Getting Started

Quickstart

In app surveys have 6-10x better conversion rates than emailed out surveys. This tutorial explains how to run an in app survey in your web app in 10 to 15 minutes. Let’s go!

Create a free Formbricks Cloud account

While you can self-host Formbricks, the quickest and easiest way to get started is with the free Cloud plan. Just sign up here and click through the onboarding, until you’re here:

Create your first survey

To be able to see a survey in your app, you need to create one. We’ll choose one of the templates and head over to the survey settings:

As you can see in the orange note here, we have not yet connected Formbricks Cloud with our app. We will do so in just a minute, let’s first setup the survey correctly.

Select “Web App” in the How to ask settings:

Scroll down to Survey Trigger and choose “New Session”. This will cause this survey to appear when the Formbricks Widget tracks a new user session:

In Recontact Options we choose the following settings, so that we can play around with the survey more easily. By default, each survey will be shown only once to each user to prevent survey fatigue:

Now hit Publish and you’ll be forwarded to the Summary Page. This is where you’ll find the responses to this survey. On the Summary Page click through to the Setup Checklist:

On the Setup Checklist you have two elements. At the top you find the Widget Status Indicator. Once your app is connected to Formbricks Cloud successfully, this will turn green:

In the manual below, this code snippet contains all the information you need:

The Environment ID of your current Formbricks workspace
The API Host which is ‘https://app.formbricks.com’ for Cloud users

In a local instance of your app, you'll embed the Formbricks Widget. Dependent on your frontend tech, the setup differs a bit:

Restart your app and open browser console

Now, restart your app in your terminal to make sure the widget is loaded. Once its loaded, open the browser console to see the Formbricks debug logs. If you did everything right, you should now see your survey in the lower right corner:

Most frequent errors and how to debug them

In case you don’t see your survey right away, here's what you can do. Go through these in orderly to find the error fast:

Formbricks Cloud and your app are not connected properly.

Go back to app.formbricks.com and go to the Setup Checklist in the Settings. If the status is still indicated as “Not connected” your app hasn't yet pinged the Formbricks Cloud:

How to fix it:

Check if your app loads the Formbricks widget correctly. Make sure you have debug mode enabled in your integration and you should see the Formbricks debug logs in your browser console while being in your app (right click in the browser, Inspect, switch to the console tab). If you don’t see them, double check your integration or if you are unable to solve this issue, please join our Discord and we’ll help you out.

Survey not loaded

If your app is connected with Formbricks Cloud, the survey might have not been loaded properly. Check the debug logs and search for the list of surveys loaded. It should look like so:

How to fix it:

The widget only loads surveys which are public and in progress. Go to Formbricks Cloud and to the Survey Summary page. Check if your survey is live:

Survey not triggered

If the survey is loaded by the widget it might not have been triggered properly.

How to fix:

Open your local app in an incognito tab or window. The New Session event is only fired if a user was inactive for 60 minutes or was logged out of Formbricks via formrbicks.logout().
Check the debug logs for “Event ‘New Session” tracked”. If you see it in the logs and the survey still did not get displayed, please let us know.

That should fix it! If not, please join our Discord! We’re more than happy to help you get started 😊