Fillout vs Google Forms: free until 1,000 responses a month

Google Forms costs nothing with a Google Account and is the right tool for internal surveys and quizzes; the moment a form has to book a meeting, take a payment or accept files from people without a Google Account, Fillout does it on a $0 plan that stops counting at 1,000 responses a month. Count your traffic before you choose: that number decides whether Fillout stays free.

Above that, Fillout's Starter plan is $15 a month on yearly billing ($180 a year) or $19 paid month to month, with unlimited seats. Google's own pages describe its consumer apps as free, and Forms is listed as included in every Google Workspace plan.

Compare what each form can do

Every row below has an answer on both vendors' pages. Fillout's side comes from its pricing page; Google's side comes from the Forms product page, the Workspace pricing page and two Google help articles.

Two capabilities sit on one side only, so they stay out of the table. Fillout includes collecting payments and PDF generation on the free plan. Google's question-types help page lists twelve question types, from Short answer to Time, and none of them is a payment or a signature field.

The logic row hides a real gap. Google's help page on branching limits "Go to section based on answer" to Multiple choice and Dropdown questions, and the jump is to a whole section. Its question-types page also mentions Checkboxes for the same jump, so the two Google pages disagree on that one type. On Fillout, the free tier already carries conditional hiding for single questions and content, calculations and answer piping.

Check the price and the limits

Two caveats on Google's figures. The Workspace pricing page served to us showed euros and an introductory discount that changed between two reads the same morning, so the dollar figures above come from Google's page for individuals, which prints them in USD. And the "unlimited" response count that circulates comes from Fillout's own comparison page, a vendor selling the other side; Google's pages read today do not publish a cap either way.

The 12-month arithmetic, for a team that wants forms that end on a booked meeting. On Fillout, Starter billed annually is 15 x 12 = $180 for the whole team, because seats are unlimited; Free costs $0 if the team stays under the free response cap. On Google, booking pages start at Business Standard: billed monthly, one user pays 16.80 x 12 = $201.60 and five users pay 16.80 x 5 x 12 = $1,008. That Workspace bill also buys business email, Meet and 2 TB of storage per user, so if your company already pays for Business Standard, the booking pages are already in the price and the comparison shifts back to features.

Decide by profile

• **A school, a club or an internal HR survey, everyone on Google accounts.** Stay on Google Forms. Quizzes are built in, responses flow to Sheets, and the sign-in requirement for uploads costs nothing when every respondent already has an account.
• **An inbound lead form that should end on a meeting, with modest traffic.** Fillout Free. The form, the routing and the slot picker are one object, and nobody needs a Workspace seat.
• **The same form shown to clients without a vendor badge.** Fillout Pro at $40 a month on yearly billing ($49 month to month) is the first tier with no Fillout branding.
• **A company already paying Workspace Business Standard for every employee.** Google's appointment booking pages are already paid for. Move to Fillout only if you need the booking step inside the form, payments in the form, or uploads from people outside Google.

What we saw building forms that book meetings

Our own use is the qualify-then-book case, so this is the side we can speak to. We split a qualification form into two steps so the first step saves the contact details, and a prospect who stops halfway can still be called back. On Fillout's free tier the answers arrive only once the form is submitted; viewing partial submissions is listed on the Business tier, at $75 a month paid yearly ($89 paid monthly).

The routing rules read the answers: a prospect with zero or one employee is sent to a 10-minute slot, the others to a full meeting, and nobody sorts the requests by hand. That flow took about three hours to build, and the native CRM and Slack sync removed the Zapier step we used before. On a run of 85 booked meetings, the people who abandoned the booking stayed visible, and that view showed which step of the flow lost them. The full setup is written up in qualify and book on one page.

One measurement from our record applies to anyone moving campaign data through a form: when a hidden URL parameter is missing from the link, the value that arrives in Fillout can be the literal string undefined. Any rule that reads it has to test for that value and reject it.

Google Forms has no booking step inside the form, so the same flow on Google means a form, then a separate appointment page from Business Standard, then a sync between the two. We have not built that version; the Google side here comes from Google's pages.

Run both for two weeks before you switch

Fillout imports a Google Form through its AI form builder: from My forms, 3rd Party, then Google forms. Its help page states that imported forms bring the structure, questions and fields, but not the submissions from the original form, so export your Google responses to Sheets first and keep them there.

Then run the real form on both for two weeks and write down two numbers: responses per day and the share of respondents who had to sign in on Google to upload a file. If two weeks of responses, doubled, stay under Fillout's free cap, Fillout costs nothing. If the sign-in step loses people on Google, that is the case for switching even at $0. Through the link on Fillout's catalogue entry, the first month of Pro is free on top of the free plan, an arrangement with the vendor that no public page lists.

Know where each one stops

Fillout's cap is soft. Its pricing FAQ says forms keep collecting responses past the monthly limit, and you either upgrade or wait for the count to reset on the 1st. The harder limits are elsewhere: 20 MB a file below Business, CAPTCHA only from Starter, and form analytics, drop-off rates and custom domains only on Business.

Google's limits sit on the respondent and on the owner's Drive. A file upload question cannot be used when the form is stored in a shared drive or when the administrator turns on Data Loss Prevention, and every uploaded file is stored in the form owner's Drive. On Business Starter that Drive is 30 GB pooled per user, which a form collecting video or large PDFs can fill.

Fillout is an affiliate of this site: we earn a commission if you sign up through the link on the Fillout plans we track. Google is not, and we earn nothing from Google Forms or Workspace.