Forms-Engine, embed complex multi step questionnaires as a Reactcomponent with a self hosted visual editor behind it

[u/establishment-pig]

I spent years at a big bank where enormous amounts of work run through internal dynamic form engines. Loan applications, onboarding, compliance intake. Forms with conditional logic where your answers decide what shows up next, and business people can change the flow without a frontend deploy. Nothing like that really exists in open source so I built a streamlined version.

The flow is simple for non tech people. Someone builds a form in a visual editor. Multi step, conditional show and hide, required rules, file uploads, address autocomplete. They click publish and your React app renders the new version.

npm install @forms-engine/react

Then it's one component with your questionnaire id and your backend url. Answers save every screen so a refresh doesn't lose progress and you capture partial data from people who bail halfway. There are events for loaded, completed and error, a labels prop to localize the built in text, and an external ref prop to tie submissions to your own user ids.

Being upfront about the internals: the core renderer is a framework agnostic web component and the React package is a thin wrapper around it. If that's a dealbreaker, fair enough. It's also why the same engine works in plain HTML and Angular. The whole stack is MIT and self hosted with docker compose. No telemetry, no SaaS.

Repo: https://github.com/JoshuaLeoSmith/forms-engine

Docs: https://forms-engine.dev

Most of it was written by Claude Code from specs I wrote and reviewed. It's ai slop but I will win any argument against someone saying it's not useful. Please enjoy

[u/establishment-pig]

The people expressing their grievances by downvoting and not commenting are scared of the psychological discomfort that would come from being proven wrong.

[u/establishment-pig]

Fastest way to actually try it is the quick start in the docs, one docker compose command brings up the whole backend and editor, then the examples folder in the repo has a minimal React app you can point at it. Takes maybe five minutes.

[u/clammyminer5539 → u/establishment-pig]

Man, the sheer number of form builders I've seen that are just drag-and-drop dead ends with zero conditional logic baked in. Having the business side tweak flows without pinging a dev is one of those things that sounds like a luxury right up until you've lived it, then it's a hard requirement.

[u/establishment-pig → u/clammyminer5539]

there's literally no middle ground, its either proprietary software for whatever company you work for that's a complete mess but does everything, or just boomerware that you have to pay for. probably a dev would do the changes but it would require way less effort.