A public form is an online form, hosted by Formt, that anyone can fill in without an account: your clients, prospects, or site visitors. Every submission runs a workflow with the details they entered, so the follow-up happens automatically, whether that is notifying your team, replying to the person, or updating your records.

The Formt contact page is a live example. The form there is the first step of our Customer Enquiry workflow, so every message you send runs that workflow, which reaches our team and logs the details to a spreadsheet we track. This guide shows you how to build the same pattern for your own forms: intake requests, sign-ups, support questions, booking enquiries, or feedback.

When a public form is the first step of a workflow, every submission starts a new run with the details the person entered. You do not run the workflow yourself: it runs on its own each time someone submits.

What someone submits is available to every step that follows, so the workflow can act on it, not just record it. Branch on an answer to send different requests down different paths. You can also use the details inside later steps, to personalise a reply, fill in a document, or set who a task goes to.

Each submission is its own run, so ten submissions create ten separate runs you can open and read individually.

The pattern is always the same: a form to collect the details, then the steps that act on them.

1. Create a new workflow and open the editor. If you are new to the editor, start with the Create a Workflow guide.
2. Add a Form step and place it first, so it is what starts the workflow.
3. Define the fields you want to collect, for example name, email, and message. Mark the ones you need as required so the form cannot be submitted without them.
4. Turn on "Make this form public and embeddable" to give the form its own shareable link and an embed snippet.
5. Add the steps that should run on submit after the Form step, such as a Send Email step to notify your team.
6. Map the form's answers into those steps, so the notification email includes the name, email, and message the person entered.
7. Share the form's link, or embed it in a page on your website.

Once the workflow is ready, you have two ways to get the form in front of people: share its link, or embed it in a page on your own site. Reach for the link when you send the form out, in an email or a social post; reach for the embed when the form should live on your website, like a contact page.

Because the form is a step in your workflow, not a separate tool, editing it is instant: change the fields any time and the hosted form updates straight away, everywhere you have shared or embedded it, with no code change and no developer.

That is how the form on the Formt contact page works: it is a public form embedded in the page.

The form is only the start. Add steps after it to do something with every submission. A few of the most common:

A public form does not have to be the first step. Any form step can be public, which lets you collect input from someone outside your team partway through a run, then carry on. This is how one workflow gathers details from several different people in turn: a client, then a supplier, then a colleague, each filling their own form without a Formt account.

A form later in the workflow gives you a link reference rather than a fixed link, because the link is different for every run. Add that reference to another step that reaches the person, usually a Send Email step, and each run emails them a private link to their form. Because the link belongs to that one run, their answers feed back into it and the run continues, rather than starting a new run the way a public first step does. Editing the form applies to future runs: a link already sent for a run in progress keeps the fields it had when that run started.

1. Add a Form step where you need the input and turn on the public option. Copy the link reference it shows you.
2. Add a Send Email step addressed to the person you need input from, and put the link reference in the email so they receive their own link. Make sure this step does not run after the form in the workflow, otherwise it would wait for the form to be submitted before sending, so the link would only arrive once the form had already been filled in, too late to be any use.
3. Pre-fill the form by giving its fields defaults that reference the steps that ran before it, so the person opens it with the details already gathered in the run filled in and just reviews, corrects, and adds their own answers.
4. When they submit, the run continues to the next step. Their link works once, so a forwarded or reopened link cannot submit twice.

Every submission is a workflow run. Open the workflow's runs to see each one, read exactly what the person entered, and check that the follow-up steps succeeded. If a notification did not send, the run shows you which step stopped and why.