When you browse the web, you’ll often encounter various forms of online activity, especially on business websites. These forms serve different purposes: contact, order, inquiry, signup, and survey. These forms are essential for websites, but creating them can be challenging, especially if you lack programming knowledge. Thankfully, several form builder plugins are available to simplify the process. Two of the most popular options for WordPress sites are Gravity Forms and Fluent Forms. In this blog post, we’ll compare these two form builders across several features to help you decide which is best for your needs.
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What is Gravity Forms?
Gravity Forms is a popular and well-established form builder plugin for WordPress. It’s known for its user-friendly interface and comprehensive features, catering to novice and experienced users. However, some users have expressed concerns about the plugin’s stagnant development and high cost, prompting them to look for alternatives.
What is Fluent Forms?
Fluent Forms is a powerful and user-centric form builder for WordPress. It has gained popularity for its robust features and active development based on user feedback. Fluent Forms offers features such as Mautic integration, PDF add-ons, conversational forms, quiz modules, and more. The plugin has a growing user base and offers strong customer support.
Gravity Forms vs Fluent Forms: Key Features Comparison
1. Ease of Use
Fluent Forms: Fluent Forms is designed with beginners in mind, offering an intuitive and straightforward interface. The drag-and-drop functionality makes it easy to create and customize forms. Fluent Forms also offers a preview option, which allows users to see how the form will look to users before publishing it. Additionally, Fluent Forms provides extensive documentation, tutorials, and 24/7 customer support.
Gravity Forms: Gravity Forms also offers a drag-and-drop feature, but it can be less intuitive for beginners. The plugin doesn’t include pre-built form templates, so users need to create forms from scratch. The absence of a preview option on the same page makes tracking progress challenging.
Winner: Fluent Forms is more user-friendly, especially for beginners, making it the winner in this category.
2. Prebuilt Form Templates
Fluent Forms: Fluent Forms offers 70+ prebuilt form templates catering to various needs, from simple contact forms to complex order forms. These templates make form creation quick and easy, even for users without coding skills.
Gravity Forms: Gravity Forms does not offer any prebuilt form templates, requiring users to create forms from scratch each time.
Winner: Fluent Forms provides more convenience with its extensive selection of prebuilt templates.
3. Input Fields
Fluent Forms: Fluent Forms offers 45+ input fields, including 20+ in the free version. Users can easily customize forms by dragging and dropping input fields or clicking on fields to add them automatically.
Gravity Forms: Gravity Forms also offers many input fields but includes only a handful of basic fields in the basic plan. Advanced fields are available in higher-priced plans.
Winner: Fluent Forms provides more input fields, especially in its free version, making it the winner in this category.
4. Layout Features
Fluent Forms: Fluent Forms offers user-friendly layout features, allowing users to align labels, set help message positions, and customize asterisks. The plugin provides a clear and simple layout system.
Gravity Forms: Gravity Forms offers layout options but requires additional plugins for customization, which can be challenging even for experienced users.
Winner: Fluent Forms offers more convenient layout features, making it the better choice.
5. Multi-Column Layouts
Fluent Forms: Fluent Forms allows users to create multi-column layouts, making forms more compact and organized. The plugin offers a container option for adding input fields in up to six columns, with the ability to apply conditional logic to containers.
Gravity Forms: Gravity Forms requires an additional plugin (“Styles & Layouts”) to create multi-column layouts, complicating the process.
Winner: Fluent Forms provides a built-in multi-column layout feature, making it the winner in this category.
6. Conditional Logic
Fluent Forms: Fluent Forms offers conditional logic for any input field, making forms dynamic and interactive. The plugin also allows conditional forwarding on emails, enabling confirmation emails and notifications based on conditions.
Gravity Forms: Gravity Forms allows users to show or hide fields based on conditions but lacks email-based conditional logic.
Winner: Fluent Forms offers more advanced conditional logic features, making it the winner.
7. Spam Filtering
Fluent Forms: Fluent Forms provides robust spam filtering options, including Google reCAPTCHA, Simple Captcha, Akismet, and Honeypot. The plugin also offers conditional form submission and a hidden input field for bot detection.
Gravity Forms: Gravity Forms offers similar spam protection options, such as reCAPTCHA and Akismet.
Winner: Both plugins provide robust spam filtering, but Fluent Forms offers additional options like conditional form submission, making it slightly more secure.
Conclusion
After comparing Gravity Forms and Fluent Forms across several key features, it’s clear that both plugins have their strengths. However, Fluent Forms is the better choice for most users due to its user-friendly interface, extensive features, and cost-effectiveness. With its robust capabilities and strong customer support, Fluent Forms is an excellent choice for creating powerful and engaging forms on their WordPress site.