If there’s one thing WordPress has a lot of, it’s form plugins. Despite offering similar core functionality, these various WordPress form plugins are definitely not created equal; and with so many choices out there, how do we know which form plugin is best for our own WordPress projects?
You’re in the right place. 🙂 Read on for the complete, honest breakdown of the best WordPress form plugins, and our clear recommendations for which ones you should use yourself.
The Best WordPress Form Plugins—the TL;DR
If you want to skip the in-depth reviews and get straight to the good stuff, here you go:
Best Free WordPress Form Plugin
Ninja Forms. If you’re on a budget, Ninja Forms Lite is the best free WordPress form plugin of the ones I looked at. It’s straightforward to use, lets you build most forms, stores entries for you, and protects against spam.
Best Premium WordPress Form Plugin
Gravity Forms. It’s a close-run race between the top three of Gravity Forms, WPForms, and Ninja Forms, but my top pick is Gravity Forms. As it’s been developed over years, Rocketgenius have engineered a lot of functionality into the core plugin, and it offers more add-ons than its rivals.
It’s August 2020 and you missed Fluent Forms? This article could be written in 2016 with the same content. It reminds me of missing Oxygen Builder in your page builder’s articles. Or missing GridPane in your hosting reviews. Guys, you should really update your WordPress vision in 2020!
Thanks for your thoughts. There are always names you could add to any review. Would you like to say anything about the particular merits of the services you mentioned?
Hi, thanks for not ignoring my post 😉 Fluent Forms is the fastest and very well featured form plugin. Great integrations, in-house statistics, custom email notifications, multi-step forms, conditional fields, calculations, payments, and CPT submissions. Oh, yes, you can also register new users with those forms! All those features are built-in, so you don’t need additional add-ons, and third-party plugins. Oxygen Builder is a little different thing from other builders. It disables the WordPress theme system completely. Imagine it more like a templating system, where you can create custom templates for posts, CPT’s and integrate with ACF and Toolset. The sites made with Oxygen Builder are the fastest in the WP ecosystem. Gridpane is exclusively made for cloud hosting of WordPress websites on cloud servers like Digital Ocean, Vultr, and Linode (or any other cloud hosting). Their stack is the most advanced in the ecosystem – their server-level caching, staging sites, updates, multisite support, etc. The best thing is their in-house support. And we’re not talking about standard good support like from Siteground. Those guys from Gridpane just know their stuff, they’re WordPress and Linux server experts, so you can expect unexpected support :-). All of them are quite new… Read more »
You’re very welcome. 🙂 Those both sound interesting, I’ll check them out when I get a chance, thanks for the added detail!
“Forminator – Contact Form, Payment Form & Custom Form Builder” blows the doors off all of these choices.
I really like WPForms, it is user friendly and can do about anything from simple to advanced forms.
Gravity Forms is several steps down when it comes to ease of use, but can obviously do any form imaginable.
However, due to the high renewal costs of WPForms I recently decided to give Quform a go. It is really good, and easy to use. A great choice as long as you don’t need a payment option in your forms.
Happy Forms is a great form builder, too.
Never heard of caldera forms?
Surprised you did not include Formidable Forms. Free version has good basic features need for most simple forms. Similar to Gravity Forms in terms of form creation. Easy to build, good layout and styling
It’s a mistake that you overlooked WP Fluent Forms.
Altho that provides a good overview of forms creation etc, most of our clients need a straight-forward integrated solution. And that needs to be one they can understand across the full requirements.
We’ve found Airtable is a wonderful solution, both the back end and user interfaces.
Rapid learning and rapid development and rapid deployment – perfect for busy creatives and developers.
You left out 2 very strong contender:
1. Caldera Form
2. Formidable Form
Interestingly, with the central role Elementor hold in my workflow, all my form need is being met with Elementor Form + Dynamic Contents for Elementor. It’s an amazing combination that has drastically reduce the need for quite a number of other plugins.