Contact Form 7 vs Form Maker: An Unbiased Comparison of WordPress Form Plugins

Posted by Josh Blackburn, in Contact Form Plugins

Introduction to Contact Form Solutions

In the realm of WordPress websites, effective communication with visitors is pivotal. A reliable contact form plugin can greatly enhance this interaction. Let’s explore two popular options: Contact Form 7 and Form Maker.

Understanding Contact Form Plugins

WordPress plugins provide essential functionalities to websites, and contact form plugins are no exception. They serve as the bridge between site owners and visitors, allowing for efficient message exchange without exposing email addresses to potential spam. A well-designed contact form plugin enables visitors to submit queries, feedback, or any other type of correspondence seamlessly, while providing site owners with the tools to manage and respond to these interactions.

Contact Form 7 Overview

Contact Form 7 is a widely recognized plugin in the WordPress ecosystem. It stands out for its simplicity and effectiveness. With Contact Form 7, we can:

• Create multiple contact forms
• Customize form fields
• Use simple markup to tweak forms

It has an established user base and offers basic features sufficient for standard contact form requirements. Being open-source, it also enjoys community support for troubleshooting and extended functionality through third-party add-ons.

Form Maker Overview

On the other hand, Form Maker is a user-friendly WordPress plugin that boasts a drag-and-drop interface for form building. Its key attributes include:

• A range of customizable templates
• Responsive design for all devices
• Advanced field types for detailed forms

It’s geared towards those of us seeking more dynamic forms with additional features such as conditional logic, multi-page forms, and the ability to collect payments. Form Maker is suitable for both beginners and advanced users who require more sophisticated form functionalities.

Key Features Comparison

When comparing the capabilities of Contact Form 7 and Form Maker, it’s important to focus on the aspects of form fields and templates, enhancements that improve user experience, and overall accessibility and responsiveness of the forms.

Form Fields and Templates

Contact Form 7 provides a variety of basic form fields which can be used to construct custom forms. Although it allows for individual form editing and a range of form fields, it tends more towards simplicity. For specialized form fields or features, users typically need to employ additional plugins.

• Basic Fields: text, email, URL, telephone, textarea, dropdowns, checkboxes, radio buttons.
• Templates: Few predefined templates; mostly relies on manual customization.

Form Maker stands out with its drag-and-drop interface making it easy to create forms with a wide array of fields. Users can also start quickly with pre-built templates which are easily customizable.

• Advanced Fields: file upload, maps, date picker, time picker, custom HTML.
• Templates: Numerous pre-designed templates that cater to diverse needs.

User Experience Enhancements

In Contact Form 7, user experience improvements come via external integrations. AJAX submission is a notable feature, reducing the need for page reloads upon form submission.

Form Maker offers an interactive experience with conditional logic, allowing the form to dynamically change based on the user’s inputs. It also supports multi-page forms, which can enhance the user experience for more complex forms, and comes with anti-spam features.

Accessibility and Responsiveness

Both plugins aim to be responsive, ensuring that contact forms work well on devices of various sizes.

Contact Form 7 adheres to basic accessibility standards, but it might require additional customization for advanced needs.

• Responsiveness: Adequate for most themes.
• Accessibility: Basic compliance with standards.

Form Maker also prioritizes responsive design, with forms readily adjusting to fit different screen sizes.

• Responsiveness: High; forms adapt smoothly across devices.
• Accessibility: Forms are created with accessibility in mind, providing a good level of compliance.

Our analysis clearly outlines how each plugin approaches these key features, showing strengths in certain areas while identifying where users might need additional tools or customization to meet their requirements.

Ease of Use

When comparing Contact Form 7 and Form Maker, we consider the interface simplicity and the level of technical knowledge required for efficient form-building.

Form Building Interface

Contact Form 7 presents us with a more traditional approach; it employs a text-based interface where we craft forms using HTML/CSS and shortcodes. For those accustomed to coding or someone who prefers a minimalist environment, Contact Form 7’s interface may appear straightforward. However, for newcomers or those uncomfortable with code, creating complex forms can appear daunting.

Form Maker, on the other hand, offers us an intuitive backend interface. It’s designed with non-tech-savvy users in our team in mind, allowing us to easily navigate through options and settings. The Form Maker’s interface empowers us to manage form fields and configurations with less dependency on direct coding.

Drag-and-Drop Capabilities

Contact Form 7: Does not include a drag-and-drop builder. We rely on manually inputting and arranging form tags, which can be time-consuming, particularly for those of us crafting more intricate forms.

Form Maker: Features a drag-and-drop form builder. This enables us to see our form’s layout in real-time and adjust it to fit our needs with ease. The drag-and-drop capabilities are exceptionally user-friendly, making form creation a significantly quicker process for us.

Using the drag-and-drop form builder provided by Form Maker can save us considerable time and reduce the learning curve associated with WordPress forms creation. Meanwhile, Contact Form 7, while robust, requires a steeper learning curve and more manual effort on our part.

Integration and Add-Ons

In our comparison between Contact Form 7 and Form Maker, we focus on the range of integrations and add-ons these plugins offer. These are key features that extend functionality and cater to diverse needs such as email marketing, payment processing, and advanced form-related tasks.

Email Marketing Integrations

Contact Form 7 pairs with a number of Email Marketing services, offering integrations through additional plugins. You can connect with services like Mailchimp, enabling you to automatically add new contacts to your mailing lists. However, this requires installing separate add-ons.

Form Maker, on the other hand, provides built-in Mailchimp integration. You can directly add subscribers to your Mailchimp lists without needing an extra plugin. We find this streamlines the workflow and simplifies the process.

Payment Gateways Integrations

Regarding Payment Gateways, Contact Form 7 doesn’t come with built-in payment options. However, with the right extensions, such as the “Contact Form 7 – PayPal & Stripe Add-on”, you can embed PayPal and Stripe payment options into your forms. This integration makes it possible to process payments directly through your forms.

Form Maker excels with PayPal and Stripe integration as well. It offers a more seamless setup experience for accepting payments. Additionally, Form Maker also supports WooCommerce, a significant advantage for those who run an e-commerce business and require direct integration with their shop.

Advanced Functionality Plugins

For Advanced Functionality, both plugins benefit from a myriad of plugins and add-ons. Contact Form 7 offers various extensions that enhance its capabilities, like the integration with CRM tools, additional form fields, and conditional logic.

Form Maker provides a variety of advanced functionality through its own add-ons. These include logic-driven forms, multi-page forms, and integrations with a multitude of CRM platforms. The ease of adding complex features and the availability of extensive documentation for Form Maker add-ons can support a more robust form-building experience.

Support and Documentation

When it comes to effective utilization of any WordPress plugin, robust support, and comprehensive documentation are crucial. We ensure that users have access to necessary resources that allow them to tackle issues and learn the systems efficiently.

Community and Developer Support

Our Community Support for Contact Form 7 is quite vast, with a plethora of discussions available on the WordPress.org support forum. We recommend first searching this communal knowledge base, as it’s likely your question has already been addressed. For those requiring more technical assistance, Developer Support is also accessible through extensive documentation available on the plugin’s official website. This includes a detailed FAQ section and support forums where both users and developers contribute and collaborate on solutions.

Guides and Tutorials

We provide a variety of Guides and Tutorials for Contact Form 7. Here’s how we structure our learning materials:

• Accessible online, our guides provide step-by-step instructions on various functionalities—ranging from basic form creation to advanced usage.
• Video tutorials give visual learners a straightforward way to grasp the implementation of complex features.

In contrast, Form Maker offers a different approach:

• Documentation: Detailed and user-friendly, ensuring a smooth learning curve for both beginners and advanced users.
• Support forums: Places where users can post questions and get assistance from both the user community and the plugin’s support team.

Price and Value for Money

When comparing the financial aspects of Contact Form 7 and Form Maker, it’s important to examine both the initial investment and the long-term value each plugin offers. Our focus is on determining which plugin provides a commendable balance between cost and functionality.

Free vs Premium Options

Contact Form 7:

• Free Version: It is completely free and includes basic features such as form creation, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering.
• Premium Add-ons: No official premium version; third-party extensions offer advanced features at varied prices.

Form Maker:

• Free Version: Offers a limited set of features suitable for basic contact form needs.
• Premium Version: Includes enhanced functionality such as multi-page forms, conditional logic, and support for a starting price of $45 for a single-site license.

Cost-Benefit Analysis

Contact Form 7:

• Ideal for those seeking a no-cost solution.
• Extensions may incur additional costs, potentially making it less cost-effective depending on the required features.

Form Maker:

• The paid version provides substantial value given the advanced features included.
• Consider the return on investment if the pro features align with your site’s needs.

Determining the best value for money depends on whether the free features meet your requirements or if the premium options’ advanced features justify the extra expense for your project.

Customization and Flexibility

When we discuss the customization and flexibility of Contact Form 7 and Form Maker, it’s important to look at the ease of styling and the advanced functionalities they offer. We’ll explore how each plugin handles CSS customization and the extent to which they support conditional logic and advanced fields.

CSS Customization

Contact Form 7 offers a baseline for customization that caters to those familiar with CSS. It allows us to directly edit CSS styles to match the aesthetic of our website. This could mean modifying the styles for form fields, buttons, and responses. We can add custom CSS to our theme’s style sheet or directly within the plugin’s additional settings.

On the other hand, Form Maker provides a variety of pre-designed themes. This can be a quicker way for us to style forms if we’re not as comfortable with CSS. Still, it also allows for CSS modifications if we want more control over the design. This way, we can give our forms a unique look without starting entirely from scratch.

Conditional Logic and Advanced Fields

Conditional logic is a powerful feature that we can use to show or hide form fields based on the user’s inputs. Contact Form 7 requires additional plugins to perform conditional logic, which means we need to integrate third-party tools to unlock this functionality.

Form Maker, in contrast, integrates conditional logic natively. This means we can easily create forms that adapt to our users’ input without the need for extra plugins. Advanced fields such as file uploads, date pickers, and captchas are also readily available, providing us with a robust set of tools to create a dynamic form experience right out of the box.

Form Management and Submissions

In the arena of form management and submissions, both Contact Form 7 and Form Maker stand out, but they offer distinct features and workflows. We focus on how these plugins handle spam protection, security of forms, and the management of entry data and user notifications.

Spam Protection and Security

Contact Form 7 uses several methods to prevent spam. By default, it includes integration with Akismet, a widely-used spam filtering service. Furthermore, it supports CAPTCHA and the lesser intrusive ‘honeypot’ technique, which adds hidden fields invisible to users but can trap bots.

• Spam Protection:
  • Akismet Integration
  • CAPTCHA: Standard and reCAPTCHA options
  • Honeypot
• Security: Natively, Contact Form 7 ensures that data submitted through forms are sanitized to prevent security risks.

Form Maker, on its part, incorporates built-in spam prevention tools, such as CAPTCHA and honeypot. For more advanced security, it also allows configuration of server-side validation rules.

• Spam Protection:
  • CAPTCHA: Simple and complex options
  • Honeypot
• Security: Form Maker ensures submissions pass through server-side validation, offering an additional layer of security against injection attacks and data breaches.

Managing Entries and Notifications

For Contact Form 7, submissions are sent directly to the email address specified within the form’s configuration, and it doesn’t natively store entries in the WordPress database.

• Notifications: Emails are customizable and support dynamic content from form fields.
• Leads Management: Requires additional plugins to store and manage leads directly within WordPress.

Form Maker provides a more robust solution for handling submissions and notifications. It saves submissions in the WordPress database, allowing users to view, manage, and export entries from the admin dashboard.

• Notifications: Highly customizable email templates, which can include both admin and user notifications upon submission.
• Leads Management: Easy access to manage leads with options to sort, filter, and export data.

Plugin Ecosystem and Popularity

In this section, we’ll examine the breadth of user engagement with Contact Form 7 and Form Maker, two notable WordPress form plugins. Understanding their ecosystem and popularity helps us gauge their impact on WordPress website owners.

Active Installations and User Base

Contact Form 7:

• Active Installations: Over 5 million
• WordPress Repository Rating: Highly rated with numerous reviews

Form Maker:

• Active Installations: Substantially fewer than Contact Form 7
• WordPress Repository Rating: Also highly rated but with fewer reviews

The disparity in active installations indicates that Contact Form 7 has a more extensive reach within the WordPress site community, reflecting its longstanding presence and adoption among users.

Community Feedback

Feedback is vital for plugin development, and both plugins actively receive input from their user base. Here’s how they fare:

• Contact Form 7: The plugin has accumulated a wealth of feedback, resulting in extensive community-driven support and enhancements. User feedback has solidified its presence in WordPress’ plugin ecosystem.
• Form Maker: As a more recent contender, it garners feedback that often highlights its user-friendly interface and functionality, which reflects an evolving user experience attuned to current web standards.

Both plugins maintain a line of communication with their respective communities, a factor that benefits users through continuous improvements and updates.

Comparative Analysis of Alternatives

In our quest to find the best alternatives to Contact Form 7, we have analyzed a few standout options. Let’s delve into the specifics of each to understand their unique features and how they compare.

Ninja Forms and WPForms

Ninja Forms:

• Ease of Use: Highly intuitive drag-and-drop interface.
• Customization: Offers a wealth of customization options, albeit some advanced features may require premium add-ons.

WPForms:

• Ease of Use: Boasts a user-friendly drag-and-drop builder that simplifies form creation.
• Customization: Provides pre-built form templates and myriad customization options, making it suitable for both beginners and advanced users.

Both Ninja Forms and WPForms offer a free core plugin on the WordPress repository. While Ninja Forms has a strong focus on developer-friendly filters and hooks for customization, WPForms is renowned for its quick setup process and powerful features available right out of the box.

Gravity Forms and Formidable Forms

Gravity Forms:

• Capabilities: Known for its developer-friendly interface and strong integration with third-party services.
• Pricing: Entry-level pricing starts at $59, which might be a bit steep for casual users.

Formidable Forms:

• Capabilities: Offers advanced calculations and data-driven applications, appealing to those who need to build more complex forms.
• Pricing: A free version is available, with premium plans offering more advanced solutions.

When choosing between Gravity Forms and Formidable Forms, consider the complexity of your needs. Gravity Forms is a worthy choice for those looking for robust integrations and a developer-centric platform, while Formidable Forms excels in creating complex forms with extensive data management requirements. Both plugins serve as powerful Contact Form 7 alternatives depending on the use case.

Final Recommendations

In our analysis of Contact Form 7 and Form Maker, we’ve gathered that both WordPress plugins offer distinct advantages for creating online forms. Our goal now is to assist you in making an informed decision between these two form builder plugins, considering ease of use and functionality for your specific needs.

Choosing the Right Form Plugin

When assessing Contact Form 7 and Form Maker by 10Web, here are the key points to consider:

• Simplicity vs. Flexibility: Contact Form 7 excels with a more straightforward plug-and-play approach, which might be ideal for beginners or those requiring basic forms. Form Maker, on the other hand, offers a drag-and-drop form builder, enhancing the ability to customize forms without diving into the code.
• Performance: Through our evaluation, Contact Form 7 generally has a minimal impact on page load time, commonly adding an overhead of +0.01s, which is slightly better than some competitors.
• Feature Set: Form Maker is robust, allowing for a variety of fields and customization options that might be necessary for more complex form building requirements.

For a WordPress site where form building is expected to be a recurrent task involving varying complexities, Form Maker may be more suitable. If speed and simplicity are your top priorities, Contact Form 7 could be a better choice.

Best Practices for Form Implementation

Implementing forms on your website should involve careful planning:

• Design with the End-User in Mind: Always ensure the forms are user-friendly. This means clear labels, reasonable field lengths, and responsive design for mobile users.
• Ensure Compliance and Security: Online forms need to be secure and compliant with regulations like GDPR. Make sure the form builder plugin you choose supports these features.
• Test for Performance: Regardless of the WordPress form builder you choose, test the forms to ensure they do not significantly impact your site’s load time or user experience.

Both plugins can facilitate robust form building and implementation when used correctly, so choose the one that aligns best with your WordPress site’s needs and your own technical proficiency. Remember, the right tool is the one that fits seamlessly into your workflow and helps you achieve your online goals efficiently.