Cognito Forms
Budget-friendly form builder with a standout calculation engine and generous free tier.
About
Cognito Forms launched in 2013 in Columbia, South Carolina, and built its reputation on two things: a calculation engine that handles pricing, dates, and conditional math without plugins, and a free plan that is unusually generous. The free tier includes unlimited forms, 100 entries per month, calculations, and even Stripe payments; paid plans run $19 per month for Pro, $39 for Team, and $129 for Enterprise on annual billing. Beyond forms it covers document generation, e-signatures, workflow automation, and client portals, and it has been HIPAA-compliant since early on, which made it popular with healthcare practices and nonprofits. The company is private-equity backed with a team of roughly 11 to 50 people.
What it can do
- Powerful calculation engine
- Unlimited forms on every plan including free
- Stripe, Square, and PayPal payments
- Document generation (PDF and Word) and e-signatures
- Workflow automation, client portals, and HIPAA compliance
- REST API with OData for Power BI, Tableau, and Excel
Setup
Sign up free at cognitoforms.com, build with the drag-and-drop builder, and embed the form or share a link.
Prerequisites
None for the free plan; paid tiers for more entries, users, and HIPAA features.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 7/10
Scored 7/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: 2013 founding, Columbia SC base, plan pricing, and HIPAA posture confirmed by the vendor's own pages, Microsoft's connector docs, and independent directories. Strengths: best-in-class free tier for a budget builder, serious calculation power, and compliance without enterprise pricing. Docked for: (1) private-equity ownership with a small team, which has shown up as price increases; (2) design flexibility lags prettier competitors; (3) brand recognition is modest outside its niches. License: proprietary.
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 6.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 7.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 2.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 8.0/10
- · Founded 2013 in Columbia, South Carolina; 11-50 employees; private-equity backed (per independent directories)
- · Free tier includes unlimited forms, calculations, and Stripe payments - one of the most generous in the category
- · Features: calculation engine, repeating sections, document generation, e-signatures, workflows, client portals, REST API + OData
- · manual review: PE ownership has shown up as price increases; design flexibility lags prettier rivals
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.