Coordinator vs Cognito Forms
Cognito gives away impressive logic, then takes 1–2% of your payments and locks entries over quota. Coordinator takes 0% of anything, locks nothing, and its 'entries' are clients and projects, not rows to ransom.
Free. No card. About two minutes to set up.
Cognito Forms, side by side
The power-logic form builder — calculations and repeating sections free, monetized by entry caps and a cut of your payments.
| What you're paying for | Coordinator | Cognito Forms |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $0 — everything | Free (capped) to ~$130/mo |
| Payment cut | 0% — your own rails | 2% free / 1% Pro on top of Stripe |
| Over-quota behavior | No quotas | Excess entries locked; no notifications fire |
| Users | Unlimited with roles | 1–20 by tier, ~$5/extra |
| Calculations & repeating sections | Numbers, units, lookups (no formula engine) | Included free — its strong suit |
| What a submission becomes | A contact, a record, or a whole project | An entry with workflow status |
Cognito Forms pricing and plan limits are approximate, from their published plans as of August 2026 — check their site for current figures. Coordinator's column doesn't change: $0.
The Cognito Forms line on your P&L
Cognito's free tier shrank in 2026 (500 → 100 entries/mo) and takes a 2% cut of Stripe payments (1% on the $19/mo Pro); real team features — workflow, portal, multi-processor — start at the $39/mo Team, and HIPAA sits at ~$130/mo Enterprise.
Users: Per-plan user counts (1/2/5/20); metered entries.
What you get that Cognito Forms doesn't give you
A percentage of revenue is the most expensive kind of pricing. Coordinator's cut is zero at every tier, because there are no tiers.
Cognito collects over-quota entries but locks them — visible only after you pay. Nothing here locks; there is no quota.
Client portal, approval flows, real records — the things Cognito sells at Team and up are the baseline here.
What Cognito Forms users complain about — answered
Recurring themes from public reviews and forums (G2, Capterra, Reddit), paired with what changes here. We only list complaints Coordinator actually solves.
“They take a cut of my payments on top of Stripe's fees”
0%. Payments settle on your own Stripe, PayPal or Wise — Coordinator never touches the money.
“The free plan's entries were cut from 500 to 100”
No entry caps to cut. Free is the whole product, permanently.
“Entries over the cap get collected but locked”
Nothing is ever held back for payment — there is no meter.
“Rebuilding the same logic on every form”
Field definitions live on types you reuse — the schema is shared, not copy-pasted per form.
What they love about Cognito Forms — kept
Conditions, skip logic, lookups and write-backs free — with the business system attached.
Kept, deepened: approvals gate real work and real billing, not just entry status.
Where Cognito Forms may still fit
No tool wins everything, and we'd rather you pick with open eyes.
Cognito's in-form calculations and repeating sections are genuinely powerful — Coordinator's forms don't do computed math.
Its PDF/Word generation from entries has no direct equivalent here.
Regulated buyers can buy a BAA; we make no compliance offering.
Rebuild your intake forms (the logic concepts map), keep any calculation-heavy quoting form in Cognito if you must, and let everything else land as clients and projects with no percentage skimmed.
Free. No card. About two minutes to set up.
The free Cognito Forms alternative, summarized
If you're searching for a Cognito Forms alternative, the short version: Coordinator is free for unlimited users — no tiers, no usage meters, no renewal-day surprises — and it covers what Cognito Forms does for form builders alongside the rest of a small business's operations: real accounting, projects with job costing, booking pages and staff scheduling, client records and forms, team chat, and a cross-company network where your invoice lands in your client's books. Cognito Forms still fits some buyers — see the fair print above — but if the complaints on this page sound familiar, switching is usually an afternoon.
Explore the form builders side of Coordinator on free-form-builder, see everything it does, or read why it's free.
Keep the Cognito Forms money
Set up free in minutes, import what you have, and put the subscription line to better use.
Free. No card. About two minutes to set up.