Right now, somebody is probably halfway through a form on your site. Maybe they’ll finish tomorrow. Maybe they’re gone for good. Whether you ever find out — and whether either of you can do anything about it — depends on a corner of Gravity Forms that confuses nearly everyone: Save & Continue and the three plugins that extend or work around it.
This is a plain-English map of that territory: the Save & Continue feature built into Gravity Forms itself, the official Partial Entries add-on, Gravity Wiz’s Advanced Save & Continue perk, and our own Manage Drafts. The four get tangled together constantly — I’ve watched people buy an Elite license for Partial Entries when what they actually wanted was to see their existing drafts, and I’ve watched people ask why Save & Continue “isn’t capturing abandoned forms” when that was never its job. Untangling them takes exactly two questions. First: who does the saving — the visitor, deliberately, or the software, automatically in the background? Second: who does the tool serve — the visitor filling out the form, or you, the person running the site? Answer those two questions about your situation and the right purchase (or non-purchase) falls out almost immediately.
One disclosure before we start: Manage Drafts is my plugin. I’ll tell you exactly where it fits, and, just as useful, the situations where you should buy one of the others instead.
The Four Tools at a Glance
| Save & Continue (native) | Partial Entries | Advanced Save & Continue | Manage Drafts | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Made by | Gravity Forms (core) | Gravity Forms | Gravity Wiz | Odd Jar |
| Who triggers the save | Visitor clicks the save link | Automatic, in the background | Visitor, or automatic (opt-in) | N/A — reads existing drafts |
| What gets stored | A draft, resumable via a private link | A partial entry (a copy of whatever was typed) | Native drafts, saved and reloaded automatically | Nothing new — no duplicate storage |
| Who it serves | The visitor | The site owner | The visitor | The site owner |
| Where it surfaces | Nowhere in the admin | Entries list | On the front end, to the draft’s owner | A Forms → Drafts admin screen |
| Expiry | 30 days (filterable) | n/a — saved as entries | 30 days, reset on every save | Shows expiry; can extend it |
| License / price | Every GF license | GF Elite, $259/yr | Gravity Perks, from $59/yr | From $39/yr, any GF 2.5+ license |
| Best for | Long forms, at no extra cost | Abandonment recovery, lead capture | Auto-save UX, member portals | Admin visibility, follow-up, deadlines |
Save & Continue: The Feature You Already Have
Save & Continue is the foundation everything else in this post builds on or works around. You enable it with a checkbox in your form settings, and Gravity Forms adds a “Save and Continue Later” link to the form. When a visitor clicks it, they get a private resume link — and the option to email that link to themselves — so they can come back and pick up where they left off. It’s a genuinely good feature for long forms: applications, registrations, anything spanning multiple pages. The resume link works for 30 days by default, which you can change with the gform_incomplete_submissions_expiration_days filter, and enabling the feature auto-creates its own confirmation and notification you can customize like any other. The official Save & Continue documentation covers the setup details.
Two caveats worth knowing before you rely on it. Single File Upload fields don’t survive a save — the file is cleared, because single uploads aren’t validated until submission (Multi-File Upload fields are fine). And the resume link is a bearer token: anyone who has the URL can open the draft, so run HTTPS if the form collects anything sensitive.
Can admins see Save & Continue drafts?
No — and this surprises almost everyone the first time they need it. Drafts are stored in their own database table, separate from entries, and in the words of Gravity Forms’ own documentation, that table “is not accessible from anywhere in the WordPress admin dashboard.” Your visitors are saving half-finished submissions right now and there is no built-in screen that lists them, counts them, or shows you what’s in them.
The second blind spot follows from the first: the resume URL isn’t saved anywhere you can retrieve it. When someone writes in saying “I saved my application but lost the email with my link” — and on any site with long forms, someone eventually will — stock Gravity Forms gives you no way to look the link up and send it again. The draft sits in the database, intact and invisible, until it quietly expires.
When Visitors Never Save: The Partial Entries Add-On
The Partial Entries add-on attacks a completely different problem: form abandonment. Most visitors who bail on a form never click a save link — they just type for a while and leave. Partial Entries captures what they typed anyway. Once enabled on a form, it saves field values in the background as the visitor works, using the WordPress Heartbeat API, roughly every 30 to 60 seconds. A partial entry is also captured on page transitions in multi-page forms, on validation errors, and when the Save and Continue link is clicked. The captured data lands as a partial entry in your entries list, where you can see exactly which fields were filled before the visitor gave up.
That makes it a lead-recovery and diagnostics tool. If someone types a name and email into your quote form and then abandons it, you have a contact to follow up with instead of a mystery. Across many partials, you can also see where people quit — which page, which field — which is exactly the kind of signal worth acting on if you’re serious about recovering abandoned form submissions. The add-on supports capture rules, too: save only when a specific field is completed, or when a percentage of all fields (or required fields) has input, so you’re not accumulating worthless two-keystroke partials.
Three things to weigh before buying. It’s an Elite-tier add-on, so it effectively costs the $259/yr Elite license. It depends on the Heartbeat API, which some hosts throttle or disable — WP Engine is the documented example — and without heartbeat ticks, background capture doesn’t happen. And there’s a consent question you shouldn’t skip: you are recording what people type before they’ve chosen to submit it. The add-on provides an optional warning message to display on the form, and depending on where your visitors live, regulations like GDPR may make disclosure less than optional. Decide what your privacy policy says before you turn it on, not after.
One interaction with Save & Continue deserves its own paragraph, because Gravity Forms’ documentation warns about it directly: partial entries and Save & Continue drafts are not synchronized. They’re two separate records. If an admin edits a partial entry and the visitor later resumes their draft, those edits can be silently lost. Capture with partials, by all means — but don’t treat a partial entry as the working copy of a draft.
When Saving Should Be Automatic: Advanced Save & Continue
Advanced Save & Continue, a Gravity Perks plugin from Gravity Wiz, upgrades the visitor’s side of the native feature. Its headline trick is auto-save with auto-load: the form saves a draft automatically as the visitor works, and when they return, it repopulates automatically — no link to click, no email to dig up. Logged-out visitors get an opt-in prompt first (“Would you like to automatically save your progress?”), which exists precisely so the auto-saving stays consent-based under GDPR; drafts saved as a guest are even claimed by the visitor’s account if they later log in.
The other half of the plugin is front-end draft management. Visitors can see a list of their own drafts — above the form, or anywhere via a shortcode — and resume, delete, or start a new one. Put that shortcode on an account page and a member portal suddenly has a proper “My drafts” area. It rounds things out with smaller conveniences: hide the native save link and rely purely on auto-save, show the save confirmation inline instead of interrupting the visitor, block draft links from being opened by someone who doesn’t own the draft, and reset the 30-day expiry clock on every save so an active draft never dies mid-effort.
Its limitations are documented and worth reading before purchase: it doesn’t work with multiple forms on the same page, inherits the native single-file-upload restriction, and guest drafts depend on cookies. Notice what it deliberately isn’t, though — an admin tool. The drafts list is shown to each draft’s owner on the front end. Your team still has no back-end screen listing everyone’s drafts, and Gravity Wiz’s own docs note the same edit-loss issue when combining with Partial Entries.
When You Need to See the Drafts: Manage Drafts
Everything above serves either the visitor (native Save & Continue, Advanced Save & Continue) or captures new data for the owner (Partial Entries). Manage Drafts covers the remaining quadrant: giving the site owner visibility into, and control over, the drafts that already exist. It adds a native Drafts screen under Forms → Drafts that lists every Save & Continue draft across all your forms — including drafts saved before the plugin was installed, since it reads Gravity Forms’ existing draft storage rather than keeping copies.
From that screen, the day-to-day jobs become straightforward. You can open any draft in an entry-style detail view and read every field, including pending file uploads. Progress bars show how far each draft got and which page of a multi-page form the person reached. Smart email detection figures out who was filling the form in — even if they never used the “email me this link” prompt — and labels where each address came from. A send-reminder action emails the submitter their private resume link, which also solves the “I lost my link” support ticket in one click; the link itself is treated like a password and revealed in the admin only when you explicitly ask. Draft notes let your team annotate a draft, and the notes migrate onto the real entry when the person finally submits. You can extend a promising draft’s expiry, export drafts to CSV, and let stall analytics plus a scheduled digest tell you which page or required field is doing the damage. When I announced the plugin, I wrote up the origin of the itch in the launch post.
Two honest boundaries. Manage Drafts only sees drafts, so if visitors abandon your form without ever clicking save, there’s nothing for it to show — that’s Partial Entries territory. And it does nothing to the front end at all (there’s no front-end code in it), so if what you want is auto-save for visitors, that’s Advanced Save & Continue. It works on any license tier that runs Gravity Forms 2.5 or later, because Save & Continue itself is a core feature on every license.
How to Choose: Decision Framework
Choose Partial Entries if:
- Your forms are lead generators and abandonment is lost revenue — quote requests, demo bookings, checkouts
- You want drop-off diagnostics: which page and which fields kill submissions
- You hold an Elite license already, or the recovered leads justify one
- Your privacy policy (and your host’s Heartbeat support) can accommodate background capture
Choose Advanced Save & Continue if:
- Visitors fill long or multi-session forms and you want progress saved without anyone thinking about it
- You run a membership site or portal where logged-in users should see and resume their own drafts
- People submit the same form repeatedly and need multiple drafts going at once
Choose Manage Drafts if:
- Your forms have deadlines — applications, grants, registrations — and “who hasn’t finished yet?” is a question you need answered on a screen
- Your team follows up on stalled submissions by hand today, or wants to start
- Support regularly fields “I lost my resume link” and you’d like that to take one click
- You want draft visibility without new data capture, on any license tier
Stick with native Save & Continue alone if:
- Forms are short, deadlines don’t exist, and an occasional lost draft costs you nothing
The combinations matter as much as the individual picks. A scholarship portal might run Advanced Save & Continue so applicants never lose work, plus Manage Drafts so the administrator can watch the deadline approach, extend expiry for a student who asked for more time, and nudge the ones who stalled on page three. A lead-gen agency might run Partial Entries for the silent majority who never save, plus Manage Drafts for the deliberate savers — two different populations on the same form, and the plugins never fight because one reads partial entries and the other reads drafts. The one pairing to handle with care is editing partial entries while Save & Continue is active, per the synchronization warning above. And for privacy-sensitive intake — healthcare, legal, HR — a consent-based stack (Save & Continue, with or without the admin layer) is a much easier conversation with a compliance reviewer than background capture.
Pricing Breakdown
Prices as of July 2026, from each vendor’s pricing page:
- Save & Continue — included in every Gravity Forms license (Basic $59/yr and up).
- Partial Entries — requires the Elite license, $259/yr (also available to Nonprofit license holders).
- Advanced Save & Continue — a Gravity Perks perk: $59/yr for one perk on one site, $169/yr for three perks on three sites, or $349/yr for all perks on unlimited sites.
- Manage Drafts — $39/yr for one site, $99/yr for ten, $175/yr for twenty, or $350 lifetime.
If you’re on a Basic or Pro Gravity Forms license, note the practical jump: getting Partial Entries means moving to Elite, while the other two tools bolt onto whatever license you already own.
The Bottom Line
Run the two questions from the top of this post against each tool and the lineup stops being confusing. Native Save & Continue: the visitor saves, the visitor benefits. Advanced Save & Continue: the software saves, the visitor benefits. Partial Entries: the software captures, the owner benefits. Manage Drafts: the visitor saves, the owner finally gets to see it. Four tools, four quadrants, remarkably little actual overlap.
So buy for the problem you actually have. Bleeding leads from abandoned forms? Partial Entries, and mind the consent question. Visitors losing work on long forms? Advanced Save & Continue. Drafts piling up invisibly while deadlines loom and your team works blind? That’s the gap we built for. See Manage Drafts for Gravity Forms →
