Wufoo is my favourite tool for creating forms and surveys.

Earlier this week I wrote about Wufoo on Communicate Jesus, and on Sydney Anglicans. I explained that churches get a 50% discount.

One of the questions posted on Sydney Anglicans was this:

“Any reason why go Wufoo over the (free) Google forms?”

Earlier this year I decided to abandon Wufoo for Google Forms (a part of Google Docs). I did this because I thought I’d save some money. I persevered and created 14 forms, but the functionality that I lost wasn’t worth the cost saving. I returned to Wufoo.

To be sure, Wufoo (even with a 50% discount) is more expensive than the free Google Docs. Sometimes a free product is on par with a paid product. Rarely is a free product better than a paid product. Wufoo wipes the floor with Google Docs, and even though it costs money, is the better solution for churches and ministries.

Here are 10 reasons why Wufoo is better than Google Docs (in no particular order).

1. The service is excellent. Whenever I’ve had a question, I’ve received an answer in less than 24 hours. With Google Forms, if you’ve got a question, you’ll need to trawl the internet and post on forums to (hopefully) get an answer. You don’t realise how important good service is until you need help.

2. Payment integration. Wufoo forms allow you to collect payments in the forms. This means if you’d like to collect payments (e.g. church camp, celebration dinner, etc) you can accept these on the same form that people use to sign-up to the event.

3. Great reporting tools. Google Forms will export to an Excel spreadsheet. Wufoo does that, and also provides tools to very easily create stunning reports. Wufoo will turn the data from your forms into graphs, charts, datagrids and more, so the information you’ve collected can be represented graphically, with very little effort on your behalf. You can see examples here.

4. Conditional logic and branching. Wufoo’s rule builder allows you to create conditions – e.g. if a user selects answer X to question A, then question B is hidden, and they jump straight to question C. You can see a good explanatory video here.

5. Notifications. For example, I set-up a form for registrations for the church’s upcoming parenting course. When someone signs up for the course, an email with all the details is sent to the course organiser. Google Forms only allows notifications to be sent to the creator of the form.

6. Custom themes. You can add a logo, change a colour scheme, or if you (or someone in your church) knows what they’re doing, add CSS (to make the form look like your church’s website).

7. Field options. Google offers these options for creating fields in your form:

Wufoo offers these options:

Wufoo also provides a theme gallery, with a range of forms that you can customise for your own use (e.g. mailing lists, contact forms, church visitors forms, and many more).

8. Multiple users. Wufoo allows you to set-up multiple users, so that one person doesn’t need to be responsible for creating each of the forms. This means (for example), the person overseeing women’s ministry could have their own log-in and access their own forms, without seeing or being able to edit any other forms.

9. Easy to share. Wufoo provides simple links to share your forms and surveys with others – in 6 different ways:

10. Regular additions of new features. The team at Wufoo listens to feedback from their users, and improves their product based on this feedback. The blog provides updates, and whenever new features are added, a notification appears when you log-in to Wufoo. They’re not sitting back basking in their success – the improvements are constant!

Not convinced? Try it for free, and get 3 forms to play with.