Recently I needed to set up a publicly available form. I didn’t want to use Google Docs, and I don’t have enough web development skills to build my own and deploy it securely. That’s why I ended up using an alternative: CryptPad.
I don’t trust Google Forms
I’ve been slowly de-Googling my life for a long time. I replaced Gmail with ProtonMail a long time ago, and I now use its calendar app a lot in place of Google Calendar. Google has a long-standing history of invading privacy, in addition to its history of randomly deleting user’s files.
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This is pretty bad.
I don’t know about you, but I need better safety guarantees than that. If I’m going to make a form, and especially one where I’m asking people to place sensitive information, I’d prefer to use a solution from a company with better privacy controls and not one based in a country with weak privacy laws.
What makes CryptPad better
CryptPad is end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) service that offers a suite of web-based office tools. Think of it as Google Docs but more private. Since it’s E2EE, neither CryptPad itself nor hackers accessing its servers can read your files.
It’s also open source, meaning it’s a collaborative effort by many developers with code that’s viewable by everyone. Of course, open source doesn’t necessarily equate to secure. However, for my purposes it’s important that the underlying system not be a black box, as in the case of Google Forms.
CryptPad is also self-hostable, so if you’re technically proficient enough, you could host it yourself. CryptPad’s website also promotes some paid private hosting options. For everyone else, there are publicly hosted instances. The France-based flagship instance, CryptPad.fr, is the one I use. I self-host a lot of services, but in the case of a collaborative office suite, I prefer leaving that to professionals.
How to make your first CryptPad form
To make a form on CryptPad, you’ll first need to make an account on CryptPad.fr. It’s free, and it comes with 1GB of storage. That’s a far cry from Google’s 15GB minimum, obviously. If you just need to make simple forms and store databases of responses, though, 1GB is more than enough.
After making your account, you can head to your CryptPad Drive and click New > Form.
CryptPad will start by asking you to make some security decisions about the form first.
These are the options and some advice on them:
- Owned document: If checked, the form won’t be owned by anyone, even you. That means no one has permission to control its ownership or delete it.
- Destruction date: If checked, this will set the form to self-destruct in a certain amount of time from now. This is useful if you want to ensure the form doesn’t exist any longer than you need it to, even if you forget about it.
- Add a password: If checked, no one will be able to see or complete the form without supplying a password first. This is useful if you want only specific people to see or complete the form.
Except for password-protection, none of these settings can be changed after selecting them, so make sure confident about your choices.
Once you create the form, you can start editing it using CryptPad’s form tools. It’ll give you a text box for describing your form at the top, plus a multiple-choice question. You can edit those if you want them, then start moving them around and adding other elements.
At the time of writing, you can add the following types of form responses:
- Text: A small, simple text box for short typed responses
- Paragraph: A big text box for longer responses, with a changeable character limit
- Choice: A multiple choice question in the form of a list
- Choice Grid: A multiple choice question in the form of a grid
- Date: A calendar tool for selecting a date
- Checkbox: A multiple choice question where more than one answer is possible
- Checkbox Grid: A checkbox question but in a grad layout
- Ordered List: A list of items the respondent can reorder
- Poll: A list of options that give you an easy-to-review poll result
You can also insert page breaks so that only parts of your form are viewable on one page. You can make specific questions conditional, so that responding a certain way results in specific other questions becoming available.
Don’t forget to make sure the form settings meet your requirements. You can optionally set a closing date (which is different from the destruction date), for responses to be anonymous regardless of whether respondents have CryptPad accounts or not, and make responses public to anyone who views the form. You can also change whether people can edit their submissions and create multiple submissions.
Some limitations and quirks to be aware of
While I’m using a CryptPad form in place of Google Forms, there are some differences to be aware of and interesting quirks I noticed.
First, CryptPad doesn’t match Google Forms one-to-one in terms of form functionality. There’s no way that I could find to add photos and videos like you can in Google Forms. The quiz and question shuffling features that Google Forms offers I also couldn’t find in CryptPad.
Also, an issue I ran into myself was that when I first tried to share a link to the form, I made the mistake of copying the address from the address bar. The address bar does not contain an address accessible to anyone. Instead, you must get the public link by clicking the “Copy Public Link” button in your form controls. Also, sometimes loading the form can take longer than your typical Google Form.
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Despite those drawbacks, I was happy with the form CryptPad gave me, and was relieved to get keep away from Google products while doing it. If you’re looking for other ways to de-google, check out a few of the easiest anti-Google switches you can make.
