Introduction
With multiple APIs evolutions and various service interactions, PayPal add-ons have had to evolve, and fork, over the last 10 years of Gravity Forms. This makes the question of “which should I use?” a little trickier than most add-ons. We have put together this guide to try and help you with that question.
PayPal Checkout
In most cases, the PayPal Checkout Add-On is what you should use. It is the most up to date, uses the most current PayPal service API, known as PayPal Complete Payments, and is the future home of most new functionality as we roll all previous add-on functions into this add-on.
Eventually, this will be the recommended add-on for all use cases, but at this time, PayPal’s Checkout service (previously known as PayPal Commerce Platform) is not available in all markets, so the legacy add-ons do still have a few specific use-cases, as described below.
Legacy PayPal Add-Ons
We classify our PayPal Standard, PayPal Pro, and PayPal Payments Pro Add-Ons as “legacy”, meaning they have been retired but are not end of life yet. The API’s they rely on have been deprecated by PayPal, so future operation is not guaranteed, though PayPal have not specified any termination dates for these services yet.
We still support these add-ons for now, but no new functionality is expected. Any future releases will purely be for required security or bug fix updates. We will eventually stop all support and development for all the retired add-ons, but at this time there is no official date for when this retirement process will begin. Keep an eye on our blog for announcements.
Note that the legacy Gravity Forms Credit Card Field has been deprecated, and is no longer supported for use in PayPal. See this article for more details.
Using More Than One
Multiple add-ons can be used with the same form as long as the PayPal/Credit Card fields and payment add-on feeds have conditional logic configured on them. See the Setting Up Conditional Payments in Gravity Forms article for an example.
One-time payments
One-time payments include products, services, and donations.
| Feature | Recommended Add-On |
|---|---|
| Credit Card Field1 (PayPal Field) | PayPal Checkout Add-On |
| PayPal Checkout (PayPal Field) | PayPal Checkout Add-On |
| PayPal Checkout (legacy) | PayPal Standard Add-On |
| Venmo (PayPal Field) | PayPal Checkout Add-On |
| SEPA-Lastschrift (PayPal Field) | PayPal Checkout Add-On |
| Bancontact (PayPal Field) | PayPal Checkout Add-On |
| eps (PayPal Field) | PayPal Checkout Add-On |
| giropay (PayPal Field) | PayPal Checkout Add-On |
| iDEAL (PayPal Field) | PayPal Checkout Add-On |
| MyBank (PayPal Field) | PayPal Checkout Add-On |
| Przelewy24 (PayPal Field) | PayPal Checkout Add-On |
| Przelewy24 (PayPal Field) | PayPal Checkout Add-On |
| Simple PCI Compliance | PayPal Checkout Add-On |
| Strong Customer Authentication (SCA/PSD2) | PayPal Checkout Add-On |
Recurring payments
Recurring payments include subscriptions and donations.
| Feature | Recommended Add-On |
|---|---|
| PayPal Checkout (PayPal Field) | PayPal Checkout Add-On |
| PayPal Checkout (legacy) | PayPal Standard Add-On |
| Simple PCI Compliance | PayPal Checkout Add-On |
| Strong Customer Authentication (SCA/PSD2) | PayPal Checkout Add-On |
- Credit Card Field support is currently in limited release on the PayPal Checkout (aka PayPal Commerce) platform. ↩