Looking to form an LLC? Choosing the right formation service is essential; otherwise you may find yourself dealing with compliance penalties instead of focusing on your business.
Swyft Filings and LegalZoom are two popular business formation service providers that offer convenient and affordable LLC formation services. In this LegalZoom vs Swyft Filings comparison guide, our experts decide which of these LLC formation services is the best.
Features of Swyft Filings and LegalZoom
LegalZoom and Swyft Filings are both services that can form an LLC correctly and quickly for your new business. That said, certain features make one LLC formation service better than the other. This comparison guide analyzes both LLC services based on their features, which include track record, pricing, customer reviews, overall value, customer service, extra features, ease of use, and more.
Company Track Record
Swyft Filings was launched by an attorney in 2012 and is fairly new in the online incorporation service industry. Nevertheless, the LLC service lives up to its name to offer excellent services with the fastest processing times.
The company has also helped over 10,000 clients to form their LLCs and also served more than 20,000 clients in other business or legal areas. This is an amazing achievement on the part of Swyft Filings who also has over 20,000 online reviews and most of them are positive reviews.
On one hand, LegalZoom started in 1999 as an online legal service provider. The company offers legal services majorly before it included business formation services into its functions. To date, the company has served about 3.6 million businesses altogether and about one million clients on business formation.
This amazing result, coupled with their extensive advertising efforts, has helped LegalZoom to build great corporate reach and brand power. LegalZoom has lots of customer reviews on third-party websites. However, there are almost equal numbers of reviews with one-star ratings and reviews with five-star ratings.
Overall, while LegalZoom takes the lead in the areas of client base, experience, and longevity, our experts adjudge Swyft Filings as the lead with more positive customer reviews.
LegalZoom vs Swyft Filings Pricing
The Swyft Filings LLC service has three packages. The simplest and cheapest package is the Basic package, which costs $49. This package only features everything necessary to help you to form your business, which includes business name availability check, preparation and filing of articles of organization, statement of the organizer, filing of necessary business paperwork, access to a compliance dashboard, addition to company alerts system, a free domain name for one year, and so on.
The Standard plan costs $149 plus state fee and includes an outline for customized meeting minutes, a custom operating agreement, and a banking resolution.
The Premium package costs $299 and includes everything in the Standard plan in addition to an upgrade to FedEx shipping, a digital business kit, and instant digital delivery of your documents. Unlike other companies with stellar registered agent service, both do not include such services in their packages.
Meanwhile, LegalZoom also offers three LLC formation packages. The entry-level package is the Economy package and costs $79 (plus the state filing fee). This package features a name availability check, letter of financial authorization, and filing of your Articles of Organization.
The Standard package costs $329 and features everything in the economy package including 20 official membership certificates and a corporate kit. The Express Gold package costs $349 but only includes an expedited formation process in addition to features on the Standard option. None of the packages also include registered agent service.
Overall, our team finds that none of the two LLC services has a highly competitive price point, though Swyft Filings has an LLC formation package for $49 package, which makes the company preferred over LegalZoom.
Registered Agent Service
Both services do not offer a one-year free registered agent service like most other top online LLC services. Instead, both companies offer their registered agent service as a stand-alone feature with charges per year. Swyft Filings charges an extra $149 per year for registered agent service while LegalZoom as a registered agents service charges $299 per year for its registered agent service.
Although both companies mentioned that their registered agent services will commence shortly after the business filing has been submitted to the state, neither of the companies would add the charges for the service to the checkout process. Instead, clients would have to apply for this service separately.
Overall, Swyft Filings wins because it charges lower for the services
Satisfaction Guarantees
Both companies have 100% satisfaction guarantees in terms of a 60-day money-back guarantee that ensures any client who is not entirely satisfied with their service would receive a full refund within 60 days of filing, with no cancellation fees or questions asked.
However, in terms of customer feedback, Swyft Filings wins. Our team observed Swyft Filings’ over 26,000 online reviews and almost all of them are positive – this shows a high level of customer satisfaction.
LegalZoom, on the other hand, has about 1,400 online reviews found on Sitejabber, Consumer Affairs, and Better Business Bureau (BBB). While the 859 reviews on Sitejabber are mostly positive, the 174 reviews on BBB are mostly negative, and the 395 reviews on Consumer Affairs are split about 50-50 between positive and negative.
User-Friendliness of Websites
Checking the websites of both services for this Swyft Filings vs LegalZoom comparison, both have user-friendly websites that can make life easy for any small business owners. Their websites are easy to use, easy to navigate, making the business filing process much simpler. In this case, there is a tie as both services offer equal ease of use of their websites.
Turnaround Times
Both LegalZoom and Swyft Filings have different ways of calculating their turnaround times just like other LLC services such as Incfile and Bizfilings. While Swyft Filings’ turnaround times are based on the LLC formation state (and can range from several days up to several weeks), LegalZoom’s turnaround times are based on the LLC formation package purchased.
For instance, LegalZoom’s Economy package has a turnaround time of 30 business days, the Standard plan has 15, and the top package has about 7 to 10 business days. However, Swyft Filings allows same or next business day processing for certain packages.
Order Tracking
If you immediately place your order on Swyft Filings, an account would be created for you on their website where you can track your order status. LegalZoom also has a similar tracking tool on its website. Overall, there is a tie, and both LLC services win.
Extra Features
Both LegalZoom and Swyft Filings offer several extra features to their clients. This is either included in their formation packages, offered as a standalone feature, or offered by third-party agents.
However, both companies offer a few unique features that the other service doesn’t offer. For instance, extra services LegalZoom offers include property deeds, divorce paperwork, living trust, power of attorney [1], last will and testament, and more. These LegalZoom’s extra features are more of legal services than for LLC formation purposes.
On the other hand, the extra services Swyft Filings offers a free domain name, free 30-minute business tax consultation, expedited LLC formation service, seller’s permits, and more. All these features are important to the business filing.
Refund Policy
Both companies offer a similar refund policy like MyCompanyWorks LLC formation service. For both companies, if you’re not satisfied with their service delivery for any reason, you can simply request a refund within 60 days of business filing and they will make a refund, no questions asked, no cancellation fees, no strings attached.
However, LegalZoom claims it will make the refund within five working days of placing the request while Swyft doesn’t specify any time frame.
Winner: LegalZoom
Customer Service
Swyft Filings has excellent customer service as seen in its numerous customer reviews. Its customer support is also superb and available only on weekdays from 10 am to 7 pm ET. Their customer support team can be accessed via phone, email, or web chat.
LegalZoom service is a bit more hit or miss as seen in its online reviews. Nevertheless, LegalZoom seems to have a better customer support system thanks to its extended support hours. Support is available via phone calls and contact form, and is open on weekdays from 5 am to 7 pm ET and from 7 am to 4 pm ET on weekends. Overall, LegalZoom takes the lead with its extended support hours.
Winner: LegalZoom
Customer Reviews
Swyft Filings undoubtedly wins in this case as it has more online reviews with over 20,000. Almost all of them are positive. LegalZoom has about 1,400 online reviews, which is lower than Swyft’s reviews. Its customer support is comparable to the most established LLC services companies. Moreso, almost half of LegalZoom’s online reviews are negative, which may be a source of discouragement to new clients.
Overall Winner: Swyft Filings
While both LegalZoom and Swyft Filings in this Swyft Filings vs LegalZoom comparison guide have formed thousands of LLCs and offer good overall value for your money, our experts deem Swyft Filings as the better option because it wins in most categories.
Aside from its more affordable pricing, Swyft Filings has a fantastic reputation with its clients and offers slightly faster business formation processing. (You can read our full review of Swyft Filings here)
We also compared LegalZoom against ZenBusiness here. Check out which incorporation services is ideal for your business.
