Every team that has built a serious form knows the spreadsheet. Column A is the question, column B is the answer, column C is where that answer sends you next — and by the time you have forty rows, nobody wants to touch it.

When we started rebuilding branching in OnlyForm, that spreadsheet was the artefact we kept coming back to. It is not that logic is hard to express; it is that the tools force you to express it somewhere other than where the form actually lives.

The problem with path maps

Traditional form builders treat conditional logic as configuration that sits beside the form. You build the questions, then you open a separate rules panel and describe, in abstract terms, what should happen. The two never quite line up.

We watched twelve teams during onboarding and saw the same three failures repeatedly:

  • Rules referenced questions that had since been renamed, so the logic silently stopped firing.
  • Nobody could answer "what does a respondent actually see?" without filling the form in themselves.
  • Duplicating a form duplicated the questions but broke half the branching conditions.
If you have to leave the form to understand the form, the logic is in the wrong place.

Logic that lives in the field

The change we made is small to describe and large to use: a condition is now a property of the field it belongs to. Open any question, and the paths leading out of it are right there — visible, named, and impossible to orphan when you rename something.

Behind the scenes the form still compiles to a graph — we did not invent a new model. What changed is that the graph is derived from the fields rather than maintained alongside them, so renaming a question updates every path that points at it.

What the beta told us

Two hundred teams ran on the new branching engine for six weeks. Median time to build a ten-question conditional form dropped from 24 minutes to 9. More usefully, the number of forms published with a broken or unreachable path fell to almost nothing — because unreachable paths are now visible while you build, not after someone complains.

Conditional logic is available on every plan today, including the free tier. If you have an existing form with rules configured the old way, it has already been migrated — open it and the conditions will be sitting on the fields where they belong.