FlowForms – Conversational Form Builder vs Meow Mailer – Free SMTP, Everything Included

FlowForms is a self-hosted conversational form builder for WordPress. Most contact form plugins give you a wall of fields. FlowForms gives your visitors a conversation. One question at a time, guided and focused — the result is higher completion rates, better responses, and a user experience that feels modern and intentional. Whether you’re collecting leads, running surveys, gathering testimonials, or building customer feedback forms, FlowForms delivers an interactive form experience that lives on your server, under your control, with no monthly subscription. View Demo | Templates Conversational, Step-by-Step Forms Our conversational form plugin enables you to create engaging, Typeform-style interactive forms that guide users through a seamless question-by-question experience. This reduces overwhelm, keeps respondents focused, and improves form completion rates compared to traditional multi-field forms. Every form flows through three stages: Welcome Screen — customisable title, description, start button, and background image Questions — any combination of 8 field types, drag-to-reorder Thank You Screen — closing message with optional redirect URL, delay, and social share buttons Drag & Drop Form Builder Build any form in minutes without touching a line of code. The intuitive React-powered drag-and-drop builder lets you add, reorder, and configure questions visually. What you build is exactly what your visitors see. 8 Ready-to-Use Field Types FlowForms ships with all the essentials: Short Text — single-line text input Long Text — multi-line paragraph / textarea Multiple Choice — single-select with optional “Other” answer Checkboxes — multi-select with min/max limits and optional “Other” answer Rating — star rating with configurable max stars and shape Yes / No — two-button question with customisable labels Email — with format validation and optional confirm-email mode Number — numeric input with optional min/max validation Beautiful Design Customisation Every form is independently styled with a live design panel. Customise: Background colour Title, description, answer, hint, field, and button colours Button hover colour and text Star rating colour Layout alignment: left or centered Border radius: angular, rounded, or full Google Fonts Font size: small, regular, or large Forms look great on every device — FlowForms is fully responsive and mobile-ready. Flexible Embed Options Embed your forms anywhere in WordPress using your preferred method: Shortcode: [flowform id="123"] Gutenberg Block: native FlowForm block — drag it straight into the editor Full-Page URL: /flowform/{id} — share a direct link to a distraction-free form page Pre-Built Form Templates Get started in seconds with 4 ready-to-use templates: Contact Form Lead Generation Survey Customer Feedback Testimonial Form Submission Management Every submission is stored securely in your WordPress database. The built-in entries dashboard gives you full control: Paginated list with search and sorting Individual entry detail view Bulk actions: mark read/unread, star, trash, delete permanently Status filters: All, Starred, Spam, Trash Unread count badge in the admin menu Email Notifications Get notified the moment someone submits your form. Configure the recipient, subject, sender name, reply-to address, and message body — all with smart tag support. Available smart tags: {admin_email}, {site_name}, {form_name}, {all_fields} Built-In Spam Protection Three layers of anti-spam run automatically on every submission — no CAPTCHA plugins required: Honeypot field — invisible to humans, catches bots Rotating server-side token — tied to each form, refreshed daily Akismet integration — if Akismet is active, submissions are checked automatically; spam entries are flagged and saved for review Multilingual Ready Every user-facing string — button labels, validation messages, placeholders, error messages — is customisable from the Global Settings panel. No translation plugin needed to adapt FlowForms for any language. FlowForms Pro (Coming Soon) We are actively researching the features users most want. The Pro version will be a self-hosted annual licence that extends the free plugin without replacing it. Candidate Pro features under research: Conditional logic (show/hide questions based on answers) Multiple email notifications and respondent confirmation emails Email marketing integrations (Mailchimp, ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, and more) File upload field Stripe payment field CSV / Excel entry export Opinion scale / NPS field Date & time picker field Phone number field with country code GDPR consent checkbox field Form scheduling (open/close at a specific date) Submission limits (cap responses at a set number) Zapier / webhook integrations Calculator & quiz scoring Extended pro template library Want to influence what we build first? Request a feature and tell us which feature matters most to you. Self-Hosted and Private Your own server: All data stays in your database Your own data: No third-party servers, no vendor lock-in Native integration: Gutenberg block, shortcode, full-page URL Conversational UX: One question at a time Full Feature List Drag-and-drop conversational form builder 8 field types: short text, long text, multiple choice, checkboxes, rating, yes/no, email, number Welcome screen and thank you screen for every form Redirect on completion with configurable delay Social share buttons on thank you screen Live design customisation — colours, fonts, layout, border radius Google Font supported Layout alignments: left and center Progress bar (show/hide) Navigation arrows (show/hide) Gutenberg block embed Shortcode embed Full-page form URL 4 free starter templates Submission entries database with full admin management Read/unread, star, trash, spam entry statuses Unread count badge in WordPress admin menu Email notifications with smart tags Honeypot, token, and Akismet spam protection Customisable user-facing strings GDPR-friendly — all data stored on your own server 100% mobile responsive Developer hooks for extensibility Source Code The full source code, including all JavaScript source files and build configuration, is publicly available on GitHub

For years, almost every WordPress site I ran ended up with a different plugin just to send email. I never really chose them. I installed whatever looked fine at the time, because honestly there is no clear winner. Most of them advertise features I don’t need, or hide the basics behind a paywall. At one point I simply wanted to see the emails my site had sent, or failed to send, and even that asked me to upgrade. That felt wrong. So I decided to build the simplest and most honest email plugin I could for WordPress. You pick one provider, set it up once, and every email your site sends goes through it. Everything is logged, so you always know what happened. No upsell maze, no ads, nothing basic locked away. That is Meow Mailer, and all of this is free: One provider, set up once. Pick the one you use and forget about it. No confusing multi provider routing. Import from your current SMTP plugin. Already set up with WP Mail SMTP or Easy WP SMTP? Meow Mailer notices and copies the provider, credentials and sender over in one click, so switching never means digging out your API keys again. A fallback for when it breaks, free. Name a second provider (or plain WordPress, which needs no setup) and it steps in only when the first one refuses an email. Your mail still goes out, the log tells you exactly who failed and why, and an alert lets you know your main provider needs a look. A real email log, free. Every email in a clean table with recipient, subject, provider and status (sent, failed, offline, pending). Click any row to read the full message, see the error, and resend it. Many plugins charge for this. Here it is free. Stays out of the way. Until you pick a provider, Meow Mailer doesn’t change how your email is sent, so activating it never breaks what already works. It still logs everything WordPress sends on its own, so you get the log from the moment you activate it. Never miss a failure. A dashboard warning appears when emails fail, so silent problems don’t go unnoticed. Dismiss it once you have had a look and it stays away until a new email fails. Failure alerts by email, free. Get told when your site stops being able to send, instead of finding out from a customer. The alert is sent by WordPress itself rather than your provider, so it still reaches you when the provider is the thing that broke. One alert per hour at most, however many emails fail. Alerts on Slack, Discord or Teams, free. Paste a webhook URL and the alerts and the weekly summary are posted to your chat as well, so finding out that email is broken never depends on email. Handy when you look after a lot of sites. Individual emails are never posted anywhere: this tells you about your site, not about the people it writes to. Weekly summary, free. A short email with what was sent, what failed, and the most common errors. Nothing is sent on a quiet week. Control WordPress’s own emails. Switch off the notifications WordPress sends by itself: new user registrations, password and email change confirmations, comment moderation, automatic update reports. Password resets are never affected, so nobody gets locked out. Background sending. Email goes out after the page has loaded, so your visitors never wait on the mail server. Offline mode. Capture every email in the log without sending. Perfect for staging and development. Filters and export. Filter by status and provider, search by subject or recipient, and export to CSV. Test and resend. Check your setup with an HTML or plain text test, and resend any logged message in one click. Auto prune. Keep logs forever, or delete anything older than 7, 30 or 90 days. Multisite ready. Set your provider up once on the main site and let every site of the network use it, or leave each site to configure its own. Email logs always stay per site. Light and private. No bloat, no tracking. Your credentials can live in wp-config.php instead of the database. What Meow Mailer will never do No open or click tracking. Other email plugins advertise it as a premium feature. It works by putting an invisible pixel in every message and rewriting every link to pass through a redirect, which means logging when your recipients read their mail and what they clicked. That is surveillance of the people your site writes to, it is personal data you then have to account for under the GDPR, and rewritten links make your email look more like spam, not less. Meow Mailer does not do it, and that is not a gap waiting to be filled in a Pro version. There is no Pro version. Supported providers Generic SMTP, Mailgun, Brevo, SendGrid, Amazon SES, Postmark, SMTP2GO, Mailjet, Resend, MailerSend, Maileroo, Gmail / Google Workspace (OAuth 2.0), Microsoft 365 / Outlook (OAuth 2.0), and Zoho Mail (OAuth 2.0). About Meow Apps Meow Mailer is part of the Meow Apps family of plugins, focused on doing one thing well with a clean, modern interface. External services Meow Mailer contacts an external service only after you choose and configure an email provider. Until then (the default “None”) and in “Offline” mode, it sends nothing anywhere. When you pick a provider, your outgoing email (recipients, subject, body, headers and attachments) and the credentials you entered are sent to that provider so it can be delivered, and only when your site actually sends an email. For Gmail, Microsoft 365 and Zoho Mail, Meow Mailer also contacts their OAuth servers when you connect and refresh your account. Nothing else is ever sent. You choose a single provider. Generic SMTP talks only to the server you configure. For the others, please review their terms and privacy policy: Mailgun (terms, privacy), Brevo (terms, privacy), SendGrid (terms, privacy), Amazon SES (terms, privacy), Postmark (terms, privacy), SMTP2GO (terms, privacy), Mailjet (terms, privacy), Resend (terms, privacy), MailerSend (terms and privacy), Maileroo (terms, privacy), Gmail (terms, privacy), Microsoft 365 (terms, privacy), and Zoho Mail (terms, privacy). Development Meow Mailer is open source. The full source, including the React code used to build the admin interface, lives on GitHub.