cForms vs Gravity Forms for WordPress

Gravity Forms recently had a promotion to get a developer’s license for a little cheaper than normal. Looked like a pretty good deal for me so I jumped on it. I was previously using cForms on all of my personal sites, as well as on client sites for Nicasio.

While cForms got the job done, there were several issues that bothered me. This is a brief comparison of the 2 plugins and why I will be using Gravity Forms from now on.

cForms Grievances

Now keep in mind that cForms is a free plugin while Gravity Forms is paid, so we aren’t exactly comparing apples to apples here. I also resepect the developer(s) of cForms a lot and thank them for putting a robust plugin out there for free. That being said there were several things that cForms did that made me willing to drop a couple of Benjamins on Gravity Forms.

1. Easily corrupted data – I don’t know why, but any time I moved a site that used cForms (example: moving from a dev environment to a live environment), the cForms data would be come corrupted. This was extremely annoying and required several extra steps to get up and running
2. Automatically inserted link back – Any cForms form you create automatically has a link back to the cForms site at the bottom.  As a plugin author myself, I see nothing wrong with getting a little link love, but you have to make it opt in rather than opt out (and the only way to opt out was to hide it with CSS).
3. cForms does it’s own JS and CSS inclusions – There are functions in WordPress that allow plugins to include JavaScript and CSS code in the head area in such a way that it won’t interfere with other plugins, and is loaded in the correct manner. cForms justs adds their own stuff to the head which can be problematic. This is particularly annoying on e-commerce sites where you need to force SSL usage. You almost always get a warning because cForms JS and CSS files are loaded without https://
4. Changing Styling Could be Tricky – cForms used its own styling system which made it slightly more annoying to customize the style and layout of forms.
5. No Conditional Logic – Maybe I missed this somewhere in cForms, but I have never been able to find a way to easily implement conditional logic in a form with cForms.
6. No Built in Support for Front End posting – This is more of a “missing feature” than a bug, but it is something that Gravity Forms has that I plan on making use of.

Cool Stuff About Gravity Forms

1. Front End Posting – Unlike cForms, Gravity Forms allows you to create forms which allow for creating posts from the front end. I haven’t really had a chance to play with this too much, but I can already think of several places this would have come in handy on past projects.
2. Solid Email Customizations – I really like how the notification system in Gravity Forms works. Simple interface with lots of customizations
3. Database Tracking – While both cForms and Gravity Forms both have database tracking/export options, IMHO the Gravity Forms implementation wins out.
4. Editor Button – For some reason the WordPress editor button in cForms always seems to interfere with some other plugin I’m running. I haven’t encountered anything like that with Gravity Forms.
5. Support – This isn’t really a fair comparison since we’re talking free vs. paid, but the added support for Gravity Forms is nice. Being a developer I doubt that I’ll use the support that much, but it’s always nice to know that it’s there if you need it. cForms does have a decent little support forum, but it can be hit or miss.
6. Add Ons – Probably one of the coolest thing about Gravity Forms are the add ons. Right now there are only 3, but according to the chatter on Twitter, several others are already in the works. Being able to tweak the plugin’s functionality with add ons on a site by site basis is a huge plus for me. cForms does have the ability to tie in custom functionality through a custom functions file, but this is more reminiscent of the old WordPress My Hacks functionality than the way modern plugins should work.

Conclusion

So there you have it. The reasons that I switched from cForms to Gravity Forms. Full disclosure, the links in this post are my affiliate link to Gravity Forms. If you read this blog or my posts at Nicasio, you know I almost never personally endorse anything, but I will if I use it and like it, as is the case with Gravity Forms