Cognito Forms vs Fillout: Which Should You Pick in 2026?

Cognito Forms wins on calculation depth and is the only one of the two that is HIPAA compliant, with a BAA on its $174/month Enterprise tier. Fillout wins on seats, which are unlimited on every plan, and on a modern builder with 50+ native integrations. Both meter submissions, so growth raises the bill either way.

These two products disagree about what a form builder is for. Cognito Forms, founded in 2013 and now private-equity backed, treats the form as the front end of a records system: formulas, repeating sections, lookups, document generation and a client portal, built for organisations that need the numbers to come out right. Fillout, founded in 2022, treats the form as a conversion surface: a polished editor, deep Airtable and Notion connections, scheduling and PDF generation, aimed at teams wiring intake into a modern stack.

The comparison turns on how you grow. Cognito Forms meters four separate things (entries, users, storage and guest collaborators) and bills each one on its own line. Fillout meters one thing (responses) and gives away seats. Which of those hurts more depends entirely on whether your next year adds volume or adds people.

Feature comparison

Every feature category, side by side, from the 2026 audit of both products.

Pricing: two different meters

Fillout is cheaper to enter at $19/month ($15 billed annually) against Cognito Forms Pro at $24/month ($19 annually), and it includes unlimited seats where Cognito Forms Pro includes two.

That is the headline, and it holds for a small team. The picture changes as either axis moves. Cognito Forms gives you 2,000 entries on Pro, 10,000 on Team at $49/month ($39 annually) and unlimited entries only at Enterprise, $174/month ($129 annually). Fillout gives you 2,000 responses on Starter, 5,000 on Pro at $49/month ($40 annually) and unlimited responses on Business at $89/month ($75 annually). Between 5,000 and 10,000 submissions a month, Cognito Forms Team is roughly half the cost of the Fillout tier you would need. Below that, and at any headcount above five, Fillout is the cheaper answer.

Both products also hold things back for the upgrade. Cognito Forms puts document generation, the client portal, PayPal and Square behind Team. Fillout puts form analytics, partial submissions and custom domains behind Business at $75/month, which is the same door that lifts the response cap: you cannot find out why a form is leaking until you are already paying for volume. Fillout's lead-generation tooling sits outside the tiers entirely, in a Conversion Kit add-on at $100/month covering abandonment recovery, enrichment, routing, email validation and ad conversion tracking.

One detail worth checking before you budget: Cognito Forms is running a live pricing experiment, so some visitors see a five-tier lineup with a new Business plan at $129/month ($99 annually) instead of the four tiers above. Confirm what your account is actually offered.

The five dimensions that decide it

Integrations and API

Both publish around 50 native integrations, but Fillout's are deeper and Cognito Forms leans harder on middleware. Fillout's catalogue spans CRMs (HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive), databases (Airtable, Notion, Google Sheets), chat (Slack, Teams, Discord) and scheduling (Calendly, Cal.com), and its Airtable connection can update existing records rather than only append them, which is rare. Cognito Forms leads its integrations page with Zapier, Make and Power Automate, so most connections route through a fourth vendor that bills per task run. Both expose a REST API; Cognito Forms adds OData feeds for reporting tools.

Conditional logic and calculations

Cognito Forms has the stronger engine and the steeper learning curve; Fillout has the friendlier authoring experience and less depth. Cognito's formula fields, repeating sections and data lookups handle multi-row pricing tables and cross-form references natively. Fillout covers conditional logic, calculations, answer piping and pre-fill on every plan including free, and its Form Agent will build page logic, calculations and dynamic values from a chat instruction, though it cannot yet configure payments, calendars or integrations. Neither ships a dedicated AI calculations assistant.

Payments

Cognito Forms supports four payment routes and Fillout supports one. Cognito offers Cognito Pay (its built-in Stripe-powered processor at 2.9% + 30c), direct Stripe, PayPal and Square, with the latter two requiring the Team plan, and no recurring or subscription billing anywhere in the product. Fillout is Stripe-only but does support recurring payments, discount codes and free trials. A deposit form suits Cognito Forms; a membership or retainer suits Fillout.

Compliance

Cognito Forms is GDPR, CCPA and HIPAA compliant with ongoing SOC 2 Type 2 audits, PCI-compliant payments and ADA / Section 508 accessibility; Fillout is SOC 2 Type 2 and GDPR compliant but not HIPAA and not CCPA. HIPAA on Cognito Forms is gated to the Enterprise tier with a BAA. Fillout counters at the top of its range with data residency: Enterprise customers pick a hosting region across the US, EU, UK, Australia and Canada, and can configure submissions to live only in external storage. Cognito Forms publishes no data residency option.

Seats and collaboration

Fillout includes unlimited seats on all five tiers; Cognito Forms caps them at 1, 2, 5 and 20 and charges $5 per additional user per month. Cognito's external collaborators are a separate purchase again, in guest packs running from $25/month for 50 up to $250/month for 2,500. Per-seat pricing changes behaviour before it changes budgets: logins get shared, the reviewer who should see the submission gets a screenshot instead, and the audit trail quietly stops matching reality.

Where Cognito Forms is the better product

Thirteen years of work on one problem shows. Website Planet's review singles out the calculations and conditional logic as the reason to buy, and the structural features around them are what Fillout has no answer to: repeating sections turn a form into a table where the respondent adds rows, and data lookups pull values from other forms so a second submission can reference the first. For an event registration with per-attendee pricing, or a quote with variable line items, Cognito Forms produces a correct total without a spreadsheet stage afterwards.

The compliance position is the other genuine win. Cognito Forms is the choice for healthcare data, and it is not close: Fillout signs no BAA. Ratings back the product up, with 4.7/5 across 216 Capterra reviews and 4.7 for value for money specifically, against Fillout's four Capterra reviews and a Trustpilot average of 3.5.

Document generation and the client portal round it out. The portal lets clients, partners or members log in, submit, and see their own history, which is a capability most form builders skip entirely. Both sit on the Team plan, so reaching them means $49/month rather than $24.

Where Fillout is the better product

Fillout's forms look better with no effort, and that is a real commercial difference on a public-facing page. Cognito Forms reviewers consistently describe the builder as dense and the output as utilitarian, with a modern branded result requiring custom CSS that someone then has to maintain. Fillout's themes, custom fonts and favicon controls arrive on Pro, and the finished form reads as something built this decade.

Scope is the second advantage. Scheduling, PDF generation, signature questions and workflows all live in the same product, so a booking flow with a generated confirmation document does not need three tools. Cognito Forms has signatures and document generation but no scheduling at all, and its workflow capability is form-scoped tasks rather than general automation, which sends the real automation work to Zapier or Power Automate.

The customer list is doing legitimate work too: Fairfax County, Domino's, Bombas, Wayfair, Harvard and The Athletic are procurement-grade references for a company this young, and the enterprise tier answers data residency questions that Cognito Forms cannot. Hackceleration's hands-on review rates the integration layer and the all-in-one economics highly while flagging the learning curve on advanced features.

See Fillout in action

Where Cognito Forms falls short in this matchup

Four meters is three too many. A team of eight taking 12,000 entries a month is on Team at $39/month annually, plus $15/month for the extra users, plus a guest pack the first time an outside reviewer needs access, plus the move to Enterprise at $129/month once entries cross 10,000. Every one of those increases was triggered by the business doing better. Fillout's single meter is easier to forecast even when it is less forgiving in absolute terms.

Design control is the other recurring complaint, and it compounds: there are no custom domains at any Cognito Forms tier, so the highest-intent moment in your funnel stays on someone else's URL. Fillout ships custom domains on Business. Cognito also has no analytics product, no drop-off tracking and no partial submission capture, which leaves you looking only at the people who finished, exactly the population that had no problem. Its 2026 AI work went into form generation, a support chatbot and an MCP connector that lets an external model query your entries, rather than into analysis inside the product.

Where Fillout falls short in this matchup

The response cap is placed awkwardly. Pro at $40/month annual stops at 5,000, and the only published route past it is Business at $75, an 87% increase; bulk submission packs exist but Fillout does not publish their price. Against Cognito Forms Team at $39/month for 10,000 entries, Fillout's mid-range is the weaker deal for anyone with volume.

Stripe-only payments will disqualify it outright for finance teams standing on Square or PayPal, and the absence of automated tax calculation matters on any order form crossing jurisdictions. Then there is the identity question. Fillout now trades as "Fillout (by Zite)": the security docs are titled for Zite, the footer reads Restly, Inc. DBA Zite, the changelog is Zite's, AI features draw on a shared Zite credit pool, and the top tier is a $300/month Team bundle of both products ($250 annually). Buyers who came for a form builder are being sold into a broader platform, and at four years old the company has less track record than the migration would be worth if it goes wrong.

What users say

The volume gap matters as much as the scores. Cognito Forms carries 90 G2 reviews at 4.5, 216 Capterra reviews at 4.7 and 476 Trustpilot reviews at 4.0, with value for money its strongest dimension and the learning curve on advanced logic its most common criticism. Fillout has 30 G2 reviews at 4.6 and a 5.0 on Product Hunt across 13 reviews, but only four Capterra reviews, and its Trustpilot average has slipped from 4.7 to 3.5 across 48 reviews, with recent complaints about automated systems flagging and blocking accounts. Read those Trustpilot entries before committing a business-critical intake flow.

Consider Paperform

Both products bill you for succeeding, and that is the thing neither comparison solves. Cognito Forms counts entries, users, storage and guests; Fillout counts responses, workflow runs and AI credits, and sells its lead-generation tooling as a $100/month add-on on top. Paperform counts none of it: submissions and seats are unlimited on every paid plan within fair use, so the eighth person and the 120,000th submission cost the same as the first. Pro is $59/month, or $49/month billed annually. Business is $149/month, or $124/month annually, with ten workspaces, SSO and the Business API.

Be clear about the price. Fillout starts at $15/month annually and Cognito Forms at $19, both well under Paperform's $49 floor. For one straightforward form at low volume, the cheaper tool is the right purchase and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. The $49 is worth paying when the work is a real multi-step process rather than an intake box.

What it buys is scope inside one subscription. Paperform covers forms, Papersign for eSignatures at 25 signed documents a month on Pro and 100 on Business, and Stepper for AI-native workflow automation with 20,000 automation credits on Pro and 100,000 on Business. That replaces the Fillout-plus-Zapier or Cognito-plus-Power-Automate arrangement where you become the integration across three renewal dates and three permission models. The calculation engine is Excel-style and drives question and page visibility, conditional email content, integration payloads and success pages, with an AI assistant that writes the formula from a plain description, which answers the scripting-syntax complaint that follows Cognito Forms around. Payments run through five gateways (Stripe, PayPal, Square, Braintree and Google Pay) with subscriptions, coupons, tax and refunds, against Cognito's four-without-subscriptions and Fillout's one. There are 4000+ integrations and a 7-day trial with no card.

Two honest caveats. Paperform is SOC 2 Type II, GDPR and CCPA compliant but is not HIPAA compliant and signs no BAAs, so protected health information stays with Cognito Forms Enterprise. And Stepper automation credits are metered even though submissions are not. On the vendor question, Paperform has been shipping since 2016, bootstrapped and profitable, with no investor setting the roadmap and no parent brand to be folded into. For deeper breakdowns, see Cognito Forms alternatives, Fillout alternatives, or the full best form builders ranking.

The verdict

Pick Cognito Forms if the form is a calculation problem or a compliance problem. Line-item quotes, repeating data entry, cross-form lookups and HIPAA-covered intake are all things it does and Fillout does not, and at 5,000 to 10,000 entries a month its Team plan is the better-priced tier. Accept that the output will look utilitarian without CSS work, that it will never live on your own domain, and that the bill has four ways to rise.

Pick Fillout if the form is a conversion problem or a team problem. Unlimited seats on every tier, a modern editor, scheduling and PDFs in the box, and an Airtable integration that writes back to existing records make it the better fit for marketing and operations teams under ten thousand responses a month. Weigh that against a Stripe-only checkout, a young company now operating under a parent brand, and a review record too thin to lean on.

Pick Paperform if the honest answer is that neither meter suits you: unlimited submissions and seats, forms plus signatures plus workflow automation in one subscription, and a price that stays the same in the year your forms start working.

Last updated September 22, 2026