Contact Form 7 alternatives

Contact Form 7: trouble right here in volcano city!Given the major change in Contact Form 7‘s frontend JavaScript and the problems having to optimize the JS or cache the page after the update, the question I get asked frequently is what alternatives there are to CF7.
So here is a very quick rundown of 3 such alternatives:

  1. Gravity Forms: premium-only, visual form builder, very flexible, big ecosystem (lots of 3rd party plugins & integrations)
  2. Formidable Forms: has a free Light version, drag & drop interface for building forms, very flexible (we currently use this on autoptimize.com), lots of integrations but smaller ecosystem.
  3. HTML Forms: free plugin from the team that also develops “Koko Analytics” (which I now use on all my sites) and “Mailchimp for WordPress” with a premium addon for extra features, similar to Contact Form 7, no frills, very light on JS so great for performance.

My advice; try HTML Forms if you have rather standard contactform-like forms and you’re not looking for something fancy (which CF7 is not either), try Formidable if you need drag & drop form building or if you (will) need more flexibility/ integrations.

6 thoughts on “Contact Form 7 alternatives”

  1. I’m a long time CF7 user because of its flexible templating but I just switched to Formidable Forms Lite last week because of this exact same issue. I picked FF because of the same reasons you mentions AND because the front end is lightweight.

    Reply
  2. Thanks for the recommendations. I probably wouldn’t have found HTML Forms if not for your post. I have now used it to replace CF7 on all my sites and it seems perfect so far. I love that it has a low JS overhead and, especially, that it ONLY enqueues that JS if the page/post requires it. It also integrates nicely with WPBruiser, which is my preferred anti-spam plugin. Not much else I can ask for. Thanks again.

    Reply
  3. Sincerly, IMHO Contact form 7 has no alternatives… it’s true there was a version (5.4.0) that had some problems with caching plugins, but they have already been fixed and cf7 it’s still one of the best forms. is incredibly simple but you can do anything with it, it has hundreds of add-on to add the features you need without using super heavy forms (you know what i mean!).
    So, disappointed to see paid plugins being favored and suggested as alternatives…

    Reply
  4. I’ve been using contact form 7 like always and was very happy with customization and configuration but speaking on performance, and this is what I came here for, I am really happy for being suggested some alternatives. Paid or not, doesnt matter – this is business anyway. So thank You for alternatives. I will measure the performance myself 🙂

    Reply

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.