For an internal poll or a signup sheet, a free questionnaire is hard to beat. The subject changes entirely once the person filling it is on a site.
Many teams start with an online questionnaire, and that is a good start: it is free, immediate, and everyone knows how to use it. The shift comes with three signs. The first is network coverage: a technician fills a form in a plant room and loses the entry. The second is evidence: an observation is worth the timestamped photo beside it, not the ticked box. The third is what follows: the answer must become an assigned task with a deadline, not one more row in a spreadsheet someone might process.
The questions to ask any tool, ours included. The answer given here is Thingsform's.
Offline capture works from the free plan, photos included, and syncs when the connection returns. In practice this is the fastest deciding criterion: a team that has lost one entry starts looking for another tool the following week.
Timestamped photo, position, a point placed on an imported floor plan, a signature collected on the spot. These stay attached to the submission and are still there six months later, when a dispute suddenly makes them necessary.
It feeds the other modules: an assigned task with its deadline, a PDF report in your own template, a dashboard metric. Processing stops being a manual Monday-morning step and becomes a consequence of submission.
An audit form shows the detail and the photo only when a finding is scored. That is the difference between a hundred-question checklist nobody finishes and one that shows fifteen at a time, filled properly to the end.
On servers located in the European Union, with daily backups, and a GDPR module to record consents and answer access requests. The question becomes concrete as soon as a form collects clients' personal data.
Often, no. Here are both cases, in the honest order.
Yes for the part that matters: building a complete form with its conditional logic and testing it offline in the field, with no card. Tasks, reports and dashboards belong to higher plans, but the field question is settled before that.
Yes, by importing the existing export file. Our advice remains to bring across only what still serves a purpose: full history costs formatting time for an often theoretical benefit, whereas still-open cases are worth the effort.
Build your hardest form, put the phone in airplane mode, fill it completely with its photos, then restore the connection. Half an hour is enough, and the answer stops being debatable — it is the only test that counts on this specific point.
We describe neither the features nor the pricing of another vendor, which change without notice to us. This page sets out the criteria to examine and Thingsform's answers. For the other tool, its current terms are authoritative.
Google Forms is a trademark of its publisher, cited here for reference. This page does not describe its features or pricing, which change over time: refer to its current terms.
The right way to decide
Rebuild your hardest form on the free plan, and have it filled in the field. Half a day is enough, and the answer stops being a matter of opinion.