A SurveyJS Alternative When Your Backend Is Laravel

Start with the layer you need

SurveyJS handles the form experience in the browser. It can suit a team building a React, Vue, Angular, or vanilla JavaScript application with a bespoke interface. Your application remains responsible for what happens after a visitor submits a form.

That responsibility usually includes an API endpoint, validation, persistence, access controls, a submission list, detail pages, notification delivery, and reporting. Those are normal application concerns. They also take time to define, implement, test, and maintain.

FilaForms takes a different position. It installs as a Filament plugin inside Laravel. You build forms visually in the panel, then use the supplied submission dashboard, analytics, and email notifications. Submission data stays in your application's own database.

The distinction matters most when the form is only one part of an internal product or customer portal. A rendering library gives your frontend team freedom. A Laravel form builder for Filament gives your Laravel team a ready-made operational layer around the form.

FilaForms supports 25+ field types. That range helps when a form needs standard inputs, selections, conditional paths, or several steps without defining each field in application code.

Compare the work after submission

Boundaries are easy to tabulate. The ownership cost that follows a rendering library is not, so it is worth spelling out.

With SurveyJS, your data model becomes an application decision. You choose how to identify a form, represent submission values, retain drafts, relate submissions to users, and secure staff access. You also decide how administrators find a particular response and export or act on it.

Those decisions can be right for a product with unusual requirements. They are less attractive when a Laravel team needs forms as supporting infrastructure. The work competes with the product work that makes the application distinct.

With FilaForms, the submission layer already belongs in the Filament panel. A developer can still work with stored results using Eloquent. That keeps custom workflows close to the rest of the Laravel application.

<?php

use FilaForms\Core\Models\FormSubmission;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Route;

Route::get('/form-submissions', function () {
    return FormSubmission::query()
        ->orderByDesc('created_at')
        ->paginate(50);
});

This route queries the same submitted data that the dashboard presents. Without an infrastructure layer, you first build the table, pagination, permissions, detail view, and staff workflow that make this data useful.

The form builder does not remove the option to extend your application. It removes the need to start with an empty submissions system. You can connect a submission to existing models, expose selected data through an API, or add business actions after a response arrives.

Read the FilaForms feature set when you want to see the builder, conditional logic, multi-step forms, and the included submission tools together. The Laravel form builder for Filament is the better starting point when your application already has its administrative surface.

The licence split is the part people miss

The survey-library repository is genuinely MIT licensed, with 4,863 GitHub stars and commits on 2 September 2026, the day this was checked. If all you need is a renderer, that is a permissive and well-maintained choice.

The cost appears next to it. SurveyJS splits its offering: the rendering library is MIT, while the visual Survey Creator is a separate commercial product. Teams often discover this after building around the free renderer and then needing non-developers to edit surveys. Check which half of the product each requirement falls into before you commit. FilaForms has no such split, because visual editing is the product rather than an add-on.

When SurveyJS is the better choice

SurveyJS is the better choice when rendering is the central requirement. It gives you total control of rendering in React, Vue, Angular, and vanilla JavaScript. FilaForms does not give you that level of frontend control.

That limitation is deliberate. FilaForms requires an existing Laravel and Filament application. It is not a hosted service, and it has no cloud version. A non-technical team that needs a shareable hosted form link in five minutes should choose a hosted form product instead.

Use SurveyJS if your design system requires custom browser components, your frontend lives outside Laravel, or form behavior must follow a client-side architecture. Plan for the backend work that follows the renderer.

Use FilaForms if Laravel and Filament already run the application, and form operations need to stay near the rest of your data. Its one-time licence per plan does not charge per response. That model can suit teams that expect form volume to grow but want the data and operations inside their own application.