Intake vs Fillout

For intake work, they overlap; as products they are aimed at different problems. Fillout is a broad, well-built form platform — many question types, conditional logic, calculations, payments, scheduling, and a long list of integrations — that can be laid out one question at a time. Intake does one thing: conversational client intake, where the agent reads each answer and writes the next question. If you need a form that takes a deposit and books a slot, Fillout. If you need a brief you can actually work from, Intake.

A conversational layout and a conversational form are not the same thing. Showing one question at a time changes the presentation; the questions themselves are still the ones you wrote, in the order your logic rules specify, and a vague answer is still accepted as-is. In Intake, the questions are generated while the conversation runs, so an answer that is too thin to use gets followed up on the spot rather than surfacing as a gap when you sit down to do the work.

Fillout is cheaper on list price and generous at the low end: a free tier with unlimited forms and seats and 1,000 responses a month, then roughly $19, $49, and $89 a month as response volume grows. Intake starts at $29/month for 25 completed intakes, $79 for 100, and $199 for 500. They are metering different things — Fillout counts responses, Intake counts finished intakes — so the comparison only holds if you translate to your own volume first. If cost per response is the deciding factor, Fillout wins it.

Fillout accepts file uploads as a question type from the Starter tier upward, and stores what it receives. Intake parses it — PDFs, Word documents, images, plain text — and files the details it finds into the relevant sections of the intake, so the conversation can ask for the contract rather than for twelve fields that all appear on it.

No. Intake collects information and returns a structured record; it does not take a payment or book a slot inside the conversation. Fillout does both. If the form has to end in a transaction or a calendar hold, that is a genuine reason to choose Fillout, or to run Intake for the intake and hand off to your existing booking tool afterwards.

Plenty of teams reasonably would. Fillout is a good fit for the short, transactional forms across a business — signups, bookings, requests — while a conversational intake earns its keep on the long, open-ended one at the start of a client relationship. They are not really competing for the same slot in a workflow.