Entries are piling up in the Gravity Forms entries list, someone else needs to see them, and that person does not have a WordPress login. A Google Sheet is the obvious answer. It is shareable, it sorts, it filters, and everybody already knows how to use it. The question that gets typed into a search box is how to connect the two. The question worth answering first is what the sheet is going to be used for, because the connection that suits a one-off export is not the one that suits a queue five people work from every day.
There are four routes, and the difference between them is not really about setup effort. It is about what happens on the day the connection breaks, and whether anyone notices.
The four routes, and what each actually costs
| Route | What it costs | Sync direction | Breaks when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manual CSV export and import | nothing | one-off, manual | someone forgets to do it |
| Official Gravity Forms export add-on | included in a licence tier | one way, on submit | the sheet is edited by hand |
| Third-party connector plugin | free to around $299 per year | one or two way | the Google token expires |
| Zapier, Make or similar | from $19.99 per month | one way, on submit | the task allowance runs out |
The manual route needs no explanation and no defending. Gravity Forms exports entries to CSV from the admin, and Google Sheets imports a CSV. For a form that closes after an event, this is the correct answer and anything else is overhead. The reason people move off it is that a CSV is a snapshot, and a snapshot is wrong the moment the next entry arrives.
The Gravity Forms ecosystem splits the automated routes between first-party add-ons and certified third-party ones, and where a particular connector sits changes the price considerably. A Gravity Forms Basic licence is $59 per year for one site, Pro is $159 per year for three sites, and Elite is $259 per year for unlimited sites, with add-ons distributed across those tiers. Google Sheets is not in that distribution. The Google Sheets connector listed on the Gravity Forms site is built by a certified developer rather than bundled with a licence, which means it is a separate purchase on top of whichever tier you already hold.
That is the first thing to check before planning around a particular plugin: whether it is included in the licence you have, or priced on its own.
The free connectors, and what free means here
There are working free plugins on the WordPress plugin directory. Connector for Gravity Forms and Google Sheets is at version 1.3.1 with around 3,000 active installations. GSheetConnector has a Gravity Forms edition at around 1,000 installations, and its Contact Form 7 edition, at roughly 40,000 installations, is the more widely used of the pair. Install numbers in the low thousands are not a verdict on quality, but they do describe how quickly a bug gets found by somebody other than you.
The paid end of the same market: Gravity Wiz sells a Google Sheets connection as one of its perks, and its pricing is $59 per year for one perk on one site, $169 per year for three perks on three sites, and $299 per year for everything on unlimited sites. The connector it sells is two way, meaning a change in the sheet can be pushed back into Gravity Forms rather than only flowing outward.
Two way sync sounds like the obvious upgrade and is worth pausing on. It means the sheet becomes a place where records can be edited, which is a genuine convenience and also the thing that makes a sheet hard to trust. Once two systems can both write, a disagreement between them has no automatic resolution. Someone has to decide which side wins, and that decision is usually made months later by whoever is looking at the discrepancy.
Feeds, mapping and filters: the settings that decide what lands
Whichever connector you pick, the configuration follows the same shape, and the names are worth knowing before you compare two plugins on a feature list.
A feed is one rule linking one form to one sheet. A form can have several feeds, which is how a single application form sends applicants to one sheet and only the paid ones to another. Inside the feed sits the field mapping, which pairs each form field with a sheet column. Mapping is where the future breaks: if someone adds a question to the form and nobody updates the mapping, the new answers arrive nowhere and the sheet looks complete. Some connectors let several form fields write into one cell, which is convenient for a full name or a full address and awkward if anyone later wants to sort on the parts.
Filters decide which submissions the feed acts on at all, based on what the person answered. Sending only entries from one country, or only those who chose a particular option, keeps a working sheet short. It also means the sheet is no longer the full record, which is fine as long as everybody reading it knows that.
Two more settings decide when anything happens. The sync trigger chooses the moment data is sent, typically on submission or, for a form that takes payment, once payment completes. Picking submission for a paid form fills the sheet with abandoned checkouts. And a full synchronisation option, where it exists, pushes an edit to an existing entry back into the row that already represents it, instead of appending a second row.
The settings that separate a maintainable setup from a fragile one are the boring ones at the bottom of the screen. A per-entry log showing whether each submission reached the sheet, with a resend button, turns a silent gap into a five-minute fix. Error reporting by email tells someone the moment a send fails rather than at the end of the quarter. Both exist in the better connectors and neither appears in a headline feature comparison, so they are worth looking for deliberately.
The failure that costs the most: a silent disconnection
Every automated route depends on an OAuth token granting access to a Google account. Tokens expire, get revoked when a password changes, break when the person who authorised the connection leaves, and stop working when a Google Workspace admin tightens third-party app access. The connection does not announce any of this. It simply stops appending rows.
The consequence is specific and it is the reason this article exists. The entries are still safe. Gravity Forms has them in its own entries table. What is lost is the assumption that the sheet is complete, and anyone working from the sheet has no way of knowing that five applications arrived last Thursday and none of them are there. Squarespace, which offers the same style of Google Drive storage, publishes a separate support article on reconnecting forms to Google Drive, which is a reasonable indicator of how often this happens across the industry rather than in one plugin.
Two habits make it survivable. Keep a check that compares the entry count in Gravity Forms against the row count in the sheet, even if the check is a person glancing at both numbers once a week. And authorise the connection with an account that belongs to the organisation rather than to an individual, so the link does not break the week someone changes jobs.
Where the sheet itself runs out
Google's published limit for a spreadsheet created in or converted to Google Sheets is 20 million cells or 100MB. For form entries this is effectively unreachable: a form with 30 questions would need well over half a million submissions to get close. The practical limits arrive much earlier and they are about people, not storage. A sheet slows noticeably once it carries a few tens of thousands of rows with formulas across them, and a sheet that several people filter at once shows each of them a different view unless everyone remembers to use filter views instead of filters.
Zapier and the automation platforms
Zapier, Make and Uncanny Automator connect the two without a dedicated plugin, and they are the right answer when the sheet is one of several destinations. Zapier's free tier allows 100 tasks per month with two-step Zaps, its Professional tier starts at $19.99 per month and adds multi-step Zaps and webhooks, and the Team tier starts at $69 per month. One form submission consumes at least one task, so the free tier covers a quiet contact form and nothing busier.
The failure mode here is different and easier to spot. When the task allowance runs out, the platform tells you, usually by email. What it does not do is queue the missed submissions indefinitely, so the gap is still a gap. Gravity Forms includes a Zapier add-on with the Pro licence at $159 per year, which removes the need for a separate connector plugin but not the need for a Zapier subscription.
The question underneath the query
Most people connecting Gravity Forms to Google Sheets are not trying to analyse data. They are trying to make a list that several people can work from, because the entries list in WordPress does not support that. The sheet gets a column called Status, then a column called Assigned to, then one called Replied, and at that point the sheet has stopped being a report and become a case tracker held together by convention.
A tracker built that way fails in predictable ways. Two people open the sheet, both see an unassigned row, both reply. Someone sorts the sheet without selecting all columns and the statuses detach from the names. The reply itself lives in an email client, so there is no record in the sheet of what was actually sent, only that somebody marked it done. None of this is a Google Sheets defect. A spreadsheet has no concept of an owner, a state, or a message sent, and adding columns does not give it one.
The alternative is to keep the sheet for what it is good at, which is sharing numbers with people who will never log in, and to put the handling somewhere that models it directly. A form tool with response management gives each response an owner and a stage, keeps the reply on the same screen as the answers, and still appends each new response to a Google Sheet as a row, updating that same row when the stage changes. The pricing page shows where that sits against a licence plus a connector plus an automation subscription, and the use cases page shows the shape it takes for applications and enquiries.
What to change first
Before choosing a connector, decide whether the sheet is a report or a queue. If it is a report, the free plugin is enough and a weekly count check is the only maintenance worth adding. If it is a queue, adding columns to a spreadsheet will keep costing you duplicate replies, and the fix is to give each response an owner and a status where the reply is also sent, which is what the demo shows with no setup.
Q1. Can I get Gravity Forms entries into a Google Sheet without a paid plugin?
Yes. Export the entries as a CSV from the Gravity Forms admin and import that CSV into Google Sheets, or install one of the free connector plugins from the WordPress plugin directory. The free connectors append new entries automatically; the CSV route is a snapshot that has to be repeated.
Q2. Will old entries appear in the sheet, or only new ones?
Most connectors only send entries submitted after the connection is made. Some offer a manual send or a full synchronisation to backfill existing entries, and that feature is worth confirming before you install, because the alternative is exporting the backlog as a CSV and pasting it in above the automated rows.
Q3. Why did my Google Sheet stop updating on its own?
Almost always the Google authorisation has lapsed. Tokens expire, get revoked when a password changes, and stop working if the account that authorised the link is disabled or has its third-party app access restricted. Reconnect the account in the plugin settings, then compare the entry count in Gravity Forms against the sheet to find what was missed.
Q4. If I edit a row in the sheet, does the Gravity Forms entry change?
Only with a connector that explicitly supports two way sync. With a one way connector, an edit in the sheet stays in the sheet and the entry in WordPress keeps the original value. That divergence is the main reason to decide early which of the two is the record people should trust.
Q5. How many form entries can a Google Sheet hold?
Google's stated limit is 20 million cells or 100MB per spreadsheet, so storage is not the constraint for form data. Performance is: a sheet with tens of thousands of rows and formulas across them becomes slow to open and filter, and that arrives long before the cell limit does.