My TOP 6 WordPress Advanced Custom Fields Alternatives

Does ACPT work just as well as ACF Pro when it comes to importing with WP All Import Pro? When it comes to Metabox for example, which is what I use at the moment, importing gallery images is still not ideal and looks a lot more simple with ACF Pro and their native integration.

One test that I'd like to see for block sets, and maybe for plugins in general, is what happens to a site if you need to delete the plugin. How much continues to work and what breaks?

I realise that in many cases the plugin has been used to generate normal code in a post, and that might continue to work. But what else?
Sometimes a website is the core of a person's career. So we need to know what it depends on.

I deleted Toolset because I would sometimes hit a bug that made me feel unsafe. It's one thing if a plugin is helping with some formatting, but it's another if it's driving your data.

I appreciate this round up of the main candidates - super helpful knowledge to add to my notes.

Crocoblock. Asde from their excellence, the support is mind-blowingly good.

If you want to go for paid option which option will you go for ?, myself as a starter i would go for Crocoblock as i can get much more for additional cost. What do you recommend if you have to choose from ACF or Jet Engine Paid option.

I tried pod but i am stuck as i am not able to get Repeater fields in Tabular format for multiple repeater fields for Tournament Table such as MatchDate, TeamA, TeamB, Score, Venue etc. I want these to be one row when user will enter data for these fields but this doesnt seem to be possible with Pod, with ACF it may be possible as we can enter field with when creating these fields i am not sure about Jet Engine.. This is the delima i am stuck with on one end we have lot more option with crocoblock and with ACF we may have flexibility. So which one you recomment?

Ad a website builder coming from a Drupal background this is one of the things about Wordpress which I find to make life harder when it comes to starting a new project or adding new features to an existing project. Due to Drupal being a community-led framework, it is highly discouraged to create a new module which has the same features as an existing one. If you try and do so, the module (plugin) may not be allowed with the response being "there's already a module fulfilling this use case. Why not ask the maintainers of that module if you can co-maintain it?".

The benefit of this is you can usually use Google to initially see if there's a module which exists to add a particular feature. So if you enter "Drupal Google Analytics" you get a single module which does this and does it well. On the other hand, if you try "Wordpress Google Analytics" you will find nothing but "Top 10 Google Analytics plugins for Wordpress!" pages.

Also you find yourself not only having to try and figure out which of these 10 is the best option, but there's the exact feature you're after behind a paywall whereas with Drupal everything is free. I understand people need to eat at the end of the day and that's probably why there's a more diverse suite of plugins available for Wordpress because people make a business out of them but the sheer amount of duplication of features makes it so that you find it hart to find the "right" plugin and even sometimes need to install two plugins which share 50% of their functionality - e.g. you may want to use JetEngine for listing grids and custom queries but another plugin is forcing you to also have ACF installed which means you have two plugins which both provide custom post types and custom fields.

Thanks for sharing.

Thanks Paul for sharing.

Very good review, lazyblocks can be added to the list I think

Hey Paul, how do you do your cool animated, depth of field screenshot animations? I bet you've got a cool tool for that...

I know ACPT is integrated with Bricks, but is there a way to handle frontend forms integration similar to Frontend Admin for ACF or the ACF integration of all the form plugins?

I found Metabox impossible to figure out because it is made for programmers. Don't waste your time with it!

Carbon Fields, more advance but probably the best solution overall.

Great overview mate (as always). I have most of these tools, but I think (so far) JetEngine has proven to be the game changer when it comes to dynamic website development

The best part of the subset of tools is the competition. Pushing each plugin to add more capabilities. I have tried all but Cube and tend to fall back to ACF because of how widely it is supported and how few of the "other" features offered from the alternatives I use. The fact that ACF Pro is bundled into some popular themes and Advanced Themer for Bricks makes the cost of entry negligible.

Shout out to ACPT and Mauro Cassani. He is very responsive and actively developing the product to take it to a place when it would take the king status from ACF.
Best wishes

Coming from ACF, acpt now offer me same features + integrates custom pot types, all in one place. Great plugin with great support

Thanks for the overview. Meta Box, the commercial version, is a good fit for me. Didn't find it too complex but that was after working with Toolset for a while.

Is it possible to use ACF to add Affiliate Program on Custom Dashboard? And is it possible to introduce Customer Levels (Levels increase with purchase)?

Toolset + Gutenberg was a nightmare. Never again. Even the Toolset support team admitted to me that the integration was a mess and they were only supporting Gutenberg because they had to.

No need to look past ACPT. Now my go to. Excellent tool and v2 coming later this year. Developer is fantastic and responsive. Love it.

As ever, exceptionally briliant. I don't know how or when you find the time to do great informative, educational and professional videos on all things related to WordPress, but I am so grateful you do. I am really pleased that you mentioned ACPT because the developer Mauro Cassani is a tremendous work horse. Thanks Paul for another great video.👍

ACF Pro is included in the Avada theme. Avadas conditional logic combined with dynamic data features is free and included in the theme. This is a good option worth mentioning, but they maybe don’t pay you for that. 😂

A lot of plugins are expensive and then you also often need to add their extensions on top of that, resulting into a rather high total cost.