A user portal lets you bring all your data, forms, user submissions, and pages with any type of content or media into one organized space. Your users can log in, access shared resources, interact with forms, and view or even edit their own submissions.
A portal can be as simple as a client dashboard for submitting and tracking project requests, or as advanced as a full learning hub with videos, checklists, quizzes, and progress tracking. It helps you streamline communication and create a professional, self‑service experience for your audience.
Why build a portal?
All‑in‑one, interactive space – bring together relevant content, media, and forms while giving users a polished, branded environment where they can sign up and log in, access resources, submit forms, and review or update their own data. No need to share each part separately or jump between different links; everything is centralized and easy to use.
Adaptable to any scenario – from client portals and HR hubs to interactive courses or school management systems, you can tailor a portal to fit your and your customers' exact needs.
Real‑world use case examples
Customer or client portals for service requests, project tracking, support tickets, or file sharing.
HR portals where employees can access policies, announcements, and submit requests or feedback.
Learning portals hosting courses with media, quizzes after each module, and certificates generated upon completion.
Student dashboards to track academic progress, assignments, or resources.
Patient portals for submitting forms, reviewing records, or managing appointments.
How to build and customize a portal
You have two options to start from:
➔ Start with a template
Explore ready-to-use Client portal templates in our 🎨 Template Gallery – to pick one and adapt it to your needs in minutes, or just for inspiration!
💡 In this article, we'll be using an Online course / LMS portal as an example – here, you can grab a ready-made template for it.
➔ Build from scratch
Prefer to design everything yourself? Start by creating a new project in your Formaloo dashboard. Click +New and pick Form, Dashboard, or Client portal:
Next, you can customize your project to the full, turn it into a portal, and share it with your users.
Step 1: Customize your future portal
Once your portal project is created, you can tailor it to your exact needs:
Remove any unnecessary pages or content (if starting from a template),
Add new folders and new pages with text, images, videos, or other media,
Connect existing forms from your account or create new ones on the go,
Insert data blocks to display submissions from any of your forms:
💡 Check out the full guide on how to customize your portal and its pages or forms.
Step 2: Activate portal mode and manage your portal's settings
Once you're done with the structure and content, you can activate the portal mode in your app to allow your users to interact with the app and see their submitted data.
In your app, click on Settings in the top-right corner and Activate Client Portal, then click on Manage users. Follow the Setup wizard to set up your portal:
➔ Connect a User directory (the database that will store the users who have access to this portal):
Create a new one on the go (new users who sign up will be added to it),
Connect an existing one (e.g., used in another portal),
Or import your users (e.g., if you'd like to add users manually, and only allow logging in, without allowing any visitor to just sign up):
👉 If you enable the sign-up option in your portal, any user who signs up will be automatically added to your portal's User Directory.
➔ Customize the Portal settings:
Decide if you'd like to let users log in, sign up, solve CAPTCHA, or log in with one-time passwords:
👉 If you're importing your portal users or plan on adding them manually, you can disable the sign-up option while only keeping the login enabled.
➔ Select the Forms to be linked to this portal:
A User Profile field linked to this Portal and its User Directory will be added automatically to the forms you select here,
This will let you track submissions from logged-in users, and will let you give users the ability to view or edit their own submissions:
👉 You can also add a User Profile field to any form added to your portal later, manually linking it to the right User Directory and your Portal.
➕ Manage portal users or update portal settings anytime later
Once your portal setup is complete, you can revisit and adjust it at any time. Go to the User Directory at the top-right corner of your portal to:
Review or manage users, or add / import new ones,
Adjust your portal settings – for example, change the connected User Directory, update login or signup options, or link additional forms to the portal.
➕ Disable portal mode in your project anytime
If you ever wish to turn off the portal mode for your project, open the Project settings, click on the three dots (...) next to Client portal, and click Disable portal:
Step 3: Manage users' access to different pages in your portal
Once you've set up your portal, you can manage users' access to each portal page individually. Next to any page, click the three-dotted menu (...) and select Access:
Here, you can configure access levels to control who can view the content on that page. The access settings are divided into two sections: External users and Internal users.
➔ External users
Under External users, you can control access for visitors and portal members:
Public (anyone with the link) – allows any visitors to access the page,
Non-logged-in users – visible only to users who are not logged in,
Logged-in users – visible to users with accounts in your portal after they log in,
Specific user roles – restricts access to certain role(s) in your User Directory.
💡 These settings enable flexible, tier-based access to your portal content:
You can keep a general Welcome page public to explain what your portal is about and how to sign up or log in,
You can make most of your pages available to logged-in users while offering premium content to users with a VIP role.
Learn more about creating and assigning custom roles to your portal users for role-based access management.
➔ Internal users
Under Internal users, you can manage access for your workspace members / project collaborators:
All app team members – allows anyone who's a collaborator on your project to access the page,
Specific teams – limits access to people who belong to a particular team within your workspace.
💡 These settings are useful for restricting internal tracking, analytics, or management pages to your internal project team only.
Step 4: Manage users' access to their data
➔ User's Profile data
Every logged-in user can always click their Profile icon at the top-right corner of the portal to update their own profile information.
This ensures that users' data linked to their submissions stays up to date and consistent if their details change at any point:
➔ User's Submissions
On your portal pages, you can display your forms' data through Tables, Kanban boards, or other data blocks linked to your forms.
⚠️ Note that by default, when you add a new data block to a page, all submissions are visible to everyone who can access that page:
But if the form features a User Profile field linked to your Portal and its User Directory, you can let users view (optionally, edit) their own submissions only:
Hover over the data block (e.g., a responses table), click Options in the top-right corner, and go to Manage Access,
Under Profile Field Access, choose the User Profile field added to the given form,
Enable or disable the following options:
Allow users to view user data – users will only see their own submissions,
Allow users to edit user data – users can also modify and save their updated submissions.
👀 The view option is useful for cases where users need to review their past submissions without making changes, or track any updates made post-submission by your team (e.g., order status updates, service request stages, assignment feedback, etc).
✏️ The editing option can be useful when users need the ability to correct errors, update details, or revise their entries over time.
➔ Here's how the same table would look from a logged-in portal user's perspective:
ℹ️️ All internal users with access to the page can switch to Admin view to see all submissions, even when the table is filtered by the User Profile field:
Step 5: Publish your portal & share its public link
Once you've set up everything, it's time to publish your portal so users can access it. Follow these steps to make your portal live:
Open the Share menu, and go to the Publish tab,
Publish your portal for the public link to get generated,
Copy link and share it with your audience,
Or click View to check out the public version of your portal:
🎨 Want to make your portal feel truly yours? Setting up a custom domain gives your users a seamless, on-brand experience – your portal will appear under your own trusted, recognizable URL. It’s a sure-fire way to build credibility with your audience.
👉 Check out our step-by-step guide to see how to set it up.
Step 6: Test your portal from a user's perspective
Once you've finished setting up your portal, it’s worth testing it from your users’ perspective to make sure everything works as intended.
➔ Double-check page visibility and content access
Open your portal by its public link and make sure visitors don’t see any restricted content meant for logged-in users only.
💡 It might be a good idea to add at least one public page, for example, a page with login instructions or a welcome message.
Otherwise, your portal may appear blank to visitors who haven’t logged in yet.
➔ Test the signup or login process
If you allow signups, go through the process yourself to make sure it works smoothly.
If you’ve imported users manually and disabled signups, create a test user and log in instead.
Once you log in, confirm that you can now see pages that are only visible to logged-in users and that the visible pages match the access levels you’ve set:
➔ Check how submissions appear for portal users
If on your portal pages, you’ve added Tables, Kanban boards, or other data blocks that display submissions, double-check how they appear to a portal user (submit any form for a test, if needed):
If the data block has no filtering based on the User Profile field, you should see all submissions,
If it’s filtered by the User Profile field, you should only see (and optionally edit) your own submissions linked to your test user's Profile.
Final thoughts
Building a portal in Formaloo lets you turn your workspace into a dynamic, self-service hub – one where users can log in, access shared resources, and interact with your forms and data in a truly convenient way.
And because you control every part of it, you can decide what’s public, what’s private, and how people engage with their own submissions.
Whether you’re running a client dashboard, an internal workspace, or a learning hub, your portal can be shaped exactly to your workflow — flexible, secure, and truly yours 🧡