WPForms Lite vs Pro: Which Version Is Right for You?

WPForms Lite is packed with basic features that make it ideal for simple contact forms, and it’s free, so it’s perfect for anyone just starting out or needing a straightforward solution.

But if you’re curious about WPForms Pro, you might be wondering if the added features, integrations, and addons are worth the investment or can help grow your business or nonprofit.

In this article, we’ll run through a complete comparison of WPForms Lite and WPForms Pro so you can easily see what you’ll get when you upgrade.

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WPForms Free vs Pro Explained

This article will help you decide if it’s time to upgrade to a premium version of WPForms. First, let’s look at the form builder and how it works.

Getting Started: WPForms Lite vs Pro

WPForms Lite and WPForms Pro share the same awesome drag and drop form builder that’s super easy for beginners. No matter which version you start with, the WPForms editor works in exactly the same way.

The WPForms user interface is easy to learn, too. To add a field, you just drag it from left to right. To open the field options, click once on the field in the editor.

You can easily make and publish a contact form in less than 5 minutes.

And our form builder is a little different from other form builders like Gravity Forms. Because with WPForms, you can expand the form builder so that it fills your entire monitor.

So it’s a WordPress plugin, but it works like a professional form builder platform! Next, here’s another great tip. There are also no usage limits in WPForms Lite or WPForms Pro either:

	WPForms Lite	WPForms Pro
Unlimited forms	✓	✓
Unlimited responses	✓	✓
Unlimited views	✓	✓
Unlimited disk space	✓	✓
AI Forms & Choices	✓	✓

Keep in mind that your hosting company might have limits on things like disk space for files. But unlike hosted form builders such as JotForm, WPForms won’t impose limits of its own.

You definitely don’t want your form to be disabled right when your traffic is increasing!

Our free version has more than has 13+ thousand 5-star reviews on WordPress.org . And 6+ million customers like you are already using it!

• If you want to learn why WPForms has so many awesome ratings, check out this comparison of WPForms Lite vs Contact Form 7 to see how much easier it is to make forms without writing code.
• You can also see this Zoho Forms vs Jotform vs WPForms comparison to see how WPForms provides extra value with some unique form features that you don’t get elsewhere.

Up next, we’ll look at the components you can use to make your forms. When you upgrade and buy a WPForms license, you get to use more fields and unlock way beyond what you get in WPForms Lite features. Let’s take a look.

Form Fields in WPForms Lite vs Pro

The form fields you can use are different in WPForms Lite and the Pro version. Let’s look at the similarities before we check out the differences:

	WPForms Lite	WPForms Pro
Name	✓	✓
Email	✓	✓
Text	✓	✓
Number	✓	✓
Number Slider	✓	✓
Dropdown	✓	✓
Multiple Choice	✓	✓
Checkbox	✓	✓
Payment fields (Items fields)	✓	✓
reCAPTCHA/ hCaptcha/Akismet/Turnstile	✓	✓
GDPR Agreement	✓	✓

These basic fields let you easily make forms for your business, hobby site, or nonprofit. With these fields, you can easily:

• Create a simple contact form
• Create an order form and accept credit card payments with Stripe
• Customize your form with dropdowns, radio buttons, and checkboxes
• Add spam protection to your forms with CAPTCHAs, email blocklists, and more
• Easily add a GDPR agreement to any form.

If you upgrade to Pro, you get access to the ‘fancy’ fields in the plugin too:

	WPForms Lite	WPForms Pro
Phone		✓
Address / Map		✓
Date / Time		✓
Website / URL		✓
File Upload		✓
Calculations		✓
Password		✓
Rich Text		✓
Layout (Multi-Column Form)		✓
Page Break		✓
Section Divider		✓
HTML		✓
Content		✓
Entry preview		✓
Hidden Field		✓
Custom CAPTCHAs		✓
Signature		✓
Survey fields (star ratings, Likert scale, Net Promoter Score)		✓

These fields are super helpful when you want to:

• Make longer forms easier to fill out: Splitting a form into sections and creating multi-page forms helps to make your visitors feel comfortable answering longer questions. It also avoids form abandonment because they won’t feel overwhelmed.
• Make surveys and polls so you can conduct your own research and find out what makes your customers tick.
• Get signed contracts, which is awesome for any business or freelancer who needs to get signed agreements.
• Prevent spam with your own custom CAPTCHAs.

There are a few fields in the Pro list that are especially handy, so let’s focus on those next. First, here’s an example of the ‘smart’ phone field in action:

This field will automatically show the correct phone number input based on your visitor’s location.

This really helps to avoid confusion when you’re getting phone numbers for sales leads, especially if you have visitors from different countries.

Next up, we also wanted to show you how the address autocomplete works because it’s awesome!

The Pro Geolocation addon connects to Google Maps or Mapbox and will automatically detect the address and complete it for your visitor. It’s a great way to add an interactive map to your address field too!

Next, let’s take a look at the Rich Text field. This allows visitors to format their entry with bold, italics, lists, colors, and more. And they can upload images too.

This is the perfect field if you want to allow users to submit blog posts through your forms.

And finally, let’s look at 1 more field that could make your workflow a lot more efficient. Using the Signature addon, your visitor can draw their signature on any form you create.

You can use this to create your own:

• WordPress contract forms
• Model release forms
• Video release forms
• And more.

But wait. Are you wondering if these fields will make your forms look too complicated? Let’s take a look at how conditional logic can help with that.

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Why Use Conditional Logic on Forms?

If you’re still on the fence about upgrading, conditional logic is one of the #1 benefits of upgrading to a WPForms paid license.

With conditional logic, you can set up specific fields to show or hide automatically.

For example, you could show and hide fields based on previous answers.

Conditional logic can be used in other ways too. You can:

• Process payments only if certain conditions are met
• Filter your survey questions according to a demographic question
• Get more control over when marketing integrations fire and when they don’t.

With WPForms Pro, you can hide all of the fields that aren’t immediately needed, then reveal them when necessary. That way, your visitor will never see tons of empty fields that don’t apply to them.

Notifications and Entry Storage: Lite vs Pro

Both WPForms Lite and WPForms Pro will send notification emails when your form is submitted. (If you don’t receive notifications, this guide on how to fix WPForms not sending email will show you the easy way to fix it.)

On top of that, WPForms Pro gives you more ways to send and manage your notifications. Here’s a quick breakdown to give you an idea of the differences.

	WPForms Lite	WPForms Pro
Form notification emails	✓	✓
CC recipients on 1 notification	✓	✓
Confirmation message on form submission	✓	✓
Multiple notifications on a form		✓
1-click notification cloning		✓
Form abandonment notifications		✓
Conditional notifications		✓

If you want to have every form entry saved in your WordPress dashboard, WPForms Pro is the best choice. You can search and filter your entries to find exactly what you need.

And you can even get notifications for forms that aren’t submitted. In fact, WPForms Pro has the best entry storage features in any WordPress form builder plugin:

	WPForms Lite	WPForms Pro
Form entry storage in WordPress		✓
Automatic entry export to Google Sheets		✓
File uploads stored in Media Library (optional)		✓
Survey and poll reporting		✓
Show visitors’ location		✓
Show user journey		✓
Export to CSV, Excel, or print entries		✓
Mark entry read/ unread and star entries		✓
Get form entries offline		✓

You might be wondering what some of these features look like, so let’s focus on a few awesome things you can do with Pro entry storage.

First up, we can’t talk about Pro without talking about the Surveys and Polls addon! This addon turns WPForms into a full survey platform:

Compared to professional survey tools, WPForms Pro has 3 huge advantages:

• You can embed surveys and polls easily on your site, which makes them super easy to share and distribute. Every form has an Embed button right in the online form builder.
• Your survey responses are all stored right in the WordPress dashboard. You don’t have to log in to different platforms to see your responses.
• Survey charts are automatically generated in WordPress. It’s easy to download and reuse these charts any way you want.

In fact, the surveys and polls tool makes the WPForms license well worth it. It has similar features to professional survey platforms.

We also want to show you the User Journey addon that you get with WPForms Pro. This is quickly becoming one of our most popular addons!

It lets you retrace your user’s steps through your website right up to the point that they submitted your form.

Our users love the insights they get from this addon. It can help you to easily see which pages on your site are leading to form conversions.

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Form Templates: WPForms Lite vs Pro

Both WPForms Lite and WPForms Pro come with 2,000+ WordPress form templates. You can access them right in the form builder.

You can hover your mouse over any template to open up a preview or use it right away by clicking on Use Template. The form builder will automatically prompt you to install the addons needed for the form to work.

And if you need to upgrade your WPForms license to use the selected template, a message will pop up to explain what you need to do.

When you combine our form templates and addons, you can easily make advanced forms like:

• Blog post submission forms to get more user generated content for your site
• Frontend submission forms for an events calendar
• Custom user registration and login forms
• Custom calculation forms
• File upload forms
• And more!

All of this extra functionality can help you:

• Save time by reducing the amount of admin work you have to do
• Simplify hiring using customized job application forms
• Make more money from your site
• Accept WordPress user submitted posts for increased efficiency and better rankings
• Make lead forms to generate more sales leads
• Take your marketing campaigns to the next level!

Payments: WPForms Lite vs Pro

All license levels of WPForms enable you to create order forms and accept credit card payments via Stripe or Square.

	WPForms Lite	WPForms Pro
Stripe	✓	✓
Square	✓	✓
PayPal		✓
Authorize.net		✓

We’ve partnered with Stripe and Square to keep overall fees acceptably low so that all of our users enjoy taking credit card payments seamlessly.

For Lite, Basic, and Plus users, there’s a 3% fee per transaction on top of the regular Stripe and Square fees.

However, you can remove the 3% additional fee by upgrading to WPForms Pro or Elite. In addition:

• WPForms Pro unlocks the Stripe Pro and Square Pro addons, which give you the ability to implement conditional logic for your Stripe or Square payment processing. This is super useful when you want to let your customers choose between one-time payments or recurring payment options in your form.
• Pro users get more payment gateways including PayPal and Authorize.net.

All versions of WPForms include a Payments screen that lets you track the payments you’ve collected via your forms.

The Payments screen gives you the convenient to monitor your sales over time right within your WordPress dashboard.

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Ways to Publish Your Forms

WPForms has an awesome drag and drop form editor that makes it easy to create your forms. And you can publish forms anywhere on your WordPress site.

With Pro, you can also use 3 additional pre-made layouts to display your forms:

	WPForms Lite	WPForms Pro
Embed forms in WordPress pages and posts using a wizard	✓	✓
Classic editor, shortcodes, and block editor support	✓	✓
Conversational forms		✓
Landing page forms		✓
Lead forms		✓

Are you wondering what these extra layouts look like?

Conversational forms show questions one by one. When your visitor answers a question, the form automatically skips to the next one.

This addon makes WPForms Pro the perfect TypeForm alternative. Additionally, you can easily publish any form on its own landing page.

Here’s the awesome thing about the form pages addon: you don’t need to write any code. In fact, once you activate the addon, all the settings you need to create your page are right here in the form builder:

It’s that easy! You can convert any form into a standalone landing page and convert it back whenever you want to. Finally, here’s our favorite: Lead Forms.

Lead forms are similar to conversational forms, but they’re embedded. That means you get all the benefits and ease of use of a conversational layout, but you keep the visitor on your page.

The Lead Forms addon is the perfect partner to the Calculations addon. To see both in action, here’s an example of a mortgage lead generator form. (The calculations in this form really work! You can try it out in real time.)

Page Builder Integrations

If you’re using a page builder to create your site, WPForms Lite and WPForms Pro will both work great for that.

For example, there’s a native Elementor widget in both versions of the plugin. So WPForms is a great option if you want to make a free Elementor contact form!

The WPForms plugin also has integrations for Divi and SeedProd so you can easily embed your forms without shortcodes if you want to.

Popular Email Marketing Integrations

Email marketing is one of the most powerful ways to get more leads from your WordPress site.

After creating a basic contact form, you could also create a newsletter signup form and use any WordPress email subscription plugins so people can subscribe to your email marketing list.

The Lite version lets you easily make a Constant Contact email subscription form.

And WPForms Pro extends this with support for many popular email automation and marketing platforms:

	WPForms Lite	WPForms Pro
Constant Contact	✓	✓
Mailchimp		✓
AWeber		✓
GetResponse		✓
Drip		✓
Campaign Monitor		✓
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)		✓
MailerLite		✓

Don’t forget: ActiveCampaign integration is also available with the Elite license!

Connecting your email marketing service is easy.

If you don’t see your email marketing provider here, don’t worry. You can easily integrate it using another integration method. We’ll look at that next.

Upgrade to WPForms Pro Now! 🙂

Bonus Integrations

Sometimes, you might want to connect your forms to services that don’t have an addon.

If you’re ready to do that, WPForms Pro is a great choice. There are 2 easy ways to make your own bonus integrations. Lite supports one of them, while Pro supports both:

	WPForms Lite	WPForms Pro
Uncanny Automator	✓	✓
Zapier		✓

Want to see how they work?

Uncanny Automator is one of our favorite WPForms integrations. It lets you easily send WPForms submissions to other plugins automatically.

If you’d like to see Uncanny Automator and WPForms in action, check out this tutorial on how to integrate WPForms and MailPoet.

The Zapier addon also lets you create your own custom connections from WPForms Pro to 7,000+ 3rd party services.

With this Pro addon, you can:

• Integrate WordPress forms with SendFox
• Make custom Pardot forms
• And send your form entries to hundreds of other services that you already use.

If you want even more control, keep in mind that Elite license holders get Salesforce integration, HubSpot CRM integration, and our powerful webhooks addon too.

Support in WPForms Lite vs Pro

Support is definitely one area where the Lite version and the Pro version are different. If you want the best possible experience, Pro is worth it.

	WPForms Lite	WPForms Pro
WordPress.org support	✓
Ticket support		✓
Typical response time	1-3 business days	~1 business day

As a Lite customer, you’ll always get support in the WordPress.org form for the WPForms Lite plugin.

But with Pro, you can get help even faster.

Once you’re a Pro customer, you’ll also be able to open a support ticket right from your WPForms account.

So Pro gives you access to a team of WPForms experts who are standing by to help from 9 am–5 pm EST every weekday.

Find out more about WPForms support resources in our detailed WPForms review.

WPForms Pricing: How Much Does WPForms Pro Cost?

Looking for the WPForms Pro cost? Plans typically start at $49.50 per year and go up depending on the number of features and websites you need to cover.

While WPForms Lite features are very useful, the paid plans unlock a whole new variety of features that can make form building extremely easy for you. All WPForms plans have affordable pricing, especially for the features you get.

The Pro license unlocks almost all of the features and addons in the plugin. Pricing starts at $199.50/yr, and you can use your license on 5 sites. With Pro, you can easily create:

• Simple contact forms
• Surveys and polls
• File upload forms
• Application forms
• Payment forms
• Donation forms
• And a lot more!

Upgrade to WPForms Pro Now! 🙂

Conclusion: Which Version of WPForms Is Best?

Now you have the full lowdown on WPForms Lite and WPForms Pro, you can see that WPForms Pro is definitely worth the investment and at very affordable pricing!

If you’re creating different types of WordPress forms for a business, or you want to drive donations for your nonprofit, the Pro license unlocks all of the tools and addons you’ll need.

Compared to Lite, Pro gives you:

• All fields
• 2,000+  templates
• Almost all addons and integrations
• Extra ways to publish and display your forms
• Full survey functionality
• Payment fields for one-off or recurring charges
• Awesome visitor insights
• And tons of ways to make forms smarter and easier to use!

Even better, WPForms Pro comes with a fuss-free 14-day money-back guarantee.

If it’s not the right fit for your website, you can get a refund for any reason—or no reason! Our support team is here to help with any billing or technical query you have.

Ready to upgrade? Buy WPForms Pro today! In just a few minutes, you’ll unlock access to almost every addon, field, and integration we’ve talked about in this review.

Upgrade to WPForms Pro Now! 🙂

FAQs on WPForms Pro vs. Lite

Here are some common questions regarding the two versions of the WPForms plugin.

Does WordPress have a form builder?

No, WordPress doesn’t have its own form builder. You’ll need to install WPForms to publish a contact form on your site.

Is WPForms free?

Yes, the Lite version is 100% free forever! The free version of WPForms includes basic fields, templates, drag-and-drop editing, and spam protection with CAPTCHA and Constant Contact integration.

How do I use WPForms Lite in WordPress?

WPForms Lite provides much of the same functionality as WPForms Pro.

To use it and create forms, simply click on WPForms » Add New.

This will open the form builder view where you can select a template and edit it by adding or removing fields using simple drag and drop functionality.

Where does WPForms’ data Go?

WPForms sends entries by email in the Pro and Lite versions. In the Pro version, it also stores your entries in WordPress. For a more detailed explanation, check out our guide: where does WPForms data go?

How do I style my forms?

WPForms makes it easy to style forms without CSS. We have a guide on how to style your forms in WordPress to explain how it works.

What is the best form plugin for WordPress?

WPForms is the best WordPress form plugin for WordPress, having over 6 million active installations across WordPress sites on the web.

What’s more, many of the core features and functionalities are available for free if you use WPForms Lite. And if you want an upgrade to get some of WPForm’s exclusive features, you can do so at reasonable pricing.

For these reasons, WPForms WordPress form plugin of choice for businesses both big and small.

Is WPForms secure?

Yes, WPForms sends notifications via email in the Lite version. In the Pro version, it stores them in your WordPress database.

As long as you maintain your WordPress site and keep it secure, your form entries are only visible to you.

What is the difference between WPForms Lite and Pro?

WPForms Lite lets you build basic forms like contact or newsletter signup forms. WPForms Pro adds features like file uploads, surveys, calculations and more!

Is WPForms free or paid?

WPForms Lite is free and available on WordPress.org, while WPForms Pro is a paid upgrade that unlocks premium features for growing businesses and nonprofits.

What is the cost of WPForms Pro?

WPForms Pro starts at around $49.50 per year. The price can change during sales or if you choose a bigger plan.

Is WPForms better than Contact Form 7?

For beginners, WPForms is easier to use than Contact Form 7. It has a visual form builder, built-in spam protection, and works without writing code.

Next, How to Stop Contact Form Spam in WordPress

Do you want to stop contact form spam forever? A lot of us have been there, annoyed and looking for a way to stop the spam.

The good news is you don’t have to go through tons of spam emails to find genuine questions and leads anymore. WPForms makes it super easy to stop email spam from reaching your inbox.

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Ready to build your form? Get started today with the easiest WordPress form builder plugin. WPForms Pro includes lots of free templates and offers a 14-day money-back guarantee.

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