If you’ve ever been in the market for a WordPress form builder, you know the challenge of trying to sift through so many options. But the reality is, there’s just a tiny fraction of WordPress form builders with the feature set, ease-of-use, and support to separate themselves from the pack. Such form builders go far beyond simple contact forms—they offer a variety of functionality and features that meet the needs of many different WordPress users—from solo freelancers to large corporate marketers. CaptainForm, launched in 2015, is one of the more recent WordPress form builder entries. It’s the product of 123ContactForm, out of Timisoara, Romania. 123ContactForm is a plugin development company that’s been around for eight years, and has extensive experience building form plugins. They specialize in helping users easily build custom, secure online forms without the need for programming skills. CaptainForm is a free and premium WordPress form builder with built-in third-party apps and a feature set that allows you to easily create basic and advanced forms from within the WordPress dashboard. In this review, we’ll take a closer look at its features, explore how to use it, and see what it offers the WordPress community. CaptainForm’s Main Features With CaptainForm, you can easily create nearly any form you need for your WordPress site, including contact forms, order forms, registration forms, surveys, quizzes, file upload forms, job application forms, booking forms, contest entry forms, loan application forms, membership application forms, and much more. CaptainForm provides tools for payment collection, market and lead generation reporting, and management of client forms from one place. Here’s the main features for CaptainForm: • Create forms within the WordPress dashboard with a drag and drop interface and no coding • 30+ customizable form templates (or create your own custom templates) • Includes forms for small businesses, human resources, event organizers, nonprofits, education, lead generation, and consulting, including: Contact forms Order forms Registration forms Feedback forms Volunteer recruitment forms Event registration forms Donation forms Job application forms Surveys and polls Quizzes User-submitted posts • Fully customizable forms with over 30 field types to choose from, including: Basic fields Text Box Number Radio Heading Email Text Area Dropdown Checkbox Likert Scale Website Advanced fields Name Time Price HTML Block Google Map Social T.O.S. Password Date Address Phone File Upload Image Page Break Star Rating Signature • Edit field labels, field size, text, field validation, and more • Set form width, alignment, encoding, text alignment, logo, backgrounds, buttons, error messages, and more • Supports custom CSS • Third-party applications built-in (no add-ons required) • Form payment options (discounts, payment processors, recurring payments, etc.) • Create complex calculation forms linked to payment gateways • Security options for your forms and sensitive data (CAPTCHA, SSL encryption, password protection, IP limitation, country filters, submission limits, anti-spam, file visibility, etc.) • Track form visitors with Google Analytics • Publish forms in pages, posts, sidebar widgets, themes, or as popups • Set rules using conditional logic to show/hide fields based on previous responses • Create autoresponders based on form submissions • Allow users to edit responses after form submission • Sort, filter, analyze or export collected data as CSV or PDF files • Send form data to multiple recipients at once • Receive form notifications via SMS • Add JavaScript to forms • Make forms invisible to search engines • Allow form users to save entries as drafts to finish later • Automatic report creation • Multi-language forms • Supports WordPress Multisite • Form submissions are saved on secure servers that are backed up daily and come with SSL encryption CaptainForm Apps CaptainForm comes with apps (add-ons) that extend functionality. For example, email apps help transfer form information to your email marketing service for list building. Payment gateway apps allow you to build purchase forms for e-commerce, accept recurring payments, offer coupon codes, and more. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Listed below are the third-party CaptainForm apps. Customer Relationship Management: Salesforce Top Producer Zoho PipelineDeals Marketo Email Marketing: MailChimp VerticalResponse iContact AWeber GetResponse Enormail ExactTarget Campaign Monitor ActiveCampaign WordPress Users (create WordPress users through form submission) File Management: Dropbox Google Drive Project Management: Smartsheet Evernote Event Management: Google Calendar Help Desk: Zendesk Desk.com Social: Google Groups Yahoo! Groups Developer Tools: Webhooks CaptainForm and E-Commerce In order to create purchase forms with CaptainForm, you’ll need to invest in the Hero plan, which costs $195 annually. The Hero plan comes with payment gateways and allows for other e-commerce functionality such as accepting recurring payments and offering coupon codes. Supported payment gateways include: PayPal PayPal Pro PayPal Payflow Authorize.Net Stripe Braintree Sage Pay PayU.ro Sisow PayFast FreshBooks Centralized Form Management One of the newer features for CaptainForm is centralized form management for agencies, freelancers, and anyone else who works with clients to build websites. This feature allows CaptainForm owners to manage all client forms from their WordPress dashboard. They can even share forms with their clients through the dashboard. With the ability to edit client forms from the same place—without the need to log in to each client WordPress installation—CaptainForm can dramatically speed up your workflow. You can even duplicate your forms for use with different clients, saving you from having to build them from scratch. The developers of CaptainForm say that centralized form management works best with their Hero license, because of the unlimited number of websites the plan allows for. Setting Up and Using CaptainForm To install and activate CaptainForm: In the WordPress admin, go to Plugins… Add New. For the free version, enter CaptainForm in the Search Plugins field, and hit enter. Click Install Now for the plugin. Then Activate the plugin. This will allow you to try out the free version of CaptainForm. For much more functionality and features you can upgrade to a higher plan by going to CaptainForm… Change Plan in the WordPress admin menu. After you purchase a plan and get a license key, enter it into the License Key field and click Activate. While there are many options and features for building forms with CaptainForm, the general workflow for using the plugin is fairly simple. Basically, CaptainForm lays out a simple three-step process that looks like this: Step 1: Edit Form Step 2: Settings Step 3: Publish After installing and activating CaptainForm, go to CaptainForm… New Form, and choose the type of form you’d like to create. When you decide on which form you like, click on Use Template. Or, you can choose Please Select to make a choice from the dropdown menu next to Other. All forms can be customized to your liking. Your form options are: Blank Form (for total customization) Contact & Lead Form Event Registration Order Form Survey Quiz Form Poll Form Other Form Other Form is a dropdown menu with templates for: Small Business Human Resources Event Organizers Nonprofit Education Lead Generation Consultants After choosing your form type, you’ll begin step one of CaptainForm’s three-step workflow. Step 1: Edit Forms Now that you have a form type to begin working with, you can click the Edit Form button to start adding Basic or Advanced Fields to your form. A. Name your form and add fields to it. If you click on a field, it will be added to the bottom of the form. If you drag a field over to the form, you can place it anywhere you’d like. Elements can also be dragged and dropped within the form after placement. B. Within the form, click on a form element to edit it. C. You can also change the layout of your form by clicking the Show Layout Options button above the form. Step 2: Settings Click the Settings button at the top of the page to go to the next step in your form creation. When you click Settings, you’ll see a dropdown menu with the choice to go to one of these areas: Note: The choices you have here depend on which plan you have for CaptainForm. Notifications Allows you to customize notifications you, and the form submitter, receive through email. Also allows you to enable SMS notification. Themes In this section are 33 themes you can choose from for the look of your forms. You can duplicate any of the themes to create your own, as well as use custom CSS. 3rd Party Apps Here you’ll find up to 26 different apps (add-ons) for added features and functionality for your forms. They include apps for customer relationship management, email marketing, file management, project management, event management, help desks, social media, and developer tools. Payments This section allows you to create payment forms, payment summaries, discounts, set notifications, and choose between payment processors. Security Here’s where you can protect your form from spammers. It provides CAPTCHA image protection (including Smart CAPTCHA), IP blocking, password protection, country filters, the ability to limit submissions, and the ability to set visibility for file uploads. Rules Field Rules allow you to show or hide fields based on form input. Autoresponder Rules let you trigger different autoresponders based on form input. Form Rules allow you do to redirect to different web pages based on form input. Translations This section allows you to change any form message into another language, and add different languages to a form in order to create a multi-language form. You can also import translations from other forms. Advanced This allows you to let your visitors finish partial form submissions later. It also allows you to link your form to external JavaScript files, and determine settings for quiz forms (including using a countdown timer). Step 3: Publish The final stop for creating forms with CaptainForm is to click on the Publish button and choose between the following methods for publishing your form: Shortcode You can copy and paste a shortcode of your form into any WordPress post or page. Sidebar Widget This allows you to use the CaptainForm widget under Appearance … Widgets, to put your form into a sidebar. Function Call This allows you to paste your form code into any WordPress theme file. Popup You can trigger a popup of your form based on the click of any text, image, or button in the form. You can also set popups to occur automatically. My Forms Page By going to CaptainForm… My Forms, you can manage your forms and see additional information about them. The blue Active link to the right of the form row allows you to change the online availability of your form. By clicking it, you can be set your form to be: Always active Inactive Active between (certain dates) Active only for me Active on certain days of the week The next three icons (to the right of the Active link), allow for duplicating, renaming, and deleting your form. And to the far right of the row, you can click the arrow to access these areas: Edit Go back to the Edit section View Get a preview of your form Settings Go back to the Settings section Publish Go back to the Publish section Submissions Where form data is stored. It can be edited, exported, and printed. Reports CaptainForm automatically creates reports (and generates charts) of your form data. You can also create your own reports. Video Tutorial: CaptainForm [embedded content] Support & Documentation CaptainForm comes with support for all four of their plans, including the free option. Inbuilt documentation within the plugin dashboard is very thorough and well executed. It includes orange information icons next to various settings, a link to their knowledge base, a link to support (allowing you to write to them), a live chat icon on every page of the plugin when they’re online (otherwise you’ll see an email icon in its place), and an introductory video. Their live chat and email support is available Monday-Friday, 9 AM-6 PM (GMT +2). CaptainForm Pricing CaptainForm includes three paid plans and one free plan. All plans (including the free Regular plan) include SSL encryption along with email and chat support. For the paid plans, purchased license keys are valid for one year. Plans come with a 30 day money back guarantee, along with the ability to upgrade, downgrade, or cancel your subscription at any time from within the WordPress dashboard. Here’s the four plans for CaptainForm: Regular (free): Unlimited activations 3 forms and 15 fields 500 submissions/month 100 MB storage Apprentice ($35/year): 1 site license Unlimited forms and fields 5000 submissions/month 500 MB storage 5 native add-ons Master ($95/year): 3 site licenses Unlimited forms and fields 20,000 submissions/month 2 GB storage 14 native add-ons Hero ($195/year): Unlimited site licenses Unlimited forms and fields 100,000 submissions/month 10 GB storage 24 native add-ons Payment integration for e-commerce WordPress Multisite support Besides the differences listed here, you can find more detailed differences on their site here. Conclusions & Recommendations CaptainForm is an easy and powerful form builder for WordPress, with impressive built-in features and add-ons. The plugin works through a SaaS business model, where users pay subscriptions for different price plans and features. Data that is collected by CaptainForm is stored on their cloud-based servers, which may be a pro or a con, depending how you look at it. A positive about this feature is that their servers are highly reliable and secure, are backed up daily on all plans (including the free plan), and come with SSL encryption. And because form submissions aren’t hosted on your own servers, there’s less database interaction and less vulnerability to malicious file uploads for your site. I was a bit disappointed to find that the integration of payment gateways is only included with the Hero plan, their most expensive plan. I would’ve loved to have seen perhaps a more limited version of their e-commerce capabilities available on lower plans. On the other hand, I find it refreshing that the people behind CaptainForm provide customer support for every plan, including the free version. I also like that they offer centralized form management for anyone building websites for clients, allowing you to manage all of the forms you create on customer sites from your own WordPress dashboard. They also get a big thumbs up for their user interface. While it’s not the most modern looking interface in the world, it’s nicely laid out and easy to use. I especially like how they break down the form creation process into three basic steps. Finally, the support features within the interface are very well done, as described earlier in this review. Overall, this is an excellent plugin and one of the more impressive WordPress form builders I’ve used. The developers did a great job of balancing powerful features with ease-of-use, something many developers struggle with. If you’re someone who only needs basic form options, the free version of CaptainForm will likely do the trick. But if your needs are greater, whether for yourself or your clients, you’ll want to take a look at one of their subscription plans. The developers of CaptainForm have set up their plans in a way that meet the needs of many different users, from WordPress beginners to web developers and designers. And when your needs grow, they have the plan to grow with you. If you’d like to find out more about CaptainForm, you can do so here. This is an analysis that was written to provide a valuable outside perspective to the creators of this product. They paid for a 100% honest, no-holds-barred break-down of all they are doing, both good and bad, because they want their product to be as good possible. In the interests of sharing that knowledge with the larger WordPress community, we also give them the option of publishing it here on WPMayor.com … but with the vital condition that the content cannot be altered or spun in any way: our readers expect and deserve the same 100% honesty. We sell thorough, no-holds-barred product studies to creators who want an outside perspective to help them evolve the best possible WordPress product. Our to-the-point expertise has helped to improve countless WordPress plugins, themes and services, find out more about PAS - The Product Analysis Service. About David Coleman David is an award-winning online marketer and brand developer with a passion for WordPress. He helps individuals and organizations live inspired lives through their unique story and brand. Twitter: @DavidBColeman Let's block ads! (Why?) SHARE SHARE SHARE Unknown RELATED POSTS