Framaforms

What Framaforms is

Framaforms is an online form and survey builder offered by Framasoft, a French nonprofit association. It is written for individuals, associations, teachers and small teams who want to put a questionnaire online without paying, without ads and without being tracked. Its French tagline reads "Concevez vos enquêtes en ligne facilement tout en respectant votre public" (design your online surveys easily while respecting your audience). The page explains that "Framaforms est une installation du logiciel libre Yakforms sur les serveurs de Framasoft" (Framaforms is an installation of the free software Yakforms on Framasoft's servers), so the product is as much a stance on data and software freedom as a feature list.

What you build and how

The editor is drag and drop: "Créez vos formulaires par simple glisser-déposer" (create your forms by simple drag and drop). The site says the large number of available fields lets you build forms "couvrant un large éventail de besoins" (covering a wide range of needs). It sums up the workflow in three steps: simplicity of creation, sharing and analysis. A "Créer un formulaire" (create a form) button and a "Visite guidée" (guided tour) welcome newcomers, and visitors can sign up or log in to manage their forms.

The interface is offered in a long list of languages: Breton, Catalan, Czech, German, English, Esperanto, Spanish, Basque, Persian, French, Galician, Hungarian, Croatian, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Occitan, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian and Serbian Cyrillic, with a link inviting people to help translate. For a multilingual association or a school working across languages, that breadth is a practical advantage.

Sharing is the second step. Once a form is published, the site says you can share it by email or on social networks, embed it in your own website, and allow cloning "afin de permettre à d’autres de gagner un temps précieux" (so that others can save precious time). Cloning suits associations that circulate the same survey across local groups or classrooms: one person builds the form, and others copy it as a starting point rather than rebuilding it.

Analysis is the third step. You can read the answers online, view them as charts, or export them "en vue de traitements plus complexes" (for more complex processing). For a club tallying event sign-ups or a teacher collecting feedback, the charts cover the everyday case, and the export hands the raw answers to a spreadsheet or statistics tool when a deeper look is needed.

The software is open. Framaforms runs on Yakforms, which the footnote names as licensed under the GNU GPL v2. The page says its code is transparent, publicly verifiable and contains no hidden features, that it is built as a community effort, and that anyone is free to duplicate it to take the project in new directions. A link invites visitors to view and contribute to the Yakforms code. The page adds that the free license lets you study the code, contribute to it and install it on your own server. This openness is what places Framaforms among open-source form tools as well as hosted ones.

Limits, cost and who runs it

Framaforms is free. The page says "Framaforms est gratuit, sans pub, ni pièges à clics" (Framaforms is free, with no ads and no click traps), and that the goal is to host a tool that serves you rather than uses you: "vous n’êtes pas le produit" (you are not the product). Framasoft says it collects as little data as possible, that you control your data, and that it has no interest in tracking or exploiting your behavior.

The hosted service carries three stated limits:

• A form has a lifetime of 6 months by default.
• A form accepts at most 5,000 responses.
• An account can hold at most 200 forms.

The service is offered subject to Framasoft's general terms of use and can be moderated under its moderation charter, and both documents are linked from the page.

There are no paid plans. Instead the page carries a donation form under the heading "Parce que libre ne veut pas dire gratuit" (because free as in freedom does not mean free of cost). Monthly gifts are preset at €2, €20, €40 or €80 a month, and one-off gifts at €20, €80, €200 or €400, payable by card, PayPal, bank transfer or check. The page says that in France, with a 66% tax deduction, an €80 donation costs €27, and that tax receipts go to French taxpayers. Recurring gifts can be stopped at any time on request.

Framasoft describes itself as a French nonprofit created in 2004, now dedicated to popular education on digital issues and cultural commons. It says its small team has 35 members, 10 of them employees, and that it is known for the Dégooglisons Internet project, with 26 ethical online tools, and for developing software such as PeerTube. Recognized as being of general interest, it says it is 94% funded by donations. Its 2025 key figures list 22 years of existence, 44 projects, 700 contributors, 10,428 donors, 6,500,000 visits a month, 1,151 free resources in its directory and 3,181 blog articles. The page says Framasoft runs about sixty free sites and services deployed on more than 100 servers, which its members maintain, support and update. A breakdown of where the money goes gives human resources 74%, servers and domains 8%, running costs 4.5%, bank fees and taxes 4.5%, external interventions and projects 4%, project services 4% and communication 1%, and the page says an independent accounts examiner checks and validates the accounts every year.

The page ties the service to a wider project. It says using Framaforms is a first step toward digital autonomy, and that offering the tool is a political proposal: exploring an alternative to surveillance capitalism through a "société de contribution" (society of contribution). It also points to CHATONS, a collective of alternative, transparent, open, neutral and solidarity-based hosts, where the same kind of service can be found hosted closer to home. Its other named projects include the Framalibre directory, the publishing house Des Livres en Communs, the Framablog, Emancip'Asso and Framaspace, and the page says donations let the association take part in nearly a hundred events a year.

For a buyer, that background matters in two practical ways. The service is funded by a donor base and not by form volume, so the free service is not a trial. And the stated mission is to help people and associations move away from surveillance-based services.

Who it suits and who it does not

Framaforms suits a school class, a club, a neighborhood association, a researcher gathering a one-off survey, or a privacy-minded team that wants a plain questionnaire run by a French nonprofit with clear terms. A multilingual group benefits from the long language list, and a network of associations benefits from form cloning. Developers and free-software advocates get a builder whose code is public under the GPL v2 and open to contributions.

The limits are firm and worth planning around: a form that must stay open longer than 6 months by default, collect more than 5,000 responses or live in an account with more than 200 forms will not fit the service as offered. Framasoft is a donation-funded association with a small team, so the service is best treated as a community resource for everyday surveys, sign-ups and feedback rather than a commercial platform for high-volume campaigns.