Formbricks Review: The Open Source Typeform Alternative

Is Formbricks the Open Source "Typeform Killer" we’ve been waiting for?

Typeform is beautiful, but expensive and closed. Formbricks brings that same "conversational" survey experience to the open source world. We analyze whether it's robust enough for enterprise data collection and how it handles survey privacy.

If you are tired of "Response Limits" and paying $10k/year just to ask your users what they think, this review is for you.

What is it?

Formbricks is not just a form builder. It is primarily an event-driven feedback and experience management (XM) platform.

Unlike Typeform and others, Formbricks lives inside your product. You trigger surveys based on code events or no-code triggers.

The Good

Absolute Data Sovereignty: For EU companies or regulated industries, this is the key feature. You can self-host the entire stack on your own infrastructure. No data transfer to the US. No Privacy Shield headaches.
The "Headless" Experience: Formbricks allows you to import survey components directly into your app. It inherits your fonts, your CSS, and your design system. It feels native, not injected.
The Economics: Typeform punishes you for going viral (overage fees). Formbricks Self-Hosted allows Unlimited Responses for free. Even the Cloud version starts at a reasonable $49/mo for the "Startup" tier, which is significantly cheaper than enterprise competitors.

The Bad (The Reality Check)

v4.0 Complexity: Late 2024 brought Formbricks v4.0. While powerful, it moved from a simple "App + DB" deployment to a microservices-lite architecture requiring Redis (caching) and MinIO/S3 (storage). For a solo dev, the deployment complexity just doubled.
The "Branding" Tax: Formbricks operates on an "Open Core" model. While the code is free, removing the "Powered by Formbricks" badge requires a paid license (even on self-hosted instances). It’s a fair trade to support the devs, but it catches some OSS purists off guard.

How it Stacks Up

vs. Typeform: Formbricks wins on price and integration depth. Typeform wins on "out-of-the-box" polish for non-technical marketing teams.
vs. Qualtrics: Formbricks is 10% of the features for 1% of the cost. Unless you need conjoint analysis and regression modeling, Qualtrics is overkill.
vs. PostHog: PostHog is adding surveys, but they are basic. Formbricks offers deep logic jumps, complex input types, and better routing.

Who is it for?

YES: SaaS CTOs, Product Engineers, and EU-based companies needing GDPR compliance.
NO: A non-technical HR manager who just wants to send a quick survey to 50 people (Stick to Tally or Google Forms).

The Verdict

Formbricks is the Linux of Surveys.

It is rougher around the edges than the proprietary giants, but it offers power, flexibility, and ownership that they cannot match. If you have the engineering resources to deploy it, it is a no-brainer.

Sources

Official website: https://formbricks.com/
GitHub repository: https://github.com/formbricks/formbricks

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