Every feature, start to finish.
From signing up to exporting your last response — plus segments, branching, access control, and the live Menti sessions. Twenty sections, in the order you’ll meet them.
Getting started
You need an account to build a form. Nobody needs one to answer it, unless you ask for it.
- 1Open Sign up and register with your name, email, and a password — or use Google or GitHub to skip the password entirely.
- 2You land straight on the dashboard, called Studio. It’s empty until you make something.
- 3Forgotten your password? Forgot password emails you a reset link that works once and expires after an hour. Accounts created through Google or GitHub have no password to reset — sign in with the provider instead.
- 4Sign out from the icon at the top right of the dashboard bar. It asks for confirmation first.
Passwords must be at least 12 characters, and a handful of predictable ones are refused outright — a password that is one repeated character, or that is built out of your own email address, won’t be accepted. Sessions last seven days.
The dashboard
Three destinations in the top bar, your profile, and the button you'll use most.
- Studio
- The overview: your forms, plus a response trend chart over 7 days, 30 days, or 3 months, with the total in range, the average per day, and your peak day.
- Forms
- Every form you own or collaborate on.
- Menti
- Your live presentations — see Menti below.
- Profile
- Your identity, avatar, and session, with milestones: forms, published, responses, and this month.
- New
- Opens the create dialog from anywhere in the dashboard.
Analytics aren’t a separate destination. Every form’s numbers live inside that form, on the Responses tab of the builder — see Responses & export.
Creating a form
The create dialog is titled New canvas and asks for three things.
- Title
- What the form is called, for you and for respondents.
- Slug
- The URL-safe name, filled in from the title as you type. Lowercase words joined by hyphens, like quarterly-feedback.
- Description
- Optional. A short note shown to respondents.
Press Create form and you land in the builder with an empty canvas. Title and slug are both required.
There’s a shortcut on the home page: type a name into the hero field and press Create form. The slug is generated from what you typed.
The builder
Two surfaces over the same form. Switch whenever you like — the form doesn't change, only the way you see it.
- Canvas
- A freeform board. Drag a field from the palette onto the canvas and position it wherever you want.
- Outline
- An ordered list. Click a field in the palette to append it, then move it up or down.
The palette sits on the left under Fields, grouped into Text, Numbers, Choice, Interactive, Date & time, and Files. There’s a Search fields... box if you’d rather type than browse. Above it is the Segments panel. Selecting a field opens its settings on the right; with nothing selected you’ll see No field selected.
The header carries the rest: a Draft or Live status pill, an Unsaved marker while you have pending edits, then Save, Preview, Share, Settings, Delete, and Publish. Preview opens the real public form in a new tab. Two tabs sit across the top: Questions for building and Responses for reading.
Saving is explicit, not automatic. If you try to leave with unsaved changes the builder stops you and asks first. If two people save the same form at once, the second save is rejected as a conflict rather than quietly overwriting the first. The view switcher is desktop-only — the canvas needs pointer dragging and three panes, so narrow screens get the outline.
Field types
Thirteen, in the six groups the palette uses.
Text
- Short text
- Single line input.
- Long text
- Multi-line input for paragraph answers.
- Email address input, format-checked before the respondent can move on.
- Phone
- Telephone number input.
- URL
- Website link input, parsed as a real URL before it is accepted.
Numbers
- Number
- Numeric value input.
Choice
- Single select
- Dropdown menu — one answer from a list you define.
- Checkbox
- Multiple checkboxes — any number of answers.
Interactive
- Rating
- Star selection, with a scale you set.
- Toggle
- Yes / no switch, with your own labels for each state.
Date & time
- Date
- Calendar selection, optionally bounded by a range.
- Time
- Time selection, optionally bounded by a range.
Files
- File upload
- An attachment. You choose how many files, how large each may be, and which types you accept.
Field settings
Four settings on every field, plus extras that depend on the type.
- Label
- The question itself. Unlabelled fields show as Untitled in the builder.
- Placeholder
- Hint text inside the input, before anyone types.
- Help text
- An optional line under the question, for context or an example.
- Required
- Forces an answer before the respondent can continue.
By type
- Single select · Checkbox
- An Options list — add and remove choices as needed.
- Rating
- Max stars — 3 (small), 5 (standard), or 10 (detailed).
- Toggle
- Active label and Inactive label, so the switch reads in your own words.
- Date
- Min date and Max date, bounding what the calendar will accept.
- Time
- Min time and Max time.
- File upload
- Files per response, Max size per file, and Accepted types — any type, PDF, images, ZIP archives, Word documents, or Excel spreadsheets.
Every field also carries a This question belongs to control, which assigns it to a segment once you have any.
Renaming a question keeps its existing answers attached. Each field is given a permanent key the moment it is created, and answers are filed under that key, not under the label — so you can fix wording on a live form without orphaning the responses you already collected.
Segments & pages
A segment is a named group of questions. Segments are what a form's pages are made of.
A new form is one continuous list. Press Split into segments in the Segments panel to create the first one, then Add segment for each one after. Segments can be renamed, reordered, and deleted from the same panel.
- Assigning a question
- Pick a segment in the field's settings, under This question belongs to.
- Unassigned questions
- Questions not in any segment come first, before the first segment. The panel tells you how many there are.
- Why they matter
- Segments give branching somewhere to jump to, and they decide how the form is paginated.
Branching
Send people different ways depending on what they've already answered.
Select a question and open its branching editor. A branch is one or more conditions, a place to go when they hold, and optionally another place to go when they don’t. Branches are checked top to bottom after the question is answered, and the first one that decides wins.
Conditions
A condition reads any earlier answer, not only the one you’re branching from, and the operators on offer follow the field’s type — is, is not, contains, does not contain, starts with, ends with, is more than, is less than, is any of, is none of, is blank, and is answered. Add several conditions to a branch to weigh more than one answer at a time.
Where it goes
- Go to question
- Jump straight to a specific question, skipping whatever sits between.
- Go to segment
- Jump to the start of a segment.
- Finish the form
- End here and submit — useful when later questions no longer apply.
- Continue in order
- Carry on to the next question, as if no branch had fired.
A branch carrying an otherwise always decides. One without it steps aside when its conditions don’t hold, and the next branch gets a turn. If no branch decides, the next question follows in order. The editor flags rules that can never fire or point nowhere under Worth checking.
Layout
How much of the form a respondent sees at once. Set it in Settings, under Layout.
- Match the form's shape
- The default. One question at a time until you add a second segment, then one segment per page.
- One question per page
- Focused and conversational. Best for longer forms and for phones.
- One segment per page
- Each segment's questions together, with Next between them.
- Everything on one page
- The whole form in a single scroll, like a classic web form.
Everything on one page is unavailable to a form that branches or is split into segments — branching needs a next page to send people to, and segments are the pages. The setting is still saved; the dialog tells you what respondents get instead.
Publishing
A form is a draft until you publish it. Drafts aren't reachable by link.
- 1Press Publish in the builder header. Any unsaved changes are saved first.
- 2The status pill flips from Draft to Live and the button reads Published.
- 3The public link starts working and the form begins accepting answers.
Publishing is what makes the link live. To take it offline again, close the form or give it a closing date — see Availability.
Who can respond
Four controls in Settings, under Who can respond. All off by default — a published form is open to anyone with the link.
- Require sign-in
- Respondents sign in to a CanvasFlow account before answering. Off by default — anyone with the link can reply anonymously.
- Record respondent email
- Saves each respondent's account email alongside their response. Turns on sign-in.
- One response per person
- Caps each signed-in account at a single response. Off by default, so people can answer more than once. Turns on sign-in.
- Restrict to an organisation
- Only accounts on the email domains you list can answer — add them one at a time. Turns on sign-in.
The last three each imply sign-in, so switching any of them on turns Require sign-in on and holds it there until they’re all off again. You can also set a Thank-you note here — it’s shown below the standard confirmation, not instead of it.
Availability
Two independent controls in Settings, under Availability. Owners only.
- Accepting submissions
- Open or closed. Manually open or close the form at any time.
- Expiration date
- A date and time after which the form stops accepting answers.
The same dialog edits the form’s title, description, layout, and thank-you note. Press Save settings to apply.
These stack. Whichever condition trips first closes the form, and each one shows the respondent a different message — see When a form won’t accept.
Collaborators & roles
Invite people to a form from the Share dialog, under Access.
- Owner
- Full control, including settings, deletion, and transferring ownership.
- Editor
- Can work on the form.
- Viewer
- Read-only access.
- 1Use Invite collaborator and search for a teammate by name or email.
- 2Pick their role. You can change it later from the same list.
- 3Remove collaborator revokes access.
- 4Transfer ownership hands the form to someone else outright — use it when a form stops being yours to run.
Only owners see Settings, and deletion is limited to whoever has the permission for it. Roles are checked on the server for every request, so a collaborator can’t reach past their role by editing a URL. Transferring ownership is not reversible by you afterwards.
What respondents see
However much of the form your layout shows them, and nothing to sign up for unless you asked.
- The questions
- One at a time, one segment at a time, or the whole form — whichever layout you chose.
- A progress bar
- How far through they are, filling to complete on submit.
- Inline validation
- Email and URL fields are checked before the next step — an invalid address is caught rather than collected.
- Required answers
- Marked as required, and enforced before they can continue.
- File uploads
- A file starts uploading the moment it's picked and never blocks the submit — the form shows its progress and attaches it when they send.
- Next and Submit
- Next advances; Submit sends on the last page.
- A confirmation
- Response received, followed by your thank-you note if you wrote one, and an optional How was the experience? rating.
If the form requires sign-in, a signed-in respondent’s answers and page position are saved as they go, so a half-finished form survives a closed tab — they pick up where they left off. A form with no fields shows Nothing to fill out yet rather than an empty screen, so a half-built draft is obvious if you share it early.
When a form won't accept
Eight states, each with its own message, so a respondent always knows why.
- Not found
- The link doesn't match a form, or the form was deleted.
- Not live
- This form is still a draft — the author hasn't published it yet.
- Closed
- The author has closed it to new submissions.
- Expired
- The form passed its closing date.
- Already submitted
- This visitor has answered once already.
- Sign in
- The author asked for responses from signed-in accounts.
- Wrong account
- The signed-in email isn't on a domain the author accepts.
- Archived
- The form has been archived and is no longer in service.
Wrong account lists the domains the form does accept, so someone signed in with the wrong address knows which one to use.
Responses & export
Open a form and switch to the Responses tab. Three sub-tabs over the same submissions.
- Summary
- Total responses, completion rate, and the average time people spent filling the form in.
- Question
- Every answer to one question at a time, so you can read a prompt end to end.
- Individual
- One submission at a time, in full, with its own values and metadata.
CSV Export sits at the right of the sub-tabs and downloads the whole set, named after the form. Responses load newest-first.
Alongside the answers themselves, each submission carries what the form could observe without tracking anyone: device category, the referring page and any UTM values on the link, how long the form was open, and — only if you asked for it — the respondent’s account email.
Managing your forms
The Forms page lists everything you own or collaborate on.
- Filter
- All forms, Drafts, or Published.
- Search
- Search forms... by title.
- Sort
- By newest, title, last edited, response count, or status.
- Per-form actions
- Open it in the builder, share it, or delete it.
- Pages
- Previous and Next page when the list outgrows one screen.
Deleting a form is permanent and takes its responses, uploads, and collaborator list with it. The confirmation dialog says so — read it before agreeing.
Menti — live sessions
A presentation you run in the room, with the audience answering from their phones.
- 1Open Menti in the dashboard and create a presentation, or import an existing .pptx deck.
- 2Build it in the editor: a slide sidebar on the left, the slide on the canvas, and its settings on the right. Add slide opens the type picker.
- 3Press present. The intro slide shows a join code and a QR card; the audience joins at /menti/join and enters a name.
- 4Move through the slides and answers appear live. Afterwards, the results view keeps every slide’s outcome.
Slide types
Interactive questions
- Multiple Choice
- A poll that fills in as a bar graph while people answer.
- Word Cloud
- Free text from the audience, sized by how often each word comes back.
- Scales
- Rating statements on a scale, averaged across the room.
Quiz competitions
- Select Answer
- A quiz question with a correct answer and a reveal. Adding one also adds a Leaderboard slide straight after it.
Content slides
- Text
- A plain slide for a heading, an instruction, or a pause between questions.
Import slides
- PowerPoint (.pptx)
- Bring an existing deck in and carry on editing it here.
Menti runs on its own service, separate from the rest of CanvasFlow. Where that service isn’t configured, the Menti pages won’t load their data — and forms, responses, and everything else carry on working normally.
Feedback & support
There's a feedback button inside the app. It reaches us directly.
- Feedback
- Share product thoughts.
- Bug report
- Something is broken.
- Feature request
- Request an improvement.
- Complaint
- Escalate an issue.
Pick a type, give it a subject and a message, and send. The page you were on and your browser details go with it — which is usually what makes a bug reproducible.
That’s the whole product.
Best way to learn the builder is to open it with something small and real — a three-question form you actually need answers to.