Indie Polls

Compared

Formbricks Alternative: Indie Polls vs Formbricks

Open source you can run yourself, against hosted software somebody else operates.

Read this first

These two are not the same kind of product. Formbricks is open source and can be run on your own infrastructure; Indie Polls is hosted software with no self-hosted edition and no public source. If self-hosting, auditing the code or keeping response data inside your own perimeter is a requirement rather than a preference, the table below does not matter: Formbricks is your answer and nothing here changes that.

Almost everyone who lands on this page has already decided something, whether they know it or not. Open source and self-hosting are not features you weigh against branching or trend charts; they are a constraint that either applies to you or does not.

If it applies (your data cannot leave your infrastructure, your security review requires reading the code, your organisation has a policy about closed SaaS, or you simply prefer software you can fork), then Formbricks is the right tool and this comparison is over. Indie Polls has no self-hosted edition, no on-premise option and no public source. That is not a roadmap item being coy about its date; it is what the product is.

Worth being precise about what open source means here, because "open source" gets used loosely in this category. Formbricks publishes its core under the AGPL and keeps some enterprise modules under a separate licence, which is a common and honest arrangement: the thing you self-host is genuinely yours to run and modify, and a few commercial extras are not. That is still a categorically different offer from anything Indie Polls makes.

If the constraint does not apply, the question becomes plainer: do you want to operate a survey platform, or use one? Self-hosting is a real job. Somebody upgrades it, backs it up, watches the queue, renews the certificate and gets paged when it falls over on a Sunday. For a large engineering organisation that is a rounding error against the control it buys. For a three-person product team it is a side quest competing with the actual work, which is exactly why a managed cloud option exists alongside the self-hosted one.

Indie Polls is the other posture taken all the way. There is nothing to run: a script tag on your site, ten question types with NPS, CSAT, stars and Likert scored automatically, a widget in four shapes that can open from your own element, targeting by page, trait, device or an event you fire, branching and A/B tests, response quotas with a redirect, account-wide recontact spacing, segment breakdowns, cross-survey trends, AI generation and insights, Slack, Zapier, signed webhooks and an MCP server. It is a different bargain, not a better one: you trade the ability to inspect and modify for never thinking about the thing again.

One more honest note, since it arises in the same conversation as self-hosting. Indie Polls does not yet support a custom domain for hosted survey links: they live on the Indie Polls domain. If your surveys must be served from your own hostname today, that is another point in Formbricks' column.

Where they overlap, and where they do not

Compared on the things that do not change every quarter. Both tools move their prices; read both pricing pages for those.

Dimension Formbricks Indie Polls
Licence and source AGPL core, with some enterprise modules separately licensed Closed source, hosted only
Where it runs Your own infrastructure, or their managed cloud Our infrastructure. There is no self-hosted edition
Who operates it You, if you self-host: upgrades, backups, uptime Nobody on your side
Data residency Entirely your choice when self-hosted Ours, and not configurable
Custom domain for survey links Yours by definition when self-hosted Not yet: hosted links are on the Indie Polls domain
Survey surfaces Link, website, in-app and email surveys Hosted page, widget in four shapes, and the first question inside your own email
Targeting Pre-segmentation on custom attributes, and event triggers Domain, path, traits, device and an event your page fires
Scored scales Survey question types including NPS NPS, CSAT, stars and Likert, each scored and charted as a scale
Flow control Survey logic Branching, plus A/B testing one question two ways
Reading the answers Centralised results across surveys Trait breakdowns, AI themes over open text, every survey on one trend chart
Extending it Fork it and change it Signed webhooks, Zapier, an MCP server and CSV

Choose Formbricks if

Formbricks calls itself the open-source experience management platform: a privacy-first suite with link, website, in-app and email surveys, attribute pre-segmentation and event triggers, offered as a managed cloud or self-hosted. Its core is AGPL-licensed, with some enterprise modules under a separate licence.

  • Response data has to stay on infrastructure you control, a hard requirement Indie Polls cannot meet.
  • Your security review involves reading the source, or your policy rules out closed SaaS.
  • You want to modify the tool itself rather than integrate with it.
  • You want surveys served from your own domain today, which Indie Polls does not yet support.

Choose Indie Polls if

Ten question types, a widget in four shapes, targeting by page, trait, device and event, and the analysis afterwards.

  • Nobody on your team wants to own the uptime of a survey platform.
  • You want branching, A/B tests, quotas, recontact spacing and trend charts without assembling them.
  • You want the analysis layer (scored scales, trait breakdowns, AI themes) rather than a response list.
  • You would rather spend the afternoon writing the questions than provisioning the thing that asks them.

Moving from Formbricks

Before anything else, check whether the constraint that put you on Formbricks still holds. If you self-hosted because of a data policy, a compliance requirement or a customer contract, stop here: moving to hosted software is a decision for whoever owns that policy, not a tooling preference, and Indie Polls will not satisfy it.

If you self-hosted because it looked cheaper or more controllable and the operational work has turned out to be the expensive part, the move itself is small. Link surveys become hosted survey pages; website and in-app surveys become the embed, where one script tag is a slide-in, a modal, a banner or an inline block; attribute pre-segmentation becomes trait rules on that embed, with device and event rules alongside.

Two things to plan for. Your response history is in your own database today, which is the good news. Export it while you still run the instance, because nothing imports it here. And your survey links change hostname, so anything pointing at your self-hosted instance needs updating before you decommission it.

Common questions

Is Indie Polls open source?
No. The source is not public and there is no self-hosted or on-premise edition. If either matters to you, Formbricks is the better tool and this page is not trying to talk you out of it.
Can I keep my response data in my own region or my own database?
Not in your own infrastructure. What you can do is have every response pushed out as it arrives, by a signed webhook to your endpoint or by Zapier, so your own database holds a copy in real time, plus CSV export on Max. That is a copy, not residency, and the distinction matters if a policy is driving the question.
Will Indie Polls support a custom domain for survey links?
It is on the list and it is not built, so the honest answer today is no: hosted survey links are on the Indie Polls domain. The embeddable widget is unaffected, because it renders inside your own page rather than sending anyone anywhere.
What do I get for giving up self-hosting?
The things that are tedious to build and boring to maintain: branching and A/B tests, four widget shapes with the option to open from your own element, targeting by trait, device and event, response quotas with a redirect, account-wide recontact spacing, segment breakdowns, cross-survey trends, AI generation and insights, Slack, Zapier, signed webhooks with retries, an MCP server, custom CSS and white label.
We are a small team weighing self-hosting for the first time. Any advice?
Price the operational work rather than the licence. Upgrades, backups, monitoring and the Sunday page are the real cost of self-hosting, and they are paid by the same people who were going to read the survey results. If no policy forces your hand, that arithmetic usually decides it, and if it does force your hand, no arithmetic matters.
What does the Indie Polls trial include?
Seven days on Max, which is the whole product: branching, A/B tests, widget targeting by trait, device and event, segment breakdowns, cross-survey trends, AI generation and insights, Slack, Zapier, signed webhooks, the MCP server, custom CSS and white label. No credit card to start it. Afterwards Pro covers the survey workflow with a monthly response allowance and two seats, and Max lifts the response cap and unlocks the rest.
Can I bring my existing responses with me, and get them out again?
Out, yes: every response exports to CSV on Max, and Slack, Zapier and signed webhooks push each one to your own systems the moment it is submitted, with a delivery log and retries behind them. In, no: there is no importer for another tool's response history. A switch starts a fresh set of results rather than moving the old ones, so the usual approach is to keep the old tool's export where it is and start the new survey clean.

See it before you decide

Seven days on Max, so nothing on this page is held back. No credit card required.

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