On the hunt for the best WordPress form plugin for your site? In our Gravity Forms review, we’ll introduce you to the plugin and help you decide if it’s the right option for your situation.
In general, Gravity Forms can make a great option for people who want to build more advanced types of forms on WordPress.
By “advanced”, that could mean different form types such as payment forms, user registration forms, lead generation forms, and so on.
It could also mean adding functions like conditional logic and calculations. These let you create more dynamic forms that change based on a user’s input.
Or, it could be integrating with other services that you’re using such as automatically adding people who submit your form to your customer relationship management software (CRM).
However, there are also some situations where Gravity Forms might not fit. For example, if you just want to build a simple contact form, the fact that Gravity Forms doesn’t have a free version might mean it’s not the best WordPress form plugin for your specific situation. Gravity Forms certainly can build simple contact forms, but you might not want to pay for it when there are already capable free contact form plugins out there.
Keep reading our Gravity Forms review and we’ll break down these thoughts in a lot more detail to help you make the right choice, as well as explain why we’ve made it our form plugin of choice.
What Types of Forms Can You Build With Gravity Forms?
Gravity Forms is a full-service WordPress form builder, which means it can help you build pretty much any type of form.
Of course, you can use it to build regular contact forms, just like any other WordPress contact form plugin. But where Gravity Forms really differentiates itself is in the other types of forms that you can create.
Here are some examples:
- User registration forms that create WordPress user accounts.
- Content creation forms that create blog posts or other post types (eg. submitting a job listing to a job custom post type).
- Payment forms that process one-time or recurring payments via Stripe, PayPal, Square, or other payment processors. This works for selling products, accepting payments for services, accepting donations, and more. You could even build a lightweight eCommerce store using just forms.
- Email subscribe forms that automatically sync people to your favorite email marketing service (Campaign Monitor, AWeber, MailerLite, and lots more).
- Lead generation forms that automatically add contacts to your CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce, and more).
- Business process forms that automate some important tasks in your business. For example, submitting information that your business needs to store or uploading a file. You can even build multi-step business process workflows with the companion Gravity Flow plugin.
- Calculator forms that perform real-time calculations using simple or advanced formulas, such as a loan payment calculator.
- Quote generator forms that can send data to you for a custom quote or automatically generate a quote using calculations.
You can also combine multiple functions into one form, which is where things get really fun.
For example, you could charge users a one-time or recurring fee to register on your site. As part of that same paid registration form, you could also automatically add users to your CRM with a certain tag and then create a task in your project management software to perform some key function related to the new user’s account.
Exploring Key Features in Gravity Forms
Now that you understand what you can build with Gravity Forms, let’s take our Gravity Forms review a little more hands-on with a real-life look at some of the most useful features in Gravity Forms.
This is not every single feature – we’re just trying to highlight some of the biggest features that you’ll use when building your forms.
Visual Drag-and-Drop Form Builder
To help you set up your forms, Gravity Forms offers a visual drag-and-drop form builder interface.
You can easily add fields to your form just by dragging them over from the sidebar on the right side of the interface.
You can also rearrange fields using drag and drop, including creating multi-column form designs just by dragging a field next to another one.
Once you’ve added a field to the form, you can open its settings in the sidebar to customize how it works.
You’ll be able to adjust labels and descriptions, plus configure other more advanced functionality depending on the field.
Pre-Made Form Template Library
While you’re always free to build forms from scratch, Gravity Forms also offers a pre-made form template library to help you save time when building common types of forms.
You’ll still be able to fully customize the template forms using the same drag-and-drop editor.
However, Gravity Forms currently only offers around 15 form templates to choose from, which is a lower number than some other form plugins.
Visual Form Styling Via the Block Editor
In Gravity Forms 2.7, the Gravity Forms team added a new feature – the Orbital form theme – to help you style your forms without needing to use custom CSS (though you are always free to use custom CSS if you prefer that approach).
When you embed your form using the Gravity Forms block, you’ll be able to access a bunch of style options right in the editor:
You can also use all of th native WordPress blocks, such as putting the Form block inside a Group block to add backgrounds and further control spacing.
Gravity Forms also offers an option to have your form inherit its styles from your active WordPress theme if you prefer that approach.
Conversational Form Interface
In addition to styling the “traditional” web form interface like we showed you above, Gravity Forms also recently launched a conversational forms feature that lets you use an interface that looks a lot like Typeform.
You can easily enable the conversational interface on a form-by-form basis.
Multi-Page Forms (With Progress Saving)
For longer forms, Gravity Forms lets you break forms into multiple pages. All you need to do is add the Page Break element where you want to separate the form.
You also have the option to save users’ partial progress, which can be especially helpful for longer forms.
Calculations
To help you create more interactive forms, Gravity Forms lets you perform simple or complex mathematical calculations based on a user’s input.
You can set up your own formulas and dynamically insert the values from form fields in the formula.
You can use this to create your own calculator forms (e.g. a mortgage calculator), quote forms, and more.
Flexible Form Notifications and Confirmations
After someone submits a form, Gravity Forms lets you create/display two types of messages:
- Notifications – these are emails that you can send to anyone, such as the form submitter, yourself, other people on your team, etc.
- Confirmations – these are messages that display on your site after someone submits the form.
For both types, you can use merge tags to dynamically insert information.
Beyond email notifications, you can also use official add-ons to set up other types of notifications. Here are a few examples:
- Send a text message/SMS via Twilio.
- Send a Slack message.
- Connect to Zapier to receive notifications via any Zapier-connected app.
Integrations With Third-Party Tools and Services
Beyond the built-in features, Gravity Forms also offers official add-ons to help you connect your forms to third-party services that you might be using including email marketing services, CRMs, payment processors, helpdesk systems, and more.
If you can’t find a direct integration, Gravity Forms also supports both Zapier and webhooks
The webhooks support also opens up some other WordPress-related automations, such as using the WP Webhooks plugin to set up webhooks for other plugins.
In-Dashboard Entry Management
In addition to letting you send yourself (or others) various types of notifications, Gravity Forms also stores all form submissions so that you can easily view them from your WordPress dashboard.
Beyond viewing basic form details, Gravity Forms also often adds extra features depending on the type of form that you’re creating.
For example, if you created an automatic recurring subscription payment form using Stripe, you can cancel a user’s subscription right from WordPress.
Conditional Logic
With conditional logic, you can configure your form to act in different ways depending on certain conditions, such as how a person answered a certain field in your form.
You can use conditional logic in a ton of different ways, including the following:
- Show or hide certain fields in your form.
- Show different confirmation messages.
- Send different notifications, either different content or to different people (or both!).
- Perform different actions in integrated services – for example, if you have a donation form, you could add a radio button that lets users choose between making a one-time or recurring donation. Based on their answer, you could choose whether to set up a one-time or recurring payment in Stripe (or a different payment processor).
You can easily set up conditional logic using a simple interface and as many “AND/OR” conditions as you want.
Gravity Forms Third-Party Add-Ons
While Gravity Forms offers tons of official add-ons to help you add more features and integrate with other tools, another nice thing about Gravity Forms is its huge marketplace of third-party add-ons, some of which we’ve written about on the WP Mayor blog.
Having access to all of these third-party add-ons opens up even more possibilities for what you can do.
They can help you build more advanced automation, add new features to your forms, connect with additional third-party services, and lots more.
Here are some more specific examples from the WP Mayor blog of what third-party Gravity Forms add-ons can help you do:
To find third-party add-ons, you have a few options:
Gravity Forms Pricing
Gravity Forms only comes in a premium version.
It might therefore not be the right option if you’re just looking for a free solution to create a simple contact form and you don’t need to connect to any other services or implement more advanced features.
But if you want to build more advanced types of forms and/or forms that integrate with other services that you’re using, Gravity Forms offers a lot of value and is cheaper than some of the other big-name form plugins.
There are three different licensing options – Basic, Pro, and Elite. There’s also a dedicated Nonprofit license that’s available to registered non-profits.
There are two main differences between the licenses:
- The number of sites that you can use Gravity Forms on. It ranges from a single site on the Basic license to unlimited sites on the Elite license.
- Which add-ons you get access to. The Elite license gives you access to every single add-on, while the other two licenses have some limits on which add-ons you can access.
The Elite license also gives you access to Priority Support, while the other two licenses offer Standard Support, though we’re not entirely sure what the difference is between the two.
Gravity Forms uses transparent pricing, so the price that you pay for the first year will be the same price that you pay at renewal. This is different from some other popular plugins that charge a lower price for the first year and then can more than double in price when you go to renew your license.
Gravity Forms does not offer a free trial, but there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee and you can also create a free demo site that has all of the official add-ons installed.
Final Thoughts on Gravity Forms
That wraps up our full Gravity Forms review.
For simple contact forms where you don’t need more advanced functionality and/or integrations, it might not be worth paying for Gravity Forms as there are plenty of free form plugins that can get the job done.
But if you want to build more advanced types of forms and/or forms that integrate with other services, Gravity Forms is one of the top options out there thanks to its built-in features, large library of official and third-party add-ons, and extensible code.
If you want to try out Gravity Forms, you have two options:
- Purchase a Gravity Forms license and install the plugin on your sites. All purchases are backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee.
- Create a free, fully functioning demo site to test the core plugin, along with all of the official add-ons.
Do you still have any questions about Gravity Forms or our Gravity Forms review? Leave a comment below!
