Comparison

Jotform collects answers. Captain Expo sells booths.

Jotform is an excellent form builder, and plenty of good shows have been run on one. But a form ends where the work starts. Here are five jobs an organizer does between opening applications and load-in, written out both ways.

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Collecting applicationsJob 01

Vendors apply for a booth, not for a row in a sheet.

An application form is a list of questions. The one question it cannot ask properly is the one that matters most - which booth do you want - because a form has no idea what your floor looks like.

With Jotform

  1. Build the form and hope you asked the right questions the first time.
  2. Add a booth field. It has to be free text, because the form cannot see your floor plan.
  3. Read back “booth 14, or 22, or anywhere near the door” and work out what they meant.
  4. Copy the answer across to wherever you are actually tracking booths.

You end up with: a sentence in a cell

With Captain Expo

  1. Publish the event. The floor plan is the application form.
  2. A vendor browses the live map and sees tier, size and price on every booth.
  3. They apply for the booth they picked, so the request arrives as a place on your floor rather than a sentence about one.
  4. Photos, category, requested tier and past events land in the same review queue.

You end up with: booth 14, corner, $260

Tracking availabilityJob 02

The map is the answer, so nothing gets sold twice.

Every organizer running on forms keeps a second document that says what is actually taken. That document is a record of decisions already made, which is not the same thing as a lock on the booth.

With Jotform

  1. Export the submissions into a spreadsheet.
  2. Mark booths as sold by hand, each time an approval goes out.
  3. Two vendors ask for booth 14 an hour apart. Nothing stops you telling both of them yes.
  4. Find out at load-in, and buy someone a drink.

You end up with: a record, not a lock

With Captain Expo

  1. The map is the only record of what is taken, and it is the same map the vendor is looking at.
  2. Choosing a booth holds it for thirty-five minutes, so nobody else can start a checkout on it.
  3. Walk away and the hold expires on its own. The booth comes back without you touching anything.
  4. Double-booking is not something you have to remember to prevent. There is no path to it.

You end up with: a floor that cannot be oversold

Collecting paymentJob 03

The pay link goes out with the approval.

The gap between “you are in” and “you are paid up” is where most of an organizer's admin lives: the invoice, the reminder, the second reminder, and the reconciliation afterwards.

With Jotform

  1. Approve by email, one vendor at a time.
  2. Raise an invoice somewhere else entirely, and get the amount right by hand.
  3. Chase it. Chase it again the week before the show.
  4. Match the payments back against your sheet so you know who still owes you.

You end up with: four tools and a reconcile

With Captain Expo

  1. Approve the application and the pay link goes out with the approval, tied to a hold that expires.
  2. Or switch the event to instant book and the vendor pays at the moment they pick the booth.
  3. The money goes to your own Stripe account, under your own name. You are the merchant of record.
  4. The booth flips to sold on the map the moment the payment clears, and your totals are already correct.
ApprovedInvite to pay sentHeld 34:58Paid $260.00

You end up with: one thread, decision to receipt

The floor planJob 04

A floor plan they can click, not one they download.

The floor plan is the single most useful thing you have, and attaching it as a PDF turns it into a picture. A picture cannot tell a vendor what a booth costs, and it cannot be corrected once it is in someone's inbox.

With Jotform

  1. Attach the plan as a PDF and hope the numbering is legible at print size.
  2. Vendors download it, zoom in, and squint at booth numbers next to a price list in a different file.
  3. Change a price or move a wall, and now there is a new PDF to send.
  4. From that moment on, everybody is looking at a slightly different version.

You end up with: floor-plan-v3-final-2.pdf

With Captain Expo

  1. Upload the plan once. AI detection finds the booths for you, or you draw them yourself in the editor.
  2. Vendors get an interactive map: zoom in, hover a booth for tier and price, click to hold it.
  3. Change a price and the next vendor to look sees the new one. There is no version two to send.
  4. Print packs are there when you need paper - booth signs, vendor lists and the floor plan itself.
Standard - $180Premium - $220Corner - $260
Talking to vendorsJob 05

Write once, send to the right vendors.

Every show generates the same four emails: applications are open, you are approved, your balance is due, here is your load-in time. On forms and a spreadsheet, all four are a mail merge you assemble by hand.

With Jotform

  1. Export the list again, because it has changed since the last export.
  2. Paste it into a mail merge and build the segment by hand in a filter.
  3. Send, and hope the filter was right about who was in it.
  4. Track unsubscribes and bounces yourself, forever, across every list you ever exported.

You end up with: a list that is already stale

With Captain Expo

  1. Every vendor who has ever applied to one of your shows is already a contact.
  2. Segments build themselves from booking history: booked in the last two years, applied but never booked, by category, by region.
  3. Write once and send under your own name and your own reply-to address.
  4. Reminders before each show go out on their own, and unsubscribes and bounces are suppressed for you.
Past 2 years - jewelry - 184Applied, never booked - 63Food and drink - 78

You end up with: a list that maintains itself

To be fair

Jotform is a great form builder. It is not a booth-sales tool.

If what you need is a form - a waiver, a survey, a call for entries, an intake sheet with conditional logic - it is one of the best there is, and Captain Expo does not try to be one. What it cannot do is hold a booth, price a floor, take a payment into your Stripe account, or stop the same table being sold twice, because none of those are things a form is for.

That gap is not a flaw in Jotform. It is just the part of your show that the form hands back to you, and it is the part that takes the evenings.

No subscriptions. No vendor fees. 5% of what you sell, and that is all.

Unlimited events and unlimited booths, free. The 5% comes out of your side when a booth sells, so your vendors never see a fee from us.

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