FormsGen vs Google Forms in Safari
The free browser version against a paid app, feature by feature, including the cases where the browser is plainly the better choice.
Every comparison on this site starts from the same admission: the free option is often the right one. Google Forms runs in mobile Safari, it costs nothing, it is made by the company that owns the format, and for a great many people it is entirely sufficient.
What follows is where the two genuinely differ, and where the browser stops being enough.
The browser is not a limited version
Open forms.google.com on an iPhone and you get the real editor with every question type Google offers. Nothing is held back. You can add questions, change their type, edit options and read responses.
The difficulty is physical rather than functional. The editing panel designed for the right-hand side of a laptop screen has to go somewhere on a display 390 pixels wide, and it goes on top of your work. Reordering questions means dragging a handle the size of a grain of rice. It is a laptop interface visiting a phone.
Where an app changes the outcome
Two situations the browser handles badly, because they are not editing problems at all.
The first is starting from nothing. Typing eight questions on a touch keyboard, choosing eight field types from a dropdown that covers what you are reading, is the point at which people stop and promise to finish later. Describing the form in one sentence removes that entirely.
The second is paper. A printed questionnaire cannot be pasted into a browser. Photographing it and having the text read on the device is not a faster version of something the browser does slowly; it is something the browser cannot do at all.
Side by side
Checked on 9 September 2026
| Feature | FormsGen | Google Forms in Safari |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $5.99/week, $49.99/year, or $89.99 once | Free |
| Anything to install The browser version works on any device with a browser | Yes | No |
| Works on Android FormsGen is an Apple-only app | No | Yes |
| Every Google Forms question type The browser exposes the complete set | 13+ | Yes |
| Build a form from a typed description | Yes | No |
| Build a form from a photo of a paper questionnaire Text recognition runs on the device | Yes | No |
| QR code without leaving the tool Google Forms gives a link, not a code | Yes | No |
| Real-time response charts | Yes | Yes |
| Responses stay in your own Google account Both create genuine Google Forms | Yes | Yes |
| Respondents need anything installed | No | No |
Which one to pick
Pick FormsGen if
Your bottleneck is creating forms rather than editing them, and it happens away from a desk: in a classroom, on a stand, in a stockroom. Or you have paper questionnaires you have been meaning to digitise for two years.
Pick Google Forms in Safari if
You already have your forms and mostly need to check responses, close a form, or fix a typo. The browser does all of that in seconds, on every device you own, for nothing. Paying for an app to do it would be a waste of your money, and we would rather say so than take it.