What you actually get for free
You need a form on your site. The interesting question is not what the paid tiers do, but what you can ship without paying. Here is where Ultivo Toolkit, WPForms and Gravity Forms draw that line.
Checked at the source in September 2026.
Free against free
Gravity Forms has no free version at all, so there is nothing to compare in that column. What their paid versions do that this plugin does not is further down.
| Feature | Ultivo Toolkit | WPForms Lite | Gravity Forms |
|---|---|---|---|
| Drag and drop builder | Yes | Yes | No free version |
| Unlimited forms | Yes | Yes | No free version |
| Spam protection | Yes | Yes | No free version |
| Conditional logic | Yes | Paid only | No free version |
| File uploads | Yes | Paid only | No free version |
| Submissions stored in WordPress | Yes | Paid only | No free version |
| Multiple notifications per form | Yes | Paid only | No free version |
| Ready-made form templates | 4 | 2,100+ | No free version |
What it costs
Four things you will want to know
What this plugin does in each of them, and what it does not. The second half of every card is the part most comparison pages leave out.
Building the form
Drag a field onto the canvas and set it up beside it. What you see on the canvas is the real front-end field, because the preview runs the same renderer that draws the form on your site. Conditional logic, validation rules and column layouts are there in the free version.
It will not split a long form over several pages, and both of their paid versions will.
Managing submissions
Submissions are stored in WordPress, and you can search what visitors actually typed instead of only the title. Each one shows whether its notification was sent, which matters more than it sounds: mail fails quietly, and people conclude a form gets no submissions while they are sitting in the list.
There is no export, so if you need your entries in a spreadsheet every week, this is not the plugin for that.
Spam
Set up reCAPTCHA v2, reCAPTCHA v3 or Cloudflare Turnstile once, then switch it on per form. A honeypot runs regardless. Nothing extra loads on pages without a form.
There is no Akismet integration, so if that already runs on your site you will be keeping two things around.
Switching over
Field groups migrate from ACF with their keys intact, so existing content keeps working. Forms are a different story.
There is no importer for forms, so an existing one is rebuilt by hand. A contact form is ten minutes; twenty fields is an afternoon.
When to choose them instead
Needs a payment field, a form split over several pages, or a total that adds up while the visitor types? Buy theirs. Ultivo Toolkit covers the forms most sites need, which is contact, quote request, application and booking, and these four are where it stops.
- Multi-step forms, where a long form is split over several screens.
- Payments, with Stripe or PayPal fields built into the form.
- Calculations, such as a quote that adds up while the visitor fills it in.
- Integrations with Mailchimp, HubSpot and other CRM and email tools.
Both are good plugins with a long history behind them. If your form needs one of the things above, buy theirs: you will spend less time than working around it.
Coming from ACF as well? What changes when you switch covers the field side.
Try it on your next form
Free on wordpress.org, with no limit on the number of sites or forms. The form builder is one of four features, and you can switch the other three off.