Gravity Forms vs Paperform
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
Editorial assessmentGravity Forms compared with Paperform
Paperform sells a beautiful document-style editor and a hosted experience aimed at small businesses who want the form to look designed. Gravity Forms sells capability and ownership inside a site you maintain yourself. If the form is a customer-facing brand surface and nobody on the team wants to touch hosting, Paperform. If the form is functional and the site is already WordPress, Gravity Forms wins on cost by an order of magnitude.
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 Paperform if
Small and mid-sized businesses that sell through their forms: agencies, consultancies, event organizers, clinics, and course sellers who need quoting, booking, payments, and signatures in one designed page, and who value the visual result enough to pay for it.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Gravity Forms | Paperform |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Forms | Forms |
| Starting price | $59 per year at renewal for the Basic licence, one site (free trial) | $24/mo (Essentials, billed monthly; $288/yr) (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. | Tiered subscription metered on annual submission quotas with published overage packs, plus per-user charges above the included seats; payment and appointment submissions are counted separately on lower tiers. |
| Free plan | No | Free forever but token: unlimited forms with only 30 submissions per month, 5 payment submissions, 5 appointment submissions, 1 user, and 100 MB storage. |
| Free trial | No trial version; a hosted online demo is available, along with a published refund policy | 7 days, no credit card required, with unrestricted access to paid features |
| 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 and mid-sized businesses that sell through their forms: agencies, consultancies, event organizers, clinics, and course sellers who need quoting, booking, payments, and signatures in one designed page, and who value the visual result enough to pay for it. |
| 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. | An hour or two for a designed form from a template. A full quote-to-book-to-pay flow with calculations, availability, and a Papersign contract is a day or more of setup and testing. |
| 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 editor is approachable but the calculation and pricing engine is the deepest in this group, and getting discount logic, tax, and conditional pricing right takes real thought. |
| Platforms | Self-hosted WordPress plugin, Any hosting environment meeting WordPress requirements, Forms rendered inside your own site and theme | Web app, Standalone hosted pages, Embeds, Custom domains (Pro and up), Papersign |
| 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 | SSO (SAML) on the Business tier, Payments processed through integrated payment providers rather than held by Paperform |
| Founded | 2008 | 2016 |
| Headquarters | United States, with a fully distributed team | Sydney, Australia |
| Ownership | Privately held by Rocketgenius, Inc.; independent and never venture-backed | Bootstrapped |
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.
Paperform
Strengths
- The best-looking output in the category without design work: forms are pages, with real copy, imagery, and layout rather than a hosted questionnaire.
- Genuine commerce depth: live pricing calculations, deposits, subscriptions, and appointment booking built in rather than bolted on via integrations.
- Papersign extends the workflow to signed contracts generated from submission data, which no other product in this group offers natively.
- 30,000-plus templates and 2,000-plus app connections mean most small-business use cases start from something rather than nothing.
Limitations
- The free plan is effectively a trial at 30 submissions a month, the weakest free offering among these five and a poor fit for the startup buyer who wants to prove value first.
- Per-seat pricing above 3 users is out of step with the category, where Tally, Fillout, and Formbricks Pro all include unlimited or generous team access.
- Annual submission quotas with separate payment and appointment meters make the true cost harder to predict than a simple monthly response count.
- API and webhook access do not exist below the 49-dollar Pro tier, which blocks developer workflows on the cheaper plans.
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.
Paperform
Tiered subscription metered on annual submission quotas with published overage packs, plus per-user charges above the included seats; payment and appointment submissions are counted separately on lower tiers.
- Free$0
- Essentials$24
- Pro$49
- Business$99
Paperform is the most expensive of the five for a comparable amount of collection, and it justifies that only if you use the commerce chain. A business that prices, books, charges, and gets a contract signed through one page is replacing a form tool, a scheduling tool, and part of a proposal tool, and 49 dollars a month is a bargain in that light. A team that just needs forms is paying two to three times Tally's flat rate for a better-looking result and a seat cap. The specific things to model before signing are the annual submission ceiling for your tier, the separate payment and appointment meters, and the seat count, because those three, not the headline price, are what move Paperform customers up a plan.
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 profilePaperform
Paperform is the right answer to a specific question: how does a small business sell something through a form that looks like it belongs to the brand? The pricing calculations, deposits, subscriptions, bookings, and Papersign contracts add up to a commerce chain that no other product in this category assembles natively, and the design output is the best here. It is also the most expensive and the most restrictive on seats and quotas, with a free plan that does not deserve the name. If you are collecting responses, Tally or Youform will do it for free and Fillout will route them better. If you are quoting, booking, charging, and getting signatures, Paperform earns its 49 dollars.
Read the full Paperform profileGravity Forms profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Paperform last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.