A Reason for Why I No Longer Recommend Gravity Forms

PPC Ace recommended Gravity Forms to dozens of users, but not anymore.

18 months ago, when I discovered Gravity Forms, I was delighted. I had previously used Contact Form 7, an extremely popular, free plugin for creating contact forms on WordPress sites. Where Contact Form 7 was code-y and slow, Gravity Forms made creating forms almost fun. It has a visual, slick interface that relies on drag-and-drop to build forms.
I instantly bought a developer license ($199) and began using it on every site I owned, as well as recommending to clients and other WordPress people at meetups and online.

The Main Problem

At some point, I noticed an issue with the file uploader function. One of my sites relies heavily on visitors being able to quickly send a PDF or JPG file to the staff, and we started getting a File Error–the rest of the form information would come through but the file wouldn’t upload to our server.
We tried to replicate the issue internally but were not successful, and it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the size of the file–sometimes the files that were rejected were large, sometimes small. (I suspect, but was never able to verify, that the user’s internet connection speed was a part of the problem–still, an unacceptable bug.)
When I posted the issue in the support forums, the support team told me they didn’t know why it was happening, and closed the issue. Internally, we tried everything we could to fix it, even changing web hosts, but we kept having the problem.  I ended up struggling with it for over a year, sticking with Gravity Forms because I believed in the product, even though I wasn’t able to get any help from the staff. Keep in mind that they charge $100-200 per year to renew the license.
When this File Upload error occurred on our company site, it required a staff person to call the customer and ask them to share the file again via email–really professional, right?
In the last few weeks the problem had been getting worse (or maybe I was finally losing patience) and I finally threw in the towel and started using Jotform.com forms–just as easy to build but hosted on secure Amazon’s s3 servers. Forms created on Jotform are then quickly embedded on to any WordPress page or post and your work is done. Their free plan covers up to 100 submissions per month and that is more than most people really need, so it’s a good option for most sites.

A Costly Error

Normally, that would be the end of the story, since it immediately cleared up file upload issues on my sites. But the punchline is that we notice an immediate uptick in conversions, that is just potential customers submitting the form.
This isn’t a statistically significant data set, but the anecdotal evidence suggests that there was something in Gravity Forms that somehow discouraged/inhibited visitors from successfully completing the form and submitting it. This probably was costing us money every single day. On this site, an average conversion is worth $50+ and conversions doubled when we switched to JotForm–instantly.
Thinking about the dollars and hours we’ve lost because of this kind of makes me sick. Gravity Forms has an extremely successful affiliate program, meaning that most “reviews” you’ll find about the plugin are actually trying to con you into clicking through to purchase it.  The “reviewer” can then earn their kickback. Gravity Forms, without a doubt, cost me business (cash) and time, well over the cost of purchasing the plugin.

Misleading Advertising

There are other issues that ticked me off about Gravity Forms–they advertise that they track conversions, but in reality it just tracks the number of people who see the form vs the people who fill it out. Calling it “conversion tracking” implies that it integrates a tool like Google Analytics to show us which keyword a visitor used to end up filling out the form, which it doesn’t. (note: it looks like they are considering that for the future.) Since this site is for a company that is mostly an off-line business, a conversion happens often by phone or email anyway, so this feature would be helpful in focusing our advertising efforts (because we could manually track sales that come in by phone).

One Final Weird Issue

Also, a few times (this was a minor issue but still bad) the plugin never sent out the notification email to us after it processed the form, and we couldn’t tell until a peeved customer would call us and say, “Hey I sent my file in through your website, why didn’t anyone contact me?” –not a great feeling.

Conclusion

I’m now recommending JotForm.com –I don’t know if they have an affiliate program but I am not a part of it. WuFoo.com does the same thing and offers a similar free program.

It might be only me who faces this issue, Gravity Forms might be useful for other one. But it was just an opinion on my part what I face there.
Share your experience and reviews here.