Feathery vs. Typeform: When to Use Each Tool for Building Forms

We built Feathery for teams looking for forms more powerful and flexible than Typeform, a simple survey builder.

In this article, we'll break down their core differences and take a look at their target audiences and use cases.

Who are Feathery and Typeform built for?

Feathery is built for product teams and startups creating custom flows like signup & onboarding.

Typeform is built for small businesses and marketers building one-off surveys with simple visuals and logic.

What are the core differences between Feathery and Typeform?

The core differences between Feathery and Typeform can be broken down into a few categories.

1. Visuals

Feathery offers a fully flexible 2D visual editor with drag-and-drop controls for creating custom layouts and content. Think Webflow-like flexibility but purpose-built for forms and easier to pick up.

Typeform offers a simple visual builder where users can control the text, question type, and a subset of styles like colors and images.

Other than that, every Typeform has a distinct "Typeform" style. You can't break from their pattern of one question per step.

2. Developer Experience

Feathery was built from the ground up with developer experience in mind. We maintain open-source SDKs, like our React library, that you can use to embed Feathery forms into your own site. Our SDKs also offer flexible APIs for extending your form logic with custom components, styles, and code. For example, you might want to send form data to your own database or do a custom validation check (e.g. a credit check based on user info or payment validation).

Typeform allows their forms to be embedded, but they don't currently offer an API for extending their forms with custom code.

3. Logic

Feathery fully supports conditional step branches, loops, and multiple entry and exit points to the form, as well as hidden fields and custom code to personalize each user's path as they fill out the form.

Feathery also offers flexible field validation out-of-the-box. For example, you can extend fields with arbitrary patterns or compose different rules (e.g. the input must be both positive & an integer).

Typeform has limited support for conditional branches and offers basic validation — email pattern validation for email fields, numbers for number fields, and so on. Currently, there's no way to extend a Typeform to support complex validations over multiple fields or server-side.

4. Conversion Tools

Feathery automatically tracks user behavior (e.g. conversion, clicks, drop-off) and generates actionable insights (e.g. "Step 4 is causing 50% of user drop-off"). A/B tests can be run natively on our platform to quantitatively improve your conversion rates.

Typeform offers basic metrics like overall completion rate and does not supporting running A/B tests natively.

5. Integrations

Feathery offers both basic and advanced integrations. For example, you can connect a Feathery signup flow directly to your authentication provider like Firebase or Stytch. If you're building a financial application, you can have your user link their financial data on Feathery via Plaid.

Typeform offers basic integrations — you can send your form data to a particular destination like a CRM, Zapier, or analytics tool.

So, should I use Feathery or Typeform?

If you're a small business or marketer looking to build a simple survey or questionnaire, Typeform is likely a good fit. Some example use cases include:

• A satisfaction survey for customer feedback
• Collect names and home addresses for mailing purposes

If you're startup or team looking to build and optimize forms with complex visuals, logic, and integrations, Feathery is likely the right solution for you. Some example use cases include:

• Design a signup flow and track drop-off analytics
• Collect user financial information and verify that information in real-time
• Create a medical patient application with complex branching logic

Ready to try out Feathery? Get started with a free account.

Still not sure if you should use Typeform or Feathery? Join our Slack community and our team will help you evaluate!