Formstack Documents vs Apryse Fluent vs Docmosis
A Definitive Comparison in 2025

Creating Templates

Docmosis lets you quickly iterate on the development of a template, Formstack Documents offers multiple builders that can be confusing to choose from, and Fluent by Apryse takes a more complex, technical approach.

Fluent by Apryse comes with 21 pre-made templates and requires a template designer plugin.

The plugin supports template creation with the Microsoft Office tools: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. While these interfaces might feel familiar, the plugin’s features require a high level of technical competence, you need to familiarize yourself with Fluent’s auto-tag and wizard features, learn to configure and connect with databases, and have a good grasp of data structures.

Formstack Documents has 40 pre-made templates to help you get started.

These include employee contracts, client contracts, event tickets, and invoices. However, most of these templates only include simple merge fields for basic text input like dates [1], names [2], emails, and descriptions. If you need advanced formatting with conditional logic, you’ll have to heavily customize the default templates or build your own from scratch.

Formstack Documents provides three different approaches to create templates from scratch:

• Text mode: A regular, text-based builder with text-based merge fields.
• Drag-and-drop builder: A text-based builder with drag-and-drop merge fields.
• Advanced mode: An HTML mode for more granular control if you’re comfortable reading/writing code.

While the builder lets you create all kinds of documents, finding features and designing high-quality templates comes with a learning curve because of all the options and builder variations, even with the mini tour and demo videos.

Alternatively, you can upload templates to Formstack Documents from any of the Microsoft Office Apps: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Or you can use a fillable PDF.

With so many options for creating templates, it’s difficult to know which one to use. The question of which one is best for any particular document can only really be answered through trial and error, which can be very time-consuming.

Additionally, Formstack Documents can generate a simple web form for testing the template with mock data (image below).

Similar to Formstack Documents, Docmosis has a document gallery with 43 document templates that include:

• invoices,
• proposals,
• certificates,
• and business letters.

Many of these are made by Docmosis and come with sample data for testing. Docmosis also provides the ability to generate sample data based on the fields in the template, either via the user interface or via the API.

You can create templates from scratch using LibreOffice Writer or Microsoft Word by adding plain-text placeholders to create the merge fields. When uploaded to Docmosis, they can be easily tested with the sample data to see what the final document will look like once generated. Also, creating conditional statements for content and injecting data into table rows requires only a few lines of code.

The final document retains the formatting applied to merge fields in your template (which we cover in depth in the next section).

Quality of Export

Formstack Documents and Apryse’s Fluent support multiple output formats with lower template-to-document conversion accuracy, while Docmosis supports fewer output formats but offers a higher conversion accuracy.

Formstack Documents and Fluent by Apryse can output documents in DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, PDF, and HTML formats. In addition to that, Formstack Documents also exports to email, while Apryse Fluent does RTF and direct-to-printer.

When it comes to the quality of document exports, both tools are acceptable for simple documents with basic formatting and simple tables. However, when working with complex documents, the final output can look quite different from the original template. For example, images can get resized or moved, font types changed, and table column widths expanded.

This means that, after investing time designing templates, they’ll end up looking different in the output, which defeats the purpose of a template-based process.

Formstack Documents Export

Apryse Fluent Export

Meanwhile, Docmosis focuses on the following document-based outputs: PDF, DOCX, ODT, and TXT.

Unlike Formstack Documents and Apryse Fluent, the generated documents look exactly like the initial template, for simple and multi-page documents alike.

This gives you the flexibility and control expected of a template-based approach, knowing that your hard work will be reflected in the final document.

Data Sources

For input data, Fluent by Apryse connects with multiple databases, Formstack Documents connects with forms and CRMs, while Docmosis primarily supports JSON and XML data.

Docmosis accepts data in XML and JSON formats, making it compatible with most modern custom-built software applications. It offers an easy-to-use API for connecting with custom-built applications and third-party tools. However, it doesn’t provide as many built-in integrations as Formstack Documents or Fluent by Apryse.

**Update: Docmosis also provides a Zapier integration, enabling it to connect easily with thousands of apps (e.g., HubSpot, Tally, Pipedrive, Salesforce). This significantly expands its integration capabilities.

Formstack Documents’ documents can be populated with data from its native integration with Formstack Forms and other integrations like Salesforce. Formstack Documents also integrates with Zapier, enabling document generation from apps like Google Forms, Eventbrite, and Constant Contact, and has a public API for even more data source integrations.

It also lets you set rules for when data should be populated in documents.

Fluent by Apryse is very flexible when it comes to data sources. In addition to its API, it connects directly with JSON, XML, SQL, Oracle, and DB2 databases to inject data into templates in real time. Unlike Docmosis and Formstack Documents, Fluent by Apryse can combine data from multiple sources into a single template, which makes it more flexible.

Resources & Support

Formstack Documents has scattered resources and inconsistent support, Fluent by Apryse’s resources are outdated, but their support is reliable, and Docmosis offers organized resources and excellent support.

Having a well-organized help section means seamless troubleshooting by end-users. This helps take the load off higher-level decision-makers and removes bottlenecks like IT, since the person encountering issues can also resolve them.

Formstack Documents’ resources are scattered throughout its website and buried under lots of pages, making it challenging to navigate and find precisely what you’re looking for. While their customer support was good, users have reported the quality has dropped since the Formstack acquisition.

Now that Fluent (previously Windward Studios) is part of the larger Apryse group, finding specific resources is challenging due to unintuitive organization. The knowledge base also isn’t frequently updated, which leads to confusion and lengthy troubleshooting sessions. On the other hand, users praise the customer support team when it was under Windward Studios, but there are no recent reviews about the support experience since the transition to Apryse.

Unlike Formstack Documents and Apryse Fluent, Docmosis’ resource section is neatly structured and organized, with filters that make it easy to find resources according to products (Cloud, Tornado, and Java) and their different versions.

And the support has been described as brilliant and excellent several times. Check out the user reviews on Capterra here.

Price & Free Trial

Docmosis has the longest and full-featured free trial and offers the best value paid plans. By comparison, Formstack Documents is quite expensive, and Fluent’s pricing plans are hidden.

Docmosis and Fluent offer a 30-day trial, while Formstack Documents has a 14-day trial.

Formstack Documents offers a 14-day free trial of their cloud solution. However, the trial documents have watermarks and “Test Document” headers, which make the test documents difficult to view and don’t provide an accurate representation of the product.

Fluent’s free trial lasts for 30 days. During this period, generated documents have the watermarks and/or Fluent logo at the bottom.

Similar to Apryse’s Fluent, Docmosis also offers a free 30-day trial. However, Docmosis gives full access to its features, without any form of branding in the headers and footers, and no watermarks and the trial period can even be extended if needed.

As for the paid plans, Formstack Documents’ plans are based on document merges, Docmosis’ are based on pages, and Apryse isn’t transparent with their pricing.

Currently, Fluent’s (or Apryse’s) paid plans are hidden. Before it was rebranded as Fluent by Apryse, as at April 2023 (the last time they were public) the starting price for the Windward Engine was $6,790 per year. Editing templates required an MS Word add-in, called the Windward Designer, which had an additional cost of $730 per user per year. This means that the number of template authors needed to be known and licensed in advance.

Fluent’s architecture includes separate components:

• Fluent Designer,
• Fluent Manager,
• and Fluent Engine.

While the Fluent Designer (used for creating templates in Microsoft Word) is likely to have per-user pricing, the Fluent Engine is licensed based on usage volume. Fluent Manager‘s pricing and licensing are less clearly defined and may vary depending on deployment or support needs.

Fluent also offers a RESTful Engine and Java Engine, similar to the Docmosis Tornado and Docmosis-Java, but unlike Fluent, Docmosis requires only a one-time license payment starting at $3,695. For support and updates, Docmosis offers an optional package, starting at $1,478 annually. Unlike Fluent, where the license fees need to be paid every year, even if you don’t take the optional renewal, the Docmosis software will continue to run indefinitely.

Formstack Documents, which is similar to Docmosis Cloud, is a part of Formstack’s suite but you can still get it separately for $99/month. It gives you access to 1 builder user, 10 document templates, and 50 document merges per month.

For additional users and higher usage, you’ll need to pay extra. The main pricing page doesn’t reveal much detail, but when attempting to upgrade from a free trial, you may encounter additional “Documents” plans – Micro, Starter, Professional, Business, and Enterprise – ranging from $31.99 to $439.99. However, these appear outdated, lack clear information, and don’t seem to align with the primary pricing page.

Docmosis Cloud pricing is completely transparent. It unlocks all features on each plan; the only difference between them is in the number of users and work environments. Each plan’s price is based on the monthly page generation (with unlimited input templates):

This simply means if you produced two documents with Docmosis, one document with 4 pages and the other with 6 pages, a total of 10 pages will count towards your quota.