The optimal JotForm alternative

If you’re looking for an alternative to JotFom, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we’ve stacked up JotForm against Plumsail Forms so you can decide which solution is more efficient for your needs. We’ve compared form builders’ features, pricing, customization options, integrations, and more.

Plumsail Forms offers a free Scooter plan that doesn’t require starting a trial or a subscription. Create a Plumsail account and try all the features you will discover in this article.

Contents

• What is JotForm?
• Why look for JotForm alternative?
• Top JotForm alternatives and competitors
  • JotForm vs Google Forms
  • JotForm vs Cognito Forms
  • JotForm vs TypeForm
  • JotForm vs Paperform
• Why Plumsail Forms is a good JotForm Forms alternative?
  • Ease of use
  • Complex layouts
  • Advanced elements
  • File upload and storage
  • Customization & branding
  • Share forms options
  • 100 + integrations & payment buttons
  • Advanced forms with JavaScript
  • Team access
  • Price
• Try free JotForm alternative

What is JotForm?

JotForm is one of the most well-known web form builder solutions for data collection. It has a drag-and-drop interface, a bunch of prominent features and capabilities that make it easy to create online forms to suit different requirements.

What are the major benefits of JotForm?

• 100 + integrations to 3rd party apps
• Payment integrations
• Mobile responsiveness
• Conditional logic
• Wide range of templates
• Design customization
• Form analytics

However, it also has drawbacks that may not fit your project.

Why look for JotForm alternative? JotForm pros and cons

Based on users’ feedback, we’ve compiled a list of the primary drawbacks of the JotForm:

• Cluttered outdated interface
• No custom form layouts
• Some settings are hard to find
• Lack of advanced customization
• Some widgets are duplicated and don't work as expected
• Limitations depending on the plan: monthly form views, submissions, available storage space
• High price

For some users, these limitations are unacceptable, and the cost of overcoming them is unaffordable. For instance, JotForm has a limit on the number of times users can view a form, which could be an issue if you want to display it on a busy website.

Top JotForm alternatives and competitors

There are many alternative form building tools on the web - some are free, some are commercial, some like JotForm have both free and paid plans.

The most well-known jotform competitors are the following, which you can also compare to Plumsail Forms:

JotForm vs Google Forms

JotForm and Google Forms are both online form builders that allow users to create and distribute forms for collecting data. However, there are a few key differences between the two platforms.

1. Ease of use: Both JotForm and Google Forms are relatively easy to use, with drag-and-drop functionality and intuitive interfaces. However, JotForm offers more customization options and advanced features, which may make it slightly more complex for beginners.

2. Design and customization: JotForm provides a wide range of pre-designed templates and customizable themes for creating visually appealing forms. Google Forms, on the other hand, offers a more minimalistic and streamlined design, with limited customization options.

3. Integrations: JotForm integrates with various third-party applications, such as Dropbox, Salesforce, PayPal, and others, making it convenient for data management. While Google Forms also offers integrations, its options are more limited compared to JotForm.

4. Pricing: Both platforms offer free plans, but JotForm's free plan includes more features and a higher submission limit than Google Forms. JotForm also provides a variety of pricing plans, including affordable subscriptions, whereas Google Forms is completely free to use.

5. Collaboration and sharing: Google Forms has an advantage in terms of collaboration, as it allows multiple users to work on a form simultaneously. It also seamlessly integrates with other Google apps, such as Google Sheets for data storage. JotForm offers collaboration features, but it may require specific plans or add-ons.

Find a comparison between Plumsail Forms and Google Forms here.

JotForm vs Cognito Forms

JotForm and Cognito Forms are both online form builder tools that allow users to create and customize forms for various purposes. However, there are a few differences between them:

1. Ease of use: JotForm is known for its user-friendly interface, making it easy for beginners to create and customize forms. Cognito also offers a user-friendly interface, but some may find JotForm more intuitive.

2. Templates and customization: Both platforms offer a wide range of pre-designed form templates that users can choose from and customize according to their needs. However, JotForm provides a larger selection of templates and has more advanced customization options.

3. Integrations: Both platforms offer integrations with popular third-party apps and services, such as payment gateways and email marketing platforms. However, JotForm has a larger number of integrations available, making it more versatile in terms of connecting with other tools.

4. Pricing: JotForm offers a free plan with limited features, while Cognito Forms have a free plan available that includes more features and a higher number of submissions per month. However, when it comes to paid plans, JotForm offers more options compared to Cognito Forms.

Find a comparison between Plumsail Forms and Cognito Forms here.

JotForm vs TypeForm

JotForm and TypeForm are both online form builders that allow users to create and customize forms to collect information. However, there are some key differences between the two:

1. Ease of use: JotForm is known for its user-friendly interface, making it easy for beginners to create forms without any coding knowledge. On the other hand, TypeForm offers a more interactive and conversational approach, which might require a bit of a learning curve for some users.

2. Form customization: Both platforms provide a range of customization options, allowing users to personalize their forms according to their needs. JotForm provides a wide variety of templates and themes to choose from, along with robust design options. TypeForm, on the other hand, offers a more sleek and modern design, focusing on engaging and interactive elements.

3. Features and integrations: JotForm offers a comprehensive set of features, including payment integrations, conditional logic, and advanced form fields. It also has a vast library of integrations with popular tools like PayPal, Salesforce, and Mailchimp. TypeForm, though with a smaller range of features, specializes in creating conversational forms and surveys, making it ideal for customer feedback or lead generation.

4. Pricing: Both JotForm and TypeForm offer a range of pricing options. JotForm provides a free plan with limitations, as well as affordable paid plans starting at a lower price point. TypeForm might have less options when it comes to pricing, but has no limits on the number of forms.

Find a comparison between Plumsail Forms and TypeForm here.

JotForm vs Paperform

JotForm and Paperform are both online form builders that allow users to create and customize forms without coding knowledge. However, there are a few key differences between the two:

1. Popularity: JotForm is a more established and widely used platform, with over 10 million users. On the other hand, Paperform is a newer form builder that focuses on providing a more aesthetically pleasing and customizable form creation experience.

2. Form design: JotForm has extensive customization options, however form design can be a little clunky. Paperform allows users to create visually appealing forms easily.

3. Features: JotForm has advanced features such as conditional logic, calculations, and form branching. Paperform also has features like conditional logic, calculations, and integrations with payment gateways.

4. Pricing: JotForm offers a free plan with limited features, while Paperform's pricing starts at $24 per month. Both apps can be quite expensive, though JotForm pricing has more restrictions for its plans.

Find a comparison between Plumsail Forms and PaperForm here.

Why is Plumsail Forms a good JotForm alternative?

Plumsail Forms can be a perfect alternative to JotForm for you. It has all the key benefits of JotForm that you might need, like a drag-and-drop interface, a wide range of form fields, advanced features and integrations, plus responsiveness, meaning that the forms adjust well to devices of all sizes, from mobiles to tablets and PCs.

You can design a responsive form from scratch in a few minutes or use one of the ready-made form templates. You can also enrich the form functionality by adding a custom JavaScript code.

In addition, Plumsail Forms pricing is very affordable. All features are available on any plan and there are no restrictions, such as monthly form views or total submission storage.

Let's take a closer look at what you can get by using Plumsail Forms instead of JotForm:

• Ease of use
• Complex layouts
• Advanced elements
• File upload and storage
• Customization & branding
• Share forms options
• 100 + integrations & payment buttons
• Advanced forms with JavaScript
• Team access
• Price

Ease of use

Both JotForm and Plumsail Forms have a drag-and-drop interface that makes creating forms very easy, even for beginners. But unlike JotForm, Plumsail Forms has a minimalistic and intuitive interface that’s easy to get used to.

One of the key features of Plumsail Forms designer is the ability to select multiple elements to instantly adjust their common properties. It incredibly speeds up the design process.

In JotForm, some settings are hidden in menus, so you won’t know they exist until you drill down through random menus. In Plumsail Forms designer, everything is more transparent; there are no hidden settings. General form settings and sharing options are all in one place.

If you still have questions, you will find detailed and clear instructions in the documentation, or you can contact support team, that responds within 24 hours.

Complex layouts

One of the primary advantages Plumsail Forms has over JotForm is grids. By default, every form already has a grid. It allows you to place fields and controls side by side and decide how many columns each row has. Grid is used as a basis on every form and inside of other containers—Tab Control, Accordion, Wizard.

Also, the Wizard container is an alternative to JotForm’s Card Forms. You can create a multi-page form with a brief description on top of each step. This way users can complete form answering one question at a time, or several questions, depending on how many you need for each step.

Advanced Elements

Plumsail Forms has powerful and highly customizable elements.

Data Table control allows you to create dynamic tables for collecting repeating data, the same way as Data Grid and Spreadsheet in JotForm. It is very flexible. You can populate column values for a new row, add custom validation to the table or particular column, perform column and table calculations.

Ink Sketch control is the alternative to JotForm’s Signature element, but way more powerful. With the Ink Sketch control, you can not only collect e-signatures but also gather diagrams, schemes, and notes on an image.

With Likert Scale control, you can promptly and effectively gather valuable feedback from your customers or employees, measure the overall experience, or conduct competitive analysis.

These are just a part of the elements available in Plumsail Forms. Captcha, Masked Input, Image control, and other major elements are available in Plumsail Forms.

File upload and storage

Whenever your business needs to collect files online, create a Plumsail Form with the Attachments field. It lets users upload files such as photos, videos, documents, and more. You can store all files in your Plumsail Account or instantly upload them to Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, SharePoint, and other cloud storage apps.

The free Plumsail Forms plan gives you 100 MB of storage space. But if you need more space, you can choose one of the available paid subscriptions or contact support to purchase additional storage.

Customization & branding

Like JotForm, Plumsail Forms themes are highly customizable. You can choose one of the pre-designed themes or create a custom theme from scratch. You can change the form's primary colors and font style as well as add custom CSS.

But besides that, you can forget about creating a theme for each form. You can design a Sharing page that matches your company's branding and use it for all forms by default. Change colors, background, add hedears and logos. You can mix forms and page designs to make the form more engaging.

Share forms options

Plumsail form has two options for sharing the form: direct link and embedding form.

Sharing pages allow you to share forms directly with users - via the URL. As mentioned before, Shared Pages are highly customizable and can become a replacement for a landing page. Even on a free plan, you can customize the domain for your forms. For instance, change it to awesome.plumsail.io.

Also, embedding a Plumsail form into any website or platform is super easy. Copy the code snippet from the form settings and paste it into your website. Or, if you need guidance, follow a step-by-step instructions for the most popular platforms like WordPress, Wix, Tilda, Shopify, etc.

It’s worth mentioning that the free version of JotForm comes with a massive watermark at the bottom of the form and on the completion page. The free Plumsail Forms version comes with the branding too. But it is less expressive and almost unnoticeable.

100+ integrations & payment buttons

JotForm and Plumsail Forms have integrations with the most popular email marketing providers, CRMs, and over 2,000 more platforms with Zapier and Power Automate. In just a few clicks, it is possible to generate documents, create SharePoint items, add rows to Excel or Google Sheets, and save data to OneDrive, Google Drive, or Dropbox on form submission.

The difference between the platforms is payment integrations. Plumsail Forms has no built-in payment integrations but allows you to integrate payment buttons into any form using HTML code.

The primary advantage of this approach is that there are no monthly payment limits. The free JotForm plan has a limit of 10 Payment Submissions per month.

Advanced forms with JavaScript

No doubt, JotForms has many advanced form features, such as conditional logic, question logic, and many widgets that you might find useful. But if you want to design more advanced forms with custom complex logic, you may need an alternative.

Plumsail Forms is more flexible. You can easily design simple forms like contact or feedback forms. But you can also customize an element’s functionality and behavior with a little knowledge of JavaScript. For example, create a complex form with custom form validation, add RegEx to check field input, advanced calculations, payment buttons. The only limitation is your imagination. If you’re looking for inspiration, you can find examples of what you can do in Plumsail Forms templates.

Team access

If you work in a team and want all users to have access to edit forms and manage collected data, in Plumsail Forms, you can invite other users as team members to collaborate on all available Plumsail services. The team members have access to all forms and submissions but still don't have access to manage the subscription or account settings. This functionality is available on all Plumsail Forms plans, including the free plan.

JotForm also offers collaboration options for editing forms and managing submissions. But this is only available with the Enterprise plan.

Price

Both JotForm and Plumsail Forms are great form builders that offer many useful features for you and your business.

We analyzed JotForm and Plumsail Forms free plans, and it turned out that the free JotForm plan is pretty limited:

We also compared the cheapest plans, and the picture hasn't changed. The JotForm starter plan is twice as expensive as Plumsail Forms and still has many restrictions:

Try free JotForm alternative

Both form builders have their pros and cons. The fundamental difference is the price and the number of features you get for that price, especially looking at the limitations that each plan offers.

Try the JotForm alternative for free. Create a Plumsail Account, design your first form and make your final decision.