The best free form builder, 15 free plans compared with sources

Five of the fifteen: Tally, Youform, Formester, Ovoform and Google Forms. The first four say unlimited on their pricing pages; Google does not publish a response cap for Forms at all.

Unlimited usually comes with a fair use policy, and it is worth reading. Tally's is the most specific: it treats consistently collecting around 50,000 submissions a month, or 100 GB of uploads a month, as extensive usage and will offer a custom plan if that continues for three or four months. Youform links its own fair usage guidelines from the pricing page. For a normal small business, none of these ceilings will come into play.

Microsoft Forms is the odd one out. On a free personal Microsoft account, each form can receive up to 200 responses, rising to 1,000 on a paid Microsoft 365 personal plan, according to Microsoft's limits page. Work and school accounts get far more.

Not among the hosted free plans we checked. Every one of them shows the vendor's name somewhere on the form or the thank-you page, and removing it is the most consistently paywalled feature in the category. Google Forms does not let you remove it at any price.

Here is what removal costs, cheapest first, on monthly billing: Formester $13 (Personal), Zunoform $14.99 (Pro), Ovoform $19 (Pro), Tally $29 (Pro, or $290 a year), Youform $29 (Pro, or $20 a month billed yearly), Jotform $39 (Bronze), Fillout $49 (Pro; its $19 Starter plan reduces the badge to light branding), Formbricks $74 (Pro) and Typeform $79 (Plus). Paperform removes branding from Pro at $49 a month billed annually.

The only route to a branding-free form at $0 is self-hosting an open-source builder such as HeyForm, which is published under the AGPL-3.0 licence. That swaps a subscription for running and securing your own server, which is a real cost even if it is not on an invoice.

This is the question the pricing pages answer least clearly, and the answers differ in ways that matter.

Typeform puts your forms into private mode at 100% of the monthly limit, and respondents see a closed message until the next month or an upgrade. Deleting responses does not give you room back. Zunoform works similarly: over the 500-a-month cap, the form shows as closed to respondents until the calendar month resets or you upgrade, and nothing already collected is deleted.

Jotform's Starter plan has two limits: 100 submissions a month and 500 stored in total. Jotform's pricing FAQ says that when you exceed total storage, the system deletes the oldest response to make room. That is data loss, not an upgrade prompt, so download and purge old submissions if you stay on Starter.

SurveyMonkey's Basic plan lets you view a limited number of responses per survey, and the exact figure is shown only once you sign up. Its help centre says responses over the limit are not viewable and are deleted automatically a year after collection unless you upgrade.

Response volume gets the headlines, but features are what usually push people off a free plan. Three are worth checking before you build.

Conditional logic is free almost everywhere now, including on Typeform. The exceptions are Formester, which keeps it for the Personal plan, and Google Forms, which can only jump between sections based on a multiple-choice or dropdown answer rather than show or hide an individual question.

File uploads vary most. Google Forms makes respondents sign in to a Google Account to answer an upload question. Microsoft Forms only offers uploads when respondents are inside your organization. Typeform keeps uploads for paid plans. Tally, Youform and Zunoform allow files up to 10 MB each on free plans.

Payments on a free plan are rarer. Tally, Fillout, Formester and Paperform include them; Tally, Fillout and Paperform say they add no fee of their own on top of the processor's. Jotform and Zoho allow 10 payment submissions. Youform, Typeform and Zunoform keep payments for paid plans.

Our free plan is 500 responses a month with unlimited forms, one seat and no card. That is less than Tally, Youform, Formester, Ovoform, Google Forms or Fillout, and more than Zoho, Formbricks, Jotform, Paperform or Typeform. If raw volume is your constraint, use one of the unlimited tools.

What Free does include: three layouts on the same questions (conversational, single page and document), per-question conditional logic, quiz scoring with outcome endings, hidden fields and calculated variables, file uploads up to 10 MB, a native scheduler with Google and Outlook calendar sync, and Google Sheets, Zoho, Zapier catch hooks and webhooks. Response emails on Free go through your own SMTP server. NPS, e-signature and payment questions can be built and previewed but need Pro to publish, and AI form generation is Business-only. Pro is $14.99 a month for 5,000 responses and removes the badge.