What's the best Google Forms alternative for a church website?

On WordPress, Gravity Forms is the most capable and starts at $59 a year; WPForms Lite is free and easy for staff to use; Contact Form 7 is free and minimal. If you'd rather not host the form yourself, Planning Center's built-in Forms puts submissions straight into People from Church Center.

Can Google Forms send responses to Planning Center?

Not on its own. Planning Center's Zapier app has triggers but no action that creates a person, so a Zap can't do it. The options are a Google Apps Script that calls the Planning Center API, or a hosted service such as Form Forward, which lists Google Forms support.

Can I embed a Google Form on my church website?

Yes. Embed HTML gives you an iframe that shows Google's form inside your page. Your site's styles can't reach inside the frame, and the answers go to Google Forms and Sheets rather than to your website or Planning Center.

Do people need a Google account to fill in a Google Form?

Not usually. They do if the form has a file upload question or is limited to one response per person, because both require signing in to Google.

Which WordPress form plugins work with PCO Bridge?

Gravity Forms, Contact Form 7, and WPForms Lite. PCO Bridge turns each accepted submission into a person and a workflow card in Planning Center People.

Google Forms on your church website: what to use instead

Google Forms is free, everyone on staff already knows it, and a volunteer can build a connect card in ten minutes. That's why so many church websites have one embedded on the "I'm new" page.

It's also why so many churches have a spreadsheet of connect cards that someone copies into Planning Center People by hand every Monday. The form was never the hard part. What happens after someone presses submit is.

This is about replacing that Google Form with a form that lives on your own website, and then getting its answers into Planning Center without the Monday copy-and-paste.

What an embedded Google Form actually is

When you choose Embed HTML in Google Forms, you get an iframe: a window on your page that shows a page from Google's servers. Visitors are still on Google's form. It just has your website around the edges.

That has a few consequences you can see from the outside.

Your site's styles stop at the frame. Google gives you a header image, colours, and a short list of fonts, but no way to match your buttons, spacing, or type, and Google's own footer stays at the bottom.
The frame has a fixed height. On a phone, a long form often ends up scrolling inside a box inside the page.
The answers go to Google. You read them in the Forms responses tab or a linked Google Sheet, and nothing reaches Planning Center unless someone or something carries it there.

Where Google Forms runs out

For a short contact form, none of this matters much. The problems show up as church forms get longer and more personal.

Branching works by section, not by question. To ask one follow-up question when someone ticks "I have kids", you have to put it in a section of its own and route people to it.
File uploads need a Google account. Add an upload question and every respondent has to sign in to Google before they can submit, which is a lot to ask of a first-time guest.
There's no payment field, so a camp deposit or retreat registration means a second form or a separate checkout link.
There's no CAPTCHA setting. A public connect card that's been online for a while collects spam, and all of it lands in the same spreadsheet as your real guests.

Form plugins that live on your own site

If your church website runs on WordPress, a form plugin puts the form in your page's own HTML, in your theme's type and colours, with submissions checked on your server. Three are worth knowing.

Gravity Forms is the most capable of the three, and it's paid. As of September 2026 the Basic license is $59 a year for one site and already includes conditional logic, file uploads without anyone signing in, and save-and-continue for long applications. Stripe and PayPal come with the Pro license at $159 a year. It's the one to choose for volunteer applications, event registration with payments, or anything with more than a handful of questions.

WPForms Lite is free, with a drag-and-drop builder that's easy to hand to a staff member. It includes spam protection with hCaptcha, reCAPTCHA, or Cloudflare Turnstile. Conditional logic and file uploads need the paid Pro version, so Lite suits connect cards, prayer requests, and contact forms rather than long applications.

Contact Form 7 is free and very simple. You edit a form as a block of tags rather than dragging fields around, which developers like and volunteers sometimes don't. It supports reCAPTCHA, Akismet, and Turnstile for spam, and it doesn't store submissions on its own; it emails them.

If you're unsure, start with WPForms Lite for your connect card and move to Gravity Forms when a form needs logic, uploads, or payments.

Moving a Google Form over in an afternoon

Rebuilding the form is the easy part. A few decisions while you do it save work later.

Ask for first name, last name, email, and phone as separate fields with plain labels. Those are the fields that identify a person, so keep them obvious.
Write every other question the way you'd want a staff member to read it later, because the question is the label that travels with the answer. In Contact Form 7 the field's tag name is the label instead, so name tags like how-did-you-hear rather than text-123.
Turn on spam protection before the form goes live, not after the first wave of junk.
Swap the iframe for the new form, then set the Google Form to stop accepting responses, with a message pointing to the new page for anyone holding an old link.
Export the existing responses from Google Sheets before you retire it, and decide who owns entering the stragglers.

Then send it to Planning Center with PCO Bridge

Once the form lives on your WordPress site, PCO Bridge connects it to People. It works with Gravity Forms, Contact Form 7, and WPForms Lite, and it runs after the form plugin has finished its own validation and spam checks, so the junk your CAPTCHA stopped never reaches Planning Center.

You pick the form and a workflow. Name, email, and phone become the person's details, and every other answer is written onto the workflow card, labelled with the question you wrote, so the person doing follow-up sees "How did you hear about us?" next to the answer. There's no field mapping to fill in, and the settings screen shows what it found before you switch the feed on.

Every accepted submission is saved on your own site before it's sent, and retried if Planning Center is briefly unavailable. A submission that can't be matched to a person with confidence is held for review rather than written blind, which is what stops the second and third copy of the same guest. File uploads stay with your form plugin and are never sent to Planning Center, and neither are password or card fields. How to add form feeds to your WordPress website walks through the setup.

If you're not on WordPress, or you'd rather keep Google Forms

PCO Bridge only works with WordPress today. If your site is on Squarespace, Wix, or something else, or your team would rather keep building in Google Forms, there are two fair options. Planning Center's own Forms puts submissions straight into People, at the cost of the form living in Church Center. Form Forward is a hosted service that lists Google Forms among the builders it connects to Planning Center.

We compared all of the routes, including those two, in How to send form submissions to Planning Center.

The short version

A Google Form on your website is Google's page in a frame, and its answers stop in a spreadsheet. If you run WordPress, move the form into a plugin that lives on your site, then let PCO Bridge carry each submission into a People workflow. PCO Bridge is in beta, and applications are open.