With a contact form, you offer your customers an easy way to get in touch with you. But the plugins can often do much more. In this article, we have tested the five most popular contact form plugins for WordPress and WooCommerce for you.
Whether it's a company website, online store or hobby blog: Anyone who runs a WordPress site usually wants their message to be seen - and to get in touch with their target group. WordPress already offers a comment function for this purpose, which can be used to hold public discussions. But what if a customer wants to ask a non-public question or has another request?
Of course, it is standard practice to link contact options on your website: be it an email address, telephone number or social media profiles. You have to provide certain mandatory information about the provider at least in the legal notice anyway. Another option is to use contact forms, which have several advantages for you and your visitors.
Advantages of contact forms for your website
On the one hand, you take the hurdle of having to contact you directly away from your readers. Not everyone feels comfortable calling you or sending you an email. With a contact form, you create a "neutral place" that has less of a deterrent effect on this part of your target group.
Secondly, smart use of the contact forms allows you to ask for everything you need to help your visitors in the best possible way when they first contact you. For example, you can ask for an order number or have the right department selected directly via a selection field.
And finally: even complex processes can be mapped using contact forms. These can be order or booking processes or payment processing, for example. This requires a few settings and extensions, but can be achieved without expensive development work thanks to the flexibility of numerous WordPress plugins.
Which WordPress plugin should I use?
Now that we know that contact forms have many benefits and can be a great asset to your site, the next question is: Which contact form plugin should you use for your website? A search for "contact form" in the WordPress plugin directory throws up almost 1,000 results. Not all of them are actually contact forms, but the selection is still huge.
In this article, we will focus on the five most popular plugins in comparison: Contact Form 7, WPForms, Ninja Forms, Gravity Forms and Jetpack Forms. Some of these have several million active installations and thousands of reviews. Do you have another tip? Let us know in the comments to this article.
Contact Form 7: The standard solution
Contact Form 7 (CF7) is the standard solution among contact forms and, with over five million active installations, the most widely used plugin. The plugin developed by Takayuki Miyoshi from Japan maps the most important functions for contact forms:
It can query text, email addresses, URLs, telephone numbers, numbers and dates, offers the option of selection fields via drop-down menus, checkboxes and radio buttons. You can also use it to add confirmation fields, for example to confirm the privacy policy or your terms and conditions.
Contact Form 7 not only supports an email that is sent to you as the website operator, but also a second, optional email address. This allows you to send your visitors a confirmation email as soon as they have submitted the form, for example.
The big plus point of Contact Form 7 are the numerous extensions that you can find in the plugin directory. These can be used to implement redirects, databases, payment processing, captchas, file uploads and countless other functions. Tip: Search for "Contact Form 7" in the WordPress.org plugin directory to find many extensions.
The most important extensions for Contact Form 7
WPForms: The freemium plugin
Just behind Contact Form 7 is WPForms lite ("Contact Form by WPForms") with over four million active installations. However, it should be noted that the WPForms plugin is only a lite version. If you need more than the basic functions, you will inevitably have to upgrade to the paid versions. For this, WPForms offers four plans for 40, 100, 200 and 300 US dollars per year.
A positive feature of WPForms is the drag-and-drop builder, which you can use to create your contact form. This works very well for the basics: names, email addresses and text fields are no problem. On the negative side, however, it quickly becomes apparent that even fields such as phone numbers, file uploads, URLs or addresses require the Pro version.
These are also required for more complex forms with payment transactions (from 200 US dollars per year) and for marketing functions such as newsletter integration in the contact form (from 100 US dollars per year).
WPForms therefore has two target groups: website operators with minimal requirements for the contact form can use the free version. And those who really want to cover the full spectrum of possibilities choose the Pro plans starting at 40 US dollars per year. This can be worthwhile if you operate a larger site and need to map complex processes.
Ninja Forms: The cheaper freemium plugin
Ninja Forms offers a freemium model just like WPForms, but is slightly cheaper. With the free version, you can also add the basics to your contact forms and put them together using drag-and-drop in the construction kit. For more, you need one of the three payment plans for 50, 100 and 250 US dollars per year.
One positive aspect of Ninja Forms is that you can integrate payment processing via PayPal Express for as little as 50 US dollars per year. For the Stripe and Recurly services, you need the 100 US dollar plan, which is still 50 percent cheaper than WPForms.
In addition, the marketing functions (such as the integration of Mailchimp or other newsletter tools) are also included in the small payment plan starting at 50 US dollars.
Tip: Customize Ninja Forms
Gravity Forms: The Pro version
Gravity Forms does not offer a free version of its plugin, only a demo account or a "money-back guarantee". The extension is therefore only really suitable for those who need advanced contact forms.
Gravity Forms is priced between Ninja Forms and WPForms - it costs 59, 159 or 259 US dollars per year. The different Gravity Forms packages differ less in terms of functionality, but rather in the number of websites on which you can use the plugin with a license. However, there are also special integrations that are not available in every package.
To find out which pricing model you need, you can check the Gravity Forms overview page to see which model your desired integrations are available in. The basic package for 59 US dollars already includes the most important marketing tools, for payment processing you need at least the medium package for 159 US dollars.
Jetpack Forms: The underdog
Jetpack Forms are relatively unknown despite the widespread use of the Jetpack plugin. This is not least due to the fact that Jetpack goes to great lengths to make the settings as unintuitive as possible. In addition, Jetpack has a reputation among many WordPress developers for being overloaded - and thus creating unnecessary clutter in your installation.
Once activated, however, Jetpack Forms can be used to create simple contact forms and insert them into posts or pages. You can have the submissions sent to you by email and retrieve them in the backend under "Feedback".
You can't do much more with the Jetpack Forms. They are more of a simple solution for anyone who has activated Jetpack anyway and wants to save themselves another plugin.
Important: Observe the GDPR
Of course, it is important for contact forms that you comply with the current rules of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as your users usually leave their contact details here. All five plugins offer options for referring to the privacy policy - or only allowing them to submit the form after confirming it.
However, these options are not always activated by default. You should therefore check exactly which settings are activated in your contact form plugin. In general, you should seek advice from a law firm specializing in online law. This is because the GDPR contains a number of pitfalls that could end in an expensive warning.
Conclusion: Which contact form plugin is the best?
The five contact form plugins for WordPress and WooCommerce presented in this article are relatively similar when it comes to basic functions. Only WPForms stands out negatively here due to the lack of input fields, and Gravity Forms due to the lack of a free version. All others offer the most important functions, can be adapted to the GDPR and can send you email notifications when the form is filled out.
There are then major differences in the advanced requirements. Jetpack Forms is excluded here, as is Contact Form 7, even though many things can be retrofitted via extensions. The extensions do not come from the plugin development team itself and therefore vary in quality.
WPForms, Ninja Forms and Gravity Forms offer the pro features you'd expect from plugins upwards of $50 per year: Integrations with newsletter and CRM tools and various payment service providers, multi-page contact forms, spam protection, drag-and-drop editors and pre-built templates that you just need to customize.
This results in the following recommendations: Users who need free contact forms that cover the basic functions are in good hands with Contact Form 7. If you need more, it may be worth checking the Contact Form 7 extensions in the plugin directory. If you want to get the most out of your contact form, there is no getting around a paid version of WPForms, Ninja Forms or Gravity Forms. The latter two plugins are more attractive in terms of price.
