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A Complete Guide to Gravity Forms PDF Solutions

By Published December 9, 2020

As an online business owner, there are a wide assortment of benefits to generating PDFs out of Gravity Forms submissions.

For example, you can use a Gravity Forms PDF solution to:

• Automatically generate PDFs for your customers, clients, or staff
• Create PDF contracts in seconds, complete with digital signatures
• Password-protect PDFs to prevent unauthorized users from accessing them
• Email (or download) a PDF version of the Gravity Forms form submission

The best part is that a Gravity PDF solution saves you a ton of time and manual work. And, you don’t have to mess around with complex PHP, HTML, or CSS code.

With this in mind, in this article, we’ll run the rule over three of the most popular third-party Gravity Forms PDF solutions for WordPress.

Features to Look for in a Gravity Forms PDF Solution

When choosing a Gravity Forms PDF solution for your business, there are a few important factors to bear in mind. These include the features you’ll need, how many people will use the tool, and your budget.

Here’s a handy evaluation criteria:

• Features: What PDF features do you need? For example, do you need PDF password protection, customization options, or integration with other products?
• Plans: Do you need a Gravity PDF solution for individual use or something that will work for your entire team? Will you need a tool for one site or multiple client sites?
• Pricing: Do you have a budget set aside for a Gravity PDF solution or are you looking to test out the waters with a free offering?

Using these evaluation criteria, you can better understand what sort of a Gravity Forms PDF solution will best fit your needs.

Three Gravity Forms PDF Solutions

Let’s take a closer look at three different third-party Gravity Forms PDF solutions. We’ll compare each one’s features, available support, integrations, user experience, and pricing.

To use any of these PDF solutions, you’ll need to have a valid Gravity Forms license activated on your WordPress website.

ForGravity Fillable PDFs

ForGravity’s Fillable PDFs Add-On is a Certified Developer product that will automatically generate PDFs when customers fill out your forms. These PDFs can then be attached and sent with form notifications after a form submission, or downloaded from a confirmation message.

With Fillable PDFs, you can take an existing PDF document, and turn it into a Gravity PDF. Setting up Fillable PDFs is quick and easy – using the visual template mapper, simply map the fields from your form to the PDF and the add-on will auto-fill the corresponding entries.

This add-on is particularly useful for business owners that would like to create custom templates and forms out of PDFs. Plus, it supports image embedding, which means you can add digital signatures and other images from your forms directly into your fillable PDF. This is perfect for creating contracts.

Fillable PDFs also lets users import existing fillable PDF documents and turn them into forms. You can do this automatically using the import PDF feature, which detects the fields within a PDF and converts them into a new form.

The plugin integrates seamlessly with Gravity Flow so PDFs can be generated as part of an automated workflow, created through the Gravity Flow platform. You might, for example, have your PDFs as part of a workflow which then requires a PayPal or Stripe payment.

In addition to this, you can also integrate Fillable PDFs with GFChart for embedding charts into your PDF fields and with GravityView to display links to generated PDFs.

ForGravity’s Fillable PDFs solution starts at $99 per year, with no other ongoing fees. You can upload custom templates, set downloadable file permissions, password protect your PDFs, and configure conditional logic.

Gravity PDF

Gravity PDF is a Certified Developer product and an automatic PDF generator add-on for Gravity Forms. Its core plugin comes for free alongside four free and customizable PDF designs to help you get started. You can also purchase further premium templates from the Template Shop.

All templates can be personalized to suit your business needs – add your logo, header, and footer, alter paper size and orientation, install your own fonts, and much more, using Gravity PDF’s rich text editor. If you are a developer, then you can also follow the Gravity PDF Template Guide and build your own templates using HTML, CSS, and PHP.

After a form submission, a PDF can be automatically generated from your chosen template and emailed to both the admin and end-user of a form submission, or, if used in conjunction with one of the Gravity Forms payment Add-Ons, after a payment has been completed.

Gravity PDF offers a number of advanced premium add-ons to further extend the core plugin and supports most languages out of the box including Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, and Japanese, enabling you to send PDFs in the language of your choice. Gravity PDF also comes with free support from the developers as well as in-depth documentation.

As mentioned, the Gravity PDF Add-On follows a freemium pricing model, with premium templates and features available to buy as extras. You can also hire the Gravity PDF team to build custom templates for you. Contact Gravity PDF directly for more information on this service.

Gravity Flow PDF Generator Extension

Gravity Flow is a form-based workflow platform built around the Gravity Forms plugin. Another Certified Developer product, this user-friendly tool enables you to easily set up multiple workflows for a wide assortment scenarios – no coding required.

Gravity Flow’s PDF Generator extension allows users to incorporate PDFs into their Gravity Flow workflows. The generator lets you add simple PDF generation steps at any point of a workflow, providing a quick way to create PDFs from form entries.

The Gravity Flow PDF Generator extension lets you create custom PDF templates. Templates are designed like notifications, using merge tags, and are generated the moment a specific step is triggered. In addition to this, the PDF Generator offers support for conditional logic, scheduling, and sending PDFs via email as an attachment.

PDF Generator is extremely effective and designed to work as an integral part of Gravity Flow. However, Gravity Flow also supports Fillable PDFs and Gravity PDF, which may be needed for more advanced PDF needs within a workflow.

Gravity Flow PDF Generator extension pricing plans start from $47 for a single site. This extension works in conjunction with the Gravity Flow Add-On, which itself starts at $97 per year for a single site license. With this you get automatic updates and standard support.

Choosing the Right Gravity Forms PDF Solution

Having a Gravity Forms PDF solution in your tech stack makes it easy to generate PDFs out of Gravity Forms entries.

You can then send PDFs to clients over email, offer them as downloadable templates, or quickly generate contracts complete with digital signatures. And, you don’t have to mess around with PHP code!

To recap:

• ForGravity – Automatically generate and send downloadable PDFs when a form is submitted. This feature rich add-on enables you to add digital signatures and other images directly from your forms into PDFs, prevent unwanted users from accessing PDFs with password protection, convert PDFs into forms, and much more.
• Gravity PDF – If you’d rather start out with a free tool, then Gravity PDF is your best bet. You can try out the four free templates it comes with out of the box and have custom templates created for you on an as-need basis.
• Gravity Flow – If you’re looking to add Gravity Forms PDF generation to your workflow to automate the process and are already using Gravity Flow, our best advice is to go for the Gravity Flow PDF Generator extension. It’s simple and effective!

Hopefully, you’re in a better position now to start exporting Gravity Forms form data, entries, and submissions as PDF files using a Gravity Forms PDF solution.

Any questions? Feel free to ask away in the comments below…

This article has been contributed by ForGravity.

If you are interested in contributing a guest article for our website, please check out this page – Guest Writing for Gravity Forms.