Formbricks vs LimeSurvey
Both are alternatives to Typeform. Here's how they stack up — verified facts, no spin.
Also searched as LimeSurvey vs Formbricks — same comparison, one verdict.
Formbricks
TOP PICKSelf-hosted surveys built for privacy-first teams.
Formbricks is an open survey and experience platform designed to be self-hosted: link surveys, in-app surveys triggered by user behaviour, and website surveys, with responses resting on your own infrastructure. That last point is the reason to choose it — for GDPR-sensitive work, form responses never leaving your servers turns a compliance conversation into a non-event. Around 12.7k stars, actively developed, with a paid cloud for teams who would rather not host. The licence is an open core with some enterprise features commercially licensed, so check which side of the line the feature you need falls on.
LimeSurvey
Twenty years of serious survey methodology, GPL, self-hosted.
LimeSurvey is the survey tool academic and research institutions actually use, and it shows: dozens of question types, quotas, randomisation, complex conditional logic, multilingual surveys and statistical export. It is not trying to be beautiful and it is not conversational — it is trying to be methodologically sound, which is a different and sometimes more important thing. GPL-2.0, self-hosted, with two decades of development behind it. Choose it when the survey is research rather than marketing.
Side by side
| Formbricks | LimeSurvey | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty Score | 90 | 93 |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes |
| Local-first | Yes | Yes |
| License | Open core (AGPL-3.0 core; enterprise features commercially licensed) | GPL-2.0 |
| Pricing | Free and open source to self-host. Paid cloud and enterprise tiers. | Free and open source to self-host. Paid cloud hosting available. |
Formbricks is Macrostack's recommended Typeform alternative, so it's our pick here.
Formbricks
Strengths
- +Responses never leave your infrastructure — the compliance answer
- +In-app and website surveys, not just link forms
- +No per-response pricing; a successful survey costs nothing extra
- +Modern interface and active development
Trade-offs
- −Some enterprise features are commercially licensed
- −You now run a service, with the upgrades and backups that implies
- −Smaller integration catalogue than Typeform
- −Conversational polish is close but not identical
LimeSurvey
Strengths
- +Most methodologically serious tool here — quotas, randomisation, complex logic
- +Excellent multilingual support
- +Twenty years of development; trusted in academic research
- +GPL-2.0 with a complete self-host path
Trade-offs
- −Interface is dated and the learning curve is real
- −Nothing conversational about it
- −PHP and MySQL to operate
- −Overkill for a contact form or a short marketing survey
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Facts verified 2026-08-07. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.