Cognito Forms vs Gravity Forms
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Both sides assessedCognito Forms compared with Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms is a $59-a-year WordPress plugin with unlimited entries on your own hosting and no platform fee on payments; Cognito Forms is hosted software with entry meters and multi-user accounts. If you already run WordPress and can own the infrastructure, Gravity Forms is far cheaper. If you want a hosted product with HIPAA, workflow, a client portal, and somebody accountable for uptime, Cognito Forms is the better answer at a still reasonable price.
Gravity Forms compared with Cognito Forms
Cognito Forms is hosted, has a genuinely usable free tier, and does repeating sections, calculations, and workflow better than most, with HIPAA on its $174 Enterprise plan. Gravity Forms costs a fraction of that annually but only exists inside WordPress. Choose Cognito Forms for a hosted tool with real structure and a compliance path; choose Gravity Forms when the site is already WordPress and volume economics dominate the decision.
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 Gravity Forms if
Businesses and agencies already running self-hosted WordPress with reliable hosting, who want unlimited forms and unlimited submissions at a flat annual price, full ownership of the data, and a plugin their developer can extend without permission.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Cognito Forms | Gravity Forms |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Forms | Forms |
| Starting price | $0 (Individual), then $19 per month billed annually for Pro ($24 month-to-month) (free plan available) | $59 per year at renewal for the Basic licence, one site (free trial) |
| 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. | Annual software licence per number of sites, not a subscription to a hosted service. Unlimited forms and unlimited entries at every tier; the tier determines how many sites you may activate and which add-ons you receive. |
| 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. | No |
| Free trial | No fixed-length trial; the free Individual plan is the evaluation path and paid features can be trialled inside the product | No trial version; a hosted online demo is available, along with a published refund policy |
| 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. | Businesses and agencies already running self-hosted WordPress with reliable hosting, who want unlimited forms and unlimited submissions at a flat annual price, full ownership of the data, and a plugin their developer can extend without permission. |
| 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. | Fifteen minutes to install, licence, and publish a first form on an existing WordPress site. Add an hour or two to configure a transactional email service, which is the step most people skip and then regret when notifications stop arriving. |
| 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 anyone comfortable in the WordPress admin. The conditional logic and calculation systems reward some study, and the hook system is developer territory rather than something a marketer will touch. |
| Platforms | Web app, Responsive hosted forms, Inline and popup embeds, Client portal for respondents | Self-hosted WordPress plugin, Any hosting environment meeting WordPress requirements, Forms rendered inside your own site and theme |
| Compliance | HIPAA on the Enterprise plan, GDPR, CCPA, ADA accessibility compliance, PCI handling through connected payment processors | GDPR tooling including consent fields, retention settings, and WordPress data export and erasure integration, PCI handled through the payment processor's hosted fields, WCAG 2.0 AA compliant form output |
| Founded | 2013 | 2008 |
| Headquarters | Columbia, South Carolina, United States | United States, with a fully distributed team |
| Ownership | Acquired by Inverness Graham in May 2025; bootstrapped and independently owned before that | Privately held by Rocketgenius, Inc.; independent and never venture-backed |
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.
Gravity Forms
Strengths
- No response metering of any kind, so the cost is identical at any volume and there is no upgrade trigger, overage, or pause behavior to plan around.
- Elite at $259 a year covers unlimited sites with every add-on, which is unbeatable arithmetic for agencies and multi-site businesses.
- Complete data ownership: entries live in your own MySQL database and files on your own storage, with direct database access on top of CSV export.
- Public commitment to WCAG 2.0 AA compliant form output, which almost nobody else in this category documents.
Limitations
- Requires self-hosted WordPress; there is no standalone hosted option, so it is simply unavailable to businesses on Squarespace, Webflow, Shopify, or a hosted WordPress.com plan without plugin support.
- You inherit uptime, backups, patching, spam defence, and email deliverability, and form notifications sent through default WordPress mail routinely land in spam unless you configure a transactional email service.
- No free version and no trial, only a demo, which makes evaluation harder than for any hosted competitor.
- No business associate agreement and no vendor HIPAA programme, so regulated healthcare use is entirely your own architecture and risk.
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.
Gravity Forms
Annual software licence per number of sites, not a subscription to a hosted service. Unlimited forms and unlimited entries at every tier; the tier determines how many sites you may activate and which add-ons you receive.
- Basic$59
- Pro$159
- Elite$259
On pure capability per dollar nothing in this category is close. Elite at $259 a year delivers unlimited sites, unlimited entries, conditional logic, calculations, payments with no commission, partial entries, e-signature, surveys, quizzes, conversational forms, and a REST API, against hosted competitors charging $1,000 to $3,000 a year for a fraction of that with a submission meter attached. The honest counterweight is that the price excludes the infrastructure and the labour, and those are not free. If you already run WordPress on hosting you trust, Gravity Forms is close to an automatic buy. If adopting it means becoming a systems administrator, the hosted vendors are charging you for something real and you should pay them.
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 profileGravity Forms
Gravity Forms is the cheapest serious form platform in this category by a wide margin, and the comparison is not really about features: at $59 a year for unlimited submissions on one site, or $259 for unlimited sites with every add-on, it prices the hosted vendors' entire business model as a service charge. Everything the category argues about, response caps, overage behavior, storage allowances, branding removal fees, data residency, complete export, simply does not apply when the database is yours. The condition is real and non-negotiable: you must already run self-hosted WordPress and be willing to own hosting, backups, spam, patching, and email deliverability. If that is true, buy it and stop shopping. If it is not, the hosted vendors are charging you for something genuinely valuable, and you should not pretend otherwise to save nine hundred dollars.
Read the full Gravity Forms profileCognito Forms profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Gravity Forms last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.