A Comprehensive JotForm Review (2023): Everything You Need to Know

Is This Software Right for You?

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Todayโ€™s online business owner understands the importance of communicating efficiently with customers.

That said, if you spent all your time on that, youโ€™d have no chance to actually run and grow your business, right?

Thatโ€™s where form builders come in.

Regardless of what kind of organization you’re running or where it’s located, it’s likely your website will need forms. Whether itโ€™s to collect payments securely, set up contact forms, launch registration forms, or other functionalities – a form-building platform will simplify the process for you.

The result? Hopefully, youโ€™ll save yourself lots of time, energy, and money, all the while collecting data to enhance your lead generation and sales strategies.

Today, weโ€™re looking at one such online form builder: JotForm.

More specifically, we’re diving into its features, templates, integrations, customer support, pricing, and its pros and cons. Hopefully, by the end of this review, you’ll have a better idea of whether this platform meets the needs of your business.

Thatโ€™s a ton of information to get through so letโ€™s make a start!

What is JotForm.com?

jotform review

JotForm was founded in 2006 by Aytekin Tank, who said he was sick and tired of coding online form. The company’s gone from strength to strength, growing from 1 million users in 2013 to over 10 million at the time of writing.

In short, JotForm’s an online form builder used by small businesses, enterprises, education professionals, and non-profit organizations. Prominent customers include Ford, Adobe, RedBull, and Pottery Barn.

JotForm makes online form creation a breeze with its simple-to-use drag and drop editor. It’s available in 18 languages, comes with over 10,000 ready-made templates, over 100 integrations, and more than 400 widgets.

Best of all, itโ€™s free to sign up either via Google, Facebook, or with a non-Gmail email address. So you can access tons of features without having to pay a penny – but if you wish to upgrade, there are paid plans too.

Now you have an overview of what JotForm does, letโ€™s take a deeper look at JotFormโ€™s features:

JotForm’s Key Features

jotform key features

The JotForm website: www.jotform.com is thankfully incredibly user-friendly, so anyone interested in using this online tool can easily find out precisely what they’ll get for their money.

Aside from its apps and integrations, which we cover in more detail lower down, JotForm offers 13 features:

  • Widgets
  • Online Payments
  • E-Commerce
  • JotForm Approvals HIPAA Forms
  • JotForm Preview
  • JotForm Tables
  • Smart PDF Forms
  • JotForm PDF editor
  • Report Builder
  • JotForm Inbox 2.0 (a new addition)
  • Assign Forms
  • Mobile Forms
  • Online Payments
  • Secure Forms

JotForm Pricing

JotForm pricing

While the JotForm website makes a big show of how itโ€™s free to sign up and how many templates and forms are available for free, just how much is actually free? Letโ€™s take a look:

There are five different JotForm accounts:

  1. Free
  2. Bronze
  3. Silver (dubbed the ‘best value’)
  4. Gold
  5. Enterprise Level

The Free Account

Costing $0, this includes the following:

  • Access to all of JotForm’s features
  • A 5 form limit
  • 100 monthly submissions
  • 100 MB of storage
  • 1,000 monthly form views
  • Total submission storage of 500 forms
  • Unlimited report fields per form
  • 10 payment submissions

All your forms and content are JotForm-branded on this plan, and HIPAA compliance isn’t available.

The Bronze Plan

This costs $24 a month if you pay annually or $29 a month if you pay monthly. The Bronze Plan offers everything in the free plan, plus:

  • A 25 form limit
  • 1,000 monthly submissions
  • 10GB worth of storage
  • 10,000 monthly form views
  • Unlimited submission storage
  • 100 payment submissions

On this plan, your forms and content are unbranded, but HIPAA compliance isn’t available.

The Silver Plan

Billed as the best value, this plan comes in at $29 a month if you pay annually or $39 a month if you pay monthly. Here you get everything above, plus:

  • A 100 form limit
  • 10,000 monthly submissions
  • 100 GB worth of storage space
  • Unlimited monthly form views and submission storage
  • 1,000 payment submissions

Again, content is unbranded, and here, HIPAA compliance is included.

The Gold Plan

This particular plan is aimed at larger businesses or ones that plan to expand. It costs $79 a month if you pay annually or $99 a month if you pay monthly. For this, you receive everything in the previous plans, plus:

  • Unlimited forms
  • 100,000 monthly submissions
  • 1TB storage space
  • Unlimited payment subscriptions.

Thereโ€™s no JotForm branding here either, and HIPAA compliance is again included.

Finally, before we discuss the Enterprise Level plan, itโ€™s worth mentioning that if youโ€™re an educational institute or nonprofit, the plans above are discounted by 50%, which we think is a great deal! Also, you can cancel any plan you sign up for, and thereโ€™s a 30-day money-back guarantee too.

The Enterprise Level Plan

Lastly, thereโ€™s a plan for more substantial enterprises. Prices here start at $79 per user per month if you pay annually.

However, the more users you add, the cheaper it gets, so:

  • 5-49 users: $79 per user, per month
  • 50-199 users: $69 per user, per month
  • 200+ users: $59 per user, per month

As you can see, this offer is aimed at larger scale organizations that want unlimited access to all of JotFormโ€™s features plus a few add-ons. For example, multiple users, single sign-on, a dedicated server, and white labeling.

JotForm’s Pros and Cons

There’s nothing better than a quick pro-cons list when weighing up whether to purchase something for your business. That said, we’ve compiled a shortlist of where JotForm shines, and conversely, where it could use some improvement:

The Pros ๐Ÿ‘

  • You can sign up for free
  • You can submit up to 100 forms a month for free
  • Ease of use is at the forefront of JotForm’s software
  • There are staggered pricing plans to suit most business sizes and budgets
  • There are thousands of attractive and easy-to-use templates
  • There are lots of powerful integrations, including popular payment gateways
  • It’s easy to collaborate with colleagues
  • JotForm’s drag-and-drop editor is incredibly intuitive, making customization a breeze – you don’t need any coding or CSS know-how.
  • JotForm’s dashboard is easy to navigate.
  • You can use JotForm offline.

The Cons ๐Ÿ‘Ž

  • You can only create five forms on the Free plan.
  • With the Free plan, JotForm’s branding is plastered all over your forms and content.
  • Some reviewers complain that the designs/styles are a tad dated.
  • Some reviewers complain about the quality of customer support. At the time of writing, its 24/7 online customer support had an average response wait time of six hours.

Getting Started with JotForm

Just sign up to get going and access your โ€œmy formsโ€ page; itโ€™s from here you can manage everything.

As we’ve already hinted at, creating forms using this platform is simple, thanks to JotForm’s drag and drop interface and pre-designed fields.

When you start creating forms, you can either have one question per slide or all your questions on the form on one page.

Then you simply pick a template (more about these later). Once youโ€™ve done that, the drag-and-drop design editor automatically launches. You can use this to modify the form content to suit your specific needs. This intuitive tool covers all the form-building basics, such as multiple-choice responses, short answers, etc.

JotForm Widgets

jotform widgets

You can choose from literally hundreds of online form widgets to add greater depth and interest to your forms. Some popular examples include videos, maps, file uploads, and social media embeds.

JotForm‘s widgets are split into a long list of categories, including audio, drawings, video, analytics, photo, social, and calculation. You’ll find these in a column on the left-hand side of the JotForm website.

To give you a flavor of what’s on offer, hereโ€™s a pick of our favorite widgets:

Social Media: If you want website visitors to interact with you via their socials on your online forms, JotForm’s social widgets make that possible.

For instance, you can:

  • Add a Facebook-like button to your forms
  • Add social media follow buttons to your forms
  • Share Instagram moments on your forms
  • Add social media share buttons to your forms

…and more.

E-Signature: This is a handy widget if you need to collect legally binding signatures.

For example:

  • Asking someone to sign an employment contract virtually
  • Having tenants sign lease agreements
  • Onboarding employees
  • Receiving signed waivers for events that youโ€™re running

Given that 40+ countries now accept e-signatures as legally binding (including the US), this is a convenient tool to have in your form-building arsenal.

Terms and Conditions: If youโ€™re entering into a binding agreement with a person or organization, the terms and conditions widget enables website visitors to accept your legally binding terms and conditions.

You can link to your terms and conditions so that users can read and agree to them with a simple tick box. This is a surefire way to be transparent about how you’ll do business together, and consequently, protect your business.

You might also want to use this widget if youโ€™re running a competition on your website and need entrants to agree to any conditions youโ€™ve set out.

Online Payments

jotform review

Bearing in mind that in 2021 alone, it was predicted that 2.14 billion people worldwide would buy goods and services online, compared to 1.66 billion in 2016. With that in mind, we can see why itโ€™s essential for businesses to be able to receive online payments securely.

Fortunately, JotForm is PCI compliant and accepts over 30 payment gateways on the free plan alone!

JotForm offers tons of online payment features. We wonโ€™t go into them all, but here are a few things you can do:

  • Secure online payments: You can securely sell products online, receive donations, and set up recurring subscriptions. Just create a secure payment form and integrate it with one of JotFormโ€™s payment gateway integrations (we cover these lower down). Then, you’re set to go!
  • JotForm doesnโ€™t charge transaction fees for receiving online credit and debit card payments or donations through your forms. Instead, you just need to factor in any fees charged by your chosen payment processor.
  • JotForm boasts PCI DSS Level 1 compliance. This feature adds an extra layer of security to your payment forms, with data security protection via 256 bit SSL, PSD2, and CCPA. As such, you can offer customers that much-needed peace of mind when they make online payments on your website. In addition, everything is GDPR compliant, and you can encrypt your payment forms as further protection against fraud.
  • Manage your stock online: Hereโ€™s a stock control tool that makes creating a professional-looking online inventory easier. You can enter your inventory amounts and track what stock you have left. You can also automatically send low stock and out-of-stock emails to customers and define option-based stock amounts for customers.
  • Invoice generator: Instantly generate invoices that allow customers to buy now and pay later for products. This particular feature runs on JotFom’s integration with PayPal Invoicing. You have the option of automatically sending out invoices to customers who then pay for products and services via PayPal. JotForm also has a Purchase Order app you can use to send customized PDF invoices.
  • Set up subscriptions: This suits subscription-based businessesโ€”for example, companies selling digital subscription-based software, courses, membership areas, subscription boxes, etc. You can process both one-off or regularly recurring payments using JotFormโ€™s PayPal, Stripe, and Square integrations.

Automation, Productivity, and Data Management

jotform review

If you run a business that needs to approve different types of workflow such as:

  • HR aplications
  • Customer service/IT tickets
  • Job application forms

…this feature is for you.

You donโ€™t need any coding experience to use this feature. You can build the approval flow you need without any expertise in using its drag and drop interface. Then, you can either start your approval workflow from scratch, a template, or use a customized one-step approval flow – the choice is yours!

To get going with this feature, just create the form as you would usuallyโ€”for example, an employee leaver form, an annual leave request, or a job application. Then select ‘settings’ towards the top of the screen, followed by ‘approval flows’ on the left-hand sidebar. Then hit the ‘create an approval flow’ button, and follow the on-screen instructions. Then, once you’re done, and the form is submitted, it will trigger the approval process.

You can create different approval outcomes, such as Approve or Deny and add ‘form approvers’ via email address. That way, the necessary people will receive an email when they’re required to approve something. Of course, you can also customize this email to suit your needs.

You can track and manage all your approvals via email; the JotForm Mobile Forms App, JotForm Inbox 2.0, or JotForm Tables. Before we dive into the latter, itโ€™s worth highlighting that JotForm has recently introduced its inbox 2.0. This allows you to organize, search, and manage all your form submissions from one easy-to-use and view inbox. You can also collaborate with team members by sharing your inbox. By this we mean, colleagues can also access, edit, and respond to form submissions.

Moving onto JotForm Tables, JotForm likes to describe this feature as a hybrid spreadsheet – except thereโ€™s more to it than a traditional spreadsheet. It’s useful for anyone wanting to improve their businessโ€™s productivity levels.

In short, this enables you to:

  • Collate and manage data from one centralized place
  • Share it with colleagues
  • Organize data using easy-to-view column headings or categories of your choosing.

Gone are the days where you had to jump between screens and spreadsheets!

To get started, head to the My Tables page and create either a blank table, choose a template, or import a CSV or Excel file. Then, using JotForm tables, you can:

  • Process and collect responses to online forms and populate your tables with submissions data
  • Import existing data via CSV or Excel files to work with your existing data
  • Enter data manually as you go

Judging by the JotForm website, its users are big fans of this feature. With some saying itโ€™s very clear, easy to use, and that it helps…organize and edit my data, and that it saves..a lot of time.

JotForm Templates

As we’ve already hinted at, there are tons of templates on offer. In fact, there are over 10,000!

There are split into the following categories:

  • Form templates
  • Card form templates
  • Approval templates (this is new)
  • Table templates
  • PDF templates

Letโ€™s take a look at each in turn:

Form Templates

jotform review

JotForm is the largest online source of free online templates. Templates are organized across tons of categories, including order forms, booking forms, membership forms, payment forms, and more. You can either search by category or industry, making it pretty easy to find the templates you need. Industries listed include education, marketing, business, eCommerce, healthcare, and IT. It’s also worth mentioning that all these templates are available either in landscape or portrait format.

Card Form Templates

jotform review

These templates are specifically designed for smaller devices like mobile phones. They’re listed just like the traditional form templates. I.e., they’re organized into the same categories as above, and again, there are over 10,000 to choose from.

Approval Templates

jotform review

While weโ€™ve already covered the approval feature above, it’s worth putting forward that there are 110+ templates to further simplify your approval flow. Templates are, again, organized into categories, including administration, IT, finance, human resources, healthcare, marketing, sales, project management, and much more. Unfortunately, there doesnโ€™t appear to be a choice here of format (i.e., landscape, portrait, or card).

Table Templates

jotform review

Again, we’ve already discussed JotForm’s tables above. But, it’s worth mentioning there are 290+ table templates available. These are split into categories like budget sheets, attendance sheets, event planning, human resources, marketing, inventory, and much more.

PDF Templates

jotform review

There are 900+ PDF templates to choose from. You can filter your search by category or industry. Categories include invoices, tickets, agreements, contracts, receipts, and many more. Industries include real estate, HR, photography, tourism, healthcare, and business.

JotForm Integrations

jotform review

JotForm offers 100+ integrations. You can explore these using the search bar at the top of JotFormโ€™s Integrations page or filter your search by category, industry, or platform.

Categories include blogging, analytics and reporting, automation, CRM, data management, communication, social media, payment processing, and more.

Industries include advertising, ecommerce, business, marketing, and nonprofit.

While almost all available integrations are web apps, one or two are created explicitly for desktop and browser use.

Thereโ€™s also a JotForm mobile app with three integrations available. All of which are designed to make it easier to access JotForms while you’re on the go.

Recognizable integrations that we havenโ€™t already referred to include Zoom, Skype, Slack, Zapier, OneDrive, Google Sheets, Klaviyo, Campaign Monitor, WordPress, Salesforce, Google Drive, Dropbox, and MailChimp.

JotForm’s Customer Support

jotform review

If you have an issue, you can send a message to access JotForm’s 24/7 support team. Just outline your problem and upload screenshots any accompanying screenshots, and someone will get back to you in a short period of time.

In addition to that, there’s the JotForm User Guide. This covers topics such as Getting Started, Share Forms, Create Forms, Manage Forms, etc.

But, for something less extensive, thereโ€™s also a helpful FAQ on the JotForm site that includes answers to questions such as What is JotForm? Do I need coding experience (no!)How secure is my data? And more. Each answer is in text and accompanied by a short YouTube video that can be watched on the JotForm site, or you can click through to YouTube.

Thereโ€™s also a JotForm blog. Popular articles include:

  • Adding a Contact Form to Your Facebook Page
  • Setting up Email Notifications
  • How to Create Your First Web Form
  • Post-pandemic Workspace: Models, Trends and Solutions
  • Best Sprout Social alternatives

Lastly, JotForm is a big fan of videos. It has its own YouTube channel with 16k+ subscribers and tons of how-to videos and tutorials that all seem to have positive viewing figures. You can access their YouTube channel via the Support Tab on JotFormโ€™s homepage.

JotForm Review: Our Verdict

So, there you have it – our JotForm review.

Considering JotFormโ€™s features, templates, prices, and support offering, our view is that JotForm is a great tool to have in your online marketing arsenal. It certainly can make life easier for businesses and organizations looking to collect data without any headaches.

We liked the generous number of templates, widgets, plugins, and features available for free. That said, the free plan is very limited in terms of how many forms you can actually create and submit. Still, itโ€™s perfectly suitable for smaller projects.

Overall, JotForm’s a great data collection and form creation tool with an intuitive drag-and-drop form designer. This software makes it incredibly easy to build advanced forms, and you have nothing to lose by giving their free version a try.

Are you thinking of using JotForm for your business? Or, are you considering one of its competitors like Google Forms or Typeform? Either way, tell us all about it in the comment box below!

Rosie Greaves

Rosie Greaves is a professional content strategist who specializes in all things digital marketing, B2B, and lifestyle. She has over three years of experience crafting high-quality content. Check out her website Blog with Rosie for more information.

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