We’ll let our vast amount of 5 star reviews speak for themselves and if anyone wants the backstory, I’ll just leave this here: http://chrislema.com/dont-be-an-idiot/
For anyone reading this review, we are not trying to be dismissive. There is a long backstory that you can get a feel for in the link above. It would also be counterproductive to address each of these items line by line. If anything said here concerns you, feel free to contact us through our site and we would be more than happy to answer any and all question you might have.
I disagree wholeheartedly with this review. For what you get, at the price you get it (namely, free), Ninja Forms’ functionality is amazing. Moreover, the price model (pay a smaller amount for the features you want, rather than a larger amount for a bunch of things you may or may not want) is IMO much better than Gravity which doesn’t have a free version — you can’t even really try it out (certainly not on your own site) if you don’t already know what it is and have an existing license.
At the end of the day, though, nothing is perfect for everyone and I will admit that there are folks who will prefer Gravity every day of the week. That’s fine. But to say Ninja Forms is a bad product is just wrong. It’s not a bad product. Maybe it’s just not your product. James and the WP Ninjas team have been doing some awesome things and I’m excited for the future of Ninja Forms. 😀
Ninja Forms is not an out and out bad product. On the other hand, in our case it was a $500 product (for which we did not receive a full refund btw, despite Chris’s post above). Expectations are much higher at $500 than at free.
The Ninja Forms Mailchimp plugin (part of the bundle) was pants. Apparently Pippin has since fixed it (only after the social media storm). We use a lot of Pippin’s own plugins in our work and are happy customers. In fact we are happy users of a lot of other people’s paid plugins and try to contribute code when we can (whether the plugin is paid or not).
The real trouble started when James Law support guy initially told us dismissively that the inadequate Mailchimp integration is a feature and not a failure (great, we can pay $500 to write our own form submission failure detection routines). The incredible rudeness of Nina Forms support when we were trying to help Ninja Forms fix the code is what set off the firecrackers.
Had Ninja Forms either agreed to fix the code in a reasonable delay instead of insult our intelligence or even had they given the refund cordially, the problem would have been solved. I’d like to think that James learned a better lesson than the one in Chris’s post. I.e. don’t be dismissive and condescending to your paid users.
WP Rocket does not have a free version and is excellent. Gravity Forms does not have a free version and is excellent. I’m not sure what the relationship between a free version and code excellence is, albeit with our own FV Player we prefer to let people try before they buy.
In any case, my point with the review was to express hope that Ninja Form will stop spamming the admin interface. Admittedly it’s a fault he shares with WPMUdev and others. When working in WordPress, we all have work to do. Plugin authors hijacking that interface too often is a huge time sink.
