The Shopify platform hosts more than 200,000 stores, making it one of the most popular commercial ecommerce systems on the market. In fact, compared to its direct competitors, it blows every other company out of the water. The Shopify brand started in 2006, and it’s grown quite a bit since then, evolving into a publicly traded company and joining forces with various other companies to make the integrations for your ecommerce website that much better.

And that’s just what makes Shopify special. Users receive a full website building suite, along with beautiful themes and tons of apps to expand their stores. Other platforms put a focus on developing a structure where all the features are packed into the actual software.

Although Shopify does have quite a few features in its system, many of them are in the form of apps, which makes it similar to WordPress, where you can turn your store into something as simple or complex as you want.

Keep reading to learn more about Shopify and the areas in which it excels and falls short.

Shopify Pricing

 

Shopify pricing is one of the easiest to work with, since it opens up options for just about everyone. If you’d like a small store, you don’t have to pay much, and if you need a large store, there’s a plan with the right features for you.

• Starter – Starting at $5 you receive a point of sale, Facebook selling, Shopify Buy button and 2.9% + 30¢ online credit card rates. This plan doesn’t include an online store (just the Buy button,) and you don’t get a blog.)
• Basic Shopify – For $29 you receive everything from the previous plan, 2.9% + 30¢ online credit card rates, Pinterest and Twitter selling and a blog.
• Shopify – For $79 you receive everything from the previous plan, 2.6% + 30¢ online credit card rates, gift cards, professional reports and abandoned cart recovery.
• Advanced Shopify – For $299 you receive everything from the previous plan, 2.4% + 30¢ online credit card rates, an advanced report builder and real-time carrier shipping.

All plans allow for unlimited products, premium support, fraud analysis, discount codes and unlimited file storage.

 

Shopify Design

The platform has a wide selection of themes, including over 116 paid solutions that all look great. In addition, the free theme count is at about 21. Although an FTP account is not offered, you can go into your account and modify the CSS and HTML to make your own customizations. Some of themes are too similar, but the sheer amount of themes shows that you should be able to find something for your industry. Also, they are modern and clean, making them some of the best on the market.

Shopify Frontend Features

 

A wonderful checkout system pushes people through your site quickly, and even the Lite plan lets you sell items through the Shopify Buy button. Some of the plans provide selling through Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter, and you can accept gift cards and discount codes. Most of the design is done through the backend, but a few real-time design features are included for dragging elements around.

Shopify Backend Features

Advanced users have the ability to customize code on the backend, and beginners have tools for customizing colors, module placements and logos. The dashboard looks similar to WordPress and some of the tabs include spots for payments, checkout, gift cards, general settings and notifications. When making a product you have settings for inserting a title and description, along with areas for media, shipping, vendors and product types.

Shopify Marketing

Alt tags, image file names and more are offered when setting up your Shopify SEO. When talking about promotions, newsletters and social media, Shopify lacks the built-in tools for this. However, each of these marketing areas have apps for you to install and make work. You can also sell through places like Amazon, eBay and Google Products with the help of apps.

Shopify Statistics

The reports are high quality, helping you predict trends for the future with reports for gross sales based on product title, SKU and traffic referrer. You can also track sales by customer, referrer, channel and more.

Shopify Hosting and Security

Level 1 PCI compliance comes with your Shopify plan, and a hosting plan and domain are included as well. The automatic backups are nice, and it’s worth noting that the hosting is provided through the ServerCentral company, which is an enterprise level platform. Another plus is the content delivery network for those times when your traffic spikes.

Shopify Extensibility

The best part of Shopify is the app store, since hundreds of apps are provided for expanding your store with marketing, shipping and social media tools. In addition, you can filter by collections if you have a particular app in mind. To give you an idea of the types of apps, you can find anything for customer service, accounting, tools and reporting. It doesn’t require a download and upload, so it simply installs the app from the dashboard, making it one of the easiest app stores to work with.

Shopify Support

Support comes in the form of live chat, email and phone discussions, all of which are available at any time of the day or week. The forum is a great place to chat with other people who use the platform, and the Ecommerce University area is filled with content that guides you on how to improve the outlook of your store. You’ll also find a blog that gets updated on a consistent basis, showing you that Shopify is constantly thinking of ways to help its users.

Conclusion

If you’re a beginner just getting started with building an ecommerce store, Shopify is a viable platform for you. It doesn’t require any coding, but if you’re more experienced and would like to make your own CSS/HTML changes, that option is there as well. Also, the app store has all the tools you really need to scale up your store and get prepared for the time when more and more people come to your shop. The pricing is on point, and if you ever realize that you need to upgrade, you have the chance to do so at anytime. Shopify leads the way in terms of ease of use, and the template designs are great, so consider this when looking for a platform for your next shop.

LiveAgent is a full web-based help desk appplication with multichannel support which integrates all channels (Email, Phone, Chat, Facebook and Twitter) into one interface.

LiveAgent Review: Pricing

LiveAgent offers 3 pricing plans:

Ticket

$9 per agent/mo

Main features include:

Custom domain parking
E-mail support – Ticketing
Contact forms
Forum & Knowledge base
iPhone/Android app

Ticket + Chat

$29 per agent/mo

Main features include:

All Ticket features
Live Chat
Real-time visitors monitoring
Chat invitations
Feedback management

All-inclusive

$39 per agent/mo

Main features include:

All Ticket + Chat features
Facebook & Twitter
Call center support
Video call
Time tracking
Gamification

Features like Live Chat, Real-time visitors monitoring, Chat invitations or Feedback management are only available starting with the Ticket+Chat, while Facebook & Twitter, Call center support, Video call, Time tracking, Gamification are only available for the All-inclusive plan.

The 14-day free trial starts with the All-inclusive plan, and there’s no credit card required during the trial period.

 

LiveAgent Review: Design

LiveAgent‘s design is not as up to date, the dashboard is a bit cluttered but intuitive. You may customize it up to one point by adding custom branding.

The interface seems to be geared towards users that have some experience with this kind of software so if you’re just starting out you might need to go through some video tutorials first.

LiveAgent Review: Features

LiveAgent has more than  170 support features and some of the most important include: Automation, SLA, Ticketing, POP3 accounts, Email piping, Departments, Priorities, Statuses, Tags, Rules, Ticket Routing, Canned/Predefined messages, Macros, Email templates, Performance Reports, Voice integration and call recording. Most importantly, LiveAgent also has an integrated live chat feature.

Live Agent Review: Backend Features

The Dashboard gives you overall information about what’s happening into your account. In the Chat section you can see your online visitors running in pending chats, and in the Tickets section you can view all the communication between you and your customers. Next, the Reports tab gives you insights on overall performance, agent performance, department or channel reports. Customer portal allows you to create, manage and customize your online knowledge base.

LiveAgent Review: Reports

LiveAgent has a strong reporting section. Even if you’re running a a one-man business or a medium size organization, every report tool is available, from department reports, usage statistics, performance reports, agent rankings, customer satisfaction ratings and detailed insights of every communication channel: Email, Live Chat, Call Center, Contact Forms or Social Media messages.

LiveAgent Review: Flexibility

LiveAgent has a great set of features making it one of the most competitive help desk software out there, therefore a native iOS and Android app is available, so you can provide customer service while on the go. The app will allow you to transfer and respond to tickets, chat with your customers  or get push notifications of new tickets or chats.

A big plus for LiveAgent are the 39 translations available, so your agents can use LiveAgent in the language they prefer.

LiveAgent Review: Extensibility

There are only 41 integrations at the moment but most of the popular online services are available: MailChimp, AWeber, Braintree, Shopify, Facebook, and Twitter.

If you’re code savvy and you’re really tied to a particular web service, there is an API available for creating integrations.

LiveAgent Review: Support

The support section is not as friendly and well organized as you would expect. There are 25 video tutorials available, a getting started section, a technical section (including FAQs) and a support forum.

If you need some fast answers, a live chat option is available on the homepage or you may reach their support team by email, phone and social media.

Conclusion

LiveAgent is easy to learn, use, and implement and it’s perfect for small and medium size businesses. If you’re looking for a live chat option, there’s one included, you’ll just have to sign up for the right plan.

Overall, they do a really good job, they have good documentation and strong reports.

If you’re running a medium size or small business then Help Scout might be the ideal help desk software for you. It takes minutes to set up, without having to deal with backend and configuration complexities.

Help Scout Pricing

Help Scout offers 3 pricing plans:

Basic:

$8/mo/user

Main features include:

1 Mailbox
Beacon
Saved Replies
Help Scout for iPhone
Help Scout branding

Standard:

$15/mo/user

Main features include:

All Free features
5 Mailboxes
1 Docs knowledge base
Reports
Workflows
Satisfaction Ratings

Plus:

$27/mo/user

Main features include:

All Standard features
Unlimited Mailboxes
3 Docs knowledge bases
Teams
Custom Fields
Free inactive Users

Annual payment earns you one month free. You can start with  a 15-day free trial, with no credit card required. For annual billing you’ll get a 10% discount.

Help Scout Design

Help Scout integrates with your email service, therefore the interface is quite simple and the UI has a clean look and feel.

Help Scout Features

Helpscout’s main features include: shared email inbox for managing tickets, Docs (for building a help center or knowledge base), saved replies, reports, office hours filtering, phone conversations or voicemail integration.
50+ voicemail services are supported out of the box for logging phone calls on your computer.

Help Scout is packed with great features and some of them are only available with the Plus plan. Be sure to check the full feature list before committing to a plan.

Help Scout Backend Features

The user interface is uncluttered and pretty intuitive.

There are five menu items on the top left side of the screen:

• Home: This is where you go when you first login. Once you get started you can add several brands, products or email addresses into your account. These options will appear on the dashboard.
• Mailbox: You can support several brands, products or email addresses from a single account. Each mailbox has unique permissions, settings and folders.
• Docs: Here you can create up to 5 knowledge base sites so customers can find answers from any device.
• Reports: This section will help you keep track of all the important support metrics, employee performance and customer satisfaction.

Help Scout Reports

The reporting interface is really great.

The reports available (four or five depending if you have Docs installed or not) can be viewed at any time via the Reports dropdown menu.

The Conversations report shows you how much volume you’re handling during a certain time period, the Productivity report measures efficiency across the help desk, and the Team and User will give you insights about how members of your team are doing. The Happiness report will show how your team is being rated by customers. If you have Docs installed, this report will help you understand what your customers are searching for in the knowledge base you have created, and how helpful the information is, as well as what percentage of customers are still sending an email after browsing the knowledge base.

Help Scout Flexibility

An iPhone app is available for replies on the go. You can check in on your mailboxes, manage conversations, and share tickets with your team members.

A well-documented APIs is available for developers to create their own integrations.

Right now a live chat option is not available out of the box but you can easily integrate third party apps like Olark or ClickDesk, HipChat, and many more.

Help Scout Extensibility

There are 40 web app integrations available at the moment, so you can account with your favorite apps and services like:

• Talkdesk
• FollowUpThen
• Hively
• Capsule
• Nicereply
• HipChat
• Campfire
• Slack
• MailChimp
• Magento REST API
• Shopify
• Mixpanel
• Bigcommerce
• Campaign Monitor
• KISSmetrics
• Infusionsoft
• Olark
• Pipedrive
• SnapEngage
• WooCommerce
• Constant Contact
• PipelineDeals
• FreshBooks
• FullStory
• Bronto
• Google Apps Integration
• eBay and Amazon Integration
• Smooch

The free plan doesn’t give access to integrations.
A well-documented APIs is available for developers to create their own apps.

Help Scout Support

There are more ways to contact their support team:

Email: via a direct email address or a web form.
Phone: you may schedule a call with one of their experts.

A decent knowledge base is available (with walkthroughs and video tutorials available) as well as a blog.

Conclusion

If you need an easy to use help desk application, look no further than Help Scout. They have a great reports section, and an extremely easy to use interface.

Zendesk is one of the most popular help desk software, suitable for all companies, no matter what size or industry sector.

Zendesk Pricing

Zendesk offers 4 pricing plans:

Essential:
$5/mo per agent when billed annually
or
$9 when billed month-to-month
Team:
$19/mo per agent when billed annually
or
$25 when billed month-to-month
Professional:
$49/mo per agent when billed annually
or
$59 when billed month-to-month
Enterprise:
$99/mo per agent when billed annually
or
$125 when billed month-to-month

Elite

$199/mo per agent when billed annually

There’s a 30-day free trial with no credit card required.

Zendesk Design

Since August 2016 a new version of the agent/admin interface of Zendesk is available, with a more clean and modern design.

Starting with the Team plan, Zendesk will give you the option to transform your interface to match your brand. With familiar customization tools, you can easily tailor the look and feel.

Zendesk Features

The Help Center is designed to help you a complete self-service support option (knowledge base). Users can use the information you are providing or turn to a community forum for answers.  Your Agents can also use the Help Center to help solve tickets. You can deliver all the content in multiple languages.

Top features include:

Essential:

• Unlimited email addresses
• Twitter and Facebook channels
• Basic knowledge base

Team:

• Branded Help Center
• Performance Dashboards
• Public Apps Marketplace

Community:

• Community forums
• Multilingual content
• Business hours & SLAs
• Insights analytics

Enterprise:

• Multibrand support
• Ticket Forms
• Hourly Insights analytics
• Auditing & admin controls

An integrated live chat software (Zopim) and phone support app (Zendesk Voice) are available – both sold separately.

Zendesk Backend Features

Zendesk will give you the option to transform your interface to match your brand. With familiar customization tools, you can easily tailor the look and feel.

There are five menu items on the left side of the screen:

First, a Home button gives you access to your dashboard, where you’ll find a snapshot of your current configuration. On the Views section you’ll find your unsolved tickets. Next is the Reporting section, where you will get detailed snapshots of ticketing, agents, customers, self-service, and more. Last button, on the bottom left corner, will take you to your settings where you’ll find all the fine-grained controls for your account.

The last button you’ll find, on the bottom left of the screen, is a link to the Admin home page. Here you’ll find the tools you need to configure Zendesk.

Two more menu items can be found on the top right corner:

First (next to the search box) is a menu item that lets you select between the Support section and the Help Center. Next, if you click on your avatar you can access all your Profile Settings.

Zendesk Reports

Zendesk Reports are available for all plans and provide metrics such as daily ticket activity, service level agreement compliance, average resolution time, customer satisfaction, agent performance, ticket resolution time, and efficiency.

Insights provides advanced reporting and metrics and is available only for the Professional and Enterprise plans.

Zendesk Flexibility

Zendesk offers a built-in chat option, a mobile app (both for iOS and Android), integrated apps so that you can offer fully scalable customer support. The Help Center gives you a lot of flexibility.

Before deciding if Zendesk is a good option for your business you can signup for a demo where a consultant will give you a brief, guided tour of the product.

Zendesk Extensibility

Zendesk offers more than 350 integrations available, called apps. The apps are found in the Apps Marketplace with  some of the most being: SalesForce, ZenCart, Magento, JIRA, TeamViewer, Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, PlanBox, MailChimp and 8X8. If you wish to create your own custom app, you can take advantage of Zendesk’s API.

Zendesk Support

Zendesk has a dedicated support section where you can access the knowledge base, Getting Started tutorials and the community forum.
If you can’t find here the answers you need, or you just need to get in touch with them about pricing or billing, then you have all the options available: contact form, phone support (with separate phone numbers for different countries and time zones) and social media (if you’re looking for a quick answer).

Conclusion

Zendesk is a customer care solution that can grow with your business. It includes all key communication methods that are needed: phone, chat, webform, email, and social media.  It also gives you the option for building a branded knowledge base and online community. Powerful insights and more than 500 integrations make Zendesk one of the best options when it comes to customer care solutions.

Intercom is a customer communication platform with a suite of integrated products for every team—including sales, marketing, product, and support.

Intercom Pricing

The help desk product is now called Messages. Pricing for Intercom Mesages is based on the total number of people you track and communicate with, not the number of agent seats your support team has. Be careful, pricing will automatically adjust as your business grows and you track more people.

There are two base plans:

Essential:

Pricing ranging from:

$53/mo for 250 people
to
$503/mo for 50.000 people

Intercom Design

The design of the interface is fresh and clean and the user dashboard offers a lot of information. Once you login you’ll notice that the interface is pretty intuitive and easy to use.

The communication features are also really good. One of the weakest points of intercom is that the design is not responsive, therefore accessing the service from mobile devices needs some improvement.

Intercom Features

Some of the key features include:

• Intercom Messenger that will allow customers to contact you inside your web or mobile app.
• Customer profiles allows you to save customer location, activity, and more, all in real-time.
• Assignment Rules is a great feature that allows you to create rules to automatically assign conversations to the right team or teammate.
• With Saved replies you’ll be able to respond to  questions with canned, yet personalized replies.
• Tagging allows you to group related people or conversations with tags—search for them later.

Typing indicators, read receipts, stickers and emojis make conversations simple and engaging.

Intercom Backend Features

The backend is very well optimized and has a clean and modern interface.

Intercom Reports

Your support insights will show you data about your signed up users and visitors to your site.

You can see exactly if your support volume is increasing, if your team is responding fast enough to your users and leads, and who on your team is busiest.

All your Support Insights get updated only once a day (midnight for your timezone).

Intercom Flexibility

iOS and Android apps will help you view, manage, and respond to customer conversations from your mobile device.

Building your own knowledge base is not supported at the moment. This is a bit of a letdown as you’ll have to use third-party apps to create a self help section.

Intercom Extensibility

Intercom integrates with almost 60 popular third party apps and services to help you have more targeted interactions with your customers.

An API is available for the tech savvy to build their own apps and integrations for Intercom.

Intercom Support

Their support section is based on the Docs forum, where you can ask questions or read on related topics. The Intercom team will usually answer to all questions on this forum.

Once you login into your account, a live chat popup is available if you have questions that need quick answers.

They will also offer support by email, but no telephone numbers are listed for reaching out to the team.

Conclusion

Overall intercom.io is incredibly useful and easy to use. It comes with a beautiful modern design but the mobile experience could be improved. Intercom has a simple pricing structure and because you pay for the number of users not the number of agents it might be a bit expensive for small businesses.

Freshdesk is a SaaS based customer support software aiming to help businesses of all sizes. With its 5 pricing plans, this customer support software is excellent for fast growing companies.

Freshdesk Pricing

Freshdesk offers 5 princing plans:

Freshdesk offers 5 princing plans:

Sprout:

$0/agent/month, for unlimited agents

Main features include:

Email Support Channel
Standard Phone Channel
Knowledge Base
Access To App Gallery

Blossom:

$19/agent/mo when billed annually
or
$25/agent/mo when billed month-to-month

Main features include:

All Sprout features
Advanced Social Channel
Team Huddle
Satisfaction Surveys
Custom Domain Mapping
Time Tracking

Garden:

$35/agent/mo when billed annually
or
$44/agent/mo when billed month-to-month

Main features include:

All Blossom features
Multilingual Helpdesk
Live Chat Channel
Ticket Templates
Community Forums
Scheduled Report

Estate:

$49/agent/mo when billed annually
or
$59/agent/mo when billed month-to-month

Main features include:

Multiple Products
Portal Customization
Shared Ownership
Enterprise Reports
Custom Agent Roles

Forest:

$89/agent/mo when billed annually
or
$99/agent/mo when billed month-to-month

Main features include:

All Estate Features
IP Whitelisting
Custom Email Servers
EU Data Center
Skill based ticket assignment

24 x 7 email support and 24 x 5 phone support included with all plans.

When you sign up, you get access to all the features in the Freshdesk Estate Plan for a 21-day free trial. No credit card is required and there are no cancellation fees. If you cancel, you’ll be billed for the current month. You can upgrade, downgrade or cancel at any time.

Freshdesk Design

Freshdesk’s design looks a bit dated but the interface is quite simple.

Your portal can be customized to reflect your brand. You can put up your logo and favicon and paint your self service portal in your brand colors.

Freshdesk Features

Freshdesk lets you create a knowledge base section for your users, and this is one of the most important features of a help desk software.

Some of the most important features: Help desk Ticketing, Multi-Channel Customer Support, Time Tracking, Built in Knowledge Base, Help desk Automation, Integrated Forums, Multi-product Customer, Support, Reports & Insights, Integrated Game Mechanics, Mobile Friendly App. For the full list of features available you should check out the Freshdesk homepage.

Freshdesk Backend Features

One you login as an agent and setup your account you’ll find the following tabs:

Dashboard: by default it will show the standings for the current month and for all agents.

Tickets: once you have configured your mailbox, all your emails are converted to tickets and you can view them under the tickets tab. Here you’ll also find tickets from other channels like Facebook, Twitter or phone.

Social: here you can reply to your brand mentions from your social media accounts.

Solutions: here you can create and edit your articles for your knowledge base.

Forums: here you can setup community forums to give a platform for customers to talk about your product/brand.

Whenever a ticket is created, the requester is automatically added as a contact in your help desk. You can see these contacts in the Customers tab.

Reports: here you’ll find an overview of all the important metrics.

Admin: under the admin tab you can add or remove agents, configure support channels and configure automation tasks.

Freshdesk Reports

Freshdesk has a strong reports section which gives you an overview of all the important metrics. You can export your data to a CSV whenever you want to create custom reports, free of cost. You also have access to a range of filters that make it easier for you to decide which parameters to export.

Freshdesk Flexibility

Freshdesk also offers a builtin chat option (paid separately) and a mobile app (iOS and Android) that allows you to reply to tickets, add notes and perform bulk actions on tickets while on the go. A mobile-ready web-based version is also available and can be used to access your help desk from any device.

You can even add a support app to your Facebook page, where your customers can raise support tickets.

Freshdesk Extensibility

There are around 100 integrations available for Freshdesk, including apps like Zappier, Twitter, Shopify, Salesforce and Gmail. If your favorite service doesn’t have an app yet you may create your own using the new Freshdesk SDK.

Freshdesk Support

A discussion forum and a huge knowledge base are available where you can explore ho-to’s and help you getting started with Freshdesk.

In case you need to contact their support team you may open a support ticket via email or a web form. Telephone numbers are available from Monday to Friday  for 4 different time zones.

They also offer a cool support glossary where you’ll find the definitions of every term you need to know in a help desk.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for premium features like LiveChat, the service tends to get a bit more expensive, but you have a 30- day free trial before you commit to a paid plan. There are a lot of features available, plenty of useful integrations and a great reports section.

Typeform aims to make forms fun and engaging, so users will be happy to fill them out and increase your conversion rates. Founded in 2012, Typeform takes a different approach to forms, making them keyboard friendly so users won’t have to use the mouse, and displaying questions one at a time.

Typeform Pricing

 

Basic: FREE

The free plan offers a ton of great features  like  mobile-ready forms, access to the emplate gallery, split-device metrics, SSL encryption, reporting and much more.  All these features will be available for 100 forms per month with up to 10 fields per form. There are some features that you could miss out like conditional logic.

Pro: $30/month

The pro plan has a really good value for the money, it will remove the Typeform branding and it includes all CORE features plus conditional logic, email respondent notifications, customizable thank you screen hidden fields and up to 2GB of storage. For both the Basic and PRO plan, Typeform branding will appear on the footer of your form. This can be removed once you upgrade to the PRO+ plan.

PRO+:  from $70

This one is aimed at companies & teams. It includes all PRO features plus Priority support, user invites and File upload up to 4GB per user.

You will get two months free when you pay for the whole year.

Typeform Design

Typeform has an unique form interface that only shows one question at a time. They recently had a design refresh and everything looks awesome. The tool allows you to include images and videos in your forms and uses fonts much larger than the average form builder. Images can be used as buttons for interactive forms.

The whole platform is designed in a drag-and-drop format, so learning how to use it will be extremely easy.

If you’re looking for a new way of presenting forms then Typeform is a great option to consider. To help you understand better why Typeform is different you can check some examples here.

Typeform Features

Pro forms support logic jumps, payments, and more
Mobile and keyboard shortcut friendly. This means that the forms will be accompanied by letters, which you can tap on your keyboard to quickly fill out the form from your computer without ever touching your mouse.

You’ll see one question at a time, with large answer and text fields so users can easily tap it on a mobile device.

They are reporting higher completion rates than other services.

Typeform Backend Features

Creating a form using the Typeform online platform is easy and quick.

Once you have created your form, editing and rearranging the fields is hassle free and doesn’t consume massive amounts of your time.

The dashboard has three menu sections: Build, Design, Configure, Distribute, Analyze.

Under the Build section you can drag and drop your fields (logic jumps are also available here and hidden fields). The Design section allows you to change color schemes, fonts or opt for a whole different theme. Under Configure your general form settings, add or remove integrations, setup respondent notifications and configure the progress widget. After your form is completed youcan go to the Diustribute section to grab the URL or embed code. Next is the Analize section where all the reports and metrcis are available.

Typeform Extensibility

Their integration with Zapier helps you push data you collect on Typeform to over 500 services like Google Sheets (aave new Typeform entries to a Google Sheets spreadsheet), MailChimp (for creating MailChimp subscribers from your entries), Trello, Dropbox and many more.

Typeform Flexibility

Typeform does not limit how many questions you can ask per form.

Typeform does not refund for contracts cancelled before the contracted period ends so be careful when committing to a full year plan.

Typeform Statistics

There is no built in analytics feature for statistics but you can easily add your Google Analytics tracking code to any of your form, in order to track and collect data about users who submit your forms. In the Analize section from your dashboard, some metrics (completion rate, unique visits or responses) will be available for every device (desktop, tablet and smartphone).

Typeform Support

Typeforms’s help and support team is reliable. They are available via email from Monday through Friday, 8AM-11PM (CET). If you send an email between these hours it is very likely that you’l get a quick to respond to our questions.

The Help Center covers topics for both beginners and advanced users, from creating a form all the way through distributing your forms, analyzing results or using the API.

Conclusion

Typeform is for everyone who want their forms stand out from the crowd. They have a free plan for smaller startups, the themes are great, and creating the forms is just as intuitive as filling them out. The pro plan has a really good value for the money, with lots of features to choose from.

Ninja Forms is a WordPress plugin that will help you create forms with a simple drag and drop interface integrated directly inside of your WordPress admin pages. Ninja Forms is a powerful tool, that could get a bit pricey at the high end level, but the best is that a free plan is also available (with unlimited email and actions).

Ninja Forms is one of the most powerful online form plugin for WordPress, but if your website is build with another CMS please consider the other forms builders we have reviewed.

Ninja Forms Pricing

Ninja Forms are a bit pricy as especially if you plan using add-ons.

Here’s what you get with the NInja Forms pricing plans:

• Personal Plan: $99 – This one is going to offer more features like Conditional Logic, File Uploads or Multi-Part Forms. Plus, you get 20% off for any additional adon installed. Depending on how many add-ons you choose and how many websites you own the price will vary. All of this for 1 site with 1 year of updates and support.
• Proffessional Plan: $199 – This plan includes 40% off aditional add-ons witch may be installed on up to 20 sites, plus even faster support email response times (8 business hours).
• Agency: $499 – With the Pro Membership you’ll have access to all 40 add-on that Ninja Forms sells at this moment, priority email response (4 business hours), Live / Screenshare support, access to the Builder PRO Pack, PDF form Submissions and integrations with popular online services like MailChimp, Salessforce, PayPal or Zapier.

Keep in mind that for all plans you will get a full year of support and updates from the date of purchase. If you wish to continue getting support or updates after one year you will have to renew your subscription.

Ninja Forms Design

Ninja Forms have a clean and simple design. There are no form templates available at this moment but customization is possible, although not on a deep level, but is enough to integrate the forms with your website design.

If you wish to customize your design a drag and drop editor is available, being already familiar with the WordPress interface will help.

Ninja Forms Features

Most of Ninja Forms’ features are available as add-ons: conditional logic, multiple forms, file uploads, login customization. Check pricing to see exactly how many add-ons are included in every plan. If you need more features but want to stay on budget go with Gravity.

Frontend posting is a great feature that allows you to create posts, pages, or custom post types from user input.

Here is a list of the core features available:

Drag & Drop Form Builder
Unlimited Emails & Actions
Submission Management
Anti-spam Measures

Other features are available as add-ons:

Conditional Logic
Multi-Part Forms
Front-End Posting
File Uploads
Save User Progress
Layout and Styles
Front-End Editor

 

Ninja Forms Backend Features

Being a WordPress plugin, Ninja Forms embeds itself into the backend of the CMS. If you are familiar with WordPress you’ll have no trouble working creating your forms.

Just select New form to access the drag and drop form builder. The add-ons and extensions will also be available under the Forms menu.

Ninja Forms Extensibility

Ninja Forms integrates with the most popular email marketing app like AWeber, MailChimp or Constant Contact, GetResponse or iContact so you can quickly create newsletter signup forms.

Here, check out the list and see if any of your favorite programs are on there:

MailChimp
Campaign Monitor
Constant Contact
Pushover
FreshBooks
AWeber
PayPal Express
MailPoet
Mad Mimi
Zoho CRM
Capsule CRM
Stripe
Insightly CRM
Batchbook CRM
Sendy
PopControl
Trello
Elavon
Zapier
SalesForce CRM
Zoho Creator
Vimeo Uploader
iContact
GetResponse
Slack
CleverReach
Webhooks
Ninja Forms Membership Bundle
Excel Export
WebMerge
Help Scout
Emma

 

Ninja Forms Flexibility

All the add-ons available make Ninja Forms a very flexible form builder but at the same time if you are planning on using too many of these extensions the service will get a bit costly.

Using the Excel Export add-on you can export Ninja Forms submissions to an Excel file.

Ninja Forms Statistics

The User Analytics extension will help you collect data about users who submit your forms.

You’ll also be able to capture the OS, IP address, Browser & Version. If the user’s IP is in the database you’ll also be able to see the Country, Region, Postal Code and City.

Ninja Forms Support

Ninja Forms also provide a extensive knowledge base and very good documentation. They offer support via email, with different response times, depending on the subscription (from 24 business hours for the free plan to 4 business hours for users with pro membership).

Conclusion

Ninja Forms might be great, but only if you use WordPress. Having a free plan, Ninja Forms could also be a really good option for anyone who needs to get started with forms but don’t want to spend more money. As you start to need more features this service will start to get a bit pricey.

Overall, they do a good job, they have good documentation and statistics and if you’re already familiar with WordPress you’ll have no trouble working with the interface.

Gravity Forms is a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to create powerful forms inside of your WordPress Admin pages. So if  you are using WordPress to for your site or blog, Gravity will integrate directly into your WordPress admin panel. All the licenses are available for one year and include the plugin and full support and updates.  If you don’t renew your subscription Gravity will still work but you won’t get any updates or access to support. Prices are very competitive, considering the tool is loaded with lots of features and the Personal License is $39/year (that’s less than $4/month!).

If your website is not built on WordPress you should consider other form builders we have reviewed.

Gravity Forms Pricing

There is no free trial, but a demo is available if you wish to get a feel of the Gravity Forms administration before you buy.

Basic License: $59/year

Use unlimited forms with unlimited entries for only one site. Features like autoresponders, Export Entries, Spam Protection are available but there basic add-ons included.

Pro License: $159/year

At this price point basic and pro add-ons can be added and you can use the license on up to 3 websites.

Elite License: $259/year

You get everything with this license, including priority ticket support and access to advanced add-ons.

Gravity Forms Design

Gravity Forms—like a number of other WordPress form plugins—lets you make forms inside of your WordPress Admin pages and it comes styled to work out of the box with just about any theme.

If you want to tweak the way your form looks you can use the Gravity Forms CSS classes under the advanced field settings to do so. Nevertheless this will require some coding skills so if you don’t want to get your hands dirty try the demo forms first and see if they match with your WP theme.

Gravity Forms Features

With Gravity you can make multi-page forms, schedule forms and restrict number of entries, create WordPress posts from entries, save forms and finish filling them out later.

Lots of add-ons are available if you need to integrate payment platforms and other web apps with the builder.

Conditional logic is is a pretty powerful feature, it allows you to show and hide form fields/questions based on how users respond to previous questions.

Gravity Forms also allows you to create WordPress posts from user entries or quickly build surveys and reader polls with open-ended text fields, drop down menus, checkboxes, numerical fields, and multiple-choice questions.

Gravity Forms Backend Features

Gravity Forms is a WordPress plugin, so your backend will be integrated into WordPress.

After you install the plugin you will find a new Forms section in the the WP admin menu where you’ll be able to add new forms, edit your forms, and see their results.

A drag and drop editor is available and you can easily create, edit and sharing your forms .

Gravity Forms Extensibility

Gravity Forms has over 100 extensions and add-ons, giving you tons of third party options. The business license gives you access to integrations (basic add-ons) with all the major email marketing services like (Campaign Monitor, MailChimp, AWeber, etc.). With the Developer license you’ll have access to the advanced add-ons.

The downside is that the add-ons are only available with the Business or Developer license so if you are running only one website it might be a little expensive.

Gravity Forms Flexibility

If you want to expand the uses for the plugin with add-ons you’ll need at least a Business license at $99 or a Developer license (for access to all add-ons) at $199.

You can get a full refund within the first 30 days of your purchase.

WordPress developers can customize Gravity Forms functionality using the Gravity Forms API.

Gravity Forms Statistics

Gravity Forms doesn’t currently have reporting capabilities or other add-ons for use as an advanced survey.

Gravity Forms Support

Gravity forms has good documentation. If you encounter problems there are customer service forums on the support page and a FAQ section that you can check before submitting a support ticket. You can also reach them on Facebook and Twitter, for quick support questions, they usually respond within a few hours.

Conclusion

If you need a form builder for your WorPress site, Gravity Forms will integrate perfectly into your backend. They have excellent form templates good documentation to help you customize your forms. There are a lot of features available and unlimited forms and entries starting with the Personal license.

The lack of statistics is a bit disappointing but for $39/year for the starting plan, is the best bang for your buck when it comes to other features and add-ons available.

Formstack is an intuitive and versatile online form building software established in 2006. It started when the founder, a web app developer back then, got tired of building forms and came up with creating Formstack.

They still consider Word, PDF and paper documents to be the some of the biggest competitors as many organizations still use this methods to collect data online. Just like the other online form building software we have reviewed Formstack has its advantages and disadvantages, let’s see what those are.

Formstack Pricing

Formstack is one of the most pricey form builders and they only offer a 14 day trial. You can also request a 20 minute demo that includes tutorials and tips to help you get started. They tend to get a bit more expensive at the higher end but you’ll get lots of attractive features included at that price and when you pay annually you’ll get two months free.

 

Silver: $39/month

The starter plan lots of features like a drag and drop form builder, conditional logic, CSS and themes, 5 users, mobile apps, save & resume, security and email support and much more. All of this if you need to create under 20 forms with maximum 1000 submissions per form every month.

Gold: $99/month

With this plan you’ll get a few more integrations (Hubspot, Google Analitycs and Salesforce), 10 users and you can build up to 100 forms with 10,000 for each form every month.

Platinum $249/month

This plan includes more advanced features like AB testing but you are limited in number of forms and submissions. Nevertheless it bumps up the number of forms to 1000, the monthly submissions per forms to 100.000 and the number of logins per account to 25.

Formstack Design

All forms have a modern design and are completely responsive. There are only a handful of pre-made templates available and with some HTML and CSS skills further customization is possible. There are more examples available on their website.

Formstack Features

Starting with the Silver plan you’ll get access to all the basic features, like the WYSIWYG Drag and Drop editor, CSS and Themes, Conditional Logic, Multiple Users, Mobile, Apps, Save & Resume, Basic Integrations,  Electronic Signatures, Form Analytics, Field Validation and Payment Processors.

Formstack is available for any platform so if you’re not running a WordPress site this might be the choice. Another big plus is that you are only limited by the number of forms and submissions, so the forms you create can be used on more that one website at one time.

Formstack Backend Features

Formstack has a clean and uncluttered administration interface with a fresh and modern design.

In the backed you’ll be able to access your Dashboard which contains reports like unique forms visits and conversion rates. In the Forms section you can organize your existing forms or create new ones. The next section is
Learn Formstack – an overview of every single walkthrough available to you, organized by category and difficulty level.

Formstack Extensibility

Formstack has many web app integrations available for payments, data collection, email lists, advanced analytics insights all arranged in categories.

Formstack Flexibility

You can export all of your data or manually choose what data to export in CSV, RTF (Word), Excel, or PDF format.

With the Formstack iOS and Android app, you can take and process orders, collect or see sales contacts, and take survey information.

FormStack does not offer a limited free plan, after a 14-day free trial you’ll have to stick to a paid plan.

Formstack Statistics

For every form some basic analytics data is avalaible: Unique Views, Conversions, Conversion Rate, Abandonments, Abandonment Rate. For more advanced analytics data the Google Analytics integration is available.

Formstack Support