Fillout vs Jotform: what a response and a seat really cost

Pick Fillout if more than one person builds forms or your volume passes a few hundred responses a month; pick Jotform if you need HIPAA-compliant forms, e-signatures or its 20,000-template library, which Fillout does not offer on the same scale. We install Fillout for clients and have never run a Jotform account, so everything below about Jotform comes from Jotform's own pages, read today.

Read the price at your volume, not the plan name

The two vendors meter different things, which is why their pricing pages are hard to compare side by side. Fillout meters one number, responses per month, and leaves seats and forms unlimited on every plan. Jotform meters four: forms, monthly submissions, stored submissions and monthly form views, on top of separate counters for payment submissions and signed documents.

On Fillout's pricing page, read today: Free at 0 dollars with 1,000 responses a month, Starter at 15 dollars per month when billed annually (180 dollars a year, or 19 if you pay monthly at 228) for 2,000 responses, Pro at 40 on annual billing (480 a year, 49 monthly) for 5,000 responses with the branding removed, and Business at 75 on annual billing (900 a year, 89 monthly) with unlimited responses.

On Jotform's pages, read today: the Starter plan is free with 5 forms, 100 monthly submissions and 10 monthly payment submissions. Bronze costs 34 dollars per month when billed annually, 39 when paid monthly, and carries 25 forms with 1,000 monthly submissions. Silver is 39 on annual billing (49 monthly) with 50 forms and 2,500 monthly submissions. Gold is 99 on annual billing with 100 forms and 10,000 monthly submissions. Enterprise is custom-priced.

Put the two ladders next to a real volume and the gap shows without any division. A team collecting 5,000 responses a month pays 40 dollars for it on Fillout Pro. On Jotform, Silver stops at 2,500, so that volume means Gold at 99. And the gap widens again once seats enter, because Jotform's own pages describe Enterprise as the only multiuser environment: a team of five on standard plans needs five paid Jotform accounts, against one flat Fillout fee covering everybody.

Jotform earns its price elsewhere. HIPAA compliance is available on Gold only, e-signatures arrive as monthly signed-document allowances (10 on Starter, 1,000 on Gold), and its template and widget library is a different scale from Fillout's. If your forms collect medical information or need signing, those are the rows that decide, not the monthly figure.

Take the free plans side by side

Fillout gives a thousand responses a month and unlimited seats before asking for a card; Jotform gives 100 submissions, 5 forms and one seat. Both pages publish the exact limits.

Fillout's free plan includes payments, conditional logic, scheduling forms, PDF generation and unlimited file uploads, all listed on the pricing page. Jotform's Starter plan does include the core features, so a solo user can test conditional logic and integrations without paying, but 5 forms and 100 submissions a month means most active projects hit the ceiling in the first weeks.

Test for free before paying: trials, refunds and codes

Neither vendor publishes a free trial, so the honest test costs nothing but time. Build one real form in each, the one you actually need this month, and run it for two weeks against real respondents. On Fillout the free tier absorbs a full test with room to spare, and every question type is available without paying. On Jotform, the free Starter plan does the same within its submission ceiling, and if you subscribe and cancel within 30 days, the pricing page commits to a full refund. If you open Fillout through this site's link, the first month of Pro is free on top; that arrangement is negotiated by us with the vendor and is not published on their pricing page, which is why it lives on the Fillout fiche rather than here as a list price.

On discounts for switchers, neither pricing page publishes one, and we found no code aimed at Jotform users on either site. The one published way to cut Jotform's price is its 50-percent reduction on Bronze, Silver and Gold for educational institutions and nonprofits.

The number to write down at the end of the two weeks is your own monthly submission count, not the plans' ceilings. Under 100 responses a month, both free plans cover you and the choice is about features. Between 100 and 1,000, Fillout's free tier still holds while Jotform needs at least Bronze. Above 1,000, take the tier tables above and read them against your real count.

Let respondents edit after submitting

Both builders let a respondent update a submission once it is sent, but they put the door in different places, which matters if edits are a core flow rather than an occasional fix.

In Fillout, editing is a first-class feature with five routes described in its help page: an edit link auto-sent in the respondent's notification email, a Send response field with an opt-in edit link, a manual edit link from the Results tab, a submission-overview email, or a login page where respondents reopen their past answers. Integrations update on re-submission, so an Airtable or Notion record is edited rather than duplicated. One condition from the same page: if the original submission has been deleted, the edit link silently opens an empty form instead of raising an error.

In Jotform, the edit link is added to the autoresponder email, per its help page, and a Thank You page toggle shows an Edit Submission button. The same page states the feature is not available on HIPAA-enabled forms, which makes the edit workflow one more thing to check before choosing Gold for compliance reasons.

Migrate your Jotform forms in one sitting

Moving existing forms is the step that decides whether switching costs an afternoon or a week, and Fillout publishes exactly what its importer takes.

From Fillout's My forms menu, "Import existing forms" offers a third-party import from Jotform (also Typeform and SurveyMonkey). The help page lists what comes across: labels, multiple-choice options, workflows, and email notification settings with their recipients. It also lists what does not. Backend settings stay behind, integrations need reconnecting to your Airtable or Notion account after the import, scheduling reminders and host availability have to be set up again, and links between forms, such as subform and record-picker fields, are re-pointed by hand. There is a batch cap of 200 forms at once if your organisation is not verified.

The part to plan before you touch anything: past submissions. The response-import switch described on that page is for Typeform. For a Jotform import the page does not list bringing responses across, only the structure. Export your Jotform submission history yourself, and expect to rebuild anything that lived in Jotform Tables or its widgets, which have no Fillout equivalent on the import path. A migration of ten complex forms with logic is a day of checking, not the minutes the marketing pages imply.

Check the caps that break in the second month

The first month on a free plan rarely breaks. The second does, once real traffic arrives, and each product breaks on its own counters.

On Jotform, the form ceiling hits first, the monthly submission ceiling second, and payment submissions are capped separately at 10 a month before you pay, so a paid event form can exhaust its payment allowance while form submissions still look fine. Stored submissions also total-cap at 500 without a subscription, and the pricing FAQ states the system deletes the oldest response to make room once that storage is exceeded. Monthly form views are counted too, at 10,000 on Starter.

On Fillout, the meter is responses only, so the cap is one number: a thousand a month free, then the tier you picked. Two conditions from the pricing page still bite. The Fillout branding stays on until the Pro tier, so client-facing forms need Pro. Partial submissions, the responses started but never submitted, are listed under the Business tier rather than available everywhere. Both conditions sit on the Fillout catalogue entry with the same figures.

Decide with the meter that fits you

The flow we install most often, a qualification form that ends on a slot picker so the answers arrive attached to the meeting, is the case Fillout was built for and the reason it is in our catalogue; we describe that setup in qualify and book on one page. If your forms live on Jotform's specific machinery, e-signatures, Tables, HIPAA, there is no reason to move.

Fillout is an affiliate of this site: we earn a commission if you sign up through the link on its fiche. Jotform is not, and we have never run a Jotform account.