Jotform builds almost any form you can imagine. pylo builds forms that write directly into your entities and start the process behind them: permissions, flows, admin UI and analytics in one system, with unlimited users, hosted in Germany.

TL;DR

Jotform is the Swiss army knife of online forms: thousands of templates, hundreds of widgets, payments, e-signatures, approvals, tables and apps, all from one account. It is hard to find a form it can't build. What it doesn't give you is your own data model: submissions live in Jotform, and connecting them to your customers, orders or projects happens in other tools. pylo is a backend platform with a form builder inside: every form writes directly into your own entities and relations, a submission starts a flow, and your whole team works with the result under one permission model. If you need payments, signatures or a ready template for everything, choose Jotform. If your forms feed a business process, pylo removes the tools behind it.

What is pylo?

pylo is a Backend-as-a-Service platform from Germany that you can use to build the operating system for your company. You model entities, fields and relations in the admin panel or through the API, and pylo generates a typed GraphQL API instantly. The form builder is part of that system: every form writes directly into your own data model. The same permission model governs the API, the admin UI, forms, flows, dashboards and the MCP server, and pylo flows run the process that starts when someone submits a form.

What is Jotform?

Jotform is a form platform from San Francisco, founded in 2006 and used by millions of people. Its drag-and-drop builder offers classic and card-style forms, conditional logic, calculations, prefill and a large widget library, plus more than 10,000 templates and many payment gateways. Around the forms, Jotform has grown into a suite: Jotform Tables to work with submissions like a spreadsheet, Approvals for multi-step sign-offs, Jotform Sign for e-signatures, a PDF editor, report builder, no-code apps and AI agents. Gold and Enterprise plans can be HIPAA compliant, and an EU data center in Frankfurt is available.

At a glance

A form suite versus forms on your data model

Jotform covers an impressive range: a contact form, a patient intake with signature, an order form with payment and an approval chain all work out of the box. Each form produces its own set of submissions, which you view in Jotform Tables or send to other tools. Linking a submission to an existing customer, order or project, or keeping one customer record across many forms, is not what the data model is built for.

pylo starts with your data. You model customers, orders, applications or tickets as entities with relations, and every form field maps to one of their fields. Five different forms can feed the same customer record, and each submission is linked to what it belongs to. pylo's builder has fewer field types and widgets than Jotform, and no payments or signatures, but nothing has to be synced afterwards.

How pylo forms work

pylo forms are built on your data model. You add fields such as text, long text, email, phone, number, URL, checkboxes, single or multiple choice and file uploads, structure the form with headings, paragraphs and page breaks, and map every field to a field on one of your entities, including relations. Fields can be hidden, carry default values, placeholders and tooltips, show or hide depending on earlier answers and check input against validation rules. A form can be public or require a login, and you can limit submissions per form and per user. You embed a form on any website as an iFrame, or build your own frontend on the API.

One form can run as several instances, each with its own availability window, its own submission limits and, for authenticated forms, its own list of users who may fill it in. The same onboarding form can run for every client or every event without copying it. You can also mark a field as the matching key, for example an email address, so a submission updates the existing record instead of creating a duplicate.

What happens after submit

Jotform sends notifications and autoresponders, runs approval flows with multiple steps and pushes data to integrations or webhooks. That covers many standard processes inside Jotform. Once the process involves your own records, for example checking for an existing customer, creating a project or updating a stock level, it usually runs through Zapier, Make or custom code.

In pylo a submission is not a response in a separate inbox; it is a record in your entities. Every submission emits an event, and that event can start a pylo flow: send a confirmation email, create follow-up records, assign the request to the right team member, call an external system or wait for an approval. Flows include retries, custom rate limiting, error handling and full event logs, and you can write your own flow actions in TypeScript. Your team then works with the result in pylo's admin UI, with list and detail views and fields that show or hide depending on the record's state.

Permissions and who sees the submissions

All self-serve Jotform plans up to Gold are for a single user. Teams, multiple users, admin controls and SSO are part of Enterprise. You can share forms and tables, but fine-grained rules such as "this partner only sees their own submissions" across many forms are not part of the model.

pylo separates tenants at the row level. Inside a tenant, any entity can act as the requester (ARO) and any entity as the requested object (ACO), with hierarchies and field-level rules. The same rules apply to the form, to the records it creates, to the admin UI where your team processes them, to dashboards and to MCP. A sales rep sees the leads from their region, a partner sees only the requests they submitted, and nobody needs a separate seat in a form tool to look at the answers.

Events and dashboards built in with pylo analytics

Jotform's report builder turns submissions into charts and reports, and form analytics show views and conversion per form. Reporting across forms on what happened afterwards, for example how many requests became orders, needs the data in another tool.

Every create, update and delete in pylo emits an event with the full before and after state, including every form submission and every change your team makes to it afterwards. You build dashboards on events and records together, for example submissions per form instance, conversion from request to offer or the time a request stays open, with the same permissions as the rest of pylo.

AI and MCP with guardrails

Jotform uses AI to create forms and runs AI agents that answer questions and fill in forms in chat, by voice or by SMS, with limits per plan.

pylo's MCP server is ready to connect, for developers who use agentic coding and for team members who want to analyze their submissions and records. The AI gets exactly the connected user's read permissions, nothing else. pylo never applies an AI's writes directly: they arrive as proposals that a human accepts or declines inside pylo, whatever AI client someone uses.

Pricing

Jotform prices by the number of forms, monthly submissions, form views and storage, and every self-serve plan is for one user. Free and paid plans differ mostly in those limits. If your team needs several logins or SSO, you need Enterprise.

pylo does not bill per form, per response or per seat. Submissions are records in your entities, so they count towards the included records of your plan. The price already includes hosting, flows, the admin UI, forms, analytics and personal onboarding, every plan has every feature and unlimited users. Plans differ only in included usage for records, flow actions and file storage.

Hosting, compliance and reliability

All pylo content data, data models and databases live in data centres in Germany. Our subprocessor list is public and names every non-EU parent company openly. A GDPR data processing agreement is part of the terms, and we never use customer data to train AI models. Paid plans come with a 99.5% availability SLA, hourly encrypted backups kept for 30 days at a separate German location, and support from the team that builds the product.

Jotform is a US company. EU accounts can store their data in Jotform's EU data center on AWS in Frankfurt, and Jotform offers a DPA. HIPAA compliance is available on Gold and Enterprise.

Where Jotform is the better choice

We would rather tell you than have you find out later:

• You need payments with many gateways, e-signatures, PDF generation or multi-step approvals out of the box. pylo has no payments or e-signatures out of the box.

• You want a template or widget for almost any use case, from patient intake to event registration.

• You need HIPAA compliance for forms on a self-serve plan.

If you need a form for everything and the submissions can live in Jotform, it is excellent. pylo is for teams whose forms feed records and processes their whole team works on.

Where pylo is a great Jotform alternative

We think these are the main reasons to pick pylo over Jotform:

• Forms that write into your data model. Every field maps to a field on your entities, including relations, so a submission is a record, not a row in a response table you sync somewhere else.

• No duplicates. A matching key such as the email address lets a submission update the existing record instead of creating a second one.

• The process starts on submit. Every submission is an event that can start a pylo flow, with retries, rate limiting, typed actions and full logs, without Zapier or Make in between.

• Your team processes the result in the same system. Admin views, state-dependent fields and permissions come with the backend, so there is no second tool to look at the answers.

• Permissions on every submission. Hierarchies and field-level rules apply to forms, records, admin UI, dashboards and MCP, with authenticated forms and per-user limits on every plan.

• One form, many instances. Run the same form for every client, event or campaign with its own time window, limits and users.

• No per-seat or per-response pricing. Unlimited users and API requests and all features on every plan. Only three meters are billed: flow actions, records, and file storage/traffic.

• German hosting from a German company. Data stays in Germany on every plan, including the free one, and the DPA is part of the terms. You get a 99.5% SLA from the first paid plan, hourly backups with 30-day retention, and personal support from the people who build the product.

FAQs - Questions and answers about pylo

• Does pylo have as many field types and widgets as Jotform? No, pylo covers the common field types including file uploads, headings, paragraphs and page breaks, with conditions and validation. It has no payment, signature or widget library out of the box, but you can easily code your own.

• Can several forms write into the same record? Yes, every form maps to your entities, so different forms can create or update the same customer, order or application.

• Can I embed pylo forms in my own website? Yes, you embed a form as an iFrame, or build a fully custom frontend with the Next.js SDK or the typed GraphQL API and write submissions into your entities with the same permissions.

• Can I keep using Jotform and send the answers to pylo? Yes, Jotform can send every submission to a pylo webhook, where a flow creates or updates the right records. Many teams start that way and move forms over one by one.

• Is pylo open source? No, but you can export all data at any time as CSV or JSON or through the API. The data models, flow definitions and generated SDK code are yours to keep, even after you leave.

• Where exactly is my data? Content data is in data centres in Germany and backups are kept at a different German location.

• Can I get access now? pylo is currently in private beta. Request access and we will set up your first entities and forms with you on a call and onboard you personally for your first project.