Gravity Forms for WordPress – Should You Get It?
A contact form is one of the most basic and most important things you’ll want to have on your new blog. But do you need a contact form badly enough to pay $39 for it – that’s the question!
Gravity Forms is a well-coded, sleek contact forms plugin for WordPress. By looking at the demo site you can clearly see that Gravity Forms will help you create almost any type of form you want. In fact, if you’re in an industry where you need to create lots and lots of forms, this could be a great investment.
But re-examine the fundamental question here – how often do you need to create new forms?
If all you need is a simple contact form on your blog, there are several free WordPress plugins like WP Contact Form and Contact Form 7 that will do the job just fine. And from my experience, once your basic contact form is up and running there is no real need for you to mess around with other solutions.
Here’s how much Gravity Forms will cost you:
- $39 for single site license
- $99 for multi-site license
- $199 for developer license
So, do you really need it? It would be interesting to hear what you have to say..
9 Responses to “Gravity Forms for WordPress – Should You Get It?”
I use cforms on my WordPress sites, and I would say I really don’t need to pay for a contact form plugin. This is for a couple of reasons: one – cforms works really well; two – as you say, I don’t have much of a requirement for contact forms, or for all singing all dancing version for that matter! Worth knowing about the options though. Thanks
I am using a beta version on my site and I feel it’s well worth the money. The beta version includes integration with MailChimp for my email newsletter, so I save load time by not having to call to all of MailChimp’s external JS files. Forms are far easier to create than with the alternatives you mentioned. There are a ton of stats, routing and autoresponder options that just work. These days, with so many bloggers being told to do eBooks, contests and email newsletters, I think that more people are using contact forms for more than just a contact form.
Gobala Krishnan Reply:
January 23rd, 2010 at 11:52 pm
MailChimp huh… that’s something I have to try in the near future
I can see a developer needing such a plug in but I’ll stick with WP Contact form for when I add a form to my site (something I need to still do).
I guess it depends on needs but definitely a great majority of us don’t really need it as the free versions like contact form 7 contain features that are more than enough for most of us.
As a developer – I couldn’t run my business without Gravity Forms and Contact Form 7. I use each for different reasons. Gravity forms is not meant for casual bloggers or affiliate marketers, at least not in my opinion. I build websites for clients where their business relies on the safe and secure capture of data and orders via forms. Gravity is pricey, but the support you get for the price is insane. I had a customization question earlier today and received an email back from the lead developer at rocket genius within 10 minutes. The drag and drop interface is sick and makes CF7 and Cforms look like childs play. Throw in Mailchimp and Freshbooks integration and we have a champion! No questions asked – worth every penny.
There is no doubt that having the right tools for the job can make life easier and I usually end up buying anything that helps me. Currently, I am happy using my AWeber autoresponder account to generate contact forms with double opt-in and a widget for blogs. For creating websites I use XSitePro that has built-in forms and ties into my AWeber account.
I use Contact Form 7, but I need to know how to create the form so that it offers my free reports. Any suggestions?
cForms is also a pretty good, more complex, free option of contact forms.
I have tried and really like the gravity forms though. The ability to route incoming contacts to various departments/emails works great for bigger companies and their sites. Also the ability to easily add conditional sections into a for (EX: If a certain dropdown selection is chosen, then additional items appear)
There are a lot more interesting things available within Gravity Forms, but as mentioned, the basic user, most of these options are not needed.