Formidable Forms vs Gravity Forms: Post Type Creation

We at WPspring love Gravity Forms. However, we often get asked this question: What about Formidable Pro vs Gravity Forms?

In terms of ease-of-use for general form creation, Formidable Forms doesn’t have much on Gravity Forms. Both feature super easy drag n’ drop form building, plenty of ‘advanced’ fields (like email address and file upload) and support for conditionals.

Where Formidable Pro truly shines, in our opinion, is in Post Type Creation.

Formidable Forms: Easier Post Type Creation

WordPress’ default backend interface for creating Post Types (ex: add a ‘Product’, add a ‘Review’) is a roadblock for many web designers looking to offer a straightforward, user-friendly interface for non-admin users. For instance, suppose you are creating a marketplace of some kind and would like to allow users to add their own products. Probably, the idea that you’ll need to train the average user to add a product via the backend ‘Add a Product’ form is a hard pill to swallow.

A form-builder plugin seems to offer a potential quick fix to this problem, especially if you are not a programmer . If you are wanting to use a form-building plugin to create a more user-friendly, frontend form for letting users create post types (Post, Page, Product, etc), then Formidable Pro is probably your better bet.

Formidable forms with Formidable Pro offers a much more straightforward way to enable a form to create an existing WordPress post type and map fields than does Gravity Forms.

Under Settings> Create Posts, Formidable Pro lets you select the Post Type you want to create from a drop down menu. You will only see post type options that you can currently create from the backend– for instance, if you do not have the WooCommerce plugin installed, you won’t see ‘Products’ in this post type dropdown. Once it is installed, you will.

Then, you can easily map your Formidable Forms fields to existing post type fields:

Further, Formidable Pro Formidable Forms does a better job of displaying ‘categories’ or ‘product categories’ in a form designed to create a Post Type. Your pre-defined categories will display in a hierarchal fashion, rather than randomly as they do with Gravity Forms. This creates a much better frontend experience for your users.

Formidable Forms ‘Views’ offer flexible options for displaying posts users have created (again, frontend). Formidable Pro’s user_id field is especially useful in this regard. When included (but hidden) in a form, Formidable Forms tracks who ‘created’ a post, letting you then create a view limiting a user to viewing/editing/deleting only posts they themselves have created.

Ex: User Alice adds 10 movie ‘reviews’ to your website. You can then offer a ‘view’ that lets Alice, when she is logged in, only view/edit/delete the reviews she herself has added.

Formidable Pro vs Gravity Forms: What’s the Verdict?

So, what’s the verdict? Which plugin is better? Well, it depends on what you want to do….

In the future, we’ll continue comparing these two powerful form-building plugins. In the meantime, if you want quick overview of Formidable Pro vs Gravity Forms, check out this table.