What is the difference between Sharepoint Forms Designer and Plumsail Forms

[harrbca]

Hi there,

I'm just starting to look into using Sharepoint Office 365 for an internal project and have come across these excellent tools. I am somewhat confused about the difference between Sharepoint Forms Designer and Plumsail Forms. In which situation is one better than the other? Do they compliment each other or does one superscede the other?

Thanks for any information that can be provided.

[AlexZver]

Hi!

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, while both products have List/Library functionality, only Forms Designer currently supports Quick Edit mode, in Plumsail Forms only regular mode is available, though 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!

[ChristianWentz]

Hello -

I knew something was wrong. I had believed I had purchased the new version. I bought it 6 or so months ago. Is it even possible I was able to buy the old version my mistake? I had the Plumsail Forms trial. I paid for the Office 365 license, and it did not look or operate as I expected it to. I thought perhaps that had screwed up somewhere.

I am using Forms Designer Client 3.15 There is no functionality for mobile or tablet views, nothing for flows, and the drag and drop interface only allows me to use on column at a time. It has been very frustrating.

Is it possible to straighten this out if indeed the wrong version was available ?

thanks

[AlexZver]

Dear Christian,

Please, mail the details about the purchase, specifically, your domain name (company.sharepoint.com) and order number to sales@plumsail.com and our sales department will contact you about potential options for update.