Contact Form 7 vs WPForms vs Contactum: Which Should You Use in 2026?
If you’re picking a WordPress form plugin, three names come up constantly: Contact Form 7, WPForms, and Contactum. All three can get a form on your site, but they differ a lot in what’s included for free, how much setup they need, and where they start charging. Here’s an honest look at each.
Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 has been around since 2007 and is still one of the most installed WordPress plugins ever, largely on reputation and inertia. Its defining trait is that forms are built by hand-editing a tag-based markup syntax rather than a visual drag-and-drop builder — there’s no field library to click through, you type things like [text* your-name] directly. This is fast once you know the syntax, but it’s a real barrier for anyone who isn’t comfortable editing form markup, and there’s no built-in entry storage: submissions go out by email and are gone unless you install a separate add-on (like Flamingo) to save them.
Spam protection and integrations are both handled through separate extensions rather than being built in, so a “simple” Contact Form 7 setup often ends up as three or four plugins working together.
WPForms
WPForms offers a genuine drag-and-drop builder and a generous template library, and its free “Lite” version covers basic forms well. The catch is how much sits behind the paywall: entry storage beyond a short window, most integrations (Mailchimp, HubSpot, Zapier, and similar), conditional logic, multi-page forms, and payment fields are all locked to paid plans, which start in the range of $49–$199+ per year depending on the tier and site count. For a site that needs more than a bare contact form, the free version stops being enough fairly quickly.
Contactum
Contactum is the newest of the three, and it leads with what’s included in the free plugin: a visual drag-and-drop builder, permanent entry storage with CSV export, built-in spam protection (honeypot, time-based checks, per-IP rate limiting) with optional reCAPTCHA/hCaptcha/Turnstile/CleanTalk on top, a Mailchimp integration, an AI form generator that builds a starting form from a plain-language description, and an importer that migrates existing forms over from Contact Form 7, WPForms, Gravity Forms, Ninja Forms, and Caldera Forms in one click.
Contactum Pro adds the features that are usually paywalled elsewhere too — payment fields, conditional logic, multi-step forms, and around three dozen third-party integrations spanning CRMs (Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, Pipedrive), email marketing tools (ActiveCampaign, Drip, ConvertKit, GetResponse, and more), storage (Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Cloudflare R2), and automation (Zapier, n8n, Notion, Airtable) — but the free tier alone is closer to what the other two charge for.
Side-by-Side
| Contact Form 7 | WPForms | Contactum | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visual drag-and-drop builder | No (markup-based) | Yes | Yes |
| Entry storage (free) | No (needs an add-on) | Limited | Yes, unlimited |
| Built-in spam protection (free) | No (needs an add-on) | Basic | Honeypot + time check + rate limit, always on |
| CAPTCHA options (free) | Via add-on | reCAPTCHA only | reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha, Turnstile, CleanTalk |
| Email marketing integration (free) | No | No | Mailchimp included |
| Import from other plugins | No | Limited | Yes, from 5 major plugins |
| AI form generation | No | No | Yes |
| Multi-step forms | Add-on | Paid | Pro |
| Conditional logic | Add-on | Paid | Pro |
Which One Should You Pick?
Contact Form 7 makes sense if you’re already fluent in its tag syntax and only need a bare-bones form with no entry storage or integrations — otherwise the lack of a visual builder and the extra add-ons needed for basic functionality make it a harder recommendation today.
WPForms is a solid, polished choice if you’re comfortable paying for a plan from day one and want a large, established ecosystem of templates and documentation.
Contactum is the strongest starting point if you want to try a visual builder with real entry storage, spam protection, and a Mailchimp connection before spending anything, and you’d rather migrate your existing Contact Form 7 or WPForms forms over automatically than rebuild them by hand — the built-in importer handles exactly that.