Good marketing depends on the right calls-to-action and forms. Those forms need to be both simple and easy to use. The right form drives conversions, sales, and leads on your website. These days you will hardly find a website without a contact form, and there’s a good reason for that.
Update – August 2026: I wrote this review back in 2020, and parts of it aged like milk. The prices I quoted are ancient history (I now point you at their live pricing page instead of guessing), the launch-date math was wrong in two directions, and one early section was marketing copy I had pasted straight from the Gravity Forms site. Not my finest editorial moment. That part is now written in my own words, like it should have been all along. The verdict, though? Unchanged. This plugin is still on nearly every site we build.
With WordPress, keep in mind that there are plenty of form builder plugins out there. Once you weigh factors like usability, support, spam protection, reliability, security, and scalability, you quickly realize that Gravity Forms is a form builder you can’t afford to overlook.
This is more than your ordinary form plugin. Gravity Forms is an excellent piece of software packed with possibilities, features, and room to expand. Below is an in-depth review of Gravity Forms, which frankly is the best web form builder plugin available today.
Gravity Forms
Let me give you the pitch the way I’d give it to a client. Gravity Forms is a visual, drag-and-drop form builder that lives right inside your WordPress dashboard. You drag fields onto a form, tweak a few settings, drop it on a page, and you’re collecting entries. Contact forms, newsletter signups, surveys, quizzes, order forms – I’ve built all of them with this thing, and none of them took longer than an afternoon.
It also plays nicely with the services I actually use – HubSpot, Mailchimp, Zapier, Stripe, PayPal, and a long list of others. And it pulls off a trick very few plugins manage: it’s simple enough that my clients can edit their own forms without breaking anything, and deep enough that I’ve never once hit a wall as a developer. That combination is rarer than it should be.
Who Made Gravity Forms?
RocketGenius developed Gravity Forms and has been recognized as the best premium plugin for a WordPress site. It launched back in 2009 (an earlier version of this review said 2011 – my bad) and has been in active development for going on seventeen years now. In plugin years, that’s practically a redwood.
Carl Hancock – co-founder, CEO, and a longtime fixture of the WordPress community – still leads the project. Over the years, the team has kept looking for new ways to make sure Gravity Forms stays a high-quality form builder plugin.
What Is Gravity Forms?
This WordPress plugin lets you build advanced forms with a drag and drop feature. The plugin comes with strong features such as advanced spam protection, form submission limits, and scheduling. It also handles WordPress Posts Creation and offers 30+ form fields.
On top of the features mentioned above, interested developers can keep extending the plugin. There is detailed, useful documentation in place to help with that process.
Developers can extend current add-ons or build their own. Right now there are plenty of free and premium add-ons available to users, most of them built by third-party developers. That’s an unusual feature, and not something you typically find in other WordPress plugins.
Pricing
One thing that sets Gravity Forms apart is that it doesn’t offer a free version. But it does provide a free demo so you can test-drive the plugin before you commit and buy.
Now, the part of this review that aged the worst: prices. When I first published this in 2020, licenses started around $59 per year and the top Elite tier retailed for around $259. Those numbers have changed since, and honestly, I’d rather send you to their pricing page for current figures than guess and get it wrong.
What I can tell you first-hand: I personally use the Elite license and pay $99/year on my resub. I’m not sure if that’s still how they do it for new customers or not, but I’ll never let this subscription lapse!
Their three license tiers each come with different levels of add-ons, and that’s pretty much the only thing that differs between the plans. You get the same great form builder on the cheapest plan that you do on the Elite plan. There is no “lite” version of Gravity Forms.
Features
Gravity Forms is packed with all kinds of features, each with its own purpose. Some of the things this plugin offers include:
Form Fields
The plugin gives users a broad range of form fields to choose from. It has done a careful job of organizing those fields into clear categories.
All you need to do is use the drag and drop feature in your open form builder, fill in the extra information it asks for, and you’re good to go.
Easy to Use Form Editor
Gravity Forms provides a form editor that is simple and easy to use. The drag and drop feature makes it easy to move things around.
Click on any field and start customizing. You can also preview the form once you have finished building it, before you publish it to the web.
Save & Proceed
With this plugin, you’re set up to start creating detailed multi-page web forms. A progress bar at the top shows how far you have gotten.
It means you can save your work and keep filling in the form at the same time. If you have turned on the save and continue function, anyone using the forms can save their progress and come back to finish later.
Fight Spam
Another big strength of this plugin is its ability to fight spam. By now you probably know how dull and tiresome it is to spend a large chunk of your time scrolling through long-form submissions.
Gravity Forms offers a number of ways to fight spam:
- Really Simple Captcha
- Akismet
- Google ReCaptcha
- Anti-Spam Honeypot
You can turn on the Akismet spam check along with your preferred captcha on the form. Or you can just use Akismet alone to fight spam.
It’s worth noting that captchas often come at a cost to user experience. So using only Akismet to fight spam would improve the overall user experience. Over time, that’s likely to lead to more organic form entries.
I personally use Recaptcha. I think the “I’m not a robot” checkbox is funny and, in my experience, it doesn’t cost the user more effort than they’re willing to put in. That single ReCaptcha v2 checkbox saves me literally thousands of spam entries across my websites. Akismet is good, but ReCaptcha is free. And Free is great!
Powerful Integrations
The plugin integrates smoothly with many WordPress plugins, online services, and web applications. All in all, it offers more than 35 integrations. The number of available integrations often depends on the Gravity Forms package you chose.
While the full list is quite long, some of the integrations include:
- PayPal
- Stripe
- Coupons
- Authorize.Net
- Signature
Some of the really cool things you can do with these integrations include:
- Receive PayPal payments
- Upload files to Dropbox using the Dropbox add-on
- Use the Survey add-on to conduct Surveys
- Create Trello Cards using the Trello add-on
- Do pretty much anything you can think of using the Zapier add-on!
Support
Support plays a big role in whether any product succeeds or fails. Gravity Forms has a very solid support team.
Premium users can expect their issues addressed within a 24-hour window. That shows just how much the team behind this plugin cares about its customers.
As an elite user myself, I found that my issues are answered and resolved within the same working day in most cases. These guys truly are great!
WordPress Post Creation
When using Gravity Forms, you can also create posts using post fields. This feature opens up countless possibilities.
- For instance, you can set up a custom form to quickly jot down your ideas without having to log in.
- You could also have a site containing users’ listings
- You can create an automated testimonial input on your website! Then have that filter into a custom testimonials post type, and be saved as drafts, so you just preview and approve them to go live. This is probably the most useful and realistic suggestion.
The plugin gives you complete control over how you manage your post.
Conditional Logic
Conditional Logic is another very powerful feature in this plugin. It lets the user hide or show available fields depending on what the user enters in the other fields.
It’s a feature that will, without a doubt, come in handy when you’re trying to collect information from users with different backgrounds. It’s also used heavily when creating things like online resume submission forms.
Additional Features
As mentioned above, this plugin comes with a whole set of great features. Some of its additional features include:
- Great and useful documentation on all topics
- All its forms are responsive
- Some pre-created column style options (although it would be nice to see more column functionality in the form builder itself)
- Ability to receive files in the form submissions
- Pass field data as query strings to thank you pages
- And so much more …
TLDR
Is Gravity Forms worth your money? Yes. Yes, it is. This plugin is easy to use, and it’s also very capable. We at Zealous Sites use it for nearly every website we create, and because it integrates so smoothly with HubSpot, we can do it without sacrificing anything. I 100% recommend Gravity Forms. You’ll love it!