InfoPath alternatives for designing SharePoint Forms

As a SharePoint consultant, I usually get few queries on what is the best form designing options in SharePoint on premise or SharePoint online. After Microsoft declared there will be no new version of InfoPath will come in future, lots of people are asking what are the alternative options of InfoPath?

InfoPath is one of the most used forms development tool in SharePoint. By using this tool you can easily create complex electronic forms without using any code or very less code. As a developer with little knowledge you can add required validation rules, conditional formatting required in the form, you can pull data from various data sources and can show in the form easily.

 

End users also can fill out the form directly in the browser without installing InfoPath in their local system. InfoPath was quite popular even if it has few well known limitations like mobile versions of the forms are not user friendly.

 

Due to its limitations, InfoPath 2013 is the last version of InfoPath and there will not be any further releases. It is necessary to look for a perfect alternative of InfoPath for form design in SharePoint. InfoPath is supported in SharePoint 2016, in SharePoint 2019, and, until July 14, 2026, in SharePoint Subscription Edition on premises and in SharePoint Online.

One of the alternative is to develop custom solutions using server-side controls as a farm solution for SharePoint on premises. Here you may need tools like Visual Studio. And for Microsoft 365 SharePoint online you can SPFx form customizers written in TypeScript. But this require time, development effort and development cost. 

Power Apps are a developer-oriented general forms platform that can connect to many data sources, including SharePoint. Although quite feature-rich, it becomes exceedingly difficult to configure for complex forms, requiring custom scripting and JSON formatting.

 

The last option you can go for is to use any third party products. There are lots of 3rd party products available. But as a we should choose one which we can use to develop forms easily with less technical knowledge, which can provide some additional benefits apart from just form design and mostly importantly which is cost effective.

 

Some 3rd party tools are good for form design but the cost is too high which is not worth money always.

 

I was going through few 3rd party forms like K2, Nintex, Kwizcom forms, Infowise Ultimate Forms etc. I found Infowise Ultimate Forms really very useful. Compare to InfoPath these tools provides various other things not just form design.

Infowise Ultimate Forms is fully no-code solution. You can develop rich business applications easily using browser only without using any tool. It supports all modern browser and device types. You will be able to create forms with tabs easily which is one of the basic requirement in any small, medium or large organizations.

 

Apart from forms, you can also implement business logic by using process without creating any workflows. You can also use various actions to connect to external applications like databases, REST APIs, Twilio, Exchange, Gmail, Docusign, etc.

I have just explained here two widely used key features of Infowise Ultimate Forms here: Reporting & Printing. Apart from this there are lots of benefits and feature available which we will discuss in another article.

Reporting is another great feature of Infowise Ultimate Forms. You can enhance SharePoint list with color coding and icons, which will improve visualization of your list data. Apart from this you can also display your data in calendars and charts. You can easily create visually attractive dashboards for your business users.

Printing SharePoint list data is a huge task in terms of alignment, how it will appear, it is not at all easy. But by using Infowise Ultimate Forms you can get a nice look, clean tabular view of the list data for printing. Apart from print you can also download the data in PDF format. Another important feature is you can email to other users as an attachment from the browser itself. Neither it will open your Outlook or any email in browser.

 

You can also select any individual item[s] from the list or the whole list. You can then print, convert to PDF, Word or Excel or email. This is really a handy feature for the business users inside organization.

 

You can install a 30 day trial version from Infowise Ultimate Forms and can try out its extensive feature set.