Basic Functionality, But That’s About It
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For what WPForms costs, it is not a great plugin. The basic functionality works, the formatting out-of-the-box looks pretty good, and the editor is great. Anything more, though, and you’re in for pain.
The second you want to do something even remotely non-standard, WPForms will not help you. A simple example is allowing the user to order a certain amount of items at a fixed price. For example, let’s say you’re selling a product for $100, and a user can order many of them.
When using WPForms with Stripe, you CANNOT specify which payment field to charge. Instead, the backend will sum every payment field in the form, and charge the sum. This means you cannot:
- Create a payment field for your fixed price item, set the cost to $100.
- Create an amount field as well.
- Create a single item “total” field which multiplies the two to charge the user.
If the user enters 5, your total field will show them $500, but the actual charge will be $600 because your $100 payment field will be automatically summed in to the Stripe charge. So you’re thinking, okay, just don’t use a “payment field” for the initial $100, but no display block exists. There is no display block, styled the same way as the payment fields, to use. What about copying the css styling that the payment field uses into an HTML block? That doesn’t work either – it broke the Stripe payment integration, so the form could no longer process any payment at all.
Most of this unnecessary difficulty is due to the awful design of summing all the payment fields in the form, rather than just allowing the user to pick which payment field should be charged (and have summing merely as a default behavior).
This is just one example. Trying to show and apply discounts is similarly difficult. For a plugin that costs what this costs, WPForms just isn’t flexible enough. Only the basics truly work out of the box, and unless you want to do the most basic payments or contact forms, you’re going to have issues that waste hours of your time. I’m trying things like discounts and quantity – that’s not that hard.
Support is not available on the weekends, and they’re slow as well. Their calculated fields simply did not work when I got it (in an opaque and impossible to debug way), and it ultimately took them a week to tell me their forms didn’t work with a js optimization plugin I was using, and to disable it. It’s just time waster after time waster.
Obviously it’s not a 1-star plugin, and if it were inexpensive, I actually think this would be a 4-star review. It’s not, though, it’s pricey, and for that price, I’ve wasted far too much time on tasks that should be trivial. Despite the good interface, it can’t be anything more than 3-stars.
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Thank you for the response.
To be clear, the calculated field not working (box was blank no matter what) was an earlier problem. I’ve since disabled my optimization plugin, so now the calculated fields work. That’s not ideal, but at least it’s functional now. That issue, end-to-end, took about 5 days if I remember correctly. The current issue (and I’m sure it won’t be the last) is that my Stripe payment simply doesn’t work with a calculated total field as the only payment field. It says “missing paymentID and paymentIntent.” At least, that’s what an hour of poking around, deleting and re-adding certain fields, and experimenting has gotten me to for a best guess.
This review is not about these exact issues, but rather that pattern of issues – something is broken, it’s broken in an opaque way, and you’ll often have to wait multiple days to get it resolved. I hope this particular Stripe payment issue is resolved, but the review stands until I go at least a month with things working as I expect, or breaking only in ways that are quick fixes.
When I use the plugin, it feels like it was made by someone who is good at design, and good at the visual presentation of things. It looks great, and the interface works great. Full credit for all that, it’s where the 3 stars come from. It does NOT feel like it’s made by someone who actually uses forms for business purposes on a daily basis. How is a simple feature like setting which payment field is actually charged not available? Why is there no way to add uneditable text formatted the same way as the fields? No one has ever tried to implement a discount or quantity field before? It’s confusing that these things don’t work out-of-the-box, and if it turns out it’s my fault somehow, I am willing to revise this review.
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