Jotform (opens in new tab) is a powerful, yet simple online form builder (opens in new tab) that prioritizes ease of use and collaboration. The software allows multiple people to edit a form simultaneously. Better yet, the design process is flexible enough to let you fully customize your surveys, and templates make it easy to get started. While Jotform isn’t particularly cheap, it is less expensive than some of its close competitors.
Is Jotform right for your data collection needs? Let’s take a closer look at this form builder to find out.
- You can sign up to Jotform here (opens in new tab).
Plans and Pricing
Jotform offers a very attractive free plan that includes 5 forms, 100 submissions per month, and 10 payments per month. For individuals and small businesses, that might be all you need. The only real downside is that your surveys will come with Jotform branding rather than your own custom logo.
The Bronze plan, which costs $19 per month, dramatically increases your capacity. You get up to 25 forms and 1,000 submissions per month, as well as 10 GB of content space and unlimited storage for response collection. This plan also removes the Jotform branding from all of your forms.
The Silver plan, at $39 per month, offers 100 forms and 10,000 submissions per month. This plan caters to healthcare businesses by securing form responses to comply with HIPAA regulations. The Gold plan, for $99 per month, goes one step further by allowing you to create an unlimited number of forms.
Features
Jotform offers a number of useful tools to help you build surveys and organize the data you collect.
Templates and Themes
Jotform isn’t the only form builder to offer survey templates, but the sheer number of options to choose from is quite impressive. There are more than 10,000 templates you can use for free. Unfortunately, this actually makes it somewhat difficult to find what you need. The template library is organized by category and searchable, but there’s no way to favorite surveys that you’ve used in the past.
Confusingly, Jotform themes are different from templates. Templates are more focused on customizing the look of your form than its content. For example, themes come with colorful backgrounds or non-standard designs. However, you can’t actually pair a theme design with questions from a form—so you have to do a fair amount of customization work either way.
Jotform has a wide range of app integrations that allow the software to work with most other business software. You can send notifications about form entries to Slack or Google, store submitted files in Dropbox, Google Drive, or Box, or accept payments through PayPal or Square. There are close to 200 apps available, so chances are good you’ll find what you need in Jotform.
Widgets are primarily designed to add functionality to your forms. For example, there are widgets to let respondents e-sign forms, take photos with their webcam, or embed files, images, and videos. The selection of widgets is pretty large, but it’s well-organized and searchable so you can find what you need.
One of the unique things about Jotform is that it’s easy to add collaborators to a form. Friends and coworkers just need a shareable link to access the form, rather than their own Jotform accounts. Simultaneous editing is a huge advantage for teams, since different individuals can be responsible for different aspects of a form or edit the wording of specific questions.
Interface and In Use
Jotform’s website isn’t all that organized, but don’t let that distract you from how easy this platform is to use. You get access to a straightforward dashboard, from which you can manage existing forms or create a new one.
When you go to create a new form, you can choose whether you prefer having all your questions on a single page or having one question per slide. You then get to pick a theme or template (you can change this later) before the form editor is launched.
The form editor is a drag-and-drop designer that’s extremely intuitive. The available elements cover all the basics, like short answer and multiple choice responses, and it’s easy to edit their content according to what data you need. The fact that payment integrations and widgets are separate from the main content elements is also a nice touch for ease of use.
While there are quite a few settings and theme customization options, the organization of the form editor is such that it doesn’t feel overwhelming. On the whole, the process of creating a survey from scratch took just a few minutes, and it was simple to add custom branding and give it a unique look. Of course, it’s easy to preview your form before releasing it into the world.
Support
Jotform offers 24/7 support via email, which is pretty nice. However, the website’s poor organization makes it hard to answer questions for yourself. There’s a blog, tutorial videos, a user forum, and a frequently asked questions page, but they’re far from easy to navigate and the search functions are limited.
The competition
Jotform has done a nice job of carving out a niche for itself, but it does lack a few key features. The most notable missing function is the ability to customize form questions based on a respondent’s previous answers. This is available in Typeform, although you’ll pay a lot more for that software. For simple forms with less customization, Google Forms is significantly cheaper than Jotform and comes bundled with the entire G Suite productivity ecosystem.
Final verdict
Jotform is an extremely capable form builder with a lot to like. The drag-and-drop form designer is incredibly easy to use and makes fast work of customizing your forms. The massive theme, app, and widget libraries are also great for building advanced forms that can handle any type of data collection. The only thing Jotform is missing is the ability to tailor surveys based on respondent’s answers, but this is more functionality than most individuals and businesses need.
- You can sign up to Jotform here (opens in new tab).
