I've been a longtime user of Contact Form 7, but recent customer requirements led me to try out Gravity Forms. I have to say, my experience has been mixed, especially considering the cost.
Gravity Forms isn't cheap. I purchased the Elite license expecting it to cover all my needs. However, I quickly realized that many essential features require additional premium subscriptions. It's frustrating to pay for an Elite license only to find that I still need to buy third-party add-ons like Gravity Perks, Gravity View, and GravityKit.
In today's world, where custom code isn't as challenging to produce, it's surprising that Gravity Forms continues to push for a $500 annual subscription on top of various premium add-ons. This pricing strategy feels outdated and overly greedy.
What do you think? Is Gravity Forms worth the investment, or have you found better alternatives? Let me know your experiences and suggestions!
Updated: I need to show form entiers on the front end. With some search filters and a calendar view. How can it be possible without the addtional paid add ons.
I cannot comment on Gravity Forms (others hopefully can feedback better on that) but I switched from Contact Form 7 to Fluent Forms and haven’t looked back.
They’ve setup the plugin nicely so a lot of key and important features can all be done from the free version (smtp delivery, spam protection) and only if you need advanced features (as I don’t know your specific requirements) you can pay for the pro license.
Yes, Gravity Forms is easily the favourite form plugin for many people, esp developers. CF7 is absolute trash compared to GF.
The Elite license is $259USD. I’ve never needed any of the third party add-ons you mentioned. The great thing about GF is it’s so simple (for developers) to build whatever you want on top of it – the documentation and API is easily the best.
I’ve been using GF for over a decade now and it’s still my preferred choice. “custom code” is one thing, but all the under the hood stuff that goes into field building UI, sending notifications, honeypot / spam catching, etc is another.
one more thing to consider: a paid plugin is way more likely to continually be updated and improved over time.
I’m looking for form plugins so I may try it
I use Gravity Forms and have done for years, personally I think it’s well worth the price.
You say you need to buy third-party add-ons but unless you’re doing something very specific then those are not required. I have needed one site where I needed Gravity View but I asked the client to buy the licence for that. I would rather clients own their own licences for plug-ins I only need on their sites.
GF also has many hooks you can use for customisation, so if you do need to add those you often don’t need an additional plug-in anyway.
For the price, it’s always reliable and the support is very good. Any problems i’ve had have been resolved with 8 or so hours maximum.
As I say, I’ve used this for a long time but have heard good things of Fluent Forms (as other poster). Either way I think investing in a stable and fully-supported form plug-in is well worth the investment and pays for itself quickly. Going back to something like CF7 you’ll feel the pain!
Gravity forms is the only WP form tool I have ever used that has not somehow become a pain in the butt at some point. It just works every time. It’s reliable and very easy to customize to fit my needs. I personally think it’s the only choice.
If on the fence about a form builder, I think formidable is worth a looksie.
I’ve used Gravity Forms for many years and still consider it a good choice. To be honest, I’m not very familiar with the third-party add-ons you mentioned (except GravityView) or why they would be “needed.” What use cases, specifically, do you need all of these add-ons for?
While I don’t have much experience with them, there are some other great WordPress form plugins out there you might want to consider. WPForms, Formidable Forms, and Ninja Forms each have “Views” features, either from them or from a third-party. Although, at a quick glance, I’m not sure if you’d be saving much money compared to the Gravity Forms equivalent.
In my opinion, if you find something that meets your needs, it might be best to just stick with it.
Fluent forms pro is the best .. that’s why I purchased an agency account to use it for my clients
I’ve spent way too much time trying to get simple features in CF7 to work when GF generally does everything in a simple interface. Set and forget.
What features do you find essential that are behind the premium subscription?
You can look like it as look at all these addons I have to pay for; or, you can look at it as look at GravityForms’ [huge community of third-party addons](https://www.gravityforms.com/community/add-ons/) that solve a ton of niche problems that I can just buy and not have to build and maintain.
I use Forminator. Free version offers features (like Stripe/Paypal) other forms have only in paid version. Can not compare it with GF, as I haven’t used latter.
If you are doing a new build, Forminator has a few features that most free form plugins do not have, like multi-page.
If you need to display form entries on the front end with search filters and a calendar view without incurring extra costs, you might want to explore **Formidable Forms**. It offers built-in features for displaying entries on the front end, including advanced filtering and calendar views, all under a single license.
Yes, it’s a great plugin with great support.
You may be able to use Gravity View to show form entries. But, that has its own license.
On a related note, Contact Form 7 apparently did some things to really upset people judging by the last couple months worth of reviews on wordpress.org. The first several pages of reviews are full of bad reviews explaining problems that broke people’s websites: https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/contact-form-7/reviews/
I recall one reviewer said the support team they’re not going to reverse one particular decision that broke a lot of sites, so it’s going to stay this way, and that *really* upset people.
I like Gravity Forms a lot and use them on numerous sites.
However, in the past year I’ve moved almost exclusively to bricks builder and it has an excellent native form builder. It’s part of the page builder so you have a ton of options for styling, conditional logic and querying post data and custom fields.
Where things really take off is the Bricksforge plugin (premium). It comes with a ton of impressive features, one of them being an Advanced Forms extension that’s just phenomenal. In addition to extending the form functionality with complex conditions and nested elements, where it really shines is it’s ability to map the form entries to custom fields and publish a post/page directly from a submitted form.
For example you can use this to build a city business directory where local businesses submit their own business info via a front facing form which can be very involved, (drop down selectors of custom fields like business type, neighborhood, business hours, etc), conditional wrappers that can show/hide whole groups of form fields and a whole slew of submit actions, including auto publishing the form data to a custom post type (e.g. business listing or local event).
Great support, been very helpful and even implemented a few features I suggested.
Is gravity forms still a security nightmare? I know we moved away from using it a long time ago because it was riddled with vulnerabilities
You can make a contact form with Google Drive. It’s one less plugin you have to manage and the results are sent to a Google spreadsheet. I’ll never use a WP plugin again
You should check out wsform. It’s not as flashy but much more performant, less opinionated and less bloated IME and can do just as much if not more.
https://wsform.com/pricing/
Bricks forge pro forms is also very good but only for bricks builder users
I have always seen gravity and fluent as top class form builders . Cf7 is quite old with no innovation
fluent forms, has a free version and lifetime option for the pro version which includes all the addons
I’ve used Contact Form 7, Ninja Forms and Gravity Forms. Little by little started gravitating towards Gravity Forms (pun intended). I’ve been migrating all of my sites forms to Gravity, they are the best
We’ve used and use Gravity Forms for many clients. That said I am a fan of Formidable Forms Pro. They allow complex calculation on fields as input to other fields. Pro is $400 a yr.
GF is a great choice. I include it in my design/dev/maintenance packages.
Gravity forms is wonderful if you are an agency. The price is well worth it when you can use it on unlimited sites. The integrations are a huge selling point and very easy to connect to some of the most common tools.
I am a long time Gravity Forms user. It isn’t perfect, I think that Fluent Forms has jumped ahead of it for feature set and ability to style. If I were making the choice today, I would choose Fluent. I have a grandfathered in Gravity Forms Developer license for unlimited sites at $99/year which makes it difficult to leave.
I have also used Crocoblock’s Jet Formbuilder and it has pretty good dynamic and database output capabilities. It integrates well with Crocoblock’s suite of other tools which *may* get you close to what you’re trying to do.
If you haven’t used Everest Forms, I would recommend it too. Been using it for a long while…. It has recently started giving ALOT of fields for free. Super underrated plugin imo. As for gravity forms, I haven’t used it as much.