Are you trying to figure out which form builder between Zoho Forms vs JotForm vs WPForms is the best for your needs?
Zoho Forms and Jotform are completely web-based form builders. On the other hand, WPForms is a WordPress form builder plugin, designed specifically to assist WordPress-powered sites to make forms without having to leave the dashboard.
In this article, we’ll analyze the key similarities as well as differences between Zoho Forms, Jotform, and WPForms so you can choose the option that works the best for you.
Zoho Forms vs Jotform vs WPForms Comparison Chart
Here’s a quick head-to-head comparison of the 3 form builders:
| Zoho Forms Standard | JotForm Silver | WPForms Pro | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing | $300/ yr | $348/ yr | $399/ yr |
| Conversational form layout | ✓ | ✓ | |
| WordPress Embed Wizard | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Payment Fields | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Address autocomplete | Google Maps | Google Maps or Mapbox | |
| Phone country code autodetection | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Form Templates | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Form Limit | Unlimited | 100 | Unlimited |
| Response Limit | 25,000 per month | 10,000 per month | Unlimited |
| Storage Space | 2 GB | 100 GB | Unlimited* |
| Offline Forms | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Anti-spam |
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*WPForms has no storage limits for file uploads, but the maximum space you can use depends on your hosting plan. To get unlimited space on your hosting, we recommend that you use WPForms with Bluehost’s Plus hosting plan.
Zoho Forms vs Jotform vs WPForms: Detailed Comparison
We’ll now take a closer look at each of our 3 form builders and see how well their key features compare against each other.
Let’s begin.
In This Article
Features
Zoho Forms, Jotform, and WPForms all have many common form-building features. For instance, they’re all drag-and-drop builders with easy-to-use visual interfaces.
All of these form builders have basic fields like single line text and checkboxes as well as advanced fields like payment options and ratings.
However, there are also many differences between these form builders, and, as we’ll see, some features are unique to each.
Let’s explore the main features that each form builder has to offer, one by one.
Zoho Forms Features
Zoho Forms is a web-based form builder that has a huge variety of form fields to create just about any type of form you’d like. It’s very easy to make great-looking forms with Zoho Forms since it has tons of pre-built templates that have a refreshing, modern style.
Zoho Forms is good for both standard forms as well as surveys. However, the form builder tools for standard forms and survey forms are entirely separate, which can be a bit frustrating.
Features:
- Drag and drop builder interface
- More than 40 different types of form fields
- A great range of templates
- Conditional logic
- Save and Resume functionality
- Multi-page forms
- Data analytics
- Field validations
- Popular payment gateways
- … And more.
Jotform Features
Like Zoho Forms, Jotform is entirely web-based. It comes with a huge range of form fields and widgets that you can add to your forms, good customization options, and great integrations.
Despite the great variety of features, Jotform has some limitations. For instance, it limits the number of submissions you can allow, even with its highest premium plan.
Features:
- A decent number of form fields and a huge range of advanced widgets
- Customizable templates and themes
- Support for most major payment gateways
- Conditional logic
- Entry submission reports and statistics
- A huge number of marketing integrations
- … And more.
WPForms Features
Unlike the other 2 form builders, WPForms is a WordPress plugin. This means you need to have a WordPress site in order to use WPForms, whereas you can make forms with Jotform and Zoho Forms even if you don’t have a website.
WPForms comes packed with excellent features and the simplest interface for adding fields and customizing settings on the go. Many features are unique to WPForms, which makes it stand out from its competitors, especially if you want to maximize your lead generation potential with forms.
One of the best unique features in WPForms is Form Abandonment. It is 1 of the many WPForms addons you can install to unlock awesome extra features, like capturing emails even if the form was abandoned by your users.
Let’s take a look at this particular feature in more detail before considering other WPForms features.
WPForms Form Abandonment Addon
The WPForms Form Abandonment addon is special because this functionality is rarely offered by other form builders out there. Neither Jotform nor Zoho Forms currently support partial entry lead capturing.
With the WPForms Form Abandonment feature, you can configure your form to save leads if the phone number or email address field was filled in by the user. But if you’d prefer, you can have your forms save all abandoned entries even if email or phone wasn’t provided (this isn’t always helpful, but it can still be valuable in some cases).
The Form Abandonment capability is incredibly useful in situations where you have a long form that some users are likely to quit due to fatigue. In some cases, users might be unable to fill in a form due to technical issues on their end such as an internet disconnection.
WPForms also has an offline form mode that backs up form entries in the event of a connection issue, but that only works if the user actually decides to return to your form.
But if you have their email address or phone number from an abandoned entry, you can use your brilliant marketing skills and sales pitch to turn them into loyal customers. This is what makes WPForms’ Form Abandonment addon so valuable!
Other WPForms Features
WPForms is 1 of the most feature-rich form builder plugins for WordPress. Many of these features are bundled with the main plugin, and many others are also available as addons.
Features:
- Simple drag and drop form buildering functionality
- 1,700+ form templates covering most industries and niches
- Unlimited forms and submissions
- Conditional logic
- Entry management integrated into WordPress dashboard
- Easy payment collection with PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.Net, and Square
- Surveys and Polls
- Conversational forms
- Save and Resume functionality
- Password-protected forms
- User journey tracking on your site
- Great variety of marketing integrations
- … And lots more.
Let’s now see how forms actually look when created with Zoho Forms vs Jotform vs WPForms.
Zoho Forms vs Jotform vs WPForms: Creating Forms
All of the forms under consideration here let you build standard forms. You can create a single page form, which adds a vertical scroll as more fields are added. Or you can create multi-page forms.
We’ll create a very basic form using all 3 form builders and see how the process and result fare for each.
Creating a Simple Form With Zoho Forms
Signing up for Zoho Forms is really easy. You only need to provide some basic information to get started.
As soon as you log in, Zoho Forms takes you to your dashboard where you can instantly start making your form.
Zoho Forms gives you the option to choose a template for your form or build it from scratch. We wanted to build all forms from scratch for this tutorial so that we can see what the process is like for each form builder.
Once inside the form builder, we were able to quickly create a form with Zoho Forms’ drag-and-drop interface. All the fields we needed for this form such as Name, Email, Phone, and Address were conveniently located on the left-hand pane.
Here’s what the form builder looks like with the live preview on the right-hand side and the field blocks on the left.
Zoho Forms has all the basic and some of the advanced files you need to create most forms without any problems.
However, there are some limitations to Zoho Forms. For instance, there’s no way to edit the Name field so that it includes just the first name. Zoho Forms requires you to have at least 2 fields. You can use a Single Line text field for this instead, but that defeats the purpose of having the Name field.
Moreover, you can’t have Zoho Forms autocomplete address details when a user is filling out their form. But Zoho Forms lets you add country code to the Phone Number field, and it can automatically detect the correct code by the user’s IP address.
Another drawback to note is that there’s no easy way of creating forms that focus on 1 question at a time. You could do that by creating a multi-page form, but you’d have to insert a new page break after every field, which can be very frustrating.
So, you’re only limited to the standard form layout with Zoho Forms.
Creating a Simple Form With Jotform
Jotform also has a very straightforward signup method. When you’re ready to create your first form, Jotform gives you 3 options to start with:
- Start From Scratch
- Use Template
- Import Form
We created a simple form from scratch to go through the complete form-building experience.
When you’ve chosen how you want to build your form, Jotform gives you 2 different layout options: Classic Form and Card Form.
The Card Form layout displays 1 question per page. You can also easily change the form layout in the middle of your form-building process. This gives you greater flexibility, which is unfortunately missing in Zoho Forms.
Jotform has a large number of form elements to choose from. These include basic fields, payment fields, and widgets.
The basic fields have all the elements you’d need to create most types of forms using a very simple drag-and-drop functionality.
Here’s how the Jotform form builder interface looks:
But Jotform really stands out when it comes to widgets. There’s a huge variety of widgets that you can add to feature advanced fields and elements in your forms such as YouTube videos and even a photo grabber.
We used basic fields for name and email, and widgets for collecting phone numbers and addresses. The Phone Picker widget adds a country code field and the Address Autocomplete uses Google Maps to automatically detect user location for easier address filling.
Unfortunately, the Phone Picker app doesn’t automatically detect the country, so users still have to manually select their country code. And like Zoho Forms, you can’t change the format of the Name field, so it always includes 2 elements, the first name and the last name.
These are some limitations with Jotform, but overall it provides a great set of features and functionalities to include in your forms.
Creating a Simple Form With WPForms
WPForms is a WordPress form builder plugin, so it only exists within the WordPress environment. You can install WPForms as you would any other WordPress plugin.
To start creating forms, you simply need to open your WordPress dashboard and select WPForms » Add New from the sidebar menu.
The WPForms form builder starts with a screen where you can give a name to your form and choose a template from 1,700+ form templates available. Or you can simply start with a Blank Form if you want to build it entirely from scratch.
The form builder screen is divided into 2 segments: the form field elements and settings on the left-hand pane and the live preview of your form on the right. To add new elements, you can simply drag and drop your desired field from the left side onto the right.
WPForms also includes a Layout field that lets you build multi-column forms with the same drag-and-drop functionality.
If you’re editing an existing form, you’ll be able to view past versions of it by clicking on the Revision icon. This lets you restore any past version of your form if you want to undo your changes.
WPForms provides some super convenient field customizations that aren’t possible with either Zoho Forms or Jotform. For example, you can set the Name field format to include:
- Only first name
- First and last name
- First, middle, and last name
Besides, if you enable the Geolocation addon and connect it to either Google Places or Mapbox, the Address field can automatically detect your country. Users can even use an interactive map in your form to pinpoint their locations.
The same is true for the Phone field, which automatically detects the country code for your user.
Currently, Zoho Forms has the country code detection functionality for the Phone field, but not for the Address field. In contrast, Jotform can integrate with Google Maps to autocomplete the Address field, but it has no such auto-detection feature for phone country codes. WPForms is the only form builder among these 3 that provides both functionalities.
One of the best WPForms features is that it allows you to choose between the classic form layout and a very modern-looking interactive form layout. WPForm’s interactive layout is the best among all its competitors.
WPForms’ Conversational Forms addon allows you to turn your forms into distraction-free, interactive forms that focus on 1 question at a time. Unlike classic forms where you need mouse input, Conversational Forms are entirely fillable with just your keyboard.
What’s more, you can always refer back to a previous field on the form at any time, since they’re all listed on the same page, only placed outside of your screen’s focus zone for maximum immersion and no distractions.
There’s no alternative to Conversational Forms in Zoho Forms. While Jotform does provide a similar view with its Card Form layout, it lacks the fluency of Conversational Forms since you’ll still need mouse input to fill it out.
Ease of Use
Let’s now compare the usability factor for each of these forms.
Zoho Forms Ease of Use
Zoho Forms is a very easy-to-use form builder tool. With a simple drag-and-drop builder, you can easily create simple to complex forms without much trouble.
There are additional options for editing the theme of your form, adding integrations, and other settings right on the horizontal bar above the form builder.
For instance, you can easily add conditional logic by clicking the Rules tab and defining a simple if-then logic to hide or display certain form fields based on a user’s response.
On the Settings tab, you can change the Submit button text, add Save & Resume functionality, edit acknowledgments and redirections upon submission, and a lot more. These are all very easy to configure.
Similarly, on the Form Builder view, you can change the properties of any field included in your form by simply clicking on it, which opens a slide-in menu from the right.
However, the properties menu partially covers your form and obscures your fields, so you can’t see any changes occurring live as you tweak the properties.
This, of course, isn’t an ideal design choice for user experience. Another issue with Zoho Forms is that since it’s an online form builder, it reloads the page every time you move between the Settings, Rules, or other tabs.
Zoho Forms gives you various options for embedding and sharing your forms. You can either use different kinds of embed codes like iframe, HTML, and CSS to publish the form on your website.
Or you can create a link that you can share with people without having to publish the form on your page. Unfortunately, you can’t directly create a page on your website with your form automatically embedded into it.
Overall, Zoho Forms is fairly easy to use, but there is considerable room for improvement.
Jotform Ease of Use
Jotform has a great overall design that allows for excellent ease of use for the most part. It gives you a lot of control in terms of the settings that you can configure while making the whole process easy.
When you click on the Settings tab on your Jotform, it opens a new menu where you can configure email notifications and autoresponders, edit the thank you page, add integrations, and create conditional logic.
However, like Zoho Forms, Jotform pops out a menu from the right when you want to change the properties for any of your form fields. This partially hides your forms, though it’s not as clunky as Zoho Forms.
Jotform provides a lot of publications with various types of embed codes and shareable direct links. It even has a WordPress plugin that you can use to embed forms you’ve created using Jotform’s online builder.
While Jotform’s site embedding options are better than Zoho Forms, it’s still not ideal since the Jotform WordPress plugin only serves to embed your forms without using code. You’ll still need to use the online form builder to create and edit your forms in the first place.
Overall, Jotform is quite easy to use, but it’s not perfect in this regard.
WPForms Ease of Use
WPForms is the most user-friendly WordPress form builder plugin. Plus, some of its design choices make form configurations and settings easier than either Jotform or Zoho Forms.
You can tweak various settings with WPForms from inside the page builder. Some of the settings you have control over include:
- General settings like submit button text
- Autoresponder emails and notifications
- Confirmation messages.
Besides, you can change the settings for any of the dozens of WPForms addons like Conversational Forms and Form Abandonment.
WPForms takes ease of use to the next level by letting you change the Field Options and properties from the left-hand pane, which never overlaps with your live form preview. This means you can always see changes happening instantly as soon as you tweak any field option.
Want to use a simple name field format so that it only includes the first name? Simply use the Format dropdown in the field options for your Name field to change it instantly.
Similarly, WPForms includes the settings for conditional logic in the same window (Zoho Forms and Jotform have separate tabs for this, which adds an extra step).
And finally, when you’re ready to publish, WPForms can create a new page on your WordPress site and automatically include your form on it.
You can also easily add forms to blog posts or widget areas. To keep track of everywhere you’ve published your form, just view the form locations on the All Forms screen.
These design choices make WPForms superior to its competitors. Creating forms and changing any properties on the go is completely hassle-free and you never have to leave the form builder environment or hide the live form preview when performing any customization or settings changes of your choice.
Pricing
Now, let’s see the pricing for these form builders
Zoho Forms Pricing
Zoho Forms offers 4 different plans, Basic, Standard, Professional, and Premium, starting from $10/month. There are storage and submission limitations with all plans, including the most advanced Premium plan.
Jotform Pricing
JotForm offers 4 paid plans, Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Enterprise. The silver plan, which is the best value, costs $29/month. This plan comes with various features but it’s not without limitations. You can only create 100 forms and receive 10,000 monthly submissions per month.
WPForms Pricing
WPForms offers 4 premium plans: Elite, Pro, Plus, and Basic.
The Pro version, which includes super valuable features like the Form Abandonment, User Journey, and Conversational Forms addons and supports 5 sites costs only $399/ year.
Plus, it also comes with payment gateway integrations like Stripe, Square, and PayPal. WPForms also provides workflow automation with over 6,000 apps using Zapier and Uncanny Automator, as well as many direct integrations with top marketing platforms, like Mailchimp, Drip, and MailerLite.
Zoho Forms vs JotForm vs WPForms: Conclusion
After extensive analysis, we can safely say that WPForms is the best form builder tool for creating all kinds of forms, from basic to advanced.
Some of the reasons why WPForms stands out in this comparison are:
- Beginner-friendly, distraction-free, and unobtrusive drag-and-drop interface
- Ability to capture leads from abandoned forms
- Visually appealing, interactive form layout with Conversational Forms
- Easiest WordPress form embed method
- Unlimited forms, entries, and storage
- Outstanding customer support
- Convenient auto-filling capabilities for Phone and Address fields
- User journey tracking for advanced analytics
Whether it’s the unique capabilities like capturing leads from abandoned entires, outstanding ease of use, or the best value for money, WPForms checks all the marks expected of a top-rated, premium form builder for WordPress.
Create Your WordPress Form Now
Next, Compare the Best Survey Tools for WordPress
Now that you’ve compared some of the top form builders, why not look into options for creating online surveys? Check out our other comparisons for all the details:
- SurveyMonkey vs Alchemer vs WPForms
- SurveyMonkey vs GetFeedback vs WPForms
- SurveyMonkey vs Google Forms vs WPForms
Ready to build your form? Get started today with the easiest WordPress form builder plugin. WPForms Pro includes lots of free templates and offers a 14-day money-back guarantee.
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