5 Reasons Gravity Forms Makes Your Current Form Plugin Look Like Crap
June 11, 2010
in Resources
I was recently looking for a forms plugin and was getting frustrated. Normally my only use for forms is as a simple contact form, but this time I needed something more robust for use on a contest site. It had to be really easy for users to submit their entries, and equally as easy for the administrators to review them. Something was going wrong with every plugin I was using, and I was about to think of other ways to make the site work.
Then I stumbled upon Gravity forms.
It was everything I was looking for, so I bought it and couldn’t be happier. I’ve narrowed down the 5 reasons that Gravity Forms is better than the form plugin you’re using, and I’m going to go into them quickly here:
Support
This is the biggest difference between free and premium anything and why I gladly pay for most things I use. If you have a problem on your site, or are building a site for someone else, you probably need it fixed now. Not in a few weeks when the author gets around to messaging you back. Gravity Forms is a small operation, so there’s no phone number or anything, but you’ll get your answer fairly quickly on the support forums.
Mail services
There’s no need to use your mail service for any responses. You can see and reply to form inquiries via the WordPress dashboard. Feel like sending an autoresponse to somebody after they fill your form out? You can do that too, and you can pass information like their name to the e-mail to personalize it.
Form Scheduling and Limited Entries
Having a contest? Let people only submit entries for the contest duration. Better yet, if you’re only allowing a certain number of submissions you can set the form to expire after that many people have replied. Briliant.
Validation
I don’t work my ass off on making a website validate just to install a plugin and have it mess all that up. Gravity Forms validates strict. Nerdy stuff, but important to some of us.
And my number one favourite feature of Gravity Forms is….
Post creation
You can allow anybody to post to your blog using your form. This includes letting them fill out custom fields. This means that for a contest site, the entries can already be processed and held in Drafts for moderation, requiring only one click to put them live.
Who it’s for
Anybody who needs a very easy to use and robust system for forms. This could be somebody who gets contacted a lot, needs to allow user-generated content, or is setting the form up for a client.
Who it’s not for
Somebody who rarely uses forms. If you get contacted once every two months, you might not need to spend the $40. But then again, you might want to anyway for the ease of use and just in case you need support.
Buy Gravity Forms
You can buy Gravity Forms, get more information and find out more about its other features (such as conditional logic, field population, data passing etc) over at the official website.
Have any experience with Gravity Forms or know of another form software that might be better? Let us know in the comments!
Stay Updated
You'll notice this site talks about the Thesis theme for Wordpress. Don't know what the heck that is? Find out.
Previous post: How to Easily Run Internet Explorer on Your Mac
Next post: Theme Thesis is on Facebook
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
I’ve had my eye on this for a while and have been waiting for a new project that justifies splashing out for the dev license. I also didn’t know about the direct to post feature so this plugin has now shot up in my expectations. A lot of people recommend this but your post is the first that actually validates the reasoning behind the recommendation.
Reply
Thanks, Daniel. Also you don’t need to spring for the dev license right away, you can just e-mail them after and get the upgrade pricing.
Reply
Do you know if Gravity Forms work with gdform.php?
Thanks!
Reply
Unfortunately no, I do not. Is that another form script? If so, this would replace it. I tried looking it up but couldn’t really tell what it is other than something proprietary for GoDaddy so you could try asking them.
Reply
Hey Matt,
Thanks the article, it definitely validates my decision to purchase Gravity Forms. I just wanted to point out one thing. Your title made me think that you were actually negative on Gravity Forms. I would add in “Current” so that it reads “5 REASONS GRAVITY FORMS MAKES YOUR CURRENT FORM PLUGIN LOOK LIKE CRAP”. Just a thought. I actually clicked on the search result for your post in Google because I thought you were bashing it instead of promoting it.
Marc
Reply
Good call.
Thanks.
Reply
Hey Matt,
Quick question. You said no worries of adding your autoresponder code. What if I want to. Do I need a different product. My reasoning is, that I use forms for the application process for my primary. After they opt in, they are in one stage of my funnel. If they fill out an app, I want them in another list, and so on.
Can I use aweber code in this form?
Thanks
Reply
@Chris Unfortunately, GravityForms does NOT integrate with aweber – only MailChimp. Apparently, aweber uses a “traditional api” and that’s not good enough for GF.
What alternative for aweber customers?
Mike
Reply
Any idea if this form plugin will eventually work with PayPal Payments Pro in some kind of way to potentially process online credit card transactions? Such as for award contests submission payments, etc.
There is already a WordPress plugin that does the PayPal Payments Pro part and I am wondering if the two of them can talk to each other? Any ideas about this?
The other plugin is here: www.blueskyis.com/code.php
I tried contacting the BlueSky guys and they never responded…
Dante
Reply
That’d be awesome, but I’m not sure. I’d contact Gravity Forms to ask.
Reply
Hey Matt,
I am wondering if there is a way the data from gravity forms can be displayed in a list style format for each entry by date and time? So if, for example, Bob submitted a form at Noon it would be automatically displayed before nancy who submitted at 11:30?
Reply
That might be possible, but I’ve never tried it. I’d recommend asking on the Gravity Forms forums.
Reply
I have been watching Gravity Forms for some time now.
I look to get the ad-on directory plugin.Ity seems nice enough though to spend $40 and find it does not make a good directory will be a kicker
Greg
Reply