Self-hosted form builder for contact forms, surveys, event registration and quizzes - a Google Forms alternative that keeps responses on your site.

LocalForm – Form Builder for Contact Forms, Surveys & Event Registration

LocalForm is a form builder for WordPress. Add your questions, drag them into order, pick your colors, and hit publish. Your form gets its own page and a link you can share right away &#8211; no page building, no shortcode wrangling, no fighting your theme&#8217;s CSS.
The name says what it does: every response stays local, on your own site, under your own domain and branding. Nothing is sent to a third-party form service, so you stay in control of your visitors&#8217; data. And there is nothing to set up before your first form is live &#8211; install, activate, and start building.
If you have been collecting answers with a cloud form service such as Google Forms or Microsoft Forms, LocalForm covers the same ground &#8211; write your questions, share a link, read the results back as a summary &#8211; except the form lives on your own domain and the answers never leave your site.
<h4>What you can build</h4>
<ul>
<li>Contact forms. Name, email and a message, with an email in your inbox every time someone writes in. Start from the template and publish in a minute.</li>
<li>Surveys and feedback forms. Ask your questions and read the results back as a summary with counts and charts, right in the admin.</li>
<li>Sign-ups and intake forms. Collect the details you need and get an email every time someone submits.</li>
<li>Quizzes and knowledge checks. Give the questions an answer key, set a pass mark, and every response is marked for you &#8211; with the score, the right answers and your own explanation shown the moment someone submits.</li>
<li>Event registrations. Set the event date, time, location, organizer and price, cap the number of registrations, open and close the form on a schedule, and send every registrant a confirmation email.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Why LocalForm?</h4>
<ul>
<li>Simple to use. A distraction-free builder: add questions, drag to reorder, pick your colors, publish.</li>
<li>Share a link. Every form gets its own page with a URL you choose &#8211; or drop it into an existing page with a shortcode or block.</li>
<li>Your data stays yours. Responses are stored on your own site and can be downloaded as an Excel or CSV file whenever you like.</li>
<li>No surprises. No account, no license key, no trial period, and no limit on the number of forms or submissions.</li>
<li>Nothing calls home. No analytics, no telemetry, and fonts are served from your own domain &#8211; so building a form never sends your visitors anywhere else.</li>
<li>Works with AI assistants. Built-in MCP support lets an assistant like Claude build and edit your forms for you, on your own site &#8211; see below.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Features</h4>
Building forms
<ul>
<li>Drag-and-drop builder in the WordPress admin &#8211; no code, no page builder needed.</li>
<li>Starter templates for a contact form, a feedback survey, an event registration, an RSVP and a quiz &#8211; they open the builder with the questions already written, and every one of them stays editable. Nothing is saved until you hit Save.</li>
<li>Question types: text, long text, email, phone, number, dropdown, single choice, checkboxes, consent, date, date range and rating. Any of them can be marked as part of a quiz where marking makes sense &#8211; see Quizzes below.</li>
<li>A consent question renders as a single tick box with your own wording beside it &#8211; put a link to your privacy policy in it and require it before the form can be sent.</li>
<li>Add section titles, text and images between questions to explain or break up a long form.</li>
<li>Multi-step forms, with no extra setup: add a section title and everything after it becomes the next step, with a progress bar, a step counter and Back and Next buttons. A long registration or intake form asks a few questions at a time instead of showing a wall of them.</li>
<li>Choose the colors and the font; pick from seven bundled font families.</li>
<li>Organize your forms with tags and filter the forms list by them.</li>
<li>Light mode hides the webhook URL, the redirect URL and the custom fields on a form&#8217;s Settings tab, for a builder that shows only the questions &#8211; per form, or as the default for new forms.</li>
</ul>
Sharing your form
<ul>
<li>Every form gets its own page at a web address you choose.</li>
<li>Place a form inside an existing page or post with the <code>[localform id="123"]</code> shortcode or the LocalForm block, which shows the real form while you edit.</li>
<li>A QR Code block puts a scannable link to a form on any page &#8211; for a flyer, a poster or a slide.</li>
<li>Share dialog in the builder: copy the link, copy the embed code, or download a QR code for print and posters.</li>
<li>Forms are shown full-screen by default, or in your theme&#8217;s normal page layout if you prefer.</li>
</ul>
Collecting responses
<ul>
<li>Visitors get instant validation and a thank-you message you can write yourself, without the page reloading.</li>
<li>Get an email whenever someone submits, and send the person who submitted a confirmation email you can customize with their answers.</li>
<li>Attach a calendar invitation to that confirmation email, so a registrant adds the event to Outlook, Google Calendar or Apple Calendar with one tap on their phone instead of retyping the date. It carries the event&#8217;s date, time, location and organizer, and an event without a time is added as an all-day one.</li>
<li>Cap the number of registrations and set an opening and closing date and time, with your own message shown when the form is full or closed.</li>
<li>Stop taking responses whenever you like: an Accepting responses switch on the form, and a Stop accepting link on the forms list, close a form on the spot without touching a date or deleting anything.</li>
<li>See whether your notification emails are actually going out. Every message LocalForm sends is recorded &#8211; who it went to, what it was about, whether the mailer took it &#8211; with a Send test email button beside it, and a warning on your own LocalForm screens the first time one fails.</li>
<li>Built-in spam protection: a hidden trap field that differs per site and rotates daily, a check that the submission came from a real browser, rate limiting, blocking for repeat bot attempts, and duplicate-submission checks.</li>
<li>Decide who may fill a form in: anyone with the link, anyone signed in to your site, or only the roles you pick. Everyone else gets your own message instead of the form, with a sign-in link if that is all they are missing, and the refusal is enforced on the server rather than merely hidden in the page. Every response then records which account left it, shown in the responses list, in your exports and on the printout &#8211; so an internal report, a staff form or a training quiz becomes a record with a name on it rather than an anonymous one.</li>
</ul>
Quizzes
<ul>
<li>Turn any form into a marked one: tick the correct options, or type the answers you accept, and LocalForm scores every response.</li>
<li>Works on single choice, dropdown, checkbox, short text and number questions. Give the harder question more points; leave a question without an answer key and it is asked but not marked.</li>
<li>Set a pass mark and every response reads Passed or Not passed. Leave it empty to report a score and let nobody fail.</li>
<li>The person answering can be shown their score, which questions they got right, the correct answer where they did not, and a sentence of explanation you wrote &#8211; so a test doubles as the lesson.</li>
<li>The score goes in the confirmation email, in the responses list, in every export, and on the printout &#8211; which is what makes a response usable as a training record.</li>
<li>The Responses summary tells you how the group did and, question by question, how many got it right: the one everybody missed is highlighted.</li>
<li>Scores are worked out from the answer key each time they are read, never stored. Correct a key you got wrong and every response you have already collected is marked again &#8211; and switching grading on for the first time scores the answers a form collected before it was a quiz.</li>
</ul>
Reading and keeping your results
<ul>
<li>A count in the admin menu of the responses that arrived since you last looked, per form on the forms list &#8211; the same badge WordPress puts on Comments, so a published form tells you it is being answered.</li>
<li>Browse every submission per form in the admin, a page at a time, with a date range and a search box to narrow the list down.</li>
<li>Summary view per question: counts and bar charts for choice questions, lowest/average/highest for numbers, per-day counts for dates, and the most recent answers for open questions.</li>
<li>Download responses as Excel (XLSX) or CSV &#8211; comma or semicolon separated, so Excel in Dutch, Belgian or German settings opens it in columns rather than one long line. Whatever the date range and search box are showing is what gets downloaded.</li>
<li>An Excel export with a Summary sheet alongside the responses: per-question counts, averages and percentages, ready to pivot or paste into a report.</li>
<li>Print any single response, or save it as a PDF, from the Print link beside it.</li>
<li>Export from the command line with <code>wp localform export</code>, or read responses over the REST API &#8211; both with the same date and search filters.</li>
<li>Answers to a data request are handled by WordPress&#8217;s own Tools &gt; Export Personal Data and Tools &gt; Erase Personal Data, which now include LocalForm responses.</li>
<li>Let a colleague read the responses without making them an administrator: two permissions of LocalForm&#8217;s own, granted per role, so the coordinator sees the registrations and nothing else.</li>
<li>Back up every form, submission and setting to a single file, and restore it here or on another site.</li>
</ul>
Connecting to other tools
<ul>
<li>Send each submission to a web address of your choice (a webhook), to plug LocalForm into your own system or an automation tool like Zapier, Make or Power Automate.</li>
<li>Requests are signed and retried automatically if the receiving end is down, with a log of the last 30 days so you can see what went out.</li>
<li>Optionally skip saving submissions entirely and only send them onward.</li>
<li>REST API for a form&#8217;s field structure, for developers building a custom renderer or syncing form definitions into another system. Authenticated with WordPress Application Passwords.</li>
</ul>
Building forms with an AI assistant (MCP)
LocalForm speaks MCP &#8211; the Model Context Protocol &#8211; so an AI assistant such as Claude can build your forms for you. Ask for &#8220;a registration form for the summer school on 12 and 13 August, with a student rate&#8221;, and the form is created on your site, with its page, ready for you to review.
<ul>
<li>Three WordPress Abilities are registered &#8211; list forms, read a form, and create or update one &#8211; and become MCP tools as soon as the MCP Adapter plugin is installed.</li>
<li>It is your site doing the work. The assistant connects to WordPress; LocalForm sends nothing out, and no form or response is uploaded anywhere.</li>
<li>Everything goes through the same validation as the builder, so an assistant cannot save something you could not have built by hand, and reconfiguring a form never touches the responses already collected.</li>
<li>Sign in with an Application Password and the usual WordPress permissions apply: only an administrator can read or change a form.</li>
</ul>
<h4>LocalForm Pro</h4>
Everything described above is in the free plugin and stays that way &#8211; none of it is a trial, a teaser or a limited version. LocalForm Pro is a separate paid add-on for the sites that need more, sold at <a href="https://localform.dev/#pricing" rel="nofollow ugc">localform.dev</a> and installed alongside the free plugin. If none of the following applies to you, you are not missing anything.
<ul>
<li>Payments. Charge for a registration and collect the money at submit, through Stripe or Mollie &#8211; card, Apple Pay, iDEAL, Bancontact, whatever your provider account has enabled. The response is saved before the payment starts, so an abandoned checkout still leaves you a registration to chase rather than nothing at all. Paid, unpaid and abandoned are all visible in Responses and in the XLSX export.</li>
<li>Build with AI. Describe the form you want, in your own words, and watch it built on your site &#8211; on the forms list for a new form, or docked beside the canvas for a change to the one you are editing. The free plugin&#8217;s MCP support covers the same ground from an outside assistant; this is the same three abilities driven from inside the admin.</li>
<li>Conditional fields. Show a question only when another answer matches a rule, enforced both in the browser and on the server.</li>
<li>More event detail. Several dates per event, each with its own start and end time and its own count, and a labelled price list so adults, students and members can be charged different amounts.</li>
<li>More question types. A File Upload field, stored outside the public media library and downloadable only by admins; a Yes/No switch built to drive conditional logic; and a one-click Invoice Details block of billing questions that appears only when that switch is on.</li>
<li>Webhook and field controls. Reusable global webhook fields carrying real JSON types, field name rules that keep the same concept arriving under the same name from every form, reusable field templates, and prefill from URL parameters.</li>
<li>Elementor widgets. Drop a form on any Elementor page, or list every upcoming event with a register link per date that opens the form with that date preselected.</li>
</ul>
The Pro add-on is not hosted on WordPress.org; it is documented at <a href="https://docs.localform.dev/pro/licensing" rel="nofollow ugc">docs.localform.dev</a>.
LocalForm is fully translatable, with translations contributed through translate.wordpress.org.
<h3>External services</h3>
This plugin does not connect to any external service on its own. It contains no analytics, telemetry, license checks or remotely hosted assets.
The MCP support described above adds no outbound request either: it registers WordPress Abilities, which an AI client calls by connecting to this site over the REST API, authenticated as a WordPress user. The plugin never contacts an AI provider, and holds no API key for one.
The one outbound request it can make is entirely under your control: if you enter a webhook URL on a form (or as the site-wide default under Forms &gt; Settings &gt; Webhooks), each submission is POSTed as JSON to that URL, signed with HMAC-SHA256. That destination is chosen and operated by you &#8211; the plugin has no default endpoint and sends nothing anywhere if no webhook URL is configured. The payload contains the submitted answers, the form title and ID, the event details you set on the form, and any &hellip;

Alternative Plugins for

Discover the Lists with LocalForm – Form Builder for Contact Forms, Surveys & Event Registration