Lanes Forms vs Google Forms

Google Forms is a free, hosted form builder: you make a form in Google's UI and responses go to a Google Sheet. Lanes Forms is a backend for forms that live in your own product, with routing to email and Lanes-hosted storage today, and webhooks on the roadmap. Choose by whether the form lives on Google's page or yours.

This page is about that split, and what owning the endpoint gets you.

At a glance

Dimension	Lanes Forms	Google Forms
Category	Form backend for your own site	Hosted form builder
Where the form lives	In your product, your design	On a Google-hosted page
Setup	One request or an MCP call, no signup	Build in Google Forms
Destinations	Email and Lanes storage with CSV export; webhooks on the roadmap	Google Sheets
Agent friendly	Yes, provision over MCP	Manual
After submit	Browser 303 to a hosted thanks page, JSON receipt for APIs	On the Google-hosted page
Programmatic use	REST API with interactive OpenAPI docs	Spreadsheet-first workflow
Docs	Lanes Forms docs	forms.google.com

Where Lanes Forms fits

Lanes Forms is for forms that are part of your product: a signup on your landing page, a contact form in your app. You own the design and the endpoint captures and routes the data anywhere you work.

The endpoint serves both people and programs. It accepts JSON, form-urlencoded, and multipart posts; a visitor submitting from a browser is redirected to a hosted thanks page, while a script gets a JSON receipt with a submission id, per submitting. Delivery today is email forwarding to verified recipients plus Lanes-hosted storage, where responses list in the dashboard and export as CSV with ?format=csv; webhook delivery is on the roadmap. See integrating.

Where Google Forms fits

Google Forms is a fast, free way to stand up a standalone form when you do not need it embedded in your own product and a Google Sheet is a fine home for the responses. The trade is ownership: the form, the page, and the responses all live in Google's tools rather than in yours.

How Lanes does it

One endpoint, two audiences. POST /v1/f/{form_id} decides from the Accept header whether you are a browser or an API caller: browsers get a 303 to a hosted thanks page, everything else gets JSON. Required fields are validated server-side, and a 422 lists exactly which were missing. See submitting.
Bots stay out of your responses. A hidden _gotcha honeypot silently marks bot posts as spam while still returning success, submissions are limited to 10 per minute per IP, bodies cap at 64 KB, and every stored submission carries a spam score. IPs are stored only as salted hashes. See submitting.
Agents can provision it. A hosted MCP server exposes create_form and submit_form with no key, so a coding agent can create the endpoint mid-build and hand you a claim link. The full endpoint map, with interactive OpenAPI docs, is in the API reference. See agents and MCP.

Choose Lanes Forms if

The form is part of your own product, with your styling.
You want submissions routed to your stack, not just a spreadsheet.
You need programmatic access: a REST endpoint, JSON receipts, and CSV export.
You want an agent to provision the form over MCP while it builds the page.

Choose Google Forms if

You want a free, standalone hosted form and Sheets is enough.
Nobody is writing code, and a familiar Google page fits the audience.

The two barely compete: one is a hosted page with a spreadsheet behind it, the other is an endpoint behind a page you own.