Best JavaScript Form Builders

OptimaJet
OptimaJetHQ
Published in
5 min readOct 8, 2021

Using forms on any website is a great way to enhance interaction with users. For example, forms can help leave clients’ payment information while purchasing online or using online surveys for gathering statistics.

Top-notch web forms are undoubtedly beneficial:

  • They help generate leads, thus increasing overall conversion rates. Filling these forms should be convenient and swift;
  • User experience with these forms is enjoyable. It enhances customers’ loyalty and makes a business look more professional and caring.

However, creating a decent web form is a time-consuming process. So often developers make a choice in favor of ready-made libraries.

Let’s consider worthwhile JavaScript libraries for creating and validating forms of any complexity.

Form Libraries for Plain JavaScript

Form.io

Form.io is a builder for API data management. The tool simplifies the connections between forms and APIs, allowing to integrate 3rd party providers and legacy systems.

Price: Free

Formvalidation

This library was initially made with jQuery. However, it’s currently fully rewritten with ES6 and Typescript. There are no dependencies and jQuery in this form validation library. It has 50 built-in validators for different kinds of input. It’s great in terms of customization as developers can create their own validators. This library is built using the plugin architecture.

It works on most principal frameworks like Bootstrap. The documentation is crystal clear, so even newbies will be able to understand it.

Price: from $50 to $200

UI Bakery

This tool allows you to design data-powered solutions using pre-built blocks. You can use the ready-made blocks from the library and add a custom JS code. UI Bakery helps to streamline workflows using integrations with native connectors and various APIs.

Price: Free 14-day trial, then $49 month

React Forms Libraries

Formbuilder.dev

Formbuilder.dev is a solution where you can design and test forms for a better user experience on websites. This builder is React-based, so it’s compatible with every web application built on React.

Formbuilder.dev encompasses the following groups of elements by default:

  • Containers;
  • Collections;
  • Controls;
  • Charts.

However, you’re free to add more elements.

This tool is event-based, meaning that developers themselves can determine the set of events and handlers for any event.

Price: Free

Formik

This React form builder and validation library was developed in TypeScript. It’s 15kB gzipped in size and has 8 dependencies. The small library is convenient for organizing and testing forms.

The documentation and examples are quite comprehensive as well. The library is easy to adopt incrementally and keeps bundle size to a minimum as it doesn’t exploit external state management libraries.

Price: Free

React hook form

This tool is a new builder and validation library for React and React Native apps. There is an entire community of contributors, so the builder is open to changes. It’s a great alternative for Formik (also developed in TypeScript), except that it’s tiny in size and there are no dependencies.

Among other advantages, React hook form can also embrace uncontrolled form validation, has a simple integration with UI libraries and follows HTML standard for validation.

Price: Free

jQuery Form Libraries

Formbuilder.online

It’s one of the most popular jQuery form builders. It’s a client-side plugin for creating dynamic form builders with JavaScript. This builder is localizable, has dozens of options and is easily customized.

Formbuilder offers many form fields and some HTML tags. A small community and extensive documentation will help you on your way to developing a form. To use the library you’ll have to install the Yarn package manager.

Price: Free

iCheck

iCheck is a library for creating forms and provides 32 options of customized checkboxes and radio buttons. iCheck offers various pre-designed themes you can edit and use for your projects.

Its size is just 1kb gzipped. It’s verified to work in all widely used browsers.

Price: Free

Vue Form Libraries

Vuelidate

It’s an easy-to-use, lightweight and model-based form validation library for Vue.js 2.0. Creators mentioned that the validations are completely decoupled from the template. So instead of providing rules for different inputs inside a template, you can declare them for your data model.

The library is minimalistic and has no dependencies.

Price: Free

Vue Select

Vue Select is aimed to create dropdown lists. It has a default template for a filterable select dropdown. Even though this component is lightweight, it provides high standards for accessibility and customization.

Vue Select has no dependencies and supports Vuex, AJAX and SSR.

Price: Free

VeeValidate

It’s a template-based form validation library for Vue.js. With VeeValidate you can validate inputs and display errors. You just need to specify what kind of validators should be used when the value changes for each input. The framework automatically generates errors with 40+ locales supported.

It’s also written in TypeScript and has zero dependencies.

Price: Free

Angular Form Libraries

Formly

It’s a dynamic Angular form library for creating and supporting application forms. There is no need to code for creating forms as it’s all in the form fields in the component typescript file.

Formly provides automatic forms generation and supports multiple schemes.

Price: Free

Schema Form

Schema Form is an Angular form builder library for generating web forms from JSON Schema. It can also validate forms using JSON Schema.

Additionally, there are a handful of third-party add-ons you can integrate with Schema Form. For example, font-pickers, WYSIWYG editors, color-pickers and so on.

Form Libraries for multiple frameworks

Surveyjs

It’s a JavaScript survey and forms library. It’s compatible with several JavaScript frameworks, namely Angular2+, jQuery, Knockout, React, and Vue.js.

It has many questions types for surveys and built-in functionalities. Survey.js supports multiple pages format, custom rendering, and Bootstrap.

Price: 499 €

Multiple Select

Multiple Select is a jQuery solution with detailed documentation. It helps developers make forms with checkboxes for mass selection or multiple orientations for a single purpose.

This forms extension library can help group elements, select all options and show multiple items in a single row.

Price: Free

Bottom Line

As you can see there are plenty of tools for building and validating forms. We also extended the number of options by demonstrating some that included checkboxes, dropdown lists and radio buttons. Learn in detail each of them and choose what fits best your projects and interests.

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