Gravity Forms vs Jotform
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 assessedGravity Forms compared with Jotform
Jotform from $39 a month is hosted, supported, HIPAA-capable on a published tier, and includes an accessibility checker, tables, and approvals. Gravity Forms is $59 a year, unmetered, and yours. The deciding question is not features but responsibility: buy Jotform if you want someone else on the hook for uptime and compliance, and Gravity Forms if you already run WordPress competently and would rather keep the money and the data.
Jotform compared with Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms is a WordPress plugin you own outright from $59 a year with unlimited forms and submissions on your own hosting; Jotform is hosted software with submission meters starting at $39 a month. If you already run WordPress and are comfortable owning uptime, spam, and storage, Gravity Forms is dramatically cheaper. If you want HIPAA, accessibility checking, approvals, and support without maintaining anything, Jotform is the safer buy.
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.
Choose Jotform if
Small businesses and practices that need forms to do real operational work, collecting payments, routing approvals, generating PDFs, capturing signatures, and that value HIPAA, EU hosting, and documented accessibility being available on a published price rather than through procurement.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Gravity Forms | Jotform |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Forms | Forms |
| Starting price | $59 per year at renewal for the Basic licence, one site (free trial) | $0 (Starter), then $39 per month for Bronze ($408 a year billed annually) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | 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. | Per-account monthly subscription metered on monthly submissions and cumulative stored submissions, with secondary caps on forms, form views, fields, payment submissions, signed documents, and upload storage. Self-serve tiers are single-user. |
| Free plan | No | Starter includes 5 active forms, 100 monthly submissions, 500 total stored submissions, 10,000 monthly form views, 100 fields per form, 10 payment submissions, 10 signed documents, and 100 MB of upload space, with Jotform branding. |
| Free trial | No trial version; a hosted online demo is available, along with a published refund policy | No separate trial; the free Starter plan is the evaluation path and paid features can be tested before committing |
| Best for | 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. | Small businesses and practices that need forms to do real operational work, collecting payments, routing approvals, generating PDFs, capturing signatures, and that value HIPAA, EU hosting, and documented accessibility being available on a published price rather than through procurement. |
| Setup time | 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. | A form is live in fifteen minutes from a template. Building a full workflow with approvals, a generated PDF, and a payment gateway is more like a day, mostly spent deciding how the process should work rather than fighting the tool. |
| Learning curve | 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. | Moderate. The builder is approachable but the platform is wide, and knowing which of Tables, Approvals, Apps, Sign, and Report Builder to use for a given problem takes some exploration. The conditional logic panel is powerful and slightly unforgiving once you have a dozen rules. |
| Platforms | Self-hosted WordPress plugin, Any hosting environment meeting WordPress requirements, Forms rendered inside your own site and theme | Web app, iOS and Android apps, Jotform Apps for staff-facing mini applications, Inline iframe, script, popup, and lightbox embeds, QR codes |
| Compliance | 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 | HIPAA with a business associate agreement (Gold and Enterprise), GDPR with a data processing agreement, CCPA, Section 508 and WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA form checking, PCI handling via connected payment gateways |
| Founded | 2008 | 2006 |
| Headquarters | United States, with a fully distributed team | San Francisco, California, with major operations in Ankara, Turkey |
| Ownership | Privately held by Rocketgenius, Inc.; independent and never venture-backed | Bootstrapped and founder-owned; no outside funding raised |
Strengths and limitations
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.
Jotform
Strengths
- HIPAA with a business associate agreement on a published $129 tier, which no other mainstream form builder offers without a sales process at anything like that price.
- A built-in Section 508 and WCAG 2.1 accessibility checker in the builder, addressing a requirement almost every competitor ignores entirely.
- EU data residency in Frankfurt available from account settings rather than through a custom contract.
- Genuinely broad scope: tables, approvals, e-signature, PDF generation, apps, and a store builder, replacing several point subscriptions.
Limitations
- Every self-serve tier is single-user; a two-person team cannot both administer forms without going to Enterprise, which is the single most frustrating gap in the lineup.
- The cumulative stored-submission cap is easy to miss at purchase and forces either deletion of history or an upgrade unrelated to current volume.
- The interface carries twenty years of accumulated features and options, and new users routinely describe it as cluttered next to a modern block editor.
- Form output looks conventional; Jotform will not win a design comparison against Typeform, Paperform, or Tally without a lot of custom CSS.
Pricing compared
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.
Jotform
Per-account monthly subscription metered on monthly submissions and cumulative stored submissions, with secondary caps on forms, form views, fields, payment submissions, signed documents, and upload storage. Self-serve tiers are single-user.
- Starter$0
- Bronze$39
- Silver$49
- Gold$129
- EnterpriseCustom
Jotform is the best capability-per-dollar buy in this category for a business that needs forms to do work rather than look good. Silver at $468 a year covers 2,500 submissions a month plus tables, approvals, e-signature, PDF generation, payments through your own gateway, and an app builder, which would cost several separate subscriptions elsewhere. Gold at $1,188 a year is the cheapest published route to HIPAA in this whole category by a wide margin. The weaknesses in the model are the cumulative storage cap, which is a slow-burning upgrade trigger most buyers do not model, and the single-user restriction, which turns an otherwise excellent small-business tool into an Enterprise conversation the moment a second person needs admin access.
Editorial verdict on each
Gravity 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 profileJotform
Jotform is the workhorse of this category and the best value in it for a small business that needs forms to actually do something. Twenty years of bootstrapped development have produced a platform that captures the submission, stores it as data, routes it for approval, generates the document, takes the payment through your own gateway, and checks the rendered form for accessibility failures, all on a published price. HIPAA at $129 a month self-serve is a genuine market anomaly and reason enough for a small clinic to stop shopping. The two things to check before buying are the cumulative stored-submission cap, which quietly forces upgrades unrelated to your monthly volume, and the single-user restriction on every self-serve tier, which is the wall a growing team hits first. If neither of those blocks you, nothing else here delivers as much for the money.
Read the full Jotform profileGravity Forms profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Jotform last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.