Form builders with calculations

Gravity Forms starts from an assumption most of the category avoids: you already run a WordPress site, and the form belongs inside it rather than on somebody else's service.

That produces a plugin rather than a platform. Forms render on your own domain, entries land in your own database, and the licence is annual rather than metered, so collecting ten thousand responses costs exactly what collecting ten does. Logic and question types are where two decades have gone — conditional fields, calculations, file uploads and a save-and-continue link are core rather than optional extras. Customisation goes as far as your stylesheet does: the form renders inside your own theme and accepts custom CSS, so matching it to the page around it is a styling job rather than a product limit.

The cost is everything that assumption excludes. There is no free version, the entry licence covers a single site, and payments, signatures and the more useful connections arrive as add-ons whose availability depends on which tier you bought. You are also responsible for the site underneath it, which is a job in itself.

Tally made two decisions at once: that a form should be written rather than assembled, and that most of what this category charges for should simply be free.

The editor behaves like a text document — you type, and a slash inserts a field — which is why ease of building is its strongest quality. There is no canvas to arrange and no field palette to learn. Value for money comes from the second decision: unlimited forms and unlimited submissions on the free plan, within a published fair-use policy, with conditional logic, calculations, signatures and file uploads included at no cost.

What you give up is control and polish. A document editor offers less layout freedom than a visual canvas, removing the Tally mark needs the Pro plan at $24 a month, and capturing part-finished responses is paid — so a plan that is generous about volume stays quiet about who nearly finished.

Jotform's decision is breadth. For almost any form somebody might need, the answer should already exist as a template rather than as an empty editor.

That produces a library running to thousands and a free tier shaped unusually: the standard feature set is included, and the limits fall on submissions, storage and form views instead. Logic and question types run deep, covering conditional fields, calculations, signatures and payments without a change of plan, and what happens after submit is equally broad, with approval routing and a long list of integrations. Customisation is deeper than a template-led builder usually implies, with custom CSS reaching individual fields and their positioning rather than only the palette.

The cost is that breadth is not taste. The editor is busier than a focused tool, several separate limits apply at once so it is possible to be stopped by one you were not watching, and forms built on the free Starter plan carry Jotform branding until you subscribe.

Fillout treats its free plan as a product rather than a trial, and says it stays free for life once you sign up.

A thousand responses a month is the headline, but the shape underneath matters more: conditional logic, calculations, integrations, CSV export and PDF printing are all available without paying. What happens after submit is unusually complete at every tier, and going over the monthly allowance does not stop a form collecting — you upgrade, buy submissions in bulk, or wait for the quota to reset.

The cost is that presentation is what you buy. The free plan shows a badge, the first paid tier shows lighter branding, and only the third removes it entirely; custom domains and partial submissions are reserved for the top plan. It is also a younger product than most of the field, with a correspondingly shorter record.

Cognito Forms treats a form as the front of a process rather than the end of one, and prices that on scale instead of on capability.

What follows is logic and question types: calculations that run across answers, conditional fields, save-and-resume for anything too long to finish in one sitting, and approval routing are all present on every tier including the free one — the combination an intake, application or registration process actually needs, rather than a contact form with extras.

The cost is in looks and in headcount. Styling control is thin next to design-led builders, the free tier allows a single user and a hundred entries a month with Cognito Forms branding on the page, and the paid plans charge for people as well as for entries, so a small team can reach the second tier before the volume does.

Fluent Forms competes on two numbers: how fast the form loads, and how much a single-site licence includes.

The mechanism is a plugin engineered to stay light, with the capabilities that usually mark a premium tier — conditional logic, calculations, save-and-resume — inside the licence rather than sold beside it. Value for money is the direct result: sixty-three dollars a year covers one site, and the agency and unlimited licences scale that without changing what a form can do. Customisation is part of the same undercutting, with custom CSS and JavaScript available rather than held back for a higher tier.

The cost is ecosystem. Payments and several integrations still sit on the higher licences, and the catalogue of third-party add-ons is smaller than the ones longer-established plugins have accumulated, so an unusual requirement is more likely to need building than buying. It also needs a WordPress site, like every plugin here.

Formstack treats a form as the first step of a document process, not as a page element, and prices itself for organisations that see it the same way.

What shows there is logic and question types: conditional fields, calculations, routing and save-and-resume are all present, and what happens after submit extends past notifications into generated documents and signature requests. The Suite plan bundles document deliveries with the forms product rather than selling them separately.

The cost is value for money, bluntly. The entry plan is $83 a month billed annually — $99 month to month — and there is no free plan at all, only a trial. For a small business collecting enquiries that is an order of magnitude more than the alternatives, and the compliance machinery it buys will go unused.

Formidable Forms is the WordPress plugin for people whose form is really a small database application wearing a form's clothes.

The centre of it is calculation, and the Views feature — bundled into the higher licences at a stated value of $349 — turns collected entries back into tables, listings and reports rendered on the site itself. Logic and question types therefore reach past submission into everything the data does afterwards. Customisation is included rather than tiered, with custom CSS available on every licence.

The cost is the ladder and the learning. Four licence tiers run from $79 to $599 a year at their normal prices, with conditional logic, payments and most integrations above the entry step, and the concepts it introduces are heavier than a contact form ever needs. It repays the effort only when the form is genuinely doing work.

QuestionPro sells a research suite rather than a form builder, and the distinction shows in what it spends its effort on. The question types, the sampling options and the analysis are aimed at somebody running a study whose results have to stand up, rather than at somebody collecting enquiries from a website.

Pricing is per user and sits at ninety-nine dollars a month, or eighty-three a month on an annual commitment. That is a per-seat cost rather than a per-form one, so the arithmetic changes shape as soon as a second person needs access. A free tier exists beneath the paid suite for smaller work.

What it is not is a quick way to put a form on a website. Ease of building is scored against a first-time user reaching something they can send, and a research suite front-loads decisions a form builder would never ask about. The reward is analysis built for research that has to hold up, and the cost is that a simple job takes longer than it needs to.

Typeform's whole product is one decision: show a respondent a single question, full screen, and move on once they answer. Everything else follows from it, including the fact that ease of building is unusually high — there is no page to lay out, only an order of questions to get right.

The mechanism is a full-screen question with logic underneath it. Branching can send two respondents down properly different paths, calculated fields can score what they answered, and a payment question can take money through Stripe at the end. What happens after submit is covered just as thoroughly: responses collect in a dashboard and push onward into a long list of other tools.

The cost is value for money, and it is steep. The entry paid plan includes a hundred responses a month, removing Typeform branding requires the tier above that, and a custom domain is an enterprise conversation. A form that works here gets expensive precisely because it worked.

Paperform decided that a form should be a page. You write copy, and where a question belongs you drop a field into the middle of the sentence.

How the form looks is the direct result. Because the editor is a document rather than a stack of fields, the finished thing reads as something written for a reader instead of something generated for a database, and it carries real copy around the questions — which is why it suits order forms and booking pages rather than surveys.

The cost arrives on the pricing page. The free plan allows thirty submissions a month, paid allowances are counted per year rather than per month, and a custom domain is an extra twenty dollars a month on top of the Pro plan. The editor asks for writing effort too; an empty page is harder to start than a template.

WPForms is built for the person who has a WordPress site and would rather not think about WordPress.

The mechanism is a drag-and-drop editor wrapped around a large template set, tuned so that a first working form takes minutes rather than an afternoon. Payments run through Stripe or Square with no platform fee while a licence is active, and a free version in the plugin directory means the first form costs nothing at all. Customisation is not the constraint the template gallery suggests: multi-column layouts and custom CSS are both documented, and the form inherits the theme around it.

The cost is the licence ladder. Conditional logic and calculations are not in the free version, integrations are spread across four annual tiers, and the promotional first-year price is roughly half what the licence renews at — so the second year is the one to budget for. Payments taken without an active licence carry a three percent platform fee.

forms.app removes the number that shapes almost every other pricing page in this category: the response cap.

Responses are unlimited on every plan, including the free one, and no credit card is required to stay there. Value for money is therefore not a calculation about volume at all — conditional logic, calculations, payments and signatures are available without watching a counter, and the decision becomes what the form should look like rather than how many people may fill it in.

The cost is that presentation is the entire ladder. Branding removal arrives on the first paid tier, a custom subdomain on the second, and a full custom domain plus partial responses only on the third — so a free form is an unmistakably branded one, and a long form on a lower plan records nothing until somebody presses submit.

Zoho Forms is priced like the suite it belongs to, which in practice means the numbers look wrong next to the standalone products.

The free tier allows 500 submissions a month, and the first paid step is $10 a month billed annually for 10,000. Approval routing, conditional rules, calculations and payment fields are all present, and what happens after submit reaches into the rest of the suite — a spreadsheet, an automation layer, a sales database — without buying a connector. Customisation runs deeper than the price implies, through a documented custom themes and CSS route and layout elements — grids, sections, page breaks — that rearrange a form rather than only recolour it.

The cost is everything that comes with being part of a suite. The interface follows suite conventions rather than form-builder conventions, the settings are numerous and scattered, and the value on offer is largely wasted if you have no intention of using anything else Zoho makes.

HeyForm is an open-source project with hosted plans attached, and that single fact changes what its price list means.

The hosted tiers are shaped by volume — $15 a month for five thousand responses, $24 for twenty thousand, $40 for a hundred and fifty thousand — which is where its value for money comes from. The forms themselves are conversational, asking one question at a time, with logic and integrations included. Customisation has no ceiling for anyone willing to self-host: custom CSS is there on the hosted plans, and the source is yours to change when it is not enough.

The cost is maturity and reach. The product is younger and thinner than the long-established builders, calculations sit behind a paid tier, there is no save-and-resume, and self-hosting is only cheap if somebody's time to maintain a server is free. The licence removes lock-in; it does not remove work.