If you want a capable form builder without drama, Gravity Forms delivers: smooth setup, lots of integrations, strong docs, and good value. Design controls are the weak spot—you’ll probably add CSS—but with ongoing moves toward Gutenberg, it’s still a dependable pick.
Overall score: 7.7/10
Overview
- Setup & Onboarding – 9/10
- Editor – 7/10
- Performance – 8/10
- Features – 7/10
- Docs & Support – 8/10
- Pricing & Licensing 7/10
Setup & Onboarding – 9/10
Setup is smooth, as you’d expect from a high-end plugin. When you create your first form, you can choose from a small template library (about 15). That’s fewer than many competitors, but we rarely use templates anyway—so it’s only a minor downside.
Editor – 7/10
After selecting a template—or clicking Blank Form—you land in the Form Builder. It’s clean and familiar, with a layout that resembles the Gutenberg editor (but isn’t Gutenberg). You drag-and-drop fields from the right-hand panel, and configure each one in a dedicated settings tab. From our perspective, we’d rather see true block-based editing: individual Gutenberg blocks for each field. We get why Gravity Forms keeps its own builder (it still serves classic and third-party editors), but a native block experience would feel more modern. That said, the current builder is easy to use and looks polished.
To embed, open the page where you want the form and add the Gravity Forms block. You can also style the form here, which we like—it’s great to design in context. However, the design controls are bare-bones: colors, borders, border radius, and font size, basically. There’s no gradient picker, no hover/active states, no shadows/effects, and no spacing controls. In practice, we almost always add custom CSS to get the finish we want.
There’s a Theme section, but it currently offers only two themes. We couldn’t find official documentation for creating a custom theme (if you’ve seen it, send it our way!). Hopefully that’s coming.
Performance – 8/10
Gravity Forms conditionally enqueues assets, limiting CSS/JS to pages that actually embed a form. The frontend uses multiple small scripts (many jQuery-based). While this adds a few requests, each file is lightweight, keeping the total payload reasonable. If you’re optimizing for every millisecond, consider deferring scripts and disabling unused add-ons.
Features – 7/10
On the Elite plan, Gravity Forms offers a strong, well-organized feature set. Integrations are easy to discover and set up—whether via native tools (Webhooks/feeds), official connectors (e.g., Slack, Zapier, Stripe/PayPal), or reputable third-party extensions (e.g., Google Sheets). Do check the plan matrix to be sure the specific connectors you need are included. For most common workflows, we struggled to find gaps.
On design, the built-in styling tools are limited. Both the block and the builder offer basic controls (colors, borders, border radius, font size), with little for states, spacing, gradients, or effects. If you want pixel-perfect alignment with your site’s aesthetics, expect to add custom CSS in your codebase.
Docs & Support – 8/10
Gravity Forms has a well-organized documentation library with clear user guides and developer articles. We didn’t see official video tutorials in the docs, but there are plenty on YouTube. We haven’t tested support first-hand; per Gravity Forms’ stated targets, Elite tickets aim for replies within ~24 hours and other plans within ~48 hours, and third-party reviews generally rate support highly. Overall: strong docs, solid support reputation.
Pricing & Licensing 7/10
Compared with competitors, Gravity Forms’ prices are a bit lower. There’s no free tier. As of this review, we didn’t see any first-year discounts—which we actually appreciate, since those can be deceptive when comparing plugins.
The feature matrix, however, is split across plans in ways that don’t always make sense to us. For example, the Basic plan includes Postmark and HubSpot integrations, while others like Dropbox or Slack require Pro or higher. Bottom line: read the plan details carefully to be sure the features you need are included.
Final verdict
Gravity Forms is a polished, feature-rich form plugin that’s easy to use and competitively priced. Integrations cover most use cases, docs/support are strong, and performance is sensible. The main drawback is styling: controls are basic, so pros will likely add custom CSS. With ongoing moves toward deeper Gutenberg integration, it’s an easy recommendation for most sites.
Overall score: 7.7/10
Get Gravity Forms here.