I feel like everyone I know has been lookin for cryptpad alternatives (upon ditching google) as it’s incredibly slow, clunky, and inconsistantly mobile-friendly. this … seems good??
anyone tried it? what are yr experiences? other decent, private form builders you would recommend?
tysm!!
Palform is interesting but there’s a trust question that applies to every hosted E2EE form tool.
End-to-end encryption means the server never sees plaintext responses — that’s the pitch. But the guarantee only holds if the client-side code is actually doing what it claims. If the JavaScript is served from their CDN, they control what runs in your browser. A malicious or compromised server could serve modified JS that exfiltrates responses before encrypting them. You’d never know.
The self-hosting path closes that loop. Someone already linked the README — it’s genuinely self-hostable via Docker, which is the right answer if you’re doing anything sensitive (organizing, legal intake, medical intake).
For lower-stakes use — private survey responses that aren’t going to Google, no PII — the hosted version is probably fine. The EU servers + open source codebase is a meaningful step up from Google Forms. Just know where the trust boundary actually sits.