Caldera Forms
Online form builder software
AI forms tools
- Features
- Ease of use
- Ease of management
- Quality of support
- Affordability
- Market presence
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Completely free
Free Trial unavailable
Free version
Small
Medium
Large
- Information technology and software
- Public sector and nonprofit organizations
- Healthcare and life sciences
What is Caldera Forms
Caldera Forms is a WordPress plugin for building and managing web forms such as contact forms, registrations, and basic lead-capture workflows. It targets WordPress site owners and administrators who want to create forms inside the WordPress dashboard and connect submissions to email and third-party services. The product historically emphasizes a drag-and-drop form builder and extensibility through add-ons and integrations. Caldera Forms has been discontinued, which affects availability, updates, and long-term support planning.
Native WordPress form plugin
Caldera Forms runs inside WordPress and uses the WordPress admin interface for form creation and management. This reduces the need for a separate hosted form tool and can simplify deployment for WordPress-centric teams. It also fits common website workflows such as embedding forms via shortcodes or blocks and handling submissions within the site.
Flexible form logic and fields
The builder supports a range of field types and conditional logic patterns used for multi-step or dynamic forms. This enables more tailored data capture than basic contact forms, such as showing fields based on prior answers. For organizations collecting structured lead or request data, this can reduce manual follow-up and data cleanup.
Integration and add-on ecosystem
Caldera Forms historically offers add-ons and integrations to route submissions to email services, CRMs, and other web tools. This supports common automation patterns like creating contacts, triggering notifications, or sending confirmation emails. For WordPress users, the plugin approach can be easier to connect with other site plugins and workflows than external form platforms.
Product discontinued and unsupported
Caldera Forms has been officially discontinued, which typically means no new features and limited or no security and compatibility updates. This increases operational risk for production sites, especially as WordPress and PHP versions change. Teams may need to plan a migration to an actively maintained form solution.
Not an AI-focused forms tool
Despite being used for lead capture, Caldera Forms is not positioned as an AI forms product and does not provide built-in AI capabilities such as automated field suggestions, response summarization, or AI-driven routing. Any AI-related workflows generally require external services and custom integration. This can be a gap for teams comparing modern form tools that include AI-assisted creation and processing.
WordPress dependency and overhead
Caldera Forms requires a WordPress environment, so it is not suitable for teams that need forms across multiple non-WordPress properties or standalone hosted forms. Plugin-based deployment can add maintenance overhead related to hosting, backups, and plugin compatibility. Performance and reliability also depend on the site’s hosting and WordPress configuration.
Seller details
Caldera Forms (WordPress plugin; discontinued)
