# Contact Form 7 vs WPForms Contact Form 7 vs WPForms on price, stored entries, and mail. Both can be free. Checked against their own pages on 11 October 2026. Author: Formgong team Published: 2026-10-11 Updated: 2026-10-12 Language: en Canonical: https://formgong.com/en/blog/contact-form-7-vs-wpforms/ Contact Form 7 is free and has no paid tier. It does not store messages unless you add Flamingo. WPForms Lite is free too. On 11 October 2026 WPForms listed Basic as normally $99 a year, with entry management on that plan. Use Contact Form 7 for a plain form. Use paid WPForms when entries must stay in WordPress. ## Pick one for the job you have Contact Form 7 vs WPForms is a builder choice. Both run inside WordPress. Neither is a store checkout. - **Pick Contact Form 7** if the form is simple, you can edit tags, and you want no license. It has been the plain plugin for years. On 11 October 2026 its site posted version 6.2.2. A note dated 10 October 2026 says version 6.2 raised the PHP requirement from 7.4 to 8.3. - **Pick WPForms** if the people who build forms want a visual builder. Pay when you need entries stored in WordPress, the field types on the paid plans, or the add-ons on that pricing page. - **Pick neither as a mail server.** Both still send through WordPress mail unless you add something else. If the host mail is the thing that fails, a new builder does not fix it. Formgong is not a third builder. It has no conditional logic and no card payments. It takes a posted form and delivers it. The [WordPress setup page](/en/for/wordpress/) shows the plugin. This page stays on the comparison people search for. ## What the pricing pages said Checked on 11 October 2026. Contact Form 7’s site has news posts, not a price list. There is no Pro plan to buy there. Prices copied from the pages, not from a review site What you are comparingContact Form 7WPForms There is a free way to publish a form.Yes. No paid tier on its site.Lite is free. The pricing page still sells licenses. The paid license, as listed that day.None.Pricing page: normally $99, $199, $399, and $599 a year. Their comparison page: Plus $99.50, Pro $199.50, Elite $299.50 a year. A transaction fee on payments.Not a payment plugin.The pricing page says active licenses pay no WPForms transaction fee. The free version or an inactive license has a 3% platform fee on transactions, plus the card processor. The introductory Basic price was not in the pricing text we could read, so it is not quoted. The lower yearly figures are from WPForms’ own comparison page, fetched the same day, not from a third-party review. Formgong’s own prices, from the product, are separate: Free is 300 submissions a month, Pro is $9 a month for 5,000, Business is $15 a month for 25,000. See the [pricing page](/en/pricing/). That is a delivery limit, not a WordPress license. ## Where the entry is kept This is the part that decides a switch. Flamingo’s plugin page says it is a message store made for Contact Form 7, which does not store submitted messages. After you activate Flamingo, messages are listed in the WordPress admin and kept in the database on the server that hosts the site. The page listed 800,000+ active installations for Flamingo, version 2.6.4. One review on that page says it only worked with PHP mail, not external SMTP. That is one person’s report, not a test we repeated. WPForms’ pricing page puts “Entry management” on Basic: see submissions in the dashboard and export them. Its comparison with Contact Form 7 says entry storage is on Basic and up, with backups in Lite. That Lite backup, Lite Connect, is off until the site owner turns it on. Our own WPForms Lite 2.0.2.2 install on 12 October 2026 confirmed that Lite stores no entries. If the email is the only copy, a mail failure deletes the lead. Flamingo or a paid WPForms plan keeps a copy in WordPress. Formgong keeps a copy in the EU, outside WordPress, and does not put the entries in your host database. ## Mail, spam, and PHP - Decide whether you need a visual builder, stored entries, or only a message in your inbox. - Contact Form 7 has no paid plan. WPForms paid plans are yearly licenses, listed on its pricing page. - Contact Form 7 does not store messages. Flamingo adds that. WPForms lists entry management on Basic. - Send from the live page and confirm the message arrived, not only that the button said thanks. Contact Form 7 6.2 raised PHP from 7.4 to 8.3, according to the author’s note on 10 October 2026. Check your host before you update. A form that ran on PHP 8.2 can stop when the plugin starts requiring 8.3. Spam tools differ, and the marketing pages disagree with each other. We are not repeating star ratings or install counts we did not read on the plugin directory. Turn on whatever the plugin you keep already documents, and send a test that should be blocked. For Telegram from an existing Contact Form 7 form, use the [webhook guide](/en/blog/contact-form-7-elementor-telegram/). It keeps the form you have. A form with no plugin at all is the [Custom HTML route](/en/blog/wordpress-contact-form-without-plugin/). ## Contact Form 7 vs WPForms when WordPress mail fails On 12 October 2026 we installed both plugins on a local WordPress 7.1.3 test site that had no mail server, so every call to `wp_mail` failed. The versions were Contact Form 7 6.2.2, Flamingo 2.6.4 and WPForms Lite 2.0.2.2. We sent one message through each default form as a logged-out visitor: name Test Visitor, email test.visitor@example.com, message “Formgong test 2026-10-12”. - **Contact Form 7** told the visitor: “There was an error trying to send your message. Please try again later.” Without Flamingo, the message was nowhere in the database. - **Contact Form 7 with Flamingo** showed the visitor the same error. Flamingo still kept the message under Flamingo, then Inbound Messages, and the message page said “Submission result: mail_failed”. - **WPForms Lite**, using the Simple Contact Form template, told the visitor: “Thanks for contacting us! We will be in touch with you shortly.” The email failed and no entry was saved. The Entries screen says “Form entries are not stored in WPForms Lite.” We did not turn on Lite Connect, so we did not test its backup. In all three cases the plugin called WordPress mail, and it returned false with this error: `wp_mail_failed: Could not instantiate mail function.` So with broken host mail, Contact Form 7 at least tells the visitor something went wrong, and Flamingo keeps a copy. WPForms Lite thanks the visitor and keeps nothing. Send a test from the live page and check that it reached the inbox. ## When a form backend is the wrong tool Stay on Contact Form 7 or WPForms when the form must live entirely in WordPress: payments, conditional logic, user registration, or a staff member who will only use a visual builder. Use a backend when the job is “tell me, and keep a copy if host mail fails.” The Formgong plugin posts to `https://formgong.com/submit`. Free includes Telegram at once, email on every submission to one recipient, and no auto-reply. It will not import a Contact Form 7 form, and it will not calculate an order total. Gravity Forms is a different paid builder. If that is the search, use the [Gravity Forms alternative](/en/blog/gravity-forms-alternative/) page so this one stays a Contact Form 7 vs WPForms answer. ## Frequently asked questions ### Is Contact Form 7 or WPForms free? Contact Form 7 has no paid tier. WPForms Lite is free. Paid WPForms plans are licenses. On 11 October 2026 the pricing page listed normally $99, $199, $399, and $599. Their comparison page listed Plus at $99.50 a year, Pro at $199.50, and Elite at $299.50. An introductory Basic price was not in the pricing text we could read. ### Does Contact Form 7 store submissions? No. The Flamingo plugin page says it was created for Contact Form 7, which does not store submitted messages. Flamingo keeps them in the WordPress database on your host. ### Does WPForms Lite store entries? The pricing page lists entry management on the Basic plan, not as a Lite line we could quote. WPForms’ own comparison page says entry storage is on Basic and up, with backups in Lite. That Lite backup, Lite Connect, is off until the site owner turns it on. We tested WPForms Lite 2.0.2.2 on 12 October 2026. It stored no entry, and the Entries screen said “Form entries are not stored in WPForms Lite.” ### Which one is better for email delivery? Neither one replaces your host’s mail. If WordPress mail fails, the notice fails with it, unless you add SMTP or send the entry somewhere else. A form backend is that other place. It is not a drag-and-drop builder. ### Should I switch if Contact Form 7 already works? No. Keep it if the tag editor is fine and you do not need entries inside WordPress. Add Flamingo if a lost email would lose the only copy. Move to WPForms if the people who edit forms will not learn tags. ## Sources and documentation - [Contact Form 7](https://contactform7.com/) - [Flamingo](https://wordpress.org/plugins/flamingo/) - [WPForms pricing](https://wpforms.com/pricing/) - [WPForms: WPForms vs Contact Form 7](https://wpforms.com/wpforms-lite-vs-contact-form-7/) - [Formgong on WordPress](https://formgong.com/en/docs/wordpress/) [Get a form key](https://formgong.com/en/#top)