Fluent Forms Review: Is It the Best WordPress Form Builder?

Plugin Details Overview

• Plugin Name: Fluent Forms
• Category: Form Builder / Marketing Automation
• Compatibility: The plugin requires a WordPress version of 4.5 or higher, as well as a PHP version of 7.4 or above, to ensure optimal performance.
• Pricing: The plugin comes in both free and paid versions, and the paid version starts at $47 per year.
• Active Installations: 600,000+
• Ratings & Reviews: 4.8/5 stars as per wordpress.org

Understanding the Dashboard Layout

The dashboard offers a clean and organized interface to manage all your forms efficiently from one place. Whether you’re creating a new form or analyzing form performance, everything is easily accessible.

Below are the key sections available on the dashboard:

1. All Forms

The all-forms feature serves as a central hub for organising, viewing, and managing all your created forms. It also offers the convenience of easily adding, deleting, duplicating, and embedding forms anywhere on the site by simply copying the short codes.

2. Entries

The Entries section plays an important role in simplifying data handling, as it manages all user submission details collected through forms.

3. Global settings

Configure site-wide preferences like email settings, reCAPTCHA, GDPR compliance, and default styles. These settings apply to all forms to ensure consistency and control.

4. Tools 

Tools are invaluable for site migrations and advanced troubleshooting. They also offer helpful utility options for importing and exporting, as well as features for debugging and scheduling tasks.

5. Integrations

Integrations, as the name suggests, provide you with the option to integrate your forms with popular third-party integrations like Google Sheets, Stack, Mailchimp, and many more. These integrations play a major role in automating the overall workflow.

6. Payments

The payments section comes up with the option to set up and manage payment gateways such as PayPal and Stripe for collecting payments through forms.

Pricing

The plugin offers annual and lifetime subscription plans along with three pricing plans based on the number of websites you can use in each subscription.

Visit the official pricing page for up-to-date pricing details.

How to Build a Form with Fluent Forms

1. Starting a New Form from the All Forms Dashboard

As the above provided screenshot represents, navigate to the all forms dashboard and click on the Add new form button to create a new form.

2. Selecting a Form Type

When you click on the ‘New Form’ or ‘Add New Form’ button, a pop-up appears showing the available form types: Regular, Premium, and Blank.

The above screenshot shows the overview of creating 3 types of forms:

• The first one is for creating a blank form.
• The second one is for creating forms using templates that match your requirements.
• The third one is dedicated to building conversational forms.

3. Naming Your Form

Click on the button located at the top, as in the screenshot, to name the form.

4. Adding Form Fields

As the screenshot suggests, you can add fields according to your requirements either by clicking on the input field button or just dragging and dropping them into the editor.

5. Customizing Form Fields

Customizing fields mainly comes up with two ways according to the requirements.

The first method is by simply clicking the Edit icon, and the second one is by clicking on the input customization tab located on the right-hand side bar.

6. Saving the Form

After you are done with the form customization, click on the save form button in the top right corner to confirm the form is properly saved.

7. Embedding the Form on a Page

The final step is to paste the short code that you copied onto the page where you want the form to appear. That’s all. Now you have successfully created a new form.

Key Features and Capabilities

• Visual Form Designer: The visual form designer feature gives you the freedom to develop highly advanced and complex forms without writing a single line of code, which means you don’t need any prior knowledge of coding. Fields can be created and rearranged in real time, allowing changes to be visible immediately, and it’s very much beginner-friendly.
• Pre-configured Input fields: This feature is highly beneficial in saving time and ensuring proper consistency in the form-building process, as it comes with 60+ ready-made form input fields, such as email, text, check boxes, drop-down, and many more.
• Ready-made form templates: The plugin comes up with a detailed library consisting of form templates for common form-building purposes like job application forms, contact forms, donation forms, etc., and it’s an ideal option for users who want to skip building forms from scratch.
• Live calculation fields: The plugin comes with a built-in numeric calculation field that automatically computes totals such as pricing estimates, taxes, etc., and updates calculations in real time. as per the user’s input value.
• Media upload fields: This feature allows users to upload any type of file, document, or image. It also provides you with the ability to restrict the file size for uploads and to designate the location for file storage.
• Multi-step forms: The multi-step form feature is mainly used in survey, registration, or application forms, as these types of forms are of long-form content, and it helps in breaking the long-format forms into sections with progress indicators, and this functionality plays a major role in reducing the rate of abandoned forms and the complexity in form submission.
• Conversational-style forms: Conversational-style forms play a key role in keeping users engaged compared to traditional forms, and they act as a chatbot and transform into a conversational way by asking questions, screen by screen.
• Option to submit user-generated content: Typically, these features collect content like testimonials, blog posts, and reviews from users directly through form submission, and it’s highly beneficial for community blogs or membership sites where they can convert these submissions into custom post types or WordPress posts automatically.
• Conditional logic: Conditional logic is highly beneficial in keeping better data handling and personalized form experiences, where it controls the behaviour of the forms based on user responses.
• Built-in payment integrations: As the name suggests, these features allow forms to accept payments directly through the forms with various payment integrations such as PayPal, Stripe, and RazerPay, and they are highly rewarding for event organizers and fundraising campaigns, as they can set one-time payments, subscriptions, or donations easily.
• External integrations 60+: The plugin comes up with over 60 tools, including productivity apps, cloud storage, CRMs, and marketing platforms.
• Anti-spam protection: The plugin comes with built-in anti-spam protection with options like Cloudflare, Google reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha, etc., and ensures only legitimate submissions.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Clean and organized UI
• In-depth integrations with various marketing tools

Cons

• Some advanced-level features, including payment and conversational forms, are limited to the pro version only.
• A moderate amount of learning is required to handle complex automation workflows.

Performance & Optimization Insights

The plugin is well optimised for performance and uses minimal front-end scripts, and conditional loading prevents the unnecessary loading of assets. Even complicated forms or numerous entries don’t slow down the website.

• Use conditional logic only if needed to prevent complex forms.
• Disable unused modules and integrations.

Fluent Forms is ideal for

• Bloggers and small business owners who want to create subscription, contact, or feedback forms easily.
• Agencies and freelancers who want to develop advanced and customized ads for their clients.
• E-commerce site owners who want to acquire enquiries and feedback through forms.
• Online course creators and coaches who want to acquire leads, feedback, or queries from students through forms.

Top Alternatives to Consider:

WPForms: WPForms is one of the most popular and beginner-friendly form builder plugins, which creates forms for multiple purposes without any coding and is packed with advanced levels of functionality.

Gravity Forms: Gravity Forms is a feature-rich and developer-friendly form builder known for its advanced functionality and flexibility. It is also highly recommended for users looking for custom workflows or complex form solutions.

Formidable Forms: Formidable Forms is a great choice for professionals who look beyond basic form creation, as it is a highly advanced WordPress form builder that easily creates highly data-driven or complex form applications.

Final Thoughts & Recommendation

Fluent Forms is a complete mix of performance, versatility, and usability, offering a smoother learning curve compared to other plugins. As a WordPress form builder plugin, it delivers a visually appealing interface backed by powerful functionalities like conditional logic, conversational forms, and payment integrations. Whether your goal is to create simple or complex form creations along with a lightweight and highly capable form solution without affecting your website’s performance and being able to evolve according to the user’s needs, then it’s worth considering.

Download & Learn More

Transform the way you collect and manage data with a powerful form builder designed for simplicity and flexibility.

Start using Fluent Forms to create, customize, and automate your forms all from one intuitive dashboard.