Why We Love Gravity Forms
There are a range of form plugins and systems available for WordPress, with a range of included features and add-on features. Our pick for our customers is nearly always Gravity Forms. Gravity Forms dates back to 2008 and has only continued to grow and provide value and functionality to customers.
The Competition
“Why not X? Why not Y?” is always a good question, and keeping on top of the latest developments is always a good thing to be doing. However, time and time again, we find ourselves reaching for the old faithful Gravity Forms. Maybe not so for it having every single flashy feature out of the box, but for the stability and eco-system that surrounds it.
Here are a few examples of form builders we have tried, and why ultimately we end up going back to Gravity Forms.
CrocoBlock JetFormBuilder
A good example is JetFormBuilder by CrocoBlock – a very modern Gutenberg based form editor (GravityForms looks like Gutenberg these days, but isn’t actually!) providing a raft of features. However, it’s incredibly OOP design of code, along with requiring compiled Gutenberg-compatible code, makes it incredibly difficult to quickly add additional processing actions and other items required for real-world situations.
It also really doesn’t quite integrate with it’s own JetEngine platform – having found during work on a site where JetBookings cannot calculate it’s own pricing correctly with customers being left with putting together formulas for working out the price of bookings instead of being able to simple add-up all of the costs in the form automatically (and providing a receipt!)
Some of the configuration can also be confusing, especially when using items such as user profile updating forms for building small systems, where options even in the documentation are not worded in a way that makes much sense beyond “try it and see if it works properly or not”.
A final gripe being notification emails need to be typed out in full with all fields, which can be incredibly time consuming! Gravity Forms provides {all_fields} which outputs everything in a HTML table which is usually good enough!
Calculated Fields Form
A more obscure options is CFF, which does provide a different range of functionality within a more compact design. The design and interface however does feel a bit clunky and overloading for simplistic forms, but provides power and complexity to do a lot with it out of the box. This includes items such as PDF generation, data lookup based on previous entries and more. Gravity Forms can do these items with add-ons, some of which involve paid extras from other companies, so an option with more of this in a singular package is also good.
However, a big part I feel it lets itself down is with data storage. Everything from an entry is stored in a singular row, which for most people is likely fine, but it restricts any ability to query and aggregate entries, for example for being able to create a voting system. While do-able, it would require decoding a JSON blob for each row which can get slow very quickly.
Gravity Forms uses a more WordPress approach of having top level information (gf_entry) and each item under a meta data (gf_entry_meta) making writing SQL queries over this much much easier.
Elementor Forms
Elementor, the popular page builder, provides a relatively comprehensive page builder system built-in. While it’s nice to have something integrated, storing entries and providing some integrations out of the box in addition, it does fall a bit short on being able to do much more than that.
It does have the advantage of being optimized for the Elementor platform, with being able to inherit styles globally from Elementor sites which is an advantage over Gravity Forms, and many other solutions on the market (although we don’t build many Elementor sites so this is less of an issue).
There is limited, but good extensibility from Elementor too, being PHP driven, making it relatively easy to add new functionality.
Where Gravity Forms Shines
Gravity Forms shines mostly upon having a great base layer to build other stuff on top of. While it would be great to see more field types (i.e repeaters being public), there is a community building additional plugins based on the hooks Gravity Forms has provided.
For example, Gravity Wiz is an entire business set up around providing extra bits and pieces to Gravity Forms and is well worth the additional subscription. Gravity PDF, Gravity View and even code we’ve written integrates and provides an extension of the user interface.
Items we’ve created include even small improvements such as being able to lookup car details against the DVSA database and auto-fill the rest of the form. Easily created as a plugin which can be installed onto other websites, configured and good to go.
This ranges up to more complex items such as a whole system we build which allowed for completion of several forms, and all of that data – including sub-forms – was combined with a template to provide an instant draft of a document.
Conclusion
With this we hope this gives you a good understanding of why we use Gravity Forms and how we are able to use this platform to build good forms which work as expected, and try to make completion easy. If you have any bespoke form needs, do get in touch to see how we can help!