Ninja Forms

What Ninja Forms is

Ninja Forms is a form builder for WordPress, aimed at site owners, agencies, nonprofits, healthcare practices and marketing teams who want forms on a WordPress site without writing code. Its About page calls it "a leading form building solution for the WordPress content management system" and says it is actively used on over 1 million websites. The company says the plugin has passed 50 million downloads, and that the team behind it has been building forms for over 10 years. It was founded by a parent company, Saturday Drive. The pages shown give no city or country.

The core plugin is free. The site's wording is that the free WordPress forms plugin "will have you up and running in minutes", and paid add-ons extend it from there.

What you build and how

You build forms inside the WordPress admin and publish them on your own pages. The FAQ answers the coding question directly: "Absolutely not", no coding skills are required to use the plugin or any add-on, even though it has been designed to be developer-friendly. A user quoted on the pricing page praises the open API and readable code, and describes building course forms where users can return and change answers with the Save Progress add-on, after removing the submit button.

The template library is the quickest way in, and the templates page shows how wide the range is. Each entry is a free download for WordPress.

• Business forms such as an invoice form with automatic calculations, email delivery and optional payment processing.
• Job application forms that collect applicant details and resumes in one submission.
• Lead capture, referral and rental application forms, and a maintenance request form that sends tenant repair requests with automated notifications.
• Calculators, including a loan calculator that shows monthly payment, interest and total cost, and a compound interest calculator.
• Quiz forms with automatic scoring.
• Medical consent forms that collect signed consent and generate a filed PDF record.

On the home page the company groups what people build by field. Healthcare gets intake forms, referral forms and history forms that you can "build and save" as templates and share through a link. Nonprofits get volunteer application forms, donation forms "with almost any payment option under the sun", event registration forms and booking forms. Marketing has its own section about linking forms to other tools. The home page sums up the growth path in one line: "Start with a simple contact form today, build a multi-step checkout next month. Pick what you need, skip what you don't."

Logic sits in the editor too. The home page includes a review from a free user, a two-person financial business owner, who describes complex forms tied to conditional logic that automate administrative work. The same page talks about building a multi-step checkout as a later step.

What happens after a visitor submits is where most of the product's depth is. The documentation is organized by what you want the form to do.

• Form Actions control what your form does on submission. A Public Link lets you share a form without embedding it on a page.
• Accept Payments covers connecting and managing gateways, naming Authorize.net, Elavon, PayPal, Recurly and Stripe, with 5 articles.
• Automation covers webhooks and Zapier, with 2 articles. The home page says you can connect to over 4,000 different services through Zapier, send custom webhooks and send SMS notifications.
• Email Marketing syncs form data with Mailchimp, Constant Contact, ActiveCampaign and others, with 10 articles.
• CRMs covers Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho and other platforms, with 8 articles. The home page names HubSpot, Salesforce, ZohoCRM, Capsule and Insightly.
• Notifications and Workflow routes submissions to Slack, Trello, Help Scout and SMS via ClickSend or Twilio, with 5 articles.

Many of these connections are add-ons. The site says there are over 40 official add-ons for layout and styling, file uploads, ecommerce and more, and the add-ons menu groups them by Advanced Functionality, CRM Integration, Submissions Extended, Payment Integration, Automation and Email Marketing. The visitor's experience is an ordinary web form on your site. For privacy requests, the documentation lists Delete Data Request and Export Data Request actions that you can put on any form so that users can ask for the personal data you hold on them to be deleted or exported.

What the pages say about plans, pricing and support

The pricing text on the site gives no dollar prices for plans. What it does state is that the plugin is free, that add-ons are sold on top, and that there is a 40% first-time discount. The FAQ explains it as "40% off your first year", after which "your subscription will renew at the full price." Check the live pricing page for the current tiers before you plan a budget.

Support is described as a dedicated team. The company says it is available 9am-4pm EST, Monday to Friday, and strives to answer all customer requests within 24 hours. A free-plugin user's review on the home page is titled "Awesome support with a personal touch!", though that is one customer's account.

On compliance, the FAQ says "Yes" to GDPR compliance, citing features for automated compliance such as template forms for users' requests for the personally identifiable data you hold. The home page says healthcare teams can find tools to help manage how sensitive information is collected and stored "for easier HIPAA compliance", and the documentation has an article titled "Is Ninja Forms secure/HIPAA compliant?" The text shown does not give its answer, so read that article before you collect patient data. The pages state no SOC 2 or ISO certification.

Who it suits and who it does not

Ninja Forms suits a WordPress site owner who wants to start free and add capabilities one at a time. A small business with a contact form and a CRM, an agency that reuses templates across client sites, and a nonprofit that needs donation and event forms all appear in the company's own audience copy. The Zapier connection and the CRM, email marketing and notification categories also make it useful for an operations team that wants submissions to land in tools it already uses.

The caveats are about the add-on model and the platform. Because payments, CRM syncing and many other features come as add-ons, the cost of a finished setup grows with what you attach, and the pricing text gives no add-on prices. The plugin runs only on WordPress, so a team that needs a form outside a WordPress site would need a different tool. And a team in a regulated field should treat the HIPAA wording as a starting point and confirm the details in the documentation.