Plugin good, support not as good

Let’s call it 2.5 stars. It has potential to improve, but the support has pulled down the ranking for me. We were attracted to this plugin because of the glowing reviews for support, but so far it has been opposite for us. We’re still giving it a try because we just paid for licenses, but we’re disappointed because we never had some of these issues with previous form plugins.

The good

• The code is lightweight. We installed the plugin on a couple sites and tested with half a dozen site speed tests. All tests showed Fluent Forms beat out Ninja Forms and Gravity Forms for page load speed.
• Easy to use. Not that other plugins are much harder to use, but there are a few parts of the interface that are a bit more intuitive.
• Ability to import forms from existing plugins. Pulled in our Ninja Forms quickly (although it did require converting a few fields that didn’t match what Fluent used like name fields and phone fields)
• Even the admin area of the form loads quicker than Ninja Forms. Ninja would spin for a couple seconds when loading forms or entries in WP admin. Fluent opens quickly. And managing entries is more robust if you like to manage entries in WP admin.
• Pricing is better than other plugins. That’s the primary reason we started looking for a new forms plugin. Other plugins require annual add-on fees for every feature outside the core plugin. Those fees add up!
• Support responds pretty quickly (less than 2 business days for most tickets) even before we had paid for a license and were just using the free plugin for testing.

The bad

• Support seems to be outsourced or overseas. Not a problem by itself, but there are English language nuances that are clearly misunderstood or overlooked in support communication. That has led to multi-day delays in getting a response as we go back and forth re-explaining the issue.
• Nearly every support ticket the past week suggested we try abandoning our solution of using one feature and instead use a different, lesser feature than what we were trying to use. Examples below…
• The phone input box includes a random phone number for US phone entries of (201) 555-1023 that can confuse users about inputting their own number. It looks like an actual number and it’s pre-filled as placeholder text using the same text color as inputted text. We asked if we could remove or change the number and the suggestion was to either use a PHP function which eliminated all the features of the phone input (like selecting country and formatting to where it was just a plain text field) or just use plain text fields that are masked. Our solution was to use CSS to lighten the text so it doesn’t appear like text the user filled in.
• The file uploads won’t come through as email attachments even after checking the settings box for that feature. Support claims it’s an issue with other plugins and the website settings. That’s possible, but hard to believe because we’ve tried on 3 different websites with different plugins and themes and they all had Ninja Forms that worked as expected last week. Now we switched to Fluent Forms and none of the file uploads will work. Not the end of the world because we can still see the attachments in the admin and we can simply link to the file uploads instead of attaching. But we’re considering this a broken feature for now.
• One ticket was completely wrong in their knowledge of Fluent Forms. We asked if we could edit the notification email HTML template instead of using the included basic grey background template. After being informed it was impossible to change that template, we noticed a box we could check called “send Raw HTML” which indeed allows for an HTML template that doesn’t require their grey background and included footer.
• BUT… the raw html adds CSS code to the message box that adds extra line breaks in any textarea inputs. If someone adds a line break in their message box, the email adds 2 line breaks. So you almost have control over the HTML. Rather than fixing the issue, support suggests we just use their template instead.

The ugly

• A support ticket asked for temporary admin access to our staging website to test things that we had already said we tried and wouldn’t work. A couple hours later the ticket was updated with a message that the support team had installed plugins and crashed our site. Could we please fix the site and grant access again? Nope. Not granting admin access again to someone who installs plugins without permission.