A form is usually the only part of a business website that earns anything, and it is the part most likely to be quietly broken. We work on all five of the plugins most Australian sites run, and the advice does not depend on which one you picked — we sell licences for none of them.
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Based here, working your hours — not a timezone away
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Over 10+ years building and maintaining sites for Australian businesses
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The same person every time — no re-explaining your site
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We only take work we can finish. Ask us anything first — no obligation
Spam is not really a forms question — it is decided before the request reaches your site at all, so the Cloudflare page answers it better and for less. This page is for choosing between the five or fixing the one you have. Continuous cover for everything else on the site is a separate arrangement, from $159/mo a month.
Install counts are from the WordPress.org plugin directory. Gravity Forms is sold directly and has no listing there, which is why its row reads as it does rather than being a judgement.
| Feature | Gravity Forms | Contact Form 7 | WPForms | Ninja Forms | Fluent Forms |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Keeps submissions in the site | Yes | No | Depends on tier | Yes | Yes |
| A failed email loses the enquiry | No | Yes | Depends on tier | No | No |
| How it charges | One licence, tiered | Free | Free core, tiered upgrades | Free core, add-ons bought separately | Free core, one Pro licence |
| Free version on WordPress.org | No — sold direct | Yes, 10M+ installs | Yes, 5M+ installs | Yes, 600k+ installs | Yes, 700k+ installs |
| Conditional logic without add-ons | Yes | No | Higher tiers | Yes | Yes |
| Best suited to | Forms that have become business logic | A contact form that should just work | A good form without a developer | Sites already on it and working | Leaving a per-add-on or tiered bill behind |
Counts checked against the WordPress.org plugin directory and rounded. "Depends on tier" is not evasion — it genuinely varies by licence, and it is the first thing worth confirming on your own install.
Ask one thing of any form plugin: does a submission get written to the site, or does it only become an email? Gravity Forms and Ninja Forms store every entry in the database. Contact Form 7 stores nothing at all. WPForms depends on your licence tier. That single answer decides whether a failed email is an inconvenience you can recover from or an enquiry that no longer exists, and it matters far more than which builder interface you prefer.
Whichever of the five you run, none of them delivers its own email — they all pass it to WordPress and WordPress passes it to your server. That shared dependency is why "our form stopped working" is so rarely a form problem, and why changing plugins to solve it is the one move guaranteed not to help. The Contact Form 7 page covers the mechanics in full, because that is where the consequences bite hardest, but the cause is identical on all five.
Contact Form 7 is free and stays free. Gravity Forms is one licence with tiers. WPForms gates specific features behind higher plans. Ninja Forms sells capability as separate add-ons that each renew on their own. Fluent Forms puts almost everything behind a single Pro licence. Those are five genuinely different cost curves, and a site that grew gradually on the add-on model can be paying more for less than a site on one licence. Working out your actual annual total is usually the most useful hour anyone spends here.
Sites accumulate form plugins the way they accumulate everything else — a theme demo brought one, an agency preferred another, nobody removed the first. The cost is not only the duplicated assets. It is that enquiries can be arriving through a form nobody remembers building, into a destination nobody monitors, and there is no alert for that because from the plugin's point of view everything is working perfectly.
Pick the page for the plugin you actually have — each covers what that one specifically gets wrong and what it costs to put right. If you are choosing rather than fixing, tell us what the form needs to do and we will say which of the five fits, including when the honest answer is the free one. A written review of what you currently run is $249.
We are not resellers for any form plugin. The recommendation changes with your requirements, not our margin.
Does a submission get written to the site, or only become an email? That answer decides whether a failed send is recoverable or an enquiry that never existed — and it varies across the four.
They all hand mail to the same WordPress function, so unauthenticated sending loses enquiries whichever one you run. Fixed once, it fixes every form on the site — and switching plugins would only move it.
Free, one tiered licence, features behind higher plans, or add-ons that each renew separately. A site that grew gradually on the last can pay more for less. We work out your real annual total.
Two or three is routine — left by different developers or a theme demo, each loading assets everywhere and each holding entries nobody checks. Consolidating is quick and shows up in load times.
Stored submissions are personal information, sitting in every backup, usually kept forever and readable by anyone with an editor account. Retention and read access take minutes to set and almost never are.
Plenty of sites should keep what they have, and we say so. Wanting a better-looking form is not a reason to migrate — that is CSS, and it is cheaper than a rebuild by a wide margin.
The one matching what your forms actually have to do. No developer and standard requirements: Contact Form 7 or WPForms. Forms that are becoming business logic — payments, routing, integrations: Gravity Forms. Paying for three or four separate add-ons: Fluent Forms will almost certainly cost less. Already on Ninja Forms and everything works: stay, and add up the renewals before anyone talks you out of it. Anyone answering this without asking what your forms do is quoting an affiliate link.
Almost always the site sending mail that the receiving server will not accept, rather than anything wrong with the form. A success message means the plugin handed the mail off, not that it was delivered. Fix authenticated sending and the problem disappears across every form you have — and add a submission log so the next failure leaves evidence.
Rebuilding the forms is the predictable half. The history is the half that decides the price, and it turns on the storage question above — so the answer is different depending on which of the five you are leaving, and the page for that plugin says which. The other thing worth settling early is whether the old entries need to be readable inside the new plugin or simply kept somewhere safe, because those are very different amounts of work for an outcome most businesses cannot tell apart.
Stop the volume before it reaches WordPress, then keep the in-form checks conservative. Filtering inside the plugin still costs you the server work, and on plugins that do not keep a rejected pile a false positive is a customer lost with no trace. The edge is the right layer and it works the same whichever form plugin sits behind it.
If they are stored in the site, yes — they are personal information, they are in every backup, and on most installations they are kept indefinitely and readable by anyone with an editor account. Setting a retention period and restricting who can read entries is quick, and it also keeps the table from becoming a performance problem on an older site.
Why CloudyWP
Gravity Forms, Contact Form 7, WPForms and Ninja Forms — fixed, built and compared by people who sell licences for none of them. Melbourne-based.
Get a fixed quote02 — How we work
Every CloudyWP project runs the same way, whether it is a one-page site or a store with a thousand SKUs. Here is exactly what happens.
01
A single scoping call, then a written plan: what gets built, what it costs, and when it ships. No discovery-phase invoices, no moving targets.
02
Custom WordPress or Shopify on clean code you own outright. Every build ships fast, passes Core Web Vitals, and is handed over documented.
03
Your site talks to the tools you already run — CRM, invoicing, email, stock. The repetitive admin stops being someone's job and starts running itself.
Scope
A fixed quote, in writing
Deliverables, price and dates agreed before a line of code is written.
48 hrs to your quote
