You can do really complex things quite easily. For example, you can have a form that users can fill out, which then generates a draft CPT, which you can review before Publish. Then using Formidable's Views, you can take information from forms and display it anywhere, conditionally, styled on a page, or only for Admins' view. What I REALLY like best is that it's clear what integrations you get, and their integrations aren't odd 3rd party developers whose prices all vary. ALL the extensions and integrations are made BY Formidable. Support is all in one place, no one can pass the buck, and their support knows all of it.
It is pricey, but even their free version is better than the other free form builders. Plus, Formidable's competitors don't tell you that you will have to pay extra, even on the highest plan, to get add-ons and that those add-ons are from an entirely different company. So while Formidable can seem expensive, it ends up being much more cost-effective in the long run.
It can do anything. It can connect anything. It's really just fabulous. I use it for a local food pantry's website, allowing people to place their pantry orders online and the pantry volunteers can easily see orders in the custom reports created with Views. I use it for the local Board of REALTOR's website for agents to submit Open House info. It creates a new Post in the CPT for Open Houses, then the Board's secretary just gives it a quick review and changes the Post from Draft to Published
Found it so much easier to create and edit my forms than other software
Would have given a 9.5 rating. Only reason for not giving a 10 is I experienced some confusion over upgrading from free lite to a discount price Pro version. I know now It auto-renews at regular price but that wasn't initially clear on the sales pages I saw. That confusion seems to be corrected on newer sales pages now.
I had a problem when still using the free Lite version. I couldn't edit one of my forms. But the edit I wanted to make was minor and I appreciated that the form still worked fine. The problem disappeared once I upgraded ... but I don't think "having" to upgrade was the issue. Think was just a system glitch. - I'm in the US. A second problem I had was the form not allowing a business acquaintance to submit a form because it wouldn't accept his Thailand based phone number. We found a non-form workaround. I haven't investigated the issue further yet to see if there's something I could change on the form to rectify this problem.
Formidable is super user friendly (we have numerous staff that design forms now who are not web designers) and at the same time can go deeper with custom HTML, conditional logic, custom CSS, math calculations, etc... The builder is drag and drop easy, results are emailed, exported as CSV, displayed on pages, or whatever you need. It's amazing! I've now used this plugin on dozens of sites over the years and never once have I regretted it. It always works, always stands up to the project's needs, and the support has been amazing when rarely needed to be called on. Seriously, they are the best support team I've seen for any plugin I've ever seen. Super responsive and super helpful.
The only issue (if I had to pick one) would be that they no longer offer pro plans for a flat fee as it is now a yearly fee, but that's totally justifiable as they need an ongoing income stream to support their business. There are great examples of other code and things you can do on their website, but with so many people using this plugin, it seems like a community site would be cool to share ideas, examples, builds, etc if you want to really build a community of users. This would be different than a chat based site like their Slack channel, rather a forum.
I've made basic feedback/contact us forms, product question forms, live event voting forms, association dues payment forms, job application forms, personality tests, and more. This has been an excellent tool.
There's so much to like: 1) Immensely flexible product - for all levels, but especially for more technically inclined, 2) The support is fantastic. Quick response times, very helpful with finding solutions...seem to really want to make sure they help as much as possible, 3) It works. A polished product has so much value in that I don't have to waste time figuring out if there's a bug or a mistake that I've made.
The only real complaint I have so far is the lack of any kind of community. For a product that is very developer friendly, I would think there would be some type of forum to allow users to share examples and ideas, maybe even quick troubleshooting. I realize this means someone would have to monitor the activity, and I'm not sure how big the team is, but I would love to have access to that. I'd also love to see a pricing model slightly more usage-based (esp for startups where every dollar counts), but I can't complain too much since it's not overly expensive for the year.
The ability to create all different kinds of dynamic, interactive forms has never been more available. I tried several of the other more popular products, and they all had more limitations, were not nearly as user-friendly, and often buggy.
Formidable Pro is the perfect tool for developers like me. It allows me to customize (just about) every aspect of the form elements. The VIEWS functionality is just a fantastic tool to get complex behaviours in a reasonable budget. Getting functional requirements from agencies can cause costs to skyrocket but with Formidable Pro I get to come in under budget, and still deliver a great project. Support is always quick and very helpful.
Some clients are intimidated byt he cost, but once I explain that savings they will get by avoiding custom development they understand the complex functionality they get 'out of the box'. It would be helpful to have an integrated PDF printer.
Using the VIEWS functionality I solved complex programming requirements. My clients benefited from complex solutions that don't break the bank. Additionally we solved picky requirments with the ability for fine-grained tuning of CSS, and javascript. We needed to create a mini-website based on answers from a form. Using VIEWS we accomplished all requirments. The project also required some javascript calculations which we can easily add to the forms. One client also required a sophiticated dashboard for a manager to view the forms submitted by each employee, Formidable pro comes with a customizable attractive solution out of the box.
It's easy to use and deploy a new form. The responsive behavior makes it easy to create great mobile pages with good value for the user. It's easy to integrate the forms into other plugins' territory.
Nothing really, maybe at the beginning, you need a few seconds to find all the great features, but I think this is more than a standard process with something new.
The best way to add value is to make it interactive. The Click rate and the search value for my page got a big boost! I can add to a lot of topics unique possibilities.
The multitude of options is endless, and they keep coming up with new ones. Despite the complexity, the interface is simple and easy to handle, and the support is amazing. Very good documentation too.
Price keeps going up. I've been using Formidable Forms for years, but am starting to reconsider it due to continuous price increases.
I use it for any kind of front-end user posting, form entries, and submissions. I've built sales interfaces, catalogs, complex multipage forms with uploads, and entire customer-facing management systems. I love the fact that it allows me to create front-end customer pages where they can review and edit all their submissions. It has complex field calculations, which makes it great for price calculations, and date management/calendar display options to build online event calendars as well. With many hooks, it's easy to customize further and work with other plugins.
Customization. Hands down the best form builder, but that 's just the beginning. Formidable Pro allows you to take the data you collect and use it any way you need, it's hard to give specifics, but examples of what it is capable of are easy. It can be a full event management system, or a complete web store, a contact directory, or a swim team management system. Formidable was not designed to be any of these things but it is powerful enough to do it. I have been asked to do things with data that would normally require a back-end solution but instead was handled by this plug-in. WordPress is a community that grows and learns together, premium plugin's were free for many years but that model comes with many downsides and few benefits. Companies such as Strategy11 continue to offer a quality product at no expense to the community and their premium solution easily adds enough to justify the expense. They remain a strong supporter of WordPress and by extension, me.
The licensing structure. A few years ago you were able to purchase the add-on's individually. Now they only come with a specific tier. I believe I understand why they did it this way and I probably would have done it myself, but I still don't "like" it.
I try to solve all my problems with Formidable. That may sound absurd and it does not work for everything, but I do try. We have all searched for plugins to do specific things only to spend hours finding work arounds for poorly written code or troubleshooting incompatibilities. I don't have these issues with Formidable so step 1 is always to consider how it can solve the problem.