Disclosure: Some of the links / products that are listed here will contain affiliate links (which will clearly be marked). Being an affiliate of that company doesn’t influence our thoughts or opinions of it, and doesn’t rank them any higher than others. Also, this list is in no particular order and aren’t simply the best alternatives, these are just some alternatives that you can choose.

For some, Contact Form 7 is a complicated (requires a guide on how to set it up and use it – affiliate link), bloated, and doesn’t save the entry WordPress contact form. The wonderful thing about WordPress is there are so many other options, including contact forms. When you use another contact form plugin you will have to recreate all the forms you have on your website, and test to make sure they still get to where you want, and they have to be shown to the visitors of your website.

With that, what alternatives are there? There are other free and paid options.

WPForms

The other most popular option is WPForms (affiliate link), if you want to use it to it’s full extent, is a yearly paid option (there is a free version but many say it’s very limited and doesn’t provide any good functionality). Price options available from $30 to $300 per year. WPForms does allow you to import your forms from Contact Form 7 (affiliate link), which is nice if you want to start using it quickly. It one of the more expensive options, and you are supporting a big company (Awesome Motive) so if you don’t like either of those there are other options. They do have a 14 day no questions asked, 100% money back guarantee. We contacted them through their website with a pre-sales questions (using a name and email address that isn’t associated with this website) and they responded in a little over 14 hours (we did contact them in the evening on a weekday). They said if you choose not to continue paying yearly then you won’t get updates or support, and that “All form notification emails will include an expiration notice in the footer” so if you are sending emails to customers then it let’s them know you are cheap. While it does have a lot more features than Contact Form 7, and it does have some features that some may use (affiliate link), you will need to upgrade your plan to get the features you may actually need (affiliate link).

Ninja Forms

Ninja Forms (affiliate link) says right on their website that it is “100% beginner friendly”, and “form building simplified”. They can say all they want on their website and it doesn’t mean it’s 100% true. They do have a free version which has a good number of features that everyone will use, but their paid plans starts from $49 to $250 each year, which may look like it’s more expensive than WPForms (affiliate link), but they do have an a la carte option which allows you to get just what you want (anywhere from $29 to $129 per year). If you don’t renew then you can still use the forms but you don’t get updates or support. According to LinkedIn, there are 12 employees at Saturday Drive (which owns Ninja Forms, and Caldera Forms) which doesn’t make it a small company. But it isn’t as big as some other companies listed here. They do have a 14 day money back guarantee (on their website it doesn’t say 100% money back, or no questions asked, unlike the other paid contact form options).

Forminator

Forminator by WPMU DEV is a popular free form plugin, and the only difference between the free and paid option is the ability to do e-signatures. It has lots of features for being free (like doing payment, surveys, polls and more) but it looks like WPMU DEV wants you to start using one of their free products, then go to the paid version, then at some point upgrade to a complete WPMU DEV membership. If you need a full-featured contact form plugin and don’t mind a company advertising their paid version (or their membership) then consider this option. However, if you do want to try it out make sure to take advantage of their 7 day free trial and they do have a 100% money-back guarantee, no questions asked (they are honest on their website and say they will ask a couple of questions like how they can improve or what they did wrong but you don’t have to answer those questions to get your money back).

Formidable Forms

Formidable Forms (affiliate link) does have a free option but it seems to be very limited (and they don’t mention what features are free and what are paid). Along with being more expensive than other contact form options, they have some features like payments at their business tier when some similar contact forms provide it in their lowest tier. As with most paid contact form plugins, they have a 14 day, no questions asked, 100% money back guarantee. As well, if you don’t continue to pay yearly for the premium version then you don’t get support, updates and any new addons they release. If you have their most expensive plan then you no longer get access to the templates included (if you stop paying), as well you get top level support (and they say their top product engineers will be on the case within 4 business hours). Formidable Forms is owned by Strategy11 which is owned by a husband and wife, and according to LinkedIn there is 5 employees, so it is a small company.

Everest Forms

Everest Forms has a good number of free features but if you want to be able to style the form, add the email address to an email marketing provider (like MailChimp or ConvertKit – affiliate link), accept payments, and a number of things then you will need their premium version. They have yearly and lifetime payment options, so you can choose whichever suites you best. As of the time of writing their yearly prices are $49 to $200 per year, and the lifetime being from $200 to $700. If you choose yearly then don’t renew, you won’t get support or updates. If you don’t like it, you have 14 days to get 100% of your money back with no questions asked.

Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms (affiliate link) doesn’t have any free version, their cost ranges from $59 to $260 per year. Which may seem expensive to some, but they do say they are meant to “create advanced forms for your WordPress website”. As with many of the premium contact forms, if you pay more you get more features and more sites to use it on. If you need to contact them, they handle support requests based on the license you hold, and they say they will acknowledge your support request anywhere from 24 to 48 hours (affiliate link) (or longer if you contact them using the website contact form). They do have a 30 day refund policy (affiliate link) which is nice but it is hidden from plain view which means you have to go searching for it. According to their LinkedIn they have 17 employees at the company.

Kali Forms

Kali Forms is “the powerful & user-friendly WordPress form plugin” which has a free and paid version. As always with having a paid upgrade, there are some limits with the free version like forms can only be one page, only PayPal payment processing, no conditional logic, basic field sets, and more. But with the free version there is unlimited fields which is nice. Kali Forms premium starts at $29 per year, up to $90 per year. Form spam is handled by reCaptcha. They do have a 14 day 100% money back guarantee, which no questions asked which is standard.

Contact Form X

Contact Form X is a completely free contact form with no paid upgrade that is made by a professional web developer (Jeff Starr), that has a limited number of fields to choose from (including reCaptcha, carbon copy, and agree to terms). It seems to provide everything that a premium contact form has, except for the premium support. If I was looking for a simple, free, contact form I would take a detailed look at this one.

Your CRM

If you are using any sort of CRM (customer relationship management) to manage your customers then you should be able to use a form they provide (and embed it directly on any pages you need it on), and if there isn’t any then make sure the contact form can have all of it’s entries go automatically into your CRM (also known as integration).

Happy Forms

Happy Forms has a free version and paid version. Their premium plans start from $49 to $290 per year. It also has a couple of things that I haven’t seen in other premium contact form plugins, like saving abandoned responses, and has conditional logic in all their premium plans. However if you want any integration besides reCaptcha you will need to upgrade to at least the business plan (such as Google Analytics, Stripe, PayPal, and Zapier). If you don’t renew then you will get to use the forms you have created but you don’t get new features, and any updates. They also offer a 45 day money back guarantee.

Very Simple Contact Form

Very Simple Contact Form is much simpler than Contact Form 7, and easier to change settings for. It is completely free, with no paid options. Unfortunately, the plugin is no longer being worked on except for necessary updates every other and than. There are very little settings for you to change, which some will enjoy or hate.

JotForm

If you are looking for a form you can use on any website that isn’t just WordPress then consider JotForm (affiliate link) that will let you create a form for almost anything (see their terms of use for full details on what isn’t allowed) and they have a generous free account. At the time of writing, the free JotForm plan includes 5 forms, 100 submissions each month, 1,000 views per month, unlimited reports & fields per form, and 10 payment submissions. You will then embed it into your website, using whatever website platform you have.

Now that you have a contact form that you can easily use, you may be wondering how to set it up to make sure none of the emails go into the spam folder. This is such a big problem that many websites experience this. Almost all the contact forms have help documents that can help guide you through the steps you can take. If you don’t want to read documents and keep trying out things, then there are many plugins that can help your email go directly through a regular email provider (like the email provider you are using). Some of those plugins are WP Mail SMTP (affiliate link) which does have some settings for free but as with WPForms (affiliate link) if you want to use it to it’s full advantage you will need to upgrade to a paid plan. If you want to use less expensive or completely free options there are Post SMTP which is completely free and WP Mail Bank which has a very good free version but does have the option to upgrade to their premium edition.

Now that you know an alternative and are able to get emails to your email inbox (or that of the place that it is needed) go out and put that contact form on the website and let people contact you and actually get a response.