Quickstart Guide

Create and launch your first survey in under 5 minutes

This guide will walk you through creating a Formbricks account, setting up your first environment, building a survey, and viewing your first responses. Let’s get started!

Overview

In this quickstart, you’ll:

1. Sign up for a free Formbricks account
2. Choose your survey type and complete onboarding
3. Create your first survey from a template
4. Configure and publish your survey
5. Share it and collect responses

Time to complete: ~5 minutes

This guide uses Formbricks Cloud for the fastest setup. You can also self-host Formbricks if you prefer.

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Step-by-Step Walkthrough

1. Create Your Formbricks Account

   Navigate to app.formbricks.com/auth/signup and create your free account.

   You can sign up with:

   • Email and password
   • Google OAuth
   • GitHub OAuth

   After signing up, you’ll be taken to the onboarding flow.

   
2. Choose Your Survey Type

   Formbricks offers two main survey types:

   Link Surveys

   • Share via email, SMS, or social media
   • No technical setup required
   • Great for reaching users outside your app
   • Best for: Customer research, NPS, market surveys

   In-Product Surveys

   • Embedded directly in your app or website
   • Triggered by user actions (page views, button clicks)
   • 6-10x higher response rates
   • Best for: Feature feedback, onboarding, in-app NPS

   

   New to Formbricks? Start with a Link Survey—it’s the easiest way to see Formbricks in action. You can always add in-product surveys later.

3. Complete Environment Setup

   Formbricks automatically creates your first Organization and Project. Each project has two environments:

   • Development: For testing surveys before going live
   • Production: For real user data

   Environments are isolated data containers. Surveys, contacts, and responses in Development never mix with Production data. Learn more in Concepts: Environments.

   If you selected In-Product Surveys, follow the instructions to install the Formbricks SDK:

   npm install @formbricks/js
   

   import formbricks from "@formbricks/js";
   
   formbricks.init({
     environmentId: "your-environment-id",
     apiHost: "https://app.formbricks.com",
   });
   

   Once Formbricks receives data from your app, you’ll see a confirmation:

   
4. Create Your First Survey

   After completing setup, you’ll see a gallery of pre-built survey templates:

   

   Popular templates include:

   • Product-Market Fit (PMF): The Sean Ellis test
   • Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measure customer loyalty
   • Feature Chaser: Identify must-have features
   • Onboarding Experience: Optimize your first-run flow
   • Interview Recruitment: Find users for research

   Choose a template that matches your goal. For this guide, we’ll use Product-Market Fit.

   You’ll be taken to the Survey Editor where you can:

   • Edit questions and answer options
   • Add or remove questions
   • Customize the welcome card and ending message
   • Add logic jumps and branching

   Keep your first survey simple! You can always iterate based on the responses you get.

5. Configure Survey Settings

   Click the Settings tab to configure how and when your survey appears.

   Key Settings for Link Surveys

   Survey Status

   • Set to In Progress to publish your survey
   • Draft: Survey is not accessible
   • Paused: Temporarily stop collecting responses
   • Completed: Archive the survey

   Close Survey

   • Set a specific end date
   • Close after X responses
   • Leave open indefinitely

   Redirect URL

   • Redirect users after completing the survey (e.g., to a thank-you page)

   Survey Protection

   • Add a PIN to restrict access
   • Enable email verification
   • Limit to one response per email

   Key Settings for In-Product Surveys

   Survey Trigger

   • Add actions that trigger the survey (e.g., “Page View”, “Button Click”)
   • For testing, use Page View to show the survey on any page load

   

   Recontact Options

   • Control how often users see surveys to avoid fatigue
   • For testing: Set to “Display multiple times” and “Show again immediately”

   Important for testing: Formbricks defaults to showing surveys only once to prevent user fatigue. Change Recontact Options to see your survey multiple times during testing.

   Audience Targeting

   • Target specific users based on attributes (e.g., plan type, location)
   • Filter by user actions (e.g., visited pricing page 3+ times)
   • Leave empty to show to everyone
6. Style Your Survey

   Click the Styling tab to customize your survey’s appearance:

   • Survey Type: Choose card, form, or full-screen layout
   • Brand Color: Set your primary color
   • Background: Solid color, gradient, or custom image
   • Question Layout: Single question per page or multiple
   • Progress Bar: Show completion progress
   • Formbricks Branding: Remove branding on paid plans

   Use your brand colors to increase trust and completion rates. Users are more likely to complete surveys that feel native to your product.

7. Publish Your Survey

   Once you’re happy with your survey, click the Publish button in the top-right corner.

   Your survey is now live! You’ll be redirected to the Survey Summary page where responses will appear in real-time.

   For in-product surveys: Changes can take up to 1 minute to appear in your app due to caching. Enable Debug Mode to troubleshoot.

8. Share Your Survey & Collect Responses

   For Link Surveys

   Copy the survey link from the Summary page and share it via:

   • Email campaigns
   • Social media posts
   • In-app notifications
   • QR codes for physical locations
   • SMS messages

   The link looks like: https://app.formbricks.com/s/your-survey-slug

   For In-Product Surveys

   Your survey will automatically appear to users when the trigger conditions are met (e.g., when they view a page or click a button).

   Testing your in-product survey:

   1. Open your app in a browser
   2. Open the browser console (F12)
   3. Look for Formbricks debug messages (if debug mode is enabled)
   4. Perform the trigger action (e.g., load a page)
   5. The survey should appear

   Survey not showing? Common issues:

   • Recontact settings are too restrictive (see Step 5)
   • You already responded to the survey (clear cookies or use incognito)
   • Trigger action hasn’t been performed
   • Audience targeting excludes you
   • SDK not properly initialized
9. View and Analyze Responses

   As responses come in, you’ll see them on the Survey Summary page:

   Summary Tab

   • Response count and completion rate
   • Question-by-question breakdown
   • Charts and visualizations
   • Response timeline

   Responses Tab

   • Individual response details
   • Filter and segment responses
   • Tag responses for organization
   • Export to CSV or connect to external tools

   Insights Tab (if enabled)

   • AI-powered response analysis
   • Sentiment detection
   • Common themes and patterns

   Set up webhooks to send response data to Slack, Notion, or your CRM in real-time. Go to Settings → Integrations to connect your tools.

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What’s Next?

Congratulations! You’ve created and published your first Formbricks survey. Here’s what to explore next:

Understand Core Concepts

Deep dive into surveys, environments, contacts, and responses

Set Up Integrations

Connect Formbricks to Slack, Zapier, Notion, and more

Explore Advanced Features

Logic jumps, quotas, multi-language surveys, and more

Browse API Docs

Programmatically create surveys and fetch responses

Need help? Join our GitHub Discussions or Discord community for support from the team and other users.