Many businesses rely on their website to engage their audience and collect information for various purposes. From surveys, to quote requests, to lead capture or more sophisticated forms such as home loan applications, the need to provide customers with simple intuitive forms that can capture data in an effective manner and channel it to downstream systems is essential.

Until recent years responsibilities associated with the administration of web forms were primarily in the domain of web developers who were responsible for building the interfaces, data validators, and the processing logic that could e-mail or feed the data to other applications. Producing, deploying, and maintaining the forms was a somewhat cumbersome and potentially costly endeavor requiring the collaboration of multiple technical and non-technical individuals.

To help with this problem, a number of vendors have begun introducing tools and services that almost completely eliminate the technical gap required to build these forms, and empower non-technical staff to easily configure and maintain complex forms, and data capture workflows. These tools make forms development a breeze by exposing easy to use interfaces in which users can drag and drop different input components such as text fields, drop downs, and date calendars (among others) into single column or multi-column forms that have one or many steps.

This new generation of services is a boon for companies both small and large, as they significantly reduce the costs of forms development and management and provide them with tremendous agility in developing, deploying and maintaining forms and data capture wizards.

Some of these services, such as FormStack and Wufoo provide the entire platform as a subscription service, requiring customers to build and host the forms in their servers, and generate shortlinks/embed code in order to deploy them. Other vendors provide stand-alone solutions such as Appnitro's MachForm, FormTools, and JSN Uniform which require customers to purchase a one-time low cost license that allows them to download and deploy/integrate the entire solution on their own servers or as part of their applications. As an added benefit, these licensed solutions are fully open source platforms that can be tweaked as needed to enhance or extend their functionality.

Although assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the numerous forms management platforms currently available can take some time, businesses who make use of web forms and data capture workflows would be well advised to make an evaluation, and move forward with the adoption of one of these services as their benefits far outweigh the (comparatively) minor up-front investment required to transition over.