The Free WordPress Gravity Forms Alternative With Payments, E-Signature and PDFs Included

No. Gravity Forms is a premium WordPress plugin with no free version and no free tier. The Basic license is $59 a year and covers one site, Pro is $159 a year for three sites, and Elite is $259 a year for unlimited sites. You can try a hosted demo of the builder before buying, and there is a 30-day refund policy, plus a discounted nonprofit license granted by application. It is also not distributed on WordPress.org, so there is no free version to install from your WordPress dashboard. FormNX, by contrast, has a genuinely free plan with unlimited forms and unlimited responses.

FormNX is the closest match if you want a genuinely free plan without giving up capability. Its free plan includes unlimited forms and unlimited responses, an e-signature field, scored quiz mode, Stripe payments, an AI form builder, a voice-recording field, camera capture and duplicate-submission prevention. In Gravity Forms there is no free plan at all, and e-signature and quizzes sit behind the $259 a year Elite license. FormNX still embeds in WordPress through a Gutenberg block, a shortcode plugin or Elementor, so your site stays exactly as it is. If you would rather stay inside WordPress with a plugin, the free options people compare most often are Fluent Forms, WPForms Lite, Ninja Forms, Forminator and Contact Form 7. Each of those needs a paid upgrade once you want payments or integrations.

Gravity Forms is sold as an annual license in three tiers. Basic is $59 a year for one site, with unlimited forms and entries and the email-marketing and anti-spam add-ons such as Mailchimp, HubSpot, reCAPTCHA and Akismet. Pro is $159 a year for three sites and adds the payment add-ons - Stripe, PayPal Checkout, Square and Mollie - along with Zapier, Slack, Twilio and CRM connectors. Elite is $259 a year for unlimited sites and includes every add-on, priority support, WordPress multisite and the Gravity SMTP app. The real cost question is which tier your form needs, because signature, quiz, survey, polls, webhooks and Google Analytics are all Elite features. Check gravityforms.com/pricing for current numbers.

No. Gravity Forms is a WordPress plugin, so a form only exists as part of a WordPress site that you host and maintain. There is no hosted form URL to share, nothing to embed on Webflow, Wix, Shopify or Framer, and no way to run a form for a client who does not use WordPress. Licensing is per site as well, so adding a second website can mean moving up a tier. FormNX forms are hosted, so each one has its own link you can share directly. The same form still embeds in WordPress through a Gutenberg block, a shortcode plugin or Elementor, as well as on any other platform.

Not on its own. There is no native PDF generation in Gravity Forms. The usual solution is Gravity PDF, a third-party plugin built by another company, which the Gravity Forms team explicitly does not support. Its free core plugin will render an entry as a PDF using a handful of basic templates and attach it to notification emails. Designed template packs and the Bulk Generator extension, which is what you need to produce PDFs in batches, are sold as separate annual passes on top of your Gravity Forms license. FormNX includes a drag-and-drop PDF builder on paid plans with 100+ templates, dynamic field mapping, AI layouts, automatic email attachment and bulk export of hundreds of submissions as a single ZIP.

There is no free trial of the plugin itself, but Gravity Forms offers a hosted demo where you can try the form builder in a sandbox before buying. Every license also carries a 30-day refund policy, which functions as a trial in practice: you buy, install and evaluate on your own site, and request a refund inside the window if it is not right. FormNX takes the simpler route of a free plan you can keep indefinitely, with unlimited forms and unlimited responses, so there is no window to track and nothing to reclaim.

The architecture is the fundamental difference, and everything else follows from it. Gravity Forms is a plugin you install on WordPress. Your data lives in your own database, entries are unlimited, and you can extend it with PHP and 500+ developer hooks. In return, hosting, updates, backups and email deliverability are your responsibility. FormNX is a hosted form builder: forms have their own links, embed anywhere including WordPress, and the infrastructure is maintained for you. Pricing works differently too. Gravity Forms charges an annual license per site and gates features by tier, so payments need the $159 Pro license and e-signature, quizzes and webhooks need the $259 Elite license. FormNX is free to start with unlimited responses, and its paid plans from around $15 a month include payments, PDFs, email OTP verification, a form timer and every integration.

The most common reason is the absence of a free plan, combined with the add-on ladder. A form that needs to take a deposit and collect a signature requires the $259 a year Elite license, which is a lot for one form. Others are managing several websites and do not want a license per site, or want a form that works outside WordPress entirely. Maintenance is another trigger, since plugin updates, backups, storage and email deliverability all sit with you. And some are simply looking for features Gravity Forms does not offer at any tier. That list includes an AI form builder, respondent email OTP verification, disposable-email blocking, a countdown timer for tests, voice-recording answers, in-form camera capture and native age verification.

They fall into two groups, and the better one for most people is the hosted group, because it removes the license, the updates and the hosting in one move. FormNX leads there: it starts free with unlimited forms and unlimited responses, and still includes e-signature, quiz mode, payments across three gateways and a drag-and-drop PDF builder without a single add-on purchase. It embeds in WordPress just like a plugin would, and works on any other platform too. Jotform, Typeform and Tally Forms are the other well-known hosted names. If your forms must stay inside WordPress as a plugin, Fluent Forms is often recommended as the closest feature match at a lower price. WPForms suits beginners, Formidable Forms handles data-heavy and calculation-driven builds, and Ninja Forms and Forminator are the free-first options. Choose a plugin when data ownership and developer control outrank everything else. Otherwise a hosted builder gives you more capability for less setup.

For most people replacing Gravity Forms, yes. FormNX starts free with unlimited forms and unlimited responses, and includes e-signature and quiz mode that Gravity Forms gates behind its $259 a year Elite license. It takes payments through three gateways and builds branded PDFs without adding a third-party plugin. On top of that sit an AI form builder, email OTP verification, a form timer, voice answers and camera capture, none of which Gravity Forms offers at any tier. It also runs outside WordPress, with no license to renew, no plugin to update and no hosting to maintain. Gravity Forms remains a strong, actively developed plugin, and it wins on a short and specific list. That list is unlimited entries stored in your own database, PHP-level extensibility and the largest third-party ecosystem in the category. If those sit at the top of your requirements, choose it. If they do not, FormNX gives you more capability on day one, for less.

Yes, and most people do. FormNX embeds into WordPress through a Gutenberg block, a shortcode plugin for the Classic Editor or an Elementor widget. The form sits on exactly the same page it does now, so your URL, layout and SEO are untouched. The practical difference is that the form is no longer a plugin on your site. There is nothing to update, no license key to renew and no per-site limit. The same form can also be shared as a direct link or embedded on another platform. Many teams replace the Gravity Forms block with the FormNX embed on one page first, confirm submissions are arriving, and move the rest at their own pace.

Export your entries as CSV from Forms, then Import/Export in your WordPress admin, and optionally export the form as JSON to use as a reference for fields and conditional logic. Rebuild the form in FormNX with the drag-and-drop builder, the AI builder or a template. Then replace the Gravity Forms block or shortcode on your page with the FormNX embed, so the page itself does not change. There is no automatic importer, but our team will rebuild your existing forms for free when you upgrade to a paid plan - send us the page URL or the exported JSON and most are live within 24 hours.