Cognito Forms vs Fillout
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
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The short answer
Editorial assessmentCognito Forms compared with Fillout
Fillout has the more modern builder and a stronger free tier, and treats submissions as a database with views and integrations into tools like Airtable and Notion. Cognito Forms goes deeper on structured data, repeating sections, document generation, and compliance, including a published HIPAA tier. Pick Fillout for modern general-purpose forms feeding a data stack; pick Cognito Forms when the form is a record with depth and regulation attached.
Choose Cognito Forms if
Small businesses, schools, nonprofits, and practices whose forms carry structured data rather than flat answers, especially order forms with variable line items, registrations with variable party sizes, and regulated intake that needs HIPAA on a published price without a sales call.
Choose Fillout if
Startups and small operations teams that want a form to actually do something: route to an owner, write into Airtable or Notion, generate a document, book a meeting. Especially strong for teams of five to fifty, since seats are unlimited on every plan and only the response count is billed.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Cognito Forms | Fillout |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Forms | Forms |
| Starting price | $0 (Individual), then $19 per month billed annually for Pro ($24 month-to-month) | $15/mo (Starter, billed monthly; $180/yr annually) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Per-account monthly subscription metered on entries per month, with unlimited forms at every tier, a fixed number of users per tier, a storage allowance, and a platform fee on collected payments that declines to zero at the Team tier. | Response-metered subscription across five tiers (Free, Starter, Pro, Business, Enterprise) with unlimited seats and unlimited forms on every plan; annual billing saves roughly 20 percent. |
| Free plan | Individual includes unlimited forms, 100 entries a month, 1 user, 100 MB of storage, conditional logic, calculations, and payment collection, with Cognito Forms branding and a 2 percent fee on transactions. | 1,000 responses per month with unlimited forms and unlimited seats, including multi-page forms, embedding, conditional logic, calculations, file uploads, pre-fill, payment collection, and workflows. |
| Free trial | No fixed-length trial; the free Individual plan is the evaluation path and paid features can be trialled inside the product | No time-limited trial needed; the free plan is permanent at 1,000 responses per month |
| Best for | Small businesses, schools, nonprofits, and practices whose forms carry structured data rather than flat answers, especially order forms with variable line items, registrations with variable party sizes, and regulated intake that needs HIPAA on a published price without a sales call. | Startups and small operations teams that want a form to actually do something: route to an owner, write into Airtable or Notion, generate a document, book a meeting. Especially strong for teams of five to fifty, since seats are unlimited on every plan and only the response count is billed. |
| Setup time | Half an hour for a straightforward form. A structured order or registration form with repeating sections, calculations, and a workflow is a half-day exercise, most of it deciding how the data should be shaped. | A basic form is a same-hour job. A routed workflow that writes into Airtable, generates a PDF, and books a meeting is realistically a half day to a day of configuration and testing. |
| Learning curve | Moderate and worth it. Repeating sections and the calculation syntax take a little study, and they are exactly the features that make the tool worth using, so buyers who never learn them get a mediocre form builder instead of a good one. | Low for form building, moderate for workflows. The concepts that take longest to internalize are pre-fill versus pre-fetch and how login forms scope a respondent to their own record. |
| Platforms | Web app, Responsive hosted forms, Inline and popup embeds, Client portal for respondents | Web app, Embeds (popup, slider, side tab, full screen), Hosted links and QR codes, Custom domains (Business and up) |
| Compliance | HIPAA on the Enterprise plan, GDPR, CCPA, ADA accessibility compliance, PCI handling through connected payment processors | SOC 2 Type II, 256-bit AES encryption at rest, CAPTCHA and spam protection on public forms |
| Founded | 2013 | 2022 |
| Headquarters | Columbia, South Carolina, United States | United States (operating as Restly, Inc.); public trackers list Chicago, Illinois |
| Ownership | Acquired by Inverness Graham in May 2025; bootstrapped and independently owned before that | Venture-backed (angel-led seed) |
Strengths and limitations
Cognito Forms
Strengths
- Repeating sections with calculations across them, which makes variable-length forms straightforward where every flat form builder makes them awkward.
- HIPAA on a published $129-a-month annual price with unlimited entries, purchased self-serve, undercutting every other vendor here that offers HIPAA at all.
- A free plan that removes volume and branding rather than capability: logic, calculations, repeating sections, and payments are all included.
- Multiple users included from the $19 Pro tier upward, in contrast to Jotform whose self-serve plans are all single-user.
Limitations
- The 2 percent and 1 percent platform fees on payments taken through the free and Pro plans are easy to overlook and can exceed the subscription cost outright.
- The form output is functional rather than beautiful; this is not a tool you choose for design.
- The native integration catalogue is small compared with Jotform or Typeform, with Zapier and Power Automate doing much of the work.
- No survey research capability at all: no crosstabs, no weighting, no significance testing, no respondent panel.
Fillout
Strengths
- Workflow and routing depth well beyond a normal form builder: post-submission automation, record updates, PDF generation, and scheduling in one flow.
- Unlimited seats and unlimited forms on every plan including free, which makes it the cheapest option in the category for teams with many form owners.
- Login forms and pre-fetch let respondents authenticate and edit their own submissions, a capability most rivals in this price band simply do not have.
- SOC 2 Type II and published encryption details make it the easiest of these five to get through a vendor security review.
Limitations
- Responses are metered on every tier below Business, which is a real cost disadvantage against Tally and Youform for public, high-volume forms.
- Form analytics and partial submissions are locked to the 75-dollar Business tier, which feels late given both are table stakes elsewhere.
- No in-app or behavior-triggered survey targeting; Fillout collects, it does not run product research inside your application.
- Cloud-only with no self-hosting or open-source option, so data-sovereignty-driven buyers have to look at Formbricks instead.
Pricing compared
Cognito Forms
Per-account monthly subscription metered on entries per month, with unlimited forms at every tier, a fixed number of users per tier, a storage allowance, and a platform fee on collected payments that declines to zero at the Team tier.
- Individual$0
- Pro$19
- Team$39
- Enterprise$129
Cognito Forms is one of the two or three best value buys in this category, and Team at $468 a year is the standout. Ten thousand entries a month, five users plus guests, workflow and approvals, a client portal, document generation, e-signature, and zero platform fee on payments is a package that Formstack charges three thousand dollars a year for and Typeform cannot assemble at any self-serve price. Enterprise at $1,548 a year for unlimited entries with HIPAA, SSO, and folder permissions undercuts every competitor that offers HIPAA at all. The one thing to watch is the transaction fee on the lower tiers, which is a real cost dressed as a cheap plan, and which is designed to move payment-taking customers up to Team. Understand that and the pricing is fair; ignore it and the free plan quietly bills you.
Fillout
Response-metered subscription across five tiers (Free, Starter, Pro, Business, Enterprise) with unlimited seats and unlimited forms on every plan; annual billing saves roughly 20 percent.
- Free$0
- Starter$15
- Pro$40
- Business$75
- EnterpriseCustom
Fillout is priced for teams, not individuals. Because seats are unlimited on every tier, a twenty-person company collecting 4,000 responses a month pays 40 dollars, which no per-seat competitor comes close to matching, and Paperform would charge 99 dollars plus per-user fees for a comparable setup. The weakness is the opposite case: a solo founder whose single form draws 8,000 responses jumps from 40 dollars to 75 while Tally and Youform stay at zero. The Business tier is also where the value judgment gets awkward, because analytics and partial submissions being gated there means the jump from Pro to Business is often about features rather than volume. Buy Fillout for the workflows, the integrations, and the SOC 2 report; do not buy it to save money on a simple form.
Editorial verdict on each
Cognito Forms
Cognito Forms is the best structured form builder in this category and one of the best values in it. Repeating sections with calculations across them solve a problem every flat form builder handles badly, the free plan keeps all the capability and limits only volume, multiple users are included from $19 a month, and Enterprise at $129 a month billed annually is the cheapest published route to HIPAA with unlimited entries anywhere in this market. Team at $468 a year, with workflow, a client portal, document generation, and no platform fee on payments, is the plan most small businesses should be looking at. Watch two things: the 2 percent and 1 percent transaction fees on the lower tiers, which are a real cost that can exceed the subscription, and the 2025 private equity acquisition, which has not yet changed anything but changes who the pricing ultimately answers to.
Read the full Cognito Forms profileFillout
MomentumFillout is the most capable form platform in this group and the one that most deserves to be called a platform. Workflows, native database integrations, login forms, PDF generation, and scheduling combine into something closer to a lightweight operations tool than a questionnaire builder, and the unlimited-seat pricing makes it genuinely cheap for a team where many people own forms. Two things should give buyers pause: the response meter, which is a straight loss against Tally and Youform for public high-volume forms, and the decision to hold analytics and partial submissions until the 75-dollar tier. Buy it for the workflows and the SOC 2 report, not to save money on a contact form.
Read the full Fillout profileCognito Forms profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Fillout last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.
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Frequently asked questions
6 questionsWhat is the difference between Cognito Forms and Fillout?
Fillout has the more modern builder and a stronger free tier, and treats submissions as a database with views and integrations into tools like Airtable and Notion. Cognito Forms goes deeper on structured data, repeating sections, document generation, and compliance, including a published HIPAA tier. Pick Fillout for modern general-purpose forms feeding a data stack; pick Cognito Forms when the form is a record with depth and regulation attached.
Is Cognito Forms or Fillout cheaper?
Cognito Forms starts at $0 (Individual), then $19 per month billed annually for Pro ($24 month-to-month). Fillout starts at $15/mo (Starter, billed monthly; $180/yr annually) (free plan available). The billing models differ, so the entry price is rarely the whole cost. Cognito Forms pricing model: Per-account monthly subscription metered on entries per month, with unlimited forms at every tier, a fixed number of users per tier, a storage allowance, and a platform fee on collected payments that declines to zero at the Team tier. Fillout pricing model: Response-metered subscription across five tiers (Free, Starter, Pro, Business, Enterprise) with unlimited seats and unlimited forms on every plan; annual billing saves roughly 20 percent.
Does Cognito Forms or Fillout have a free plan?
Cognito Forms has a free plan. Individual includes unlimited forms, 100 entries a month, 1 user, 100 MB of storage, conditional logic, calculations, and payment collection, with Cognito Forms branding and a 2 percent fee on transactions. Trial terms: No fixed-length trial; the free Individual plan is the evaluation path and paid features can be trialled inside the product. Fillout has a free plan. 1,000 responses per month with unlimited forms and unlimited seats, including multi-page forms, embedding, conditional logic, calculations, file uploads, pre-fill, payment collection, and workflows. Trial terms: No time-limited trial needed; the free plan is permanent at 1,000 responses per month.
Who should choose Cognito Forms?
Small businesses, schools, nonprofits, and practices whose forms carry structured data rather than flat answers, especially order forms with variable line items, registrations with variable party sizes, and regulated intake that needs HIPAA on a published price without a sales call.
Who should choose Fillout?
Startups and small operations teams that want a form to actually do something: route to an owner, write into Airtable or Notion, generate a document, book a meeting. Especially strong for teams of five to fifty, since seats are unlimited on every plan and only the response count is billed.
What are the best alternatives to Cognito Forms and Fillout?
SaaSTracker profiles 23 products in Forms & Surveys. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to Typeform (Category Leader), Tally (Best Value), Formbricks (Innovation). Every profile is compiled from primary sources, so a shortlist can be built from pricing, limitations, and fit rather than from star ratings.
