You build a form by typing on a page, a bit like writing in a doc, and insert blocks as you go. As of October 2026 Tally's pricing page describes a free plan with unlimited forms and submissions within its fair-use guidelines, and lists many features on that free plan, including conditional logic, answer piping, file uploads, signatures and payments.

Tally also offers native integrations; its site lists Google Sheets, Notion, Airtable, Slack, Zapier and Make, among others.

HornetForms: the document, with a few extra pockets

HornetForms is also a document-style builder. You type, press / to add a question, and the form reads top to bottom like a page. So yes, in spirit we're closer to Tally than to Typeform.

Where we put our own energy:

Smarter forms. Conditional logic, multi-page forms, answer piping with @, calculated fields with formulas, hidden fields filled from the URL and up to 20 named endings.
Translations (Pro) and right-to-left. Up to 10 languages per form, AI translation or a CSV file for translators and a language switcher on Pro, plus proper RTL layouts for Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Urdu (free for the form's own language).
Developer-friendly plumbing. Signed webhooks (Standard Webhooks format, with retries) on every plan, plus a REST API with scoped API keys and an OpenAPI 3.1 document on Business.
Privacy by default. Cookieless form analytics, optional tracking pixels only if you add them, and hosting in Germany.
A Free plan that stays free. Unlimited forms and responses, logic, uploads, signatures and webhooks, free forever. Pro and Business are coming soon for the fancier extras. Sign-ups are invite-only for now.

A side-by-side, with honest gaps

Here's a table. It only lists things we could check. Where we didn't verify a detail on a competitor's site, it says "See their site" rather than pretending.

Topic	HornetForms	Typeform	Tally
Building style	Document-style editor with `/` commands	Conversational, best known for one question at a time	Document-style editor
Free option	Free forever plan with unlimited forms and responses; Pro and Business coming soon	Free plan (see their site)	Free plan with unlimited forms and submissions, within fair use
Native integrations with other apps	None yet: webhooks and REST API (Business, coming soon)	Many, e.g. HubSpot, Salesforce, Slack	Many, e.g. Google Sheets, Notion, Airtable
Payments in forms	No	See their site	Yes, listed on their pricing page
Logic, piping and calculations	Yes	See their site	Yes, listed on their site
Translations and right-to-left layouts	Up to 10 languages per form (Pro); RTL for Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Urdu (free for the form's own language)	See their site	See their site
Analytics without cookies	Yes, built in	See their site	See their site
Where data is hosted	Germany (Hetzner)	See their site	See their site

Notice the two rows where HornetForms says "No" or "None yet". That's on purpose. A table where one column wins every row isn't a comparison, it's a brochure.

Who should pick what

This is the part that actually matters, so here's our honest take.

Pick Typeform if:

You love the one-question-at-a-time experience and want it polished out of the box.
Your team lives in a CRM or marketing tool like HubSpot or Salesforce and you want a native connection you can set up without a developer.
You want a product with a long track record and a large ecosystem around it.

Pick Tally if:

You want a document-style builder and need native integrations such as Google Sheets, Notion or Airtable today.
You need to collect payments inside a form. HornetForms can't do that.
You want a product that's been out of beta for years.

Pick HornetForms if:

You like building forms like a doc and want strong logic, piping and calculations in the same place.
You run forms in more than one language, or in a right-to-left language, and want that handled properly (right-to-left works on Free; translations are coming with Pro).
You or your developer are happy to connect things with webhooks (free) or the REST API (Business, coming soon). If it speaks HTTP, you can hook it up.
Privacy matters to your respondents: cookieless analytics, nothing extra loaded unless you add it, and hosting in Germany.
You want a Free plan that stays free, and you don't mind joining a waitlist first.

If you read that and think "Typeform sounds right for us", great. Go build something lovely. We'd rather you end up with the right tool than the wrong one with our name on it.

A few questions to ask before you switch

Whatever you pick, these questions tend to sort things out quickly:

Where do responses need to end up? If the answer is "one specific app, without any code", check that app's native integrations first.
Who fills in your forms? One language or several? Any right-to-left readers?
How much logic do you need? A contact form needs none. A quote calculator needs a lot.
What do your respondents expect about privacy? Some audiences notice cookie banners and trackers more than others.
What happens when you grow? Check the paid plans of each tool. Ours are listed on our pricing page as "coming soon".

The small print

Typeform and Tally are trademarks of their respective owners. HornetForms is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by either company. Everything we say about them reflects their official websites as of October 2026; for current details, please check typeform.com and tally.so.

Want to give HornetForms a spin?

The Free plan is free forever, and you can see what's planned for Pro and Business on the pricing page. The full feature tour lives on the features page. Sign-ups are invite-only for now, so join the waitlist and we'll send you an invite when a spot opens up. No sting, we promise.

Why we built HornetForms

info@hornetforms.com (The HornetForms team) — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Most of us have a love-hate relationship with forms. We need them all the time: a contact page, a sign-up for a workshop, a quick "how did we do?" after an event. And yet building one often feels like assembling flat-pack furniture with the instructions in the wrong language. Lots of panels, lots of little settings, and somehow there's always a screw left over.

Filling them in isn't much better. Slow pages, captchas that ask you to find every traffic light in a city, and a quiet feeling that someone is tracking what you do.

So we built HornetForms. It's a form builder from the small team at PhraseMine, and this post explains what we wanted, what's in version 1.0, and what we deliberately left out.

Forms should feel like writing a doc

The idea we kept coming back to was simple: making a form should feel like writing a note.

In HornetForms you open a blank page and start typing. Need a question? Type / and pick one from the menu: short text, email, a rating, a file upload, a signature, and plenty more. Headings, paragraphs, lists, images and dividers live in the same flow, so a form reads top to bottom exactly the way your respondents will see it.

A few things we cared about here:

Autosave. You should never lose work because a tab closed.
Publishing on purpose. Your edits stay a draft until you hit publish, so you can tinker without breaking the live form.
Version history. Published versions and draft snapshots are kept, and you can restore an older one if the new idea turns out to be less good than it looked at midnight.
Keyboard shortcuts for the things you do a hundred times, like duplicating or moving a block.

And if you'd rather not start from a blank page at all, you can describe the form in plain language and let AI write an editable first draft. Or pick one of the 21 built-in templates and change what you need.

Respect the people on the other side

Every form has two audiences: the person building it and the person filling it in. The second group usually gets less attention, which is odd, because they're the ones doing you a favour.

So we tried to be good guests:

Cookieless analytics. Each form has an Insights tab with views, starts, completions, drop-off, traffic sources, devices and NPS or CSAT scores. It works without cookies and without storing IP addresses.
Tracking is your call, not ours. If you want Google Analytics 4, Google Tag Manager or a Meta Pixel on a form (Pro), you can add them yourself, and you can turn on a consent banner for respondents. If you don't add anything, nothing extra loads.
Spam protection that leaves humans alone. Every public form has a hidden honeypot field, a minimum fill time and rate limits. If you want more, you can switch on Cloudflare Turnstile per form. (We wrote a whole post about this: spam protection that doesn't annoy humans.)
Hosted in Germany. HornetForms runs on servers at Hetzner in Germany.

None of this is flashy. It's just the stuff we'd want if we were the ones filling in the form, which, let's be honest, we usually are.

What's in version 1.0

Version 1.0 shipped on October 1, 2026. It's a big release, so here is the short tour. The features page has the long one.

Building. More than 20 question types, from short text and dropdowns to ranking, matrix, NPS, CSAT, file upload and signature (drawn or typed). Multi-page forms, conditional logic that shows, hides or jumps, and answer piping, so you can greet someone by name on page two. Calculated fields handle quotes, scores and quizzes. If that sounds like a lot, our guide to conditional logic, answer piping and calculations walks through one real example.

Making it yours. Themes and presets, 21 fonts and your colours. On Pro you also get a logo and a cover image, custom CSS if you like to fiddle, and a way to hide the "Made with HornetForms" badge.

Sharing. A public link with a custom slug, custom domains (Pro), QR codes, link previews with your own title and image, and embeds in several flavours: inline, popup, slider, auto popup, a floating launcher or full page.

Speaking your respondents' language. Buttons and messages in 12 interface languages, plus (on Pro) up to 10 translation languages per form, with AI translation or a CSV file for your translators, and a language switcher. Proper right-to-left layouts for Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Urdu work on every plan when that's the language you write the form in. More in multilingual and right-to-left forms.

Working with responses. A responses table with filters and summaries and CSV export. On Pro: Excel export, response editing with a revision history, partial submissions so people can save and come back later, and automatic deletion of old responses if you set a retention period.

Working together. A workspace with folders, search, templates and a trash that keeps deleted forms for 30 days. Team members with roles and multiple workspaces come with Pro and Business, and only the account that owns the plan pays, never the people you invite.

What we're not (yet)

We'd rather be upfront about this part.

HornetForms doesn't have a big shelf of native integrations. There's no built-in Google Sheets, Slack or Zapier connection, and there's no way to take payments inside a form. We know those matter to a lot of people.

What we have instead is a solid way to connect anything that speaks HTTP:

Email notifications for you and an optional confirmation email for the respondent.
Signed webhooks. Every submission can be sent to a URL of your choice, signed using the Standard Webhooks format and retried if your server has a bad day.
A REST API (Business, coming soon) with scoped workspace API keys and an OpenAPI 3.1 document, so developers can read forms and responses from their own code.

If your workflow depends on one particular native integration, another tool may suit you better today, and that's fine. We wrote an honest comparison with Typeform and Tally that says so out loud.

Free forever, for real

The Free plan is free forever. Unlimited forms and responses, logic, piping, calculations, file uploads, signatures, embeds, webhooks and cookieless insights, with no credit card and no trial clock ticking in the corner. We want people to build real forms with it and tell us where it pinches.

The fancier extras, like custom domains, badge removal, translations and the REST API, will live in the Pro and Business plans. You can see what's planned on the pricing page. Those plans are marked "coming soon" because, well, they are.

Sign-ups are invite-only for the moment while we keep an eye on things. If you'd like in, join the waitlist and we'll send you an invite as soon as we can. We promise the form is short. We built it with HornetForms, after all.