Microsoft Forms collects answers into Excel in minutes and comes with Microsoft 365. pylo collects them into your own data model and starts the process behind them: permissions, flows, admin UI and analytics in one system, with unlimited users, hosted in Germany.

TL;DR

Microsoft Forms is the form tool that is already there for every Microsoft 365 company: surveys, quizzes and polls in a few clicks, answers in Excel, sharing inside Teams and a Power Automate trigger for the next step. For internal surveys and quick feedback it is hard to beat, because it costs nothing extra. It stops being enough once a form is the start of a process: answers land in a response sheet, not in your customers, orders or projects, and building the process behind them means Power Automate, SharePoint lists or Dataverse, and often premium licences. pylo is a backend platform with a form builder inside: every form writes directly into your own entities and relations, a submission starts a flow, and your whole team works with the result under one permission model. If you need a quick survey for colleagues, use Microsoft Forms. If your forms feed a business process, pylo removes the tools behind it.

What is pylo?

pylo is a Backend-as-a-Service platform from Germany that you can use to build the operating system for your company. You model entities, fields and relations in the admin panel or through the API, and pylo generates a typed GraphQL API instantly. The form builder is part of that system: every form writes directly into your own data model. The same permission model governs the API, the admin UI, forms, flows, dashboards and the MCP server, and pylo flows run the process that starts when someone submits a form.

What is Microsoft Forms?

Microsoft Forms is Microsoft's form, survey and quiz app, included in Microsoft 365 for business and education and available with a free personal Microsoft account. You build forms with choice, text, rating, date, ranking, Likert and file upload questions, add branching, themes and quiz scoring, and Copilot can draft a form from a prompt. Forms can be open to anyone with the link or limited to people in your organisation. Responses appear in a summary view and can be opened in Excel, and Power Automate can start a flow when a new response arrives. Each account can have up to 400 forms with 200 questions each, and business and education accounts can collect up to 5,000,000 responses per form.

At a glance

A response sheet versus forms on your data model

Microsoft Forms is great at collecting answers. Each form has its own set of responses, which you see as charts or open in Excel. That is enough for a team survey or an event sign-up. It becomes manual work as soon as a response belongs to something: a supplier, a customer, a machine or a project. There is no link between a response and an existing record, two forms can't update the same customer, and a second submission from the same person is simply a second row.

pylo starts with your data. You model customers, requests, inspections or tickets as entities with relations, and every form field maps to one of their fields. Five different forms can feed the same customer record, and each submission is linked to what it belongs to. pylo's builder has no quiz mode or rating scales like Microsoft Forms, but nothing has to be copied out of Excel afterwards.

How pylo forms work

pylo forms are built on your data model. You add fields such as text, long text, email, phone, number, URL, checkboxes, single or multiple choice and file uploads, structure the form with headings, paragraphs and page breaks, and map every field to a field on one of your entities, including relations. Fields can be hidden, carry default values, placeholders and tooltips, show or hide depending on earlier answers and check input against validation rules. A form can be public or require a login, and file uploads work for external respondents too. You can limit submissions per form and per user, and embed a form on any website as an iFrame, or build your own frontend on the API.

One form can run as several instances, each with its own availability window, its own submission limits and, for authenticated forms, its own list of users who may fill it in. The same inspection form can run for every site or every client without copying it. You can also mark a field as the matching key, for example an email address or a supplier number, so a submission updates the existing record instead of creating a duplicate.

What happens after submit

With Microsoft Forms, the process behind a form is built in Power Automate. The trigger for new responses is a standard connector, so a notification or an Excel row is easy. Writing into Dataverse, SQL Server or your own API needs premium connectors, and from then on every user of that flow needs a premium licence. Many teams therefore store their process data in SharePoint lists, which have no real relations and get slow and hard to secure as they grow.

In pylo a submission is not a row in a response sheet; it is a record in your entities. Every submission emits an event, and that event can start a pylo flow: send a confirmation email, create follow-up records, assign the request to the right team member, call an external system or wait for an approval. Flows include retries, custom rate limiting, error handling and full event logs, and you can write your own flow actions in TypeScript, including calls to Microsoft services through their APIs. Your team then works with the result in pylo's admin UI, with list and detail views and fields that show or hide depending on the record's state.

Permissions and who sees the submissions

In Microsoft Forms, whoever owns or co-authors a form sees all of its responses, and the Excel file can be shared like any other file. Rules such as "this team lead sees only the requests from their location" are not part of Forms, so they end up in a SharePoint list, a Power App or Dataverse security roles.

pylo separates tenants at the row level. Inside a tenant, any entity can act as the requester (ARO) and any entity as the requested object (ACO), with hierarchies and field-level rules. The same rules apply to the form, to the records it creates, to the admin UI where your team processes them, to dashboards and to MCP. A site manager sees the inspections of their site, a supplier sees only the requests they submitted, and nobody needs a Microsoft licence to work with the answers.

Events and dashboards built in with pylo analytics

Microsoft Forms shows a summary per form with charts per question. Reporting across forms, or on what happened after submit, means Excel or Power BI, which is licensed separately.

Every create, update and delete in pylo emits an event with the full before and after state, including every form submission and every change your team makes to it afterwards. You build dashboards on events and records together, for example submissions per form instance, open requests per location or the time a request stays open, with the same permissions as the rest of pylo.

AI and MCP with guardrails

Microsoft puts Copilot into Forms to draft questions and summarise responses, depending on your Copilot licence. pylo's MCP server is ready to connect, for developers who use agentic coding and for team members who want to analyze their submissions and records from Claude, ChatGPT or any other client. The AI gets exactly the connected user's read permissions, nothing else. pylo never applies an AI's writes directly: they arrive as proposals that a human accepts or declines inside pylo.

Pricing

Microsoft Forms itself costs nothing extra if you already pay for Microsoft 365, and for surveys that is the end of the calculation. The cost shows up in the process behind the form: premium licences per user once flows or apps write to a real database, Power BI for reporting and the time someone spends maintaining SharePoint lists and Excel files.

pylo does not bill per form, per response or per seat. Submissions are records in your entities, so they count towards the included records of your plan. The price already includes hosting, flows, the admin UI, forms, analytics and personal onboarding, every plan has every feature and unlimited users. Plans differ only in included usage for records, flow actions and file storage.

Hosting, compliance and reliability

All pylo content data, data models and databases live in data centres in Germany. Our subprocessor list is public and names every non-EU parent company openly. A GDPR data processing agreement is part of the terms, and we never use customer data to train AI models. Paid plans come with a 99.5% availability SLA, hourly encrypted backups kept for 30 days at a separate German location, and support from the team that builds the product.

Microsoft Forms data is stored in the Microsoft cloud according to your Microsoft 365 tenant's data location, and Microsoft offers the EU Data Boundary, a DPA and a broad set of certifications. Microsoft is a US company, and data from free personal accounts follows Microsoft's consumer terms.

Where Microsoft Forms is the better choice

We would rather tell you than have you find out later:

• You need a quick survey, poll or quiz for colleagues and want it inside Teams and Outlook without another tool.

• You need quiz scoring, rating scales, Likert and ranking questions. pylo has no quiz mode.

• Your answers only need to end up in Excel, and nobody has to process them as records afterwards.

• You already pay for Microsoft 365, and an additional tool is harder to justify than an included one.

For internal surveys and feedback, Microsoft Forms is a sensible default. pylo is for teams whose forms feed records and processes their whole team, and sometimes their customers or suppliers, work on.

Where pylo is a great Microsoft Forms alternative

We think these are the main reasons to pick pylo over Microsoft Forms:

• Forms that write into your data model. Every field maps to a field on your entities, including relations, so a submission is a record, not a row in an Excel sheet.

• No duplicates. A matching key such as the email address lets a submission update the existing record instead of creating a second one.

• The process starts on submit. Every submission is an event that can start a pylo flow, with retries, rate limiting, typed actions and full logs, without Power Automate or premium licences.

• Your team processes the result in the same system. Admin views, state-dependent fields and permissions come with the backend, so there is no SharePoint list or Power App to build next to the form.

• Permissions on every submission. Hierarchies and field-level rules apply to forms, records, admin UI, dashboards and MCP, with authenticated forms for internal and external users.

• One form, many instances. Run the same form for every site, client or campaign with its own time window, limits and users.

• No per-seat pricing. Unlimited users and API requests and all features on every plan. Only three meters are billed: flow actions, records, and file storage/traffic.

• German hosting from a German company. Data stays in Germany on every plan, including the free one, and the DPA is part of the terms. You get a 99.5% SLA from the first paid plan, hourly backups with 30-day retention, and personal support from the people who build the product.

FAQs - Questions and answers about pylo

• Does pylo work with Microsoft 365? Users can sign in with their Microsoft account, and flows can call Microsoft services through their APIs with custom actions. pylo does not run inside Teams and is not affiliated with Microsoft.

• Can external people upload files in pylo forms? Yes, file uploads work in public and authenticated forms, and files are stored in EU-hosted object storage with public or private links.

• Can several forms write into the same record? Yes, every form maps to your entities, so different forms can create or update the same customer, supplier or request.

• Can I embed pylo forms in my own website? Yes, you embed a form as an iFrame, or build a fully custom frontend with the Next.js SDK or the typed GraphQL API and write submissions into your entities with the same permissions.

• Is pylo open source? No, but you can export all data at any time as CSV or JSON or through the API. The data models, flow definitions and generated SDK code are yours to keep, even after you leave.

• Where exactly is my data? Content data is in data centres in Germany and backups are kept at a different German location.

• Can I get access now? pylo is currently in private beta. Request access and we will set up your first entities and forms with you on a call and onboard you personally for your first project.