GravityExport
vs GC Google Sheets

Both. GravityExport added Google Sheets as an export destination in version 1.15.0, alongside Excel, CSV and PDF files. You connect your Google account in the GravityKit settings, then pick an existing spreadsheet or create a new one. Numbers, currency and dates arrive as real values rather than text, so sorting and SUM work immediately, and a submitted value that looks like a formula is stored as text so it can never run in your spreadsheet. Full details are on the GravityExport product page, and our guide to exporting entries to Google Sheets walks through the setup.

This is the question that separates the two plugins. GravityExport treats one tab as a mirror of your form and rewrites it in full on every export, so an edited entry is updated in place and a deleted one disappears. There is no row matching to go wrong, and changes made in a single request are combined into one rewrite, so importing fifty entries rewrites the tab once rather than fifty times. GC Google Sheets (Gravity Wiz) appends a row per submission and matches entries to rows through a lookup column, which does update the right row once you enable its Update & Delete Rows option, though under the Automatic lookup option, entries created before you selected it cannot be matched or updated afterwards. See how the Google Sheets export works for the mirror behaviour, or Gravity Wiz’s documentation for theirs.

This is the clearest split between the two. GravityExport runs on three triggers: automatic on every new entry, scheduled, or a webhook URL. Scheduled runs go hourly, twice daily, daily, weekly, every 30 days, or a custom number of hours, and the file lands in Dropbox, Box, an SFTP/FTP server, local storage or a secure link. Since 1.15.0 a scheduled run can send only the entries received since the last successful export, and a run that fails does not move the starting point, so nothing is skipped. Each feed has an activity log, Next Run and Last Run columns and optional failure alerts. GC Google Sheets has no schedule at all, by design: it is feed-based and fires on submission, so rows appear as they arrive rather than in a batch you control. Our guide to scheduling recurring exports covers the setup, and there is a walkthrough for sending form data to Dropbox.

Different limits apply, because the two do different work. GravityExport assembles a file, so size matters: since 1.8.0 large scheduled exports use chunked processing to prevent timeouts and memory issues, with a pre-flight memory check on scheduled XLSX runs. Its Google Sheets destination inherits Google’s own ceilings instead: a spreadsheet holds at most 10 million cells across all tabs and an export briefly needs room for two copies, so treat about half that as the practical limit for one feed, and a single cell holds 50,000 characters before the value is truncated. GC Google Sheets never builds a file, so it has no memory ceiling, and Gravity Wiz advertises unlimited actions, sends and syncs on every tier. Its documented caution is different: when bulk-processing a large number of entries, Google API rate limits can occasionally affect row order, and they suggest adding a small delay or handling order in the spreadsheet.

No, and this is worth being precise about because the Gravity Forms directory listing calls it Google Sheets: Two Way Connect. Gravity Wiz staff confirmed in September 2023 that updating data in the Google Sheet does not update the matching Gravity Forms entry. The second direction refers to populating form fields from spreadsheet data, and that requires GP Populate Anything (Gravity Wiz), which is sold separately in the Gravity Perks suite rather than Gravity Connect, so two-way use means two licenses. Neither plugin turns Google Sheets into an editing surface for your entries. To edit entries outside wp-admin, you would use front-end editing in GravityView instead.

GravityExport will, within the tab it owns. It rewrites that tab in full on every run, so anything you type into it is replaced, though each export is staged and swapped in one step so the tab is never left half written, and other tabs in the workbook are untouched. This is where GC Google Sheets is the better fit: it maps your fields into columns of a spreadsheet you have already built and appends rows underneath, leaving your column order, headers and formulas alone. It does not apply colors or formatting itself, which Gravity Wiz recommends doing in Google Sheets directly. If your spreadsheet is the thing your team works in every day, appending is the safer shape. One related setting to know about on the GravityExport side: a global option can remove empty columns from exports, so leave it off if a downstream system expects a fixed column structure.

With GravityExport, they are simply included: a Google Sheets export always sends the whole form, so your existing entries appear on the first run without any extra step. GC Google Sheets processes feeds on submission, so historical entries need a separate step. Gravity Wiz documents two routes for this: their free GF Feed Forge plugin, which the docs note can process a single feed for a few thousand entries assuming a healthy memory limit, and GravityImport, which can trigger the feed for each imported entry. Note that GravityImport is a GravityKit product that Gravity Wiz recommends in its own documentation.

Partly, and this is a real limitation rather than a feature. GravityExport’s bulk export creates one worksheet per form inside a single workbook, so you get all your forms in one file but not merged into a single combined sheet, and that bulk path does not offer a date-range filter. Each Google Sheets feed likewise keeps to its own tab. GC Google Sheets is also configured as one feed per form, though Gravity Wiz documents sending a parent form and its child form to the same spreadsheet by creating a feed for each. If you need genuinely merged rows from different forms, both products will leave you doing the join in the spreadsheet. Our guide to exporting Gravity Forms data covers the workable patterns.

GC Google Sheets writes rows into a live Google Sheet. Gravity Wiz does not document any CSV, Excel, or PDF file output for it, and its own Gravity Forms export guide points to separate tools for that, including GravityExport. On the GravityExport side, set expectations correctly: its PDFs are data tables, styled with your fonts, colors, page size and a header logo, but they are not templated per-entry documents. If you need a branded invoice or certificate for each submission, that is a job for Gravity PDF, as our guide to Gravity Forms PDFs explains.

Yes, with limits. Gravity Forms’ built-in export produces a CSV by hand from the admin. GravityExport Lite is free on WordPress.org, exports to Excel and CSV, and gives you a secure download URL that stays current without a WordPress login, which is why it has 10,000+ active installations and a 5.0 rating from 39 reviews. It does not include the Google Sheets destination, because connecting Google Sheets, Dropbox or Box requires a paid license. There are also free third-party connectors on WordPress.org, such as Connector for Gravity Forms and Google Sheets by CRM Perks. Neither GravityExport nor GC Google Sheets has a free tier that syncs to Sheets. For a full side-by-side of the free and paid versions, see the GravityExport Lite vs GravityExport breakdown.