Five of the best WordPress contact form plugins for 2014

Here’s our look at five of the best WordPress contact form plugins for 2014.

Forms are a central part of any WordPress-powered website. So what are the best free and paid plugin options for your forms?

Let’s start by looking at some of the free plugins available.

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 is an old favorite of many in the WordPress community. It is simple to use; however, over the past year it has been updated quite a bit. It now has really Simple CAPTCHA system incorporated into the plugin. It also has multilingual functionality through its ability to integrate with another popular language plugin, Bongo.

Contact Form 7 has been around for a number of years and is a tried and tested basic form plugin. However, do remember it’s a free product, so its support is a little bit patchy. The developer of this plugin has been supporting it for a number of years, and I do get the impression he has a love-hate relationship with the plugin at times.

Key functionality:

1. CAPTCHA
2. Akismet (anti-spam) inbuilt support
3. Multilingual support through Bongo

Fast Secure Contact

Fast Secure Contact is an impressive free plugin that its chief developer has spent hundred of hours building. It has more customizable features than Contact Form 7, which allows you to build more complicated forms. One of the nice features of this plugin is its drag and drop interface; it also has a backup and restore tool. You get all this nice stuff for free!

I personally can’t remark about what level of support you going to get from the key developer. However, it looks a great free form plugin.

Key functionality:

1. Drag and drop interface
2. Form backup and restore tool
3. CAPTCHA
4. Online scheduling and appointment booking
5. Inbuilt phone conference service
6. Conditional logic: dependent on how the fields are filled in, other fields will show or be hidden.

Ninja Forms

Ninja Forms is quite an amazing plugin, which uses an interesting model for profit and sustainability.

Basically, the core plugin is totally free and full featured. You then can buy some great paid add-ons from their online library.

I personally feel this is a great business model that will help the developers to make a living from all their hard work, thereby allowing for future development of this great plugin. It also has the benefit of supporting a powerful and completely free basic core plugin, which has added value to it users.

So many free plugins that have a premier upgrade pathway are very disappointing: you normally find that key functionality of the plugin is missing from the free version.

Key functionality:

1. Full visual form editor with drag and drop interface
2. Great anti-spam tools (simple question & answer functionality) plus CAPTCHA.
3. Most of plugin key functionality works without JavaScript
4. Live preview your form with your theme, a powerful and useful feature

…I could go on, but the list of key functionality would be very long!

Visual Form Builder

Visual Form Builder is both a free and premier plugin. It offers a lot of the functionality of both Fast Secure Contact and Ninja. However, I don’t personally feel it’s such a good deal as Ninja Forms.

However, it does come with a lovely backend interface and some powerful functionality (like the Email Designer) that you don’t find with Ninja Forms. Unfortunately, to get most of this functionality, you must purchase the premier version of the plugin. A good example of this is the language translation support that the Visual Form Builder offers.

Key functionality:

1. Inbuilt analytics (pro version only), a powerful and useful feature
2. Conditional logic: dependent on how the fields are filled in, other fields will show or be hidden.
3. Language translation (pro version only), which could be a powerful reason to buy this plugin.
4. Email designer interface that allows you to truly customize your messages.
5. Upload attachments

Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms is only available as premier plugin, i.e. you won’t find it on the WordPress.org plugin list. However, it is one of the most popular premier plugins for WordPress. Its really is a great plugin that offers enormous flexibility and ability.

One of its strengths is that it’s one of the most well-developed plugins on the marketplace at the present moment, with great support. It even has a great API system, which you won’t find with the other plugins listed in the article. It also has a number of add-ons, which you get for free if you buy into a higher price level.

However, I feel that Ninja Forms will offer a larger library of add-ons in the end, because unlike Gravity, Ninja offers outside developers the ability to build on to its core system.

For the present moment, Gravity Forms offers a great deal of value and stability with excellent customer support. However, one of things that did surprise me was its lack of language integration; this could be a key reason why you would look at Visual Form Builder.

Key functionality:

1. Powerful visual form builder
2. Conditional logic
3. Order forms
4. Notifications
5. Payment integration
6. Integration with the leading email sending platforms: Mailchimp, AWeber and Campaign Monitor.

and loads more!