Searches for Gravity Forms rarely come from someone with no form at all. They come from a team already collecting something on a WordPress site, usually with a plugin that has started to creak, and the question underneath is narrower than the search term suggests. Not "is this good software" but "will this particular purchase solve the particular thing that is going wrong".
That question needs two answers. One is the licence map, because the feature you are shopping for may sit two tiers above the price you had in mind. The other is the boundary of the product, because the plugin draws a clear line at the moment a submission lands, and everything past that line is left to whatever you already use. Both answers are published and specific, so this is worth twenty minutes before a purchase rather than after one.
What the core plugin covers
Gravity Forms is a commercial plugin, sold only by licence, with no free edition on the plugin directory. The published system requirements are PHP 7.4 or later, MySQL 5.7 or later, and the current version of WordPress. Submissions land in your own database and are read from the WordPress admin, which means no per submission fee and no external service holding the data.
The builder itself is generous before any add-on is involved. The feature list includes a drag and drop builder, multi-column layouts, over thirty field types, paginated forms, conditional logic on fields, sections and pages, save and continue for long forms, calculations inside fields, file uploads, merge tags for pulling submitted values into notifications, custom CSS per form, and a template library to start from. Accessibility is stated as WCAG 2.0 AA. Notifications support conditional email routing, so a submission can go to a different address depending on what was selected.
On the data side, core includes CSV export of entries, form import and export between sites, a REST API, webhook style data routing to send submissions onward, GDPR tooling for consent and personal data, reCAPTCHA v2 and v3, an anti spam honeypot, and an Akismet integration. For developers there are over five hundred hooks and an add-on framework for building custom actions that fire on submission.
Read that list against the plugin you are replacing and a lot of it will already be familiar. The part that trips up budgets is the next list.
Where the licence tiers actually divide
Three licences are sold, all annual. The feature list marks certain items with an asterisk, and those items need a Pro or Elite licence, or an add-on bought alongside.
| Licence | Price per year | Sites | Support | Add-on tier included |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $59 | 1 | Standard | Basic add-ons |
| Pro | $159 | 3 | Standard | Basic and Pro add-ons |
| Elite | $259 | Unlimited, plus WordPress Multisite | Priority | All add-ons |
The add-on tiers are the real dividing line, not the site count. The Basic tier covers email marketing and spam services: ActiveCampaign, Akismet, AWeber, Brevo, Campaign Monitor, CleverReach, Cloudflare Turnstile, Constant Contact, EmailOctopus, Emma, GetResponse, HubSpot, iContact, Kit, Mailchimp, MailerLite, Mailgun, Postmark, reCAPTCHA and SendGrid.
The Pro tier adds the payment processors and the workflow connectors: Stripe, Square, PayPal Checkout, Mollie, Zapier, Slack, Trello, Twilio, Dropbox, Help Scout, Capsule CRM, Zoho CRM and others. If a form needs to take money or notify a chat channel, Pro is the floor.
The Elite tier holds the features people often assume are core. User Registration, Conversational Forms, Partial Entries, Polls, Quiz, Survey, Signature, Coupons, Chained Selects, Geolocation, Advanced Post Creation, Moderation, Webhooks and Salesforce all sit here. A survey form, an electronic signature, or capturing data from someone who abandoned the form halfway are all Elite features, not Basic ones. That is the single most common surprise, and it is a $200 per year gap from the entry price.
One more practical note: there is no trial version. What is offered instead is a fully working online demo, the full user documentation, and the terms of service to read before buying, plus a published refund policy. So the evaluation has to happen either on the demo or inside the refund window rather than on your own site for free.
The add-on model changes how you plan
Buying a licence is not the end of the setup. Each integration is a separate plugin you install and configure, and the licence simply entitles you to it. That has two consequences worth planning around.
The first is the update surface. A site with a payment add-on, a CRM add-on, a spam add-on and a survey add-on is running five plugins from the same vendor rather than one, each with its own release cycle. This is normal for the WordPress ecosystem and it is not a defect, but it belongs in the maintenance estimate rather than being discovered later.
The second is that workflow is sold separately from forms. The vendor also publishes Gravity Flow, described as workflows to automate forms, and Gravity SMTP for email delivery, as distinct products rather than add-ons included in a licence. If what you actually need is an approval chain with steps and assignees, that is a second purchase and a second setup, and it is better to know that while comparing prices than after the first licence renews.
Anyone weighing this against a hosted tool should compare on the same basis. A licence at $259 per year is cheap next to most subscriptions, and it stays cheap as the number of submissions grows, because nothing meters submissions. The cost that does not appear on the pricing page is the hours: hosting, backups, PHP upgrades, plugin conflicts, and the person who owns all of it. Whether that trade is good depends entirely on whether you already run a WordPress site with someone maintaining it.
There is a third consequence, quieter than the other two. The licence is annual, and the support level attached to it differs by tier: Basic and Pro carry standard support, and Elite carries priority support. On a site where a form takes payments, support response time is not a luxury item, because a broken payment add-on is a broken checkout. That pushes some teams to Elite for reasons that have nothing to do with the feature list, and it is worth naming as a reason rather than discovering it during an outage.
What the plugin does with a submission, and what it does not
This is the part of the evaluation most comparisons skip, because it is not a feature you can tick.
A submission becomes an entry. The entry list in the admin shows the fields, lets you search and filter, mark entries as read, star them, add notes, and export the lot to CSV. Notifications fire on submission to whichever addresses you configured. For collecting data and getting it into another system, that is a complete story.
What the entry list does not carry is the state of the work. There is no field for who on the team owns this one, no stage that moves from new to reviewing to decided, and no record of what was sent back to the person. Look at the published feature list and you will find nothing describing an assignee or a status, because that is not what the product is for. The plugin's job ends when the data is safely stored and routed onward.
In a team of one this is invisible. The one person reads the notification email, replies from a mail client, and remembers where everything stands. The gap opens with the second person. Two colleagues open the same notification and both reply. A submission from three weeks ago is sitting in nobody's queue because nobody was ever named. Someone asks how many applications are still waiting on a decision and the only honest answer involves exporting a CSV and reading a mail thread alongside it.
The usual workaround is a spreadsheet next to the entry list, with a column for owner and a column for status, kept in step by hand. It works, and it is the point at which the real question stops being which plugin and starts being which shape of tool.
Two shapes, and which problem each one solves
It helps to stop comparing products and compare shapes. A form plugin on your own WordPress site and a hosted form tool with response management are not competing on features. They are answering different questions.
| Form plugin on your site | Hosted tool with response management | |
|---|---|---|
| Where submissions live | Your database, no metering | The vendor's service |
| Cost driver | Annual licence, site count, add-on tier | Usually the number of people, or the volume |
| Owner and status per response | Not part of the product | The reason the product exists |
| Replying to the person | Your mail client or a marketing integration | Usually inside the same screen |
| What you maintain | WordPress, PHP, plugins, backups | An account |
| Best fit | Forms embedded in an existing site, payments, deep customisation | Intake a team processes together |
Read across the table and the decision usually resolves itself. If the form has to live inside a page you control, take a payment, feed a CRM, and be styled to match a theme exactly, the plugin is the right shape and the licence tier is the only remaining question. If the form is the front door of a process that several people work through, the plugin is doing half the job and a spreadsheet is quietly doing the other half.
Plenty of teams need both, and that is a legitimate answer rather than a compromise. The marketing site keeps its plugin for contact and payment forms. Applications, enrolments and support requests go to something that holds an owner and a stage, where pricing follows the number of people rather than the number of submissions. A tool built for the second job typically starts free for one person and charges per plan tier as the team grows, which is a different cost curve from a per site licence. The use cases worth checking are the ones where a decision gets made about each submission, because those are the ones where the reply matters more than the form.
How to test the fit without guessing
The absence of a trial is an obstacle, not a wall. Three checks will settle most of the decision before any money moves.
First, take the single form that causes the most trouble today and rebuild it in the online demo. Not a simplified version of it: the real one, with every conditional rule and every required field. Half an hour in the builder tells you more about whether the field types and the logic cover your case than any feature list, and it surfaces the fields you assumed existed and do not.
Second, list every integration the form needs and check which add-on tier holds each one, then take the highest. A form that emails a Mailchimp list is Basic. Add a Stripe payment and it becomes Pro. Add an electronic signature and it becomes Elite. Doing this before you pick a licence stops the upgrade three weeks later, which is the usual sequence.
Third, and most easily skipped, write down what happens after the notification email arrives. Who opens it. Who decides. Who writes back. Where the decision is recorded so that the next person can see it. If that description fits in one sentence and names one person, the plugin is enough. If it involves several people, a shared mailbox, and a spreadsheet that somebody keeps in step by hand, the missing piece is not a form feature and it will not appear in a higher tier. The things to test against in that case are owner, stage, history and the send box, and the test is a fortnight of real submissions rather than a checklist.
What to change first
Write down the one thing that is going wrong now, then check which licence tier fixes it: surveys, signatures and partial entries are Elite, payments and chat notifications are Pro, and the site count is rarely the constraint. If the thing going wrong is that nobody can tell who owns a submission or what was already sent, no tier fixes that, and a week of real intake run through Halict alongside your current form will make the difference obvious. The pricing comparison to make is annual licence plus maintenance hours against a per person subscription, not one headline figure against the other.
Q1. Is there a free version of Gravity Forms?
No. It is sold by annual licence only, starting at $59 per year for a single site, with no free edition on the WordPress plugin directory and no trial version. What is offered instead is a fully working online demo, the complete documentation, and a published refund policy, so evaluation happens either on the demo or inside the refund window.
Q2. Which licence do surveys and signatures need?
Both are Elite features, at $259 per year. Survey, Signature, Quiz, Polls, Partial Entries, Conversational Forms, User Registration, Geolocation, Coupons, Chained Selects and Webhooks all sit in the Elite add-on tier. The Basic licence at $59 covers email marketing and spam add-ons, and Pro at $159 adds payments and connectors like Stripe, Square, Zapier and Slack.
Q3. Is there a limit on how many entries can be collected?
The pricing page prices by site count and add-on tier rather than by volume, and entries are stored in your own WordPress database, so the plugin itself does not meter submissions. The practical limits are the ones your hosting imposes: database size, upload storage for file fields, and how well the admin list performs once a form holds tens of thousands of entries.
Q4. Can a team assign submissions to each other and track status?
Not in the plugin as sold. The entry list supports search, filters, read and starred flags, notes and CSV export, and there is no field for an assignee or a stage. Gravity Flow is published as a separate product for workflow automation, so an approval chain with steps and owners is a second purchase, or a job for a tool built around response management.
Q5. What is the honest running cost compared with a hosted form tool?
The licence is the small part. Add the hosting, the backups, the PHP and plugin upgrades, and the hours of whoever resolves a conflict between add-ons on a Friday afternoon. If a WordPress site and that person already exist, the licence is close to free in comparison. If neither exists yet, a subscription priced by the number of people is usually cheaper once those hours are counted honestly.
Q6. Does it make sense to run both a form plugin and a separate intake tool?
For many teams, yes. Contact and payment forms stay on the site where the plugin handles styling, embedding and the payment gateway. Applications, enrolments and support requests go to a tool that keeps an owner, a stage and the sent replies on one screen. The two rarely overlap, because the first is about collecting and the second is about deciding.