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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 LLC, the company behind it, 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.
If you'd like to try it, sign up for free. No card needed, and your first form is a few minutes away.