Formstack 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 assessedFormstack compared with Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms is a WordPress plugin from $59 a year with unlimited forms and submissions on your own hosting and add-ons for signatures, partial entries, and payments. Formstack is hosted, supported software with document generation and Salesforce depth. If you run WordPress and can own the infrastructure, Gravity Forms does most of this for one twentieth of the price; if you need a vendor accountable for uptime and compliance, Formstack is the grown-up option.
Gravity Forms compared with Formstack
Formstack charges $996 a year for 25 forms with 1,000 submissions each and one builder user; Gravity Forms charges $59 a year for unlimited forms and unlimited submissions on one site. What Formstack adds is hosted infrastructure, document generation, bundled e-signature, approval routing, and native Salesforce operation. If you are a Salesforce shop or need generated documents with a vendor accountable for them, pay Formstack. Otherwise the price difference is difficult to justify.
Choose Formstack if
Operations, HR, finance, and compliance teams at small and mid-sized organizations that need many moderate-volume forms feeding approvals, generated documents, and signatures, and especially Salesforce-centred businesses that want forms built natively inside the org.
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 | Formstack | Gravity Forms |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Forms | Forms |
| Starting price | $83 per month billed annually ($996 a year) for the Forms plan (14 days trial) | $59 per year at renewal for the Basic licence, one site (free trial) |
| Pricing model | Per-account annual or monthly subscription with submissions metered per form rather than per account, a fixed number of builder users, and a pooled storage allowance. Compliance features are add-ons. | 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 | No | No |
| Free trial | 14 days, no credit card required | No trial version; a hosted online demo is available, along with a published refund policy |
| Best for | Operations, HR, finance, and compliance teams at small and mid-sized organizations that need many moderate-volume forms feeding approvals, generated documents, and signatures, and especially Salesforce-centred businesses that want forms built natively inside the org. | 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 | A single form takes under an hour. A full Suite workflow with approval routing, a merged document template, and a signature step is a multi-day project, and the Salesforce-native edition should be scoped as a proper implementation rather than an afternoon. | 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. The form builder is straightforward, but document templating and approval routing require thinking through the process before configuring it, and the Salesforce edition assumes someone who understands the org's object model. | 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, Hosted forms and embeds, Salesforce-native application, Experience Cloud components | Self-hosted WordPress plugin, Any hosting environment meeting WordPress requirements, Forms rendered inside your own site and theme |
| Compliance | HIPAA available as a purchasable add-on, PCI-oriented payment handling via processor integrations, GDPR data processing terms, Salesforce Shield compatibility in the Salesforce edition | 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 | 2006 | 2008 |
| Headquarters | Fishers, Indiana, United States | United States, with a fully distributed team |
| Ownership | Privately held, growth-equity backed by Silversmith Capital Partners and PSG; parent entity rebranded to Intellistack in 2025 | Privately held by Rocketgenius, Inc.; independent and never venture-backed |
Strengths and limitations
Formstack
Strengths
- Per-form submission metering suits organizations with many moderate-volume forms far better than the account-wide meters used by the rest of the category.
- Forms, document generation, e-signature, and approval routing in one subscription replaces three or four separate vendors.
- Unlimited e-signatures with no per-envelope fee on the Suite plan, which is a direct saving against per-document signature pricing.
- The deepest Salesforce integration in this category: native forms inside the org, dynamic prefill, progressive data capture, Experience Cloud, and Shield compatibility.
Limitations
- No free plan of any kind, only a 14-day trial, in a category where several credible competitors give away unlimited responses.
- The entry plan includes a single builder user, so any team collaboration means paying for extra seats or moving to Suite.
- API access is presented as an Enterprise feature rather than being included on paid self-serve plans.
- The per-form cap is punishing for a single high-traffic form, which is the most common marketing use case.
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
Formstack
Per-account annual or monthly subscription with submissions metered per form rather than per account, a fixed number of builder users, and a pooled storage allowance. Compliance features are add-ons.
- Forms$83
- Suite$250
- Salesforce SolutionsCustom
- EnterpriseCustom
Formstack is poor value as a form builder and reasonable value as a small workflow platform. Paying $996 a year for 25 forms and one builder user makes no sense next to Jotform's $468 Silver tier or Tally's free plan if all you need is capture. It starts to make sense at the Suite level, where $3,000 a year buys forms, unlimited e-signature, and automated document generation that would otherwise be a form subscription plus a signature vendor plus a merge tool. The per-form meter is a real advantage for organizations with a wide, shallow portfolio of forms and a real penalty for anyone with one popular form. Salesforce-native operation is the strongest single reason to pay the premium, and if you are not a Salesforce shop it is worth asking honestly whether you are buying the thing that justifies the price.
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
Formstack
Formstack is not competing for the buyer who wants a nice form, and it prices accordingly. What it sells is the whole chain from capture to approval to generated document to signature, with the strongest Salesforce integration in the category and a per-form submission model that fits an operations portfolio far better than the account-wide meters everyone else uses. If you are a Salesforce shop, or you are currently paying separately for a form tool, a merge tool, and a per-envelope signature vendor, the Suite at $3,000 a year is a rational consolidation. If you just need forms with logic and payments, you are looking at one of the most expensive entry prices in this market for something Jotform or Cognito Forms does for a third of the money, and you should also weigh the 2023 layoffs and the Intellistack rebrand before you commit a core process to it.
Read the full Formstack 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 profileFormstack 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.