Using Third Party Form Building Tools Vs Developing Your own

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We are currently using Formstack as a form builder tool for collating data.

Its a useful tool, and you can build pretty complex logic into it, but its not perfect.

Currently the situation is that we can have third party companies collate data on our behalf using FormStack, and they can send that data to us via spreadsheets. I'm aware you can use webhooks and recieve the data in a http post, but this something that isn't being used at this time.

At present, where reading the data gathered from the spreadsheets and recording it in the database for our own bespoke managements system (that we have inherited). This has many flaws and is not a great approach.

Note: We have full control of the mgmt system, and maintain / develop on it.

Our mgmt system also has its own Data Captures forms, which captures exactly the same data as the third party companies, that are using FormStack.

Our plan is to build a new mgmt system, completely re-engineered, and I'm trying to determine the best ways to go forward with the data capture process.

We have spoke about building our own Form Builder within the new application, so that the management teams have control and responsibility for the forms that they build.

My concern with this, is that we are re-inventing the wheel, when 3rd party tools like FormStack exist. I also think that it will take up a lot of time developing such a feature and we may never quite achieve that of what something like a dedicated product such as FormStack can do.

On the other side of the coin, I don't like the idea of our application being coupled to any third party software tool, as its bad practice. If for whatever reason we need to move away from FormStack or something similar, we have created ourselves a big problem.

The data we capture are similar to Surveys, and they can change quite frequently.

Any suggestion on a process to follow would be appreciated.

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