The Free Cognito Forms Alternative That Never Caps Your Submissions

Yes, Cognito Forms is free to use on its Individual plan. It includes unlimited forms and can take payments, but it is capped at 100 entries a month, 100 MB of storage and one user, and every form carries Cognito Forms branding. Electronic signatures, Save & Resume, branding removal, document generation and every integration - including webhooks, the API, Zapier and Make - start on the Pro plan. Payments taken on the free plan carry an extra 2% Cognito fee on top of what the processor charges. Paid plans come with a 14-day free trial and no card is required. FormNX's free plan has no monthly submission limit at all, and includes an e-signature field, scored quiz mode and an AI form builder.

Cognito Forms pricing has four plans. Individual is free. Pro is $19 a month billed annually or $24 month-to-month, with 2 users, 2,000 entries a month and 1 GB of storage. Team is $39 or $49 a month, with 5 users, 5 guests, 10,000 entries a month and 10 GB, and adds workflow and approvals, a client portal, data lookups, PayPal and Square. Enterprise is $129 or $174 a month, with 20 users, 20 guests, unlimited entries and 100 GB, and adds HIPAA compliance, single sign-on and folder permissions. Extra users are $5 a month each, and integrations include a monthly allowance of API requests with $20 for every extra 100,000. Nonprofits can request a discount. Check cognitoforms.com/pricing for current numbers.

According to Cognito Forms' own help center, entries above your monthly limit continue to be collected but access to them is locked. Locked entries do not trigger notifications or integrations, so the confirmation email or Zapier step you rely on stops for those responses. You then have 30 days to upgrade before you lose access to them. Entries saved with Save & Resume count toward the limit even while they are still incomplete. Storage works the same way. Uploaded files keep arriving but are locked until you upgrade or delete entries. FormNX has no monthly submission cap on any plan, so there is nothing to lock.

FormNX is the best free Cognito Forms alternative if you want a free plan that does not run out. It includes unlimited forms and unlimited submissions, an e-signature field, scored quiz mode, Stripe payments, an AI form builder, a voice-recording field, camera capture, password protection and duplicate-submission prevention. The Cognito Forms free plan stops at 100 entries a month and leaves out signatures and integrations. Other free Cognito Forms alternatives people compare are Google Forms, which has no built-in payments or e-signature, Tally Forms, and Jotform, whose free plan is capped at 5 forms and 100 submissions a month.

The Cognito Forms alternatives and competitors that come up most are FormNX, Jotform, Zoho Forms, Formstack, Typeform, Fillout and Google Forms. FormNX is the pick if you want to stop counting entries: submissions are unlimited on every plan, and e-signature, quiz mode and payments start on the free plan. Jotform has more than 20,000 templates but caps both forms and submissions by tier. Zoho Forms and Formstack also appear on most shortlists. Typeform is built for one-question-at-a-time conversational surveys. Fillout is strongest when forms write into Airtable or Notion. Google Forms is free and simple, but has no payments or signatures of its own.

In a Cognito Forms vs Jotform comparison, Cognito Forms leans on calculations and approval workflows, and Jotform on its large template library. Both meter your usage and charge more as your volume grows. Cognito Forms caps entries at 100, 2,000 and 10,000 a month below Enterprise. Jotform caps monthly submissions by tier - 100 on Free, 1,000 on Bronze, 2,500 on Silver and 10,000 on Gold - and caps active forms too, at 5, 25, 50 and 100. FormNX has no caps at all, with unlimited forms and submissions on every plan. See our Jotform alternative comparison for the full breakdown.

For most people, neither - FormNX combines what each one is missing. Google Forms gives you unlimited free responses but has no built-in payments, e-signature or PDF generation. Cognito Forms adds calculations, payments and workflow, but its free plan stops at 100 entries a month and keeps Cognito branding. FormNX gives you unlimited submissions on every plan, like Google Forms, plus e-signature, quiz mode, calculation fields and Stripe payments on the free plan. See how FormNX compares on our Google Forms alternative page.

FormNX, if you measure by what the free plan includes. It has unlimited forms and unlimited submissions, an e-signature field, scored quiz mode, calculation fields, Stripe payments, an AI form builder, a voice-recording field, camera capture, password protection and duplicate prevention, with no credit card and no time limit. Google Forms is also free and unlimited but has no payments, signatures or PDFs. Cognito Forms and Jotform both stop their free plans at 100 entries or submissions a month. See the FormNX free plan for the full list.

Yes, Cognito Forms is legit. It is an established US company based in Columbia, South Carolina, and was acquired by the private equity firm Inverness Graham in May 2025. It reports SOC 2 Type II certification, TLS 1.2 or higher in transit, GDPR and CCPA compliance with a Data Processing Addendum, and two-factor authentication for every user. Complaints in its Capterra reviews centre on plan limits, price increases and form design. If those limits are the problem, FormNX gives you unlimited submissions on every plan, with EU data hosting, TLS in transit and no tracking cookies on your published forms.

Yes, on the Pro, Team and Enterprise plans, but not on the free plan. Respondents sign with a mouse or a finger, and the signature appears in the entry and in any document the form generates. FormNX puts its e-signature field on every plan, including free. Respondents can type, draw or upload a signature, it carries an audit trail, and on paid plans it embeds straight into the branded PDFs your form produces.

Cognito Forms adds its own fee on top of the processor's: 2% of each payment on the free Individual plan and 1% on Pro. On Team and Enterprise there is no additional Cognito fee. The free and Pro plans process payments through Cognito Pay, a Stripe-powered processor for eligible US customers at 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction, while PayPal and Square become available on Team. FormNX charges a 0% platform fee on paid plans, and Pro, from around $15 a month, lets you enable Stripe, PayPal, Razorpay and Square on the same form so each customer picks at checkout.

Not directly. Cognito Forms sends entries to Google Sheets through Zapier, Make or Microsoft Power Automate, which means an account with one of those services as well as a Cognito Forms Pro, Team or Enterprise plan. FormNX has a native Google Sheets integration on paid plans that streams each submission into your sheet, alongside native Slack, Discord, Mailchimp and webhook connections. Zapier, Make and Pabbly are there too for everything else.

Yes, but you build the scoring yourself. Cognito Forms' own guide assigns a point value to each answer option, then adds calculation fields to total the points and work out a percentage. Open-text answers cannot be scored automatically and have to be marked by hand, and there is no countdown timer. FormNX has a native quiz mode on the free plan with scoring, grading, answer feedback and admin insights. Random question subsets and a form timer that auto-submits at zero are available on paid plans.

For most people replacing Cognito Forms, yes. FormNX never caps submissions, where Cognito Forms locks entries above 100, 2,000 or 10,000 a month unless you pay for Enterprise. It puts e-signature and quiz mode on the free plan. Its Pro plan, from around $15 a month, costs less than Cognito Pro and includes four payment gateways with no platform fee, a drag-and-drop PDF builder and native integrations. It also adds email OTP verification, a form timer, voice answers, camera capture and popup forms, and every Pro plan seats 5 users per workspace where Cognito Pro includes 2. For collecting responses, payments and signatures, FormNX does more for less.

Export your entries from each form to Excel - repeating sections come out on separate worksheets. Rebuild the form in FormNX with the drag-and-drop builder, the AI builder or one of 1,000+ templates. Then replace the Cognito Forms embed code on your site, or the link you share, with the FormNX version, and close the old form once new submissions are arriving. There is no automatic importer, but our team will rebuild your existing forms for free when you upgrade to a paid plan - send us the public link and most are live within 24 hours.

It can, but you assemble it. Cognito Forms builds order forms from choice fields with prices and optional images, repeating sections for line items, and quantity limits that act as inventory. Tax is added as an additional fee, and coupon codes are made from a text field plus an if/then price formula, with quantity limits to cap how often each code is used. FormNX has one Products field that does it in one place: product cards with photos and descriptions, and a price and availability for every variant combination. You also get a live cart total, tax added on top or already included, shipping with a free-shipping threshold, and discount codes with usage limits and expiry dates. See the order form builder. Available on all FormNX Pro plans.