LegalZoom

This is the section to read twice, because it is where LegalZoom's main selling point meets its main catch.

Pro and Premium both advertise unlimited 30-minute attorney consultations on new legal topics. That is real, and no competitor on this chart offers anything equivalent. Swyft Filings bundles attorney consultations on its Premium plan, and that is the closest anyone else comes.

The qualifier is the duration. The pricing page states that a 30-day subscription is included. After those 30 days, continued attorney access runs at $49 a month, cancel anytime. The 150+ document library and the eSignatures run for a year, on a separate clock.

So the honest reading of Pro at $249: you are buying a filing, an EIN, an operating agreement and one month of legal advice. If your legal questions arrive in that first month, which for a new company they often do, the value is real. If they arrive in month four, you are paying $49 a month or starting again.

Two practical moves. Write down every legal question you have before you buy, then book the consultations inside the 30 days. And set a calendar reminder for day 28, because this converts to a paid subscription rather than lapsing.

The signup flow asks for the fundamentals first: business name, state of operation, industry classification. It is straightforward for somebody with no filing experience, and the running total stays visible while you add options.

Upsell prompts appear throughout, for registered agent service and legal protection trials. Accepting them is optional, and the total updates as you go, which is more transparent than services that reveal add-ons at the final step.

Speed is where LegalZoom trails the field:

• Standard processing: 15 to 20 business days
• Expedited processing: 5 to 10 business days, for $99

That is materially slower than the rest of this chart. ZenBusiness and Tailor Brands both file in one business day on their paid tiers, and Swyft Filings does the same on Premium. Even LegalZoom's paid expedite lands at 5 to 10 days, slower than a rival's standard paid tier.

If your timeline has any urgency, this is the wrong service. If you have a month, the speed difference costs you nothing.

LegalZoom charges $249 a year for registered agent service, the highest price on this chart. What comes with it is a genuinely fuller package than rivals offer: $1 million identity theft protection, Experian credit monitoring, unlimited cloud storage, mail alerts, tax deadline notifications and help switching from another provider.

Set against the field:

The identity theft and credit monitoring extras are worth something, but they are consumer products you can buy separately, and the core job, receiving legal documents reliably, is identical at $125. Unless you specifically want that bundle, this is the line item to source elsewhere.

The catalogue is the widest of any service we track, and it is the strongest structural reason to pick LegalZoom:

• DBA registration: $99 + filing fees
• Trademark services: search $199 to $499, registration $599 + federal fees, monitoring $175 a year
• Copyright registration: $114 + $65 filing fees
• Corporate amendments: $129 + filing fees, or $239 expedited
• Business dissolution: $129 + state fees, or $239 expedited
• Business licence research: $99.99, covering local, county, state and federal
• Annual report filing: $99 + state fees, or $119 rush
• Operating agreements: $99 standard, $199 expedited
• Business email via Google Workspace: from $7.20 per user per month

Alongside these it files corporations, nonprofits and estate planning documents, which ZenBusiness and Tailor Brands do not. If you expect to file a trademark, a DBA and an LLC over a couple of years, keeping them in one account has real administrative value. Our LLC vs S corp explainer covers the election most owners consider next.

Formation is a one-off cost, the registered agent is not, and that is what decides the total. Below is the three-year service cost using each provider's published prices, cheapest formation plan plus registered agent, excluding state fees, which are identical whoever files for you.

Add the attorney subscription at $49 a month beyond the first 30 days and a LegalZoom buyer who keeps it lands near $1,300 over three years. That is the real comparison, and it is why the free filing headline is the least informative number on the page.

You are not obliged to buy everything in one place. File with LegalZoom for the attorney access and the catalogue, appoint Northwest as registered agent at $125, and you keep the advantage while dropping $372 over three years. Our side-by-side comparison sets the packages out together.

LegalZoom is the only service on this chart that publishes audited numbers, which means its own disclosures can be read as buying advice. Three figures from its second quarter 2026 results, reported on 5 August 2026, are worth a buyer's attention.

Revenue per subscription unit is $270 a year, across 1.892 million subscription units. That is the number the business is built on, and it is roughly what a registered agent plus one add-on costs. When the checkout suggests a subscription, that is the target being met.

Annual small business retention is around 57%. Put plainly, more than four in ten small business subscribers do not renew. That is not a scandal, it is normal for the category, but it tells you something useful: a large share of buyers conclude within a year that the recurring services are not worth the money. Buy accordingly, and treat every subscription as opt-out rather than opt-in.

Subscription revenue grew 11% while transaction revenue fell. That is the fifth consecutive quarter of double-digit subscription growth, and it is the strategy stated out loud.

Context for the pressure behind it: revenue was $205.3 million for the quarter, up 7%, but full-year guidance was cut to $795 to $805 million from the $810 to $830 million given three months earlier, and the company announced a 13% workforce reduction alongside it. Management attributed the shortfall to weaker customer acquisition from reduced Google search traffic and rising paid search costs.

For a buyer, the workforce reduction is the part that matters most. Support capacity is the first thing to feel a 13% cut, and support is what you are paying a premium for here.

LegalZoom's public rating depends heavily on which platform you look at, and the spread is wider than any other service on this chart.

BBB also records 1,469 complaints over three years. The gap between an A+ accreditation and a 2.69 customer score confuses a lot of readers, so it is worth explaining: the letter grade reflects how a business responds to complaints, not how many it receives or how satisfied its customers are.

The pattern behind the split is familiar. Platforms that a company invites happy customers to review after a successful order skew high; platforms people seek out when something has gone wrong skew low. Both are real. The reading that fits the evidence: the filing itself usually goes fine, which is what the Trustpilot volume reflects, and the friction sits in billing, renewals and cancellations, which is what drives people to BBB.

Compare that with Northwest, whose complaints cluster on optional extras rather than the core service, and the difference in where the friction sits is the more useful signal than either score alone.

Two guarantees apply.

100% Accurate Filing Guarantee. If your filing is rejected or incorrect because of a LegalZoom error, the company corrects it with the government agency at no extra cost.

60-day satisfaction guarantee. This one has a hard edge. A refund is available within 60 days only if the order has not yet been completed and does not require documents to be submitted to a government agency. Once your formation documents go to the Secretary of State, the filing fees are not refundable. State filing fees and third-party processing fees are never refundable.

So the practical deadline is submission, not day 60. If you are having second thoughts, act before the paperwork leaves. That places LegalZoom roughly level with ZenBusiness and Swyft Filings, both of which draw the line in the same place, and well ahead of Tailor Brands, which publishes no comparable guarantee.

Yes, and it is the most transparent company on this chart by necessity. LegalZoom was founded in 2001, is headquartered in California, and has traded on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the ticker LZ since its June 2021 initial public offering, which priced at $28.00 a share. Jeffrey Stibel has been chief executive since July 2024, alongside his role as chairman.

Being listed means quarterly financial statements, audited accounts and disclosure obligations that no privately held competitor carries. If you want to know whether the company taking your filing will still be there in three years, this is the only one where you can check rather than guess.

Scale is not in doubt either. More than 4 million businesses formed since 2001, 1.892 million active subscription units, and A+ BBB accreditation held for 25 years. For context on the market it operates in, the US Census Bureau recorded 491,941 seasonally adjusted business applications in March 2026 alone.

The honest summary: this is an established, well-capitalised company under real pressure to convert buyers into subscribers. Nothing about that makes the filing less reliable. It does mean reading the renewal terms on every line of the checkout.