Wufoo is an online form builder. It was founded in 2006 by Kevin Hale, Chris Campbell and Ryan Campbell through Y Combinator, and SurveyMonkey bought it in 2011. It’s still run by SurveyMonkey today.
Businesses use it for order forms, bookings, applications, registrations and lead capture, anywhere a website needs to collect structured information.
What it does
The form builder starts from templates or a blank page, with a theme designer for matching a brand. Branching and logic show or skip fields based on earlier answers, file uploads arrive with the entry, and notifications go out by email or text the moment someone submits.
Forms can also take payments through Stripe, Square, Braintree, PayPal and others. Entries live in reports and analytics inside Wufoo, and export whenever needed. Wufoo’s servers sit in a SOC 2 Type II audited data center in the US.
Plans and integrations
Wufoo runs from a Free plan through Starter, Professional, Advanced and Ultimate. Payments, field encryption and password protection start at Professional.
On paid plans, entries can flow straight into Mailchimp, Salesforce, Campaign Monitor and Asana, with Google Sheets and DocuSign also featured, and Zapier opens up more than a thousand more.
Sending entries to Salesforce or HubSpot
The native Salesforce integration creates a Lead or a Contact each time someone submits a form, filling Salesforce’s standard fields such as name, email, phone and address. A Lead needs the form to collect a last name and a company. The connection signs in with a Salesforce login plus a security token, and the token changes whenever that password does. The Salesforce edition also has to include API access.
HubSpot isn’t in Wufoo’s own integration list, so entries usually reach it through Zapier, where Wufoo’s New Entry trigger pairs with HubSpot’s Create or Update Contact. Zaps that check Wufoo on a schedule draw on its daily API allowance, and several polling at once can use it up and get an HTTP 421 error. Zaps started by a webhook don’t count against it. Zapier doesn’t support Wufoo’s multi-select and checkbox fields, and fields marked Admin Only aren’t returned through the API.
Matching payments to entries
Each paid entry shows its payment details in the Entry Manager. The status starts as Unpaid and moves to Paid or Denied as the merchant processes the charge, as long as the merchant account is set up to notify Wufoo. Staff can also change it by hand.
The amount shown is what was charged, whether or not it was paid. Every merchant also returns a confirmation number, which ties the entry to the matching charge in the payment processor’s own records.
Getting entries into a spreadsheet
Google Sheets is one of the featured integrations. For a one-off copy, the Entry Manager can filter entries and then download them as an Excel or CSV file. File uploads come through as links to each file, not the files themselves, and comments stay behind.
Reading entries through the API
Wufoo’s REST API uses the account’s API key to read forms, fields, entries and reports, and can submit new entries too. Daily request allowances grow with the plan, from 100 on Free to 100,000 on Ultimate, and entry lists come back up to 100 at a time.
A webhook per submission
A webhook sends each new entry to another system the moment it’s submitted, optionally with a handshake key to prove where it came from and the form’s structure alongside. A form can have up to ten webhooks, and they don’t count against the API allowance.
When a form feeds a business
Wufoo’s webhooks and built-in integrations cover the simple cases, and there’s plenty of room beyond them. An order form can raise the invoice and match its payment, a booking can reach the diary and the CRM together, and an application can open a record with its uploaded files attached.
Someone retyping the parts that don’t arrive, or ticking off payments against entries by hand, is doing work that’s easy to underestimate. Counting the hours it takes shows what it costs, and a look at low-code’s ceiling shows when a Zap is still enough.