The read · 26 Oct 2026
Contact Form 7 still sets the terms
At the top, forms is a two-plugin market. Contact Form 7 holds 42% of the category's installs at 10M+, and WPForms sits behind it at 5M+. The next plugin down has 800K. Both leaders shipped a release in the past week, so neither is coasting on its size.
Contact Form 7 is hard to attack because of the plugins that grew up around it. Flamingo and CFDB7 both store its form submissions, and they sit at 800K and 600K installs. That makes them bigger than almost every standalone form builder in the directory. This quarter's small climbers point the same way. CompactForm, a drag-and-drop builder for Contact Form 7, went from 10 to 100 installs, and a webhook connector for it doubled to 100. Developers still treat Contact Form 7 as a platform worth building on, and that's a moat no rival builder can copy.
A well-kept middle and a neglected tail
Downloads across the category rose 40.8% over the last 90 days. That's a lot of new activity for a market this mature, but the data doesn't show where those downloads went. The rise is real and the cause isn't clear yet.
The chasing pack is in good shape. Five builders, from Fluent Forms down to SureForms, hold between 500K and 800K installs each, and every one has released an update in the past two weeks. A newcomer going after general-purpose forms would face two entrenched leaders plus a mid-market that's actively maintained.
The tail looks very different. Roughly twice as many tracked plugins are poorly maintained as well kept. The plugins losing installs this window were mostly small Gravity Forms add-ons that slipped back into double digits.
The openings are in specialist jobs
SureDonation had the strongest real growth in the window, going from 800 to 4K installs. It handles donation forms along with fundraising campaigns and donor management. That suggests new entrants are more likely to win by owning a specific job built on top of forms than by competing on the form builder itself.
Several plugins also left the directory. The largest was Visual Form Builder, closed on 2026-10-05 with 20K+ installs. Smart Forms followed on 2026-10-08 with 5K+ installs, and Piotnet Forms closed on 2026-10-06 with 2K+. No reason was recorded for any of them. Their users now need somewhere else to go, which is one more small opening for the specialists.
