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!!
Another alternative https://framaforms.org/
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.
thank you for explaining that!! super helpful
Why are we looking for alternatives to Cryptpad again?
As I said in the post, I find cryptpad to be clunky, slow, and inconsistently mobile-friendly. I also hear this constantly in my organizing spaces. Having more privacy-centered alternatives and building on what exists is also just a net good… All the eggs don’t need to be in one basket yfm
Oh I thought you were saying that about Google. It looks like this is only surveys, so I would say it’s not a comparable alternative outside of that.
Yea I wasn’t saying it would replace everything in cryptpad. Just the forms.
https://github.com/palform/palform/blob/main/README.md#self-hosting
It might be a bit too early for someone to having tried it
But it does look interesting
Really want to hear some opinions on this one
