Fluent Forms Review: The Best WordPress Form Plugin in 2020

Why Fluent Forms Stands Out Among WordPress Form Builders

There's no shortage of form builder plugins in the WordPress ecosystem. Gravity Forms, WPForms, and Ninja Forms have been around for years and have massive user bases. So why would a relative newcomer like Fluent Forms earn the top spot?

It comes down to three things: speed, style, and momentum. Fluent Forms nails the fundamentals — getting a form live on your site is remarkably quick — while also delivering a polished styling experience and shipping new features at a pace that puts more established competitors to shame. Version 3.5 is a particularly significant release, adding payment processing and several other features that push it firmly into premium territory.

Speed: From Install to Live Form in Minutes

Fluent Forms offers a generous free version available directly from the WordPress plugin repository. Just search for "Fluent Forms" under Plugins > Add New, install, and activate. There's no complex setup wizard or account registration standing between you and your first form.

Once installed, head to Fluent Forms > All Forms and click the blue button to create a new form. The free version ships with four starter templates — including a contact form — that you can deploy immediately. The Pro version unlocks dozens more templates across categories like education, marketing, nonprofits, IT, HR, and finance.

The form editor itself uses a familiar drag-and-drop interface. Adding fields like text inputs, date pickers, and dropdowns is as simple as dragging them onto your form canvas. When you're done, copy the shortcode from the All Forms screen, paste it into any WordPress page, and you're live. The entire process from install to published form can take under five minutes.

Free vs. Pro: What You Get at Each Tier

The free version of Fluent Forms is surprisingly capable. You get access to all the general form fields, conditional logic, email notifications, built-in analytics, and integrations with MailChimp and Slack. For many small sites that just need a contact form or simple lead capture, the free version may be all you need.

Conditional logic deserves a special mention here — it's available even in the free tier, which is unusual for form plugins. You can set fields to show or hide based on other field values, like only displaying an email field when the first name matches a certain condition. Email notifications are also fully customizable with the WordPress visual editor, letting you control exactly what gets sent when someone submits a form.

The Pro version unlocks advanced fields, the full template library, the visual form styler, and integrations with services beyond MailChimp and Slack. If you need to connect your forms to a CRM, Google Sheets, or other marketing tools, that's where Pro becomes essential.

Style: The Built-In Form Styler

One of the standout Pro features is the visual form styler. Access it by clicking "Preview & Design" while editing any form. You'll find several preset themes — Modern Bold, Modern Light, Classic, and Bootstrap — plus a fully custom option.

The custom styler gives you granular control over every visual element. You can adjust label typography and color, customize input field styles, change placeholder text appearance, style radio buttons and checkboxes, and design your submit button with separate hover state colors. It's essentially a mini theme builder just for your forms.

This matters more than it might seem. With most form plugins, getting your forms to match your site's design means writing custom CSS. Fluent Forms eliminates that friction entirely, letting you dial in the look without ever touching code. The result is forms that feel native to your site rather than bolted on.

Built-In Analytics and Conversion Tracking

Fluent Forms includes form analytics right on the All Forms screen. For each form, you can see the number of views, the number of completions (or entries), and a calculated conversion rate. These metrics are togglable if you don't need them cluttering your dashboard.

For marketers, this is invaluable. If a form has a low conversion rate, you know to either tweak the form itself — maybe reduce the number of fields or change the CTA text — or adjust the surrounding page content. Having this data built in means you don't need a separate analytics plugin or Google Tag Manager setup just to understand how your forms are performing.

Landing Pages: Instant Standalone Form Pages

Version 3.5 introduced a landing page feature that turns any form into a standalone, styled page with its own URL. Enable it under your form's Settings > Landing Page, then add a title, description, logo, featured image, and background image. There are preset styles available, or you can customize the design to match your brand.

This is a fantastic feature for quick campaigns. Need to send a survey link to a client? Want a simple registration page for an event? Instead of creating a new WordPress page, choosing a template, embedding a shortcode, and styling everything, you can have a polished landing page ready in about a minute. The generated URL is clean and shareable — no extra page builder required.

Payment Processing with Stripe and PayPal

Payment support arrived in Fluent Forms 3.5, and the implementation is clean. Four new payment field widgets appear at the bottom of the form editor: a payment field for defining what customers are paying for, a quantity selector, a payment method chooser (Stripe or PayPal), and a custom payment amount field for donations.

Setting up a payment form is straightforward. Add a payment field, give it a label like "Site Audit," set your price, and choose whether it's a single item, radio selection, or checkbox selection for multiple items. If you support both Stripe and PayPal, the payment method widget lets customers choose their preference.

The custom payment amount field is particularly useful for nonprofits and churches. Instead of fixed pricing, visitors can enter whatever amount they'd like to donate. Combined with the landing page feature, you could have a branded donation page with payment processing live in just a few minutes.

Signatures, reCAPTCHA, and Advanced Features

Fluent Forms offers a signature add-on that places a signature capture field directly in your form. It works with both mouse input on desktop and finger input on mobile devices — useful for contracts, waivers, or any situation where you need a signed acknowledgment.

Spam protection comes via Google reCAPTCHA v2 integration. Setup requires grabbing a site key and secret key from Google's reCAPTCHA admin console, pasting them into the Fluent Forms settings, and then adding the reCAPTCHA module to your form from the Advanced Fields section. Google provides this service for free, and it's an essential addition for any public-facing form.

Beyond these, Fluent Forms supports user registration — letting form submissions automatically create WordPress accounts — and custom post creation, where a form submission generates a new post in a custom post type. These are powerful features for membership sites, directories, or any project where you want front-end content submission.

Multi-Page Surveys and Polls

Building surveys and polls with Fluent Forms is surprisingly intuitive. Start with one of the survey templates — the market research survey template, for example — and you get a multi-page form out of the box. Each page is separated by a simple page break element in the editor, making it easy to understand and modify the flow.

The survey template includes a mix of field types: radio buttons, checkboxes, long-form text areas, and even a country selector module that automatically populates with every country in the world. No manual data entry required for common field types like this.

What's impressive is how readable the form structure remains in the editor, even for complex multi-page surveys. Each question sits above a page break, creating a clear visual hierarchy. You can rearrange pages by moving the breaks, add new questions by dropping fields between breaks, or remove pages entirely. It keeps form building accessible even when the end result is quite sophisticated.

Final Verdict: Should You Switch to Fluent Forms?

Fluent Forms v3.5 delivers on all three of its core strengths. Speed — you can go from zero to a live, styled form in minutes. Style — the built-in form styler eliminates the CSS guesswork that plagues other plugins. And momentum — the pace of feature development is genuinely impressive, with payment processing, landing pages, signatures, and more all arriving in rapid succession.

The free version is worth installing on any WordPress site that needs forms. It's more capable than many paid alternatives, and the upgrade path to Pro is straightforward if you need advanced integrations, the form styler, or payment processing. For WordPress users who've been wrestling with bloated or overpriced form plugins, Fluent Forms is a refreshing alternative that punches well above its weight.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.