Formbricks
Formbricks is an open-source, privacy-focused survey and user feedback platform you can self-host. It provides a visual no-code survey editor, mobile SDKs, embeddable widgets, integrations, and a real-time analytics dashboard so teams can collect and analyze feedback across web, mobile, email and other channels.
It’s aimed at product teams, UX researchers, engineering groups, and any organization that needs data sovereignty or wants to avoid third‑party storage. Self-hosting keeps data under your control, enables code inspection and customization, and supports compliance requirements such as GDPR.
Use Cases
- Product teams collecting in-app feedback via native Android and iOS SDKs to improve mobile UX.
- UX researchers running targeted, conditional surveys embedded on websites or delivered by link or email.
- Privacy-conscious organizations that must keep survey data on-premises or in a controlled cloud for compliance or internal policy.
- Engineering teams replacing or supplementing commercial SaaS survey vendors with an auditable, modifiable stack.
- Workflows that require routing responses into CRMs, Slack, HubSpot, Notion or automation tools via integrations and webhooks.
Strengths
- Open-source and auditable — the full codebase is on GitHub, so you can inspect and modify behavior for compliance or feature needs.
- Privacy-first architecture — designed for self-hosting and data sovereignty, suitable for GDPR and internal security requirements.
- Feature-rich — no-code editor, conditional logic, targeting, embeddable widgets and WordPress support make it comparable to many commercial alternatives.
- Mobile-native support — official Android (Kotlin) and iOS (Swift) SDKs enable high-quality in-app surveys without relying on webviews.
- Integrations & webhooks — pre-built connectors and webhook support let you pipe responses into existing automation and analytics workflows.
- Branding and domain control — UI customization and separate public survey domains help maintain trust and a consistent user experience.
- Real-time dashboard — built-in analytics and trend visualization let teams spot issues and measure satisfaction without immediate exports.
Limitations
- Self-hosting complexity — the stack relies on multiple components (for example
Redis,MinIOand other services) and requires following repo deployment docs; setup is nontrivial. - Operational responsibility — backups, upgrades, scaling, security patches and monitoring are your team’s responsibility, which increases operational overhead compared with a managed SaaS.
- Analytics depth — the built-in analytics are pragmatic but may lack advanced cohort analysis and enterprise BI features; you may need to export data to a BI tool for deep analysis.
- Smaller community — fewer third-party tutorials and forum discussions than large commercial products; support is primarily via official docs and the project’s GitHub.
- Managed offering transparency — the project markets a cloud option, but public self-serve pricing is limited; expect to contact sales for managed pricing or trials.
Final Thoughts
Formbricks is a practical choice when data control, privacy and mobile-native feedback matter more than the convenience of a fully managed service. It brings many capabilities found in commercial survey platforms while allowing internal hosting and code modifications.
Choose self-hosting if you have DevOps/SRE capacity to manage a multi-service deployment and need compliance or customization. If you lack operational resources or require advanced, out-of-the-box enterprise analytics, evaluate the managed offering or plan how survey data will flow into your BI stack. Start with a small proof-of-concept deployment from the GitHub repo to validate integration points, scaling behavior, and analytics needs before rolling it into production.