Forms Designer Forum

Hi All - thinking of trying this out in preference to PowerApps. However, I am not clear of the difference between Forms Designer and just Forms. They are the same price and appear to do the same thing. If anyone can explain or just point me to a page explaining it I would very much appreciate it.

Given the scenario below which tool would be better suited?

We use SPO and this is mainly to be used to create to replace the List Form used to book training requests. Users can book a training request and view their own training requests but once saved they cannot edit them. This uses a list in SPO with about 25 fields.

I need a tool to allow me to create a form where certain fields are read-only to users but can be edited by trainers/office staff (i.e. Office Use Only style). Alternatively, create 2 forms - one for users with limited fields and the other for the Admins with all fields.

Thanks - Simon

Dear Simon,

Simply put, Forms Designer is our older product, it is designed to work with SharePoint Classic UI.

Plumsail Forms, on the other hand, is our newest product, it also allows you to customize SharePoint Forms, but it's built for SharePoint Modern UI. It uses Vue.js and Bootstrap v4, its forms are responsive and mobile-friendly. Plumsail Forms also includes other features, for example, it allows you to design custom Web Forms, to publish anywhere on the web and handle submissions with MS Flow.
 
Since Plumsail Forms were built from scratch, it has a different architecture from Forms Designer and uses different JavaScript API, these forms are not compatible with the older ones. But we've tried to make Plumsail Forms as convenient as possible and continue bringing new features, just recently we've introduced automatic redirection for different SharePoint groups and support for SharePoint themes.
 
Forms Designer itself is still fully supported and worked on, it's still our primary product for SharePoint On-Premises and SharePoint Online Classic UI, but you can think of Plumsail Forms as more of a spiritual successor to Forms Designer. If you need to work with classic UI, go with Forms Designer, if you need Modern UI and responsive Forms - go for Plumsail Forms.
 
One more thing, if your site uses Modern UI, but the forms are designed in Forms Designer, when you open a form, the site will automatically switch to classic UI just for that form. The same is true for Plumsail Forms - the site or the list might use classic UI, but once the form opens, it automatically switches to Modern UI just for that form. Why does it work like that? In short, to allow you to use any product with any site - be it classic or modern. Just remember - Forms Designer forms rely on Classic UI and will always open in Classic UI, Plumsail Forms rely on Modern UI and will always open in Modern UI.
 
Finally, both products have List/Library functionality, both support Quick Edit mode, there are more configurations you can apply to List/Library in Plumsail Forms, it's easier to use scripts with it. Yet, Plumsail Forms actually offers DataTable control which can be used to store its data in one of the fields on the form, for example.
 
Hope this information helps! Let me know what you think and if you have any questions - would be glad to answer!