You’re probably familiar with the quote ‘The whole is greater than the sum of the parts‘. When you combine together the functionalities of Gravity Forms, GravityView, Gravity Flow, GravityPDF and GFCharts, you extend your WordPress website with a full suite of possibilities: to collect or import data, to process and extend this data and to show and display information in webpages, PDF’s or charts.
Our agency story
Since 2014 we’re using the combination of Forms, Views, Workflows, PDF, Charts and other premium extensions (like Perks and add-ons) to create custom online Business Process Management environments for our clients.
Examples of our work for clients:
- A full Business Processing portal and online webforms for a National Government organisation, organising the process of requesting and processing subsidy requests. Totalling already more than a million entries and thousands of users.
- A two-yearly international event needed an event website where they could organise registering participants, sending automatic invoices, checking payment status, making workshop choices, publishing information about workshops and presentations. The conference was already organised in 3 different countries with hundreds of participants.
- A CRM system where both telephone and online client requests are processed and handled.
- An online learning environment, connecting WordPress with Moodle.
- In a national project about curriculum improvements for primary and secondary schools, the NGO client wanted to consult with teachers, professionals and experts to get feedback on their suggestions. We organised standardized forms to collect data from thousands of people and organised a teacher portal where 160 teachers structured, extended and organised the collected feedback.
What it costs us
Since we are using the software to build complex solutions for many clients, we like to buy the most extensive licenses that are available. The plugins we recommend to use (prices end 2021, can be different now):
| Developer | License | Price (yearly) | Get Add-on |
| Rocketgenius, Inc. | Gravity Forms Elite | $259 | gravityforms.com |
| Katz Web Services, Inc. | GravityView All Access | $399 | gravityview.co |
| Steven Henty S.L. | Gravity Flow Ultimate | $447 | gravityflow.io |
| Blue Liquid Designs | Gravity PDF All Access | $399 | gravitypdf.com |
| Mensard | GFChart All | $199 | gfchart.com |
| Gravity Wiz LLC | Gravity Perks Pro | $299 | gravitywiz.com |
| JetSloth | Gravity Forms Bundle | $129 | jetsloth.com |
| Total yearly | $2131 |
For our company it’s a no-brainer. If you would like to buy software with similar possibilities and you want to have the same flexibility and openness that this Gravity combination delivers… good luck finding a better deal.
Benefits
For us the benefits of using this combination of Gravity plugins are:
- Open Source: All the software we use is Open Source. It doesn’t mean it’s free or without costs, but the source code itself is 100% open. That means that nothing is hidden for us, we can check every single line of code. This is important to us, because our clients expect from us that we know what is installed on their servers (and they want to have a guarantee that all the personal data is owned by them and not send to 3rd parties).
- WordPress is the Operating System of the internet, powering almost 40% of websites worldwide. That also means vulnerabilities will be spotted and solved quickly, the software has regular updates and is 100% open source and free.
- Gravity Forms is for us the number 1 Form Builder for WordPress. The Form software provides a robust, backwards compatible WYSIWYG Form builder, excellent documentation and a big userbase. Especially the well documented Add-On Framework makes it relatively easy to extend Gravity Forms, with professional premium add-ons, or by building something yourself. The Rocketgenius team also invest heavily in empowering the community with an active forum, fast support and a Certified Developers program.
- GravityView is for us an essential addition to Gravity Forms. We use it a lot to create Information Tables, DataTables and custom overview pages. But besides that it offers a Front-end possibility to create your own Edit pages for Gravity Forms entries, which we use to create very specific Checklists and Evaluation pages, without the need of a new entry. Katz Web Services also offers in their All Access license functionalities as Import Entries (to import CSV files into a Gravity Form, creating new Entries based on your Excel data), which turned out to be essential for our business.
- Gravity Flow is another need-to-have add-on for Gravity Forms. We use it by now in every project we do. It gives you full automation possibilities for enriching and changing Entry Data + it creates dozens of possibilities to make connections with other data sources, send out automatic e-mails or PDF’s at a specified time or in a defined order.
The importance of trustworthy developers
We know most of the developers that work on the WordPress extensions mentioned above and we also check with every update the code that is added or changed. Since most developers started in their niche around 2014 / 2015, we learned over the years which developers provide the highest standards.
It’s very important, when extending your WordPress website, to learn about the developers that are behind the code you install and activate, because you give them huge power to change functionalities in and behavior of your website. We highly advice to do this analysis for yourself every time you decide to activate a WordPress plugin on your site. For us, the Gravity Forms Add-ons we promote on our website and in our tutorials proved to be trustworthy and of high quality.
Avoid nulled versions
We know that some people search for nulled versions of software. We advice not to use these kinds of offers. Besides that some of the providers of nulled versions are pretty shady businesses, you also miss out on access to (premium) support and regular updates. From an ethical point of view, it’s also fair to pay the developers of products you love and use the price they charge for their work.
That’s why we always decide to buy an official license for every bit of software we use: premium support, regular updates and a paying a fair price to developers (also to enable them to continue developing their wonderful products).
Why not a SaaS solution?
A dedicated SaaS solution can in many cases solve a specific problem by providing a hosted solution. This could be interesting when you want a quick solution and a dedicated team that focuses delivering a specific functionality.
But be aware of:
- A SaaS solution mostly has a subscription model per user or per form/view/chart, so you pay more when you use the service more. For example if you want to buy a SaaS-solution only for your Forms and want no limitations, around $80 per month ($960 per year) is a reasonable price. Buying the Elite license from Gravity Forms gives you, except the hosting itself, the same functionalities, but for only $259.
- To get started, using a SaaS-solution is maybe an attractive option moneywise (it saves a lot of hassle in the beginning), but in most cases you are locked-in with the SaaS-provider, it’s difficult to adapt the software to specific wishes of your clients and the software is mostly hosted on a server that is not yours (which can cause problems if your client demands data to be hosted in their own country or on a server they can only access).
Why not other WordPress plugins?
There are plenty of other Form (and View / Flow) solutions out there, like Formadible Forms, WPForms, Ninja Forms and Contact Form 7. Although all these plugins offer valuable solutions for their users and should be explored, we stick to Gravity Forms and their ecosystem of Add-on developers because it offers us the most stable, secure and extendable solution to build the portals and CRM-systems we envision.
