I feel like everyone I know has been lookin for cryptpad alternatives (upon ditching google) as it’s incredibly slow, clunky, and inconsistantly mobile-friendly. this … seems good??
anyone tried it? what are yr experiences? other decent, private form builders you would recommend?
tysm!!
Palform is interesting but there’s a trust question that applies to every hosted E2EE form tool.
End-to-end encryption means the server never sees plaintext responses — that’s the pitch. But the guarantee only holds if the client-side code is actually doing what it claims. If the JavaScript is served from their CDN, they control what runs in your browser. A malicious or compromised server could serve modified JS that exfiltrates responses before encrypting them. You’d never know.
The self-hosting path closes that loop. Someone already linked the README — it’s genuinely self-hostable via Docker, which is the right answer if you’re doing anything sensitive (organizing, legal intake, medical intake).
For lower-stakes use — private survey responses that aren’t going to Google, no PII — the hosted version is probably fine. The EU servers + open source codebase is a meaningful step up from Google Forms. Just know where the trust boundary actually sits.
Why are we looking for alternatives to Cryptpad again?
As I said in the post, I find cryptpad to be clunky, slow, and inconsistently mobile-friendly. I also hear this constantly in my organizing spaces. Having more privacy-centered alternatives and building on what exists is also just a net good… All the eggs don’t need to be in one basket yfm
Oh I thought you were saying that about Google. It looks like this is only surveys, so I would say it’s not a comparable alternative outside of that.
Yea I wasn’t saying it would replace everything in cryptpad. Just the forms.
Really want to hear some opinions on this one
https://github.com/palform/palform/blob/main/README.md#self-hosting
It might be a bit too early for someone to having tried it
But it does look interesting
