Form.ioReviews of form.io

We started to use this framework in an important project and we have found it very interesting and usefull

wonderful concept and application of that concept, too many bugs and buggy scenarios.

Platform is great, but support for the Open Source software is very hard to get.

Everything is well-engineered except authentication in embedded mode.

Nice its great to work with them

It is great! But still needs a lot of work, specially the “next” version. Never the less, I love using formio.

Overall a powerful and complete application building environment. Fully supports back end for front end (BFF) requirements in parallel environments (stages). The form builder makes it easy for experienced users to construct complicated multi-page forms. Connection to various pre-configured back-end services is straight forward and also easily set up. In the current form this tool is a good candidate for SAAS solutions for small to medium scale business requirements. Some cautions are worth noting however. Form versioning within any stage (unique environment) is done change by change with each incremented 'published' version being assigned the next sequential version number. Semantic versioning is only done when publishing ALL the current forms into a new or existing stage. For an application with a new version being developed, tested and deployed, this is an appropriate method. If the forms and their versions need to be managed independently, this method is not sufficient as it is not possible to develop, test and deploy a single form in isolation to all other forms being developed. Server-side field validation is only done on final submission of the form where the data is then saved to the data base. If 'draft' submissions (after completing a page, for example) are performed, there is no validation as if all the form validation were done at that point, fields not yet visible to the user would likely not have valid data. There needs to be the ability to perform partial validation, otherwise the payload being processed may contain values which are a security risk such as SQL injection and cross-browser links. Furthermore, server-side validation when finally done only checks required fields, regular expressions, and specifically entered validate logic. Field definition validation done in the renderer such as field length (max/min), valid values in selection lists or options, field input mapping, etc. are never done. Web-hooks which are user defined links to downstream processing for micro-service and other externally supported functions are only suitable for simple interfaces and primarily asynchronous processing. Although transaction mapping is included in the enterprise version of form.io, there are usually additional process required which are not easily configurable including variable endpoints by environment, token and permission requirements, etc. This usually means that a separate micro-service will be required to interface between form.io and internal applications. All of the above will be issues unless the form.io is being deployed as an 'On Premise' (on premises) application. This presents a whole new set of issues related to deployment, support for Mongo DB, etc. but will be required to build a cloud based solution. In final analysis, form.io is ideal for the systems it was designed for but not easily adapted to work outside of that box. If using either open-source or enterprise form.io in a locally hosted environment, make sure to design all the required interface solutions before starting the implementation to avoid costly re-work once forms begin to be developed.

It is a very flexible and powerful tool, but does require a lot of expertise to setup correctly. In our efforts to find a suitable replacement for Microsoft SharePoint, FormIO checked all the boxes - and we tried many options. When comparing price and features, it was the best option for us. Having access to use the tools for free before committing to a purchase decision was also why we decided to go with FormIO.