Maybe you’ve looked into drag and drop form builders because you know how time-consuming and complex forms can get, but you always seem to run into roadblocks.

For example…

What if you need to define complex logic and workflows such as conditional field visibility, field calculations, and dynamic form branching—BUT you need them in JSON so you can leverage its portability and flexibility?

You’re probably looking at doing it by hand, but if your application is form-heavy, it’s tens or even hundreds of hours to get it all done.

Or what if you need to extend its capabilities, implement a lot of custom CSS, integrate your existing auth provider, require revision control or offline mode, configure team-based user access, or handle PDFs?

Do you have accessibility requirements?

How much time will it take to configure screen reader announcements on user actions, set focus order, trap, and placement, dynamically change aria attributes, handle validation messages, and set special styles for valid/invalid fields?

Do you have offline users?

Traveling to remote locations without a data connection and having to write down information only to fill out an online form later might be costing you thousands in lost time.

How secure do your forms need to be? Do you need bank-level security? Do specific fields need encryption? What about while the information is in transit and not just at rest so that it’s fully end-to-end? That’s a separate project itself.

Then there’s the data—something that gets ignored with most most form builders.

It needs to be validated, stored, and integrated with backend services or APIs to process submissions.

Sometimes on-premise, in the cloud, or in legacy systems, or all three.

And what if you need to add or even REMOVE a field to an existing form that already has 100, 1000, or 100,000 submissions?

Do you need to preserve that historical data and/or keep record of who changed the form, when they changed it, and why they changed it? Depending on your compliance requirements, you might have to figure out a solution.

ALSO, what if a form needs to change and it’s deployed in multiple places? Every change request will come to YOU and you’ll have to spend hours to hunt down each location and make the changes.

On top of that, you might need to keep everything in house, in your environment, which rules out leveraging external 3rd-party tools.

When you start looking at the potential requirements, building forms and managing the data is its own development project all by itself that requires extra hours to build and maintain, EVEN with most form management software options, because they’re only half the solution:

Eliminate All Of It From Your Development Lifecycle

Without committing to technologies you don’t want.

Without things getting expensive if you scale.

And without sacrificing any security or compliance requirements you might have.

Form.io is a form management, data management, and rendering platform that lets you, or anyone, do all the complex form building, AND their APIs, in a drag and drop interface, that will output the JSON schema for you.

That means, as a developer, you don’t have to be the one who’s actually building the forms, the JSON, or APIs. They’re generated automatically—you can just grab them.

Then, with Form.io’s Open Source Renderers (React, Angular, Vue, and more), you can dynamically render your forms AND automatically hook that form into the REST API that’s generated from the same JSON schema—with a single line of code that you can just copy and paste into your app.

If the form needs to change, you or anyone can edit the form in the drag and drop interface and the form will update automatically, in real time, and reflect the changes everywhere its deployed.

That’s especially useful when you’re performing rapid prototyping or implementing user feedback and you need to iterate with speed.

And when all the data is flowing through Form.io, you get a single source of truth that updates in real time that you can run reports on so you’re never in the dark.

Form.io is the complete form management software platform:

With our Security and Compliance module, every single nuanced regulation is handled, out of the box, with every accessibility requirement too.

When you view a form that’s changed, whether fields were added or removed, you can see an historical record of everything—all versions of the form, who changed it, when it was changed, and why—AND all the submission data as they relate to each historical and current version of the form.

With Form.io’s PDF Plus Server, you can build PDF forms and configure user-facing downloadable PDFs with drag and drop tools AND save 100s of hours by auto-converting your legacy PDFs to dynamic, JSON-driven, responsive PDF forms.

Form.io’s Security Module ensures your data remains protected, end-to-end, based on the fields you choose.

And with built-in offline mode, offline users will thank you for not making them record information twice, and you’ll recover lost productivity.