Alternative to communities for building a portal

If you are looking to build a portal you must be checking your options. At first it may seem like the only possible way is using the Salesforce communities. It also makes sense keeping all your activities under the Salesforce umbrella. and you may be right - this is an advantage, however like any other solution- there are also disadvantages.
Maybe you are not aware of this, but using the communities for creating a portal means you will need to hire a visual force developer. each addition will cost you money, and the development will of course take time. 
If you search more thoroughly for a solution you will surely find that a form builder can be used as an alternative for this. Its advantages include zero coding, does not require a developer, user friendly tool, quicker results. 

It may seem trivial, but not all form builders can be used for this solution. First - not every form builder even has a Salesforce integration. Second - the integration has to be bi-directional in order to allow you to read and write from SF.
You will need to find a form builder that can do the job. like FormTitan for example, which not only has a powerful integration with Salesforce, but also has really cool elements that work with SF: Tables, lookup etc.

Read all about the Salesforce Push integration
Read all about the Salesforce Get integration