Jotform vs Google Forms

Google Forms is free and will remain free. Jotform's free plan is generous but branded. Most people arrive at this comparison having outgrown Google Forms and wanting to know exactly what they get for leaving.

What Google Forms will not do

Google Forms has no payment collection and no calculations across answers. File uploads require respondents to be signed in to a Google account, which quietly excludes anyone outside your organisation and is the limitation people discover last and resent most.

Google Forms scores 1 for customisation and 3 for logic. Jotform scores 5 and 5. In practice that is the difference between showing and hiding a question and building a form that behaves differently for each respondent.

Jotform also has signatures, save-and-resume, and HIPAA-enabled forms for health information. Google Forms has none of the three.

What you give up in exchange

Google Forms is free with unlimited responses and no branding to remove, which is a stronger position than any paid free-tier in this directory. Google Forms scores 5 for value against Jotform's 3.

Jotform's free plan includes standard features rather than a reduced set, which is unusual and worth saying. What it does not include is the absence of branding: free Jotform forms carry it. Several separate limits also apply at once — submissions, storage and form views each have their own counter, so you can be stopped by a number you were not watching.

The other thing Google Forms does better is the destination. Responses can be written straight into a Google Sheet as they arrive, where they can be filtered, charted and shared like any other data. If your team already works in a spreadsheet, that is worth more than several of Jotform's features.

Google Forms scores 5 for ease against Jotform's 4, partly because there is less to learn and partly because Jotform's editor is genuinely busy.

Which should you choose?

Choose Google Forms if nothing on your form needs a payment, a signature or a calculation, and the answers belong in a spreadsheet.

Choose Jotform if any one of those three is a requirement — and check the branding, because it is on the free plan and removing it is the reason most people end up paying.