Formbricks

Formbricks is an open-source survey and experience management platform that enables product teams, UX researchers, and customer success teams to gather feedback at every point of the user journey. Whether through in-app micro-surveys, targeted website overlays, branded email surveys, or shareable link surveys, Formbricks unifies feedback collection in a single privacy-first platform — without fragmenting data across multiple tools.

Built on Next.js 15, React 19, TypeScript, Prisma, and PostgreSQL, Formbricks is a monorepo powered by Turborepo. It supports full self-hosting via Docker with S3-compatible storage (MinIO), Redis/Valkey caching, and a Hono.js-based API layer. The platform ships with a no-code survey editor, advanced audience targeting using custom user attributes, a built-in response analysis dashboard, and native integrations for Slack, Notion, Airtable, and Google Sheets.

Formbricks operates under a dual-license model: the core surveying engine is AGPLv3 open source, while advanced enterprise capabilities — including SSO, role-based access control, audit logs, AI-powered smart tools, white-labeling, and contact management — require an enterprise license. The platform also ships an AI package supporting multiple LLM backends (AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, Azure OpenAI, and OpenAI-compatible providers) for AI-assisted survey creation and response analysis.

With over 12,000 GitHub stars, 300+ contributors, and a release cadence of roughly two releases per week, Formbricks is one of the most actively maintained open-source feedback tools available. It supports multilingual surveys through Lingo.dev i18n integration, provides a public OpenAPI specification, an MCP server for AI agent integration, and a well-documented SDK for embedding surveys directly into web and mobile applications.

What You Get

• No-Code Survey Editor - Build surveys with drag-and-drop question blocks including NPS, multiple choice, rating scales, open text, picture selection, and date pickers without writing code.
• In-App Surveys - Embed targeted surveys into web applications via a single JavaScript snippet or NPM package, triggered by user behavior, attributes, or custom events.
• Website Surveys - Show overlay surveys to specific website visitors based on URL path, scroll depth, time on page, or custom JavaScript conditions.
• Email Surveys - Send embedded surveys inside transactional or marketing emails, capturing feedback at key lifecycle moments without requiring users to visit a separate page.
• Link Surveys - Generate shareable survey URLs for distribution via support tickets, social media, or QR codes, with full response analytics and partial-submission tracking.
• Audience Targeting & Segmentation - Pre-segment users using custom attributes (plan tier, signup date, feature flags) so surveys only appear to the most relevant audience.
• Native Integrations - Push survey responses automatically to Slack, Notion, Airtable, and Google Sheets as responses arrive, with webhook support for any other destination.
• AI-Powered Analysis - Use built-in AI tools (supporting AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, Azure OpenAI, and OpenAI-compatible providers) to summarize open-text responses and assist survey creation.
• Self-Hosting via Docker - Deploy the full platform on your own infrastructure with Docker Compose, controlling data residency, retention, and compliance from day one.
• MCP Server & OpenAPI - Integrate Formbricks into AI agent workflows via the included Model Context Protocol server, or interact programmatically through the comprehensive OpenAPI v3 specification.

Common Use Cases

• SaaS onboarding friction detection - A product team triggers a 3-question in-app survey after a user completes their first workflow to identify setup blockers and reduce time-to-value.
• Pre-churn intervention - A customer success team targets users who have not logged in for 14 days with a link survey asking why they stopped engaging, enabling proactive outreach.
• Post-release feature validation - An engineering team shows a contextual in-app survey to users who have triggered a newly shipped feature, capturing immediate sentiment before a wider rollout.
• NPS benchmarking - A company runs a recurring quarterly NPS link survey sent by email to their full customer base, with responses piped automatically into a Notion database for analysis.
• Support ticket follow-up - A support team appends a Formbricks link survey to every resolved ticket, measuring satisfaction and routing low-score responses to a Slack channel for immediate review.
• GDPR-compliant user research - A European startup self-hosts Formbricks on their own VPC to collect qualitative UX research data without sending any personal information to third-party SaaS tools.

Under The Hood

Architecture Formbricks is organized as a Turborepo monorepo separating the main Next.js application, a suite of shared packages (database, AI, email, storage, surveys, types), and a standalone Storybook for component development. The web application follows a feature-module structure under apps/web/modules/, with each domain (survey, response-pipeline, integrations, billing, contacts, analysis) encapsulated in its own directory. Response processing is handled through a dedicated pipeline module that processes webhooks, fires integrations, and sends telemetry asynchronously, keeping the core survey submission path fast. Enterprise features are isolated in an apps/web/modules/ee/ directory under a separate license, cleanly gated by a license-check module that validates entitlements at runtime for both cloud and self-hosted deployments.

Tech Stack The platform runs on Next.js 15 and React 19 with extensive use of React Server Components and Server Actions to minimize client-side JavaScript. Prisma ORM manages all PostgreSQL interactions with generated type-safe clients, while Valkey (Redis-compatible) handles caching and background job queuing via BullMQ. The shared @formbricks/ai package abstracts multiple LLM backends — AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, Azure OpenAI, and OpenAI-compatible providers — behind a unified adapter registry. Hono.js powers the public REST API layer with full OpenAPI 3.0 documentation. The survey rendering engine lives in @formbricks/surveys and @formbricks/survey-ui packages, enabling embedding in any frontend framework. i18n is handled through Lingo.dev with auto-generated locale files. Docker Compose orchestrates PostgreSQL, MinIO (S3-compatible storage), and Valkey for local development and self-hosted deployments.

Code Quality The codebase maintains extensive test coverage across unit, integration, and end-to-end layers using Vitest and Playwright, with over 550 test files. Error handling follows a typed Result pattern throughout service modules, returning structured ok/error objects instead of throwing unhandled exceptions. Zod schemas enforce runtime validation at every API boundary with Prisma-generated types providing compile-time safety. Pre-commit quality gates run via Husky and lint-staged enforce Prettier formatting on every commit. ESLint with TypeScript rules, React hooks linting, and accessibility checks (jsx-a11y) run in CI. The structured separation between API handlers, service modules, and data access objects makes the codebase navigable for contributors, supported by a CONTRIBUTING.md, active issue management, and Gitpod workspace configuration for instant development environments.

What Makes It Unique Formbricks combines survey collection with a contact/audience management system, allowing teams to maintain persistent user profiles enriched with custom attributes across multiple survey interactions — a pattern closer to a CRM-lite than a simple form builder. The MCP server integration positions Formbricks as a data source for AI agents, enabling automated feedback analysis workflows without custom integration code. The multi-provider AI package with a pluggable adapter registry allows self-hosters to bring their own LLM infrastructure rather than being locked into a specific provider. The response pipeline’s native integration system — supporting Slack, Notion, Airtable, and Google Sheets — runs as part of the response processing job rather than requiring external event buses, keeping the operational footprint minimal for self-hosted deployments.

Self-Hosting

Formbricks uses a dual-license model. The core survey platform is released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPLv3), which means you can use it freely for personal and commercial purposes, modify it, and self-host it without any subscription. The copyleft clause of AGPLv3 requires that if you distribute a modified version or run it as a network service, you must release your modifications under the same license. This is generally not a concern for teams running Formbricks internally, but it is relevant if you build a SaaS product on top of Formbricks and distribute it to external users. Code in the apps/web/modules/ee/ directory is separately licensed under the Formbricks Enterprise Edition license, which requires a paid subscription for production use — this covers features like SSO, RBAC, audit logs, AI smart tools, white-labeling, and contact management quotas.

Running Formbricks yourself requires PostgreSQL, a Redis-compatible cache (Valkey), and S3-compatible object storage (MinIO or AWS S3). The recommended deployment path is Docker Compose, which the team maintains with documented configurations. You are responsible for database backups, schema migrations on upgrades, infrastructure scaling as survey volume grows, and applying security patches. The release cadence is roughly two releases per week, so staying current requires an active upgrade process — the team provides release notes and migration guides, but automated rollout is not included. The platform supports horizontal scaling but requires your own load balancer and session-aware configuration.

The cloud-hosted version at formbricks.com removes all operational burden — Formbricks GmbH manages uptime, automatic upgrades, backups, and scaling. The cloud tier also provides enterprise support channels, SLAs, and managed onboarding that are not available to self-hosters by default. Enterprise license holders get priority support and access to the full feature set including AI tools and advanced access control, which are locked behind the EE module on self-hosted deployments. For organizations with strict data residency requirements or existing cloud infrastructure, self-hosting remains compelling; for teams that want to move quickly without managing infrastructure, the cloud tier eliminates substantial operational overhead.