Form builders with e-signatures

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Formsite is a survivor, and the product reflects two decades of solving the same administrative problems rather than a recent attempt to reinvent them.

The product carries rules, calculations, signatures, save-and-resume and payment handling, and the plan ladder mostly changes capacity rather than capability — $21 a month at the first step, rising to $59, each with a stated annual price. Results are managed inside the product rather than exported to be useful.

The cost is the first impression. There is no free plan, only a fourteen-day trial, so evaluating it means committing time before money. The default styling is plain, and matching a form to your own site takes deliberate work.

MakeForms sells on security and compliance, and builds an otherwise conventional no-code form product behind that positioning.

The plans bundle a large email allowance — ten thousand messages on the first tier, twenty-five thousand above it, with extra credits sold at a tenth of a cent each — which reframes the product as something closer to a small automation platform than a form page. Rules, calculations, payments and file handling are all present.

The cost is the entry price. The first plan is $65 a month and the second is $133, several times what comparable capability costs elsewhere, and the emails bundled with it are only worth paying for if you were going to send them. For a business that simply needs forms, the pitch is aimed somewhere else.

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.

SurveySparrow's argument is that a survey which feels like a conversation gets finished more often than one that arrives as a page of questions. The product is built around that: chat-style surveys as a first-class format, alongside the more conventional layout for cases where a respondent would rather see everything at once.

The capability underneath is broad for a survey tool. Conditional logic, calculations, payment collection, signature capture and saving a part-finished response are all present, which is more than a tool built purely for research usually offers.

The cost is in how the pricing is counted. Every advertised figure assumes yearly billing, and the response allowances are annual rather than monthly, so the entry plan's two and a half thousand responses have to cover twelve months rather than one. For a survey sent in bursts that is a different shape of limit from the monthly caps used elsewhere, and worth checking against how you actually collect.