Cascade Forge is automation inside WordPress: when something happens on the site, do one thing and then another. A form submission goes to Slack and a CRM; a WooCommerce order fires a webhook; a published post is handed to Lang Forge for translation.
The difference from Zapier or Make is where the work happens. Flows execute in your own WordPress installation — there is no monthly task quota, no third party holding the payload, and no external credentials for anything that talks to another Forge plugin. The tradeoff is honest too: a flow only runs when WordPress runs, which for scheduled work means wp-cron.
Nothing has to be written as JSON. Every trigger and every step draws its own form from the parameter schema it already declares, conditions are rows of field / operator / value, and a picker drops {{event.*}} values into any text field. Twenty ready-made recipes are shipped as a library, so the first flow is an import rather than a blank screen. Thirty-four triggers and thirty-four actions ship across the two packages — twenty-six triggers and nine actions in the free plugin, eight triggers and twenty-five actions in the Pro add-on, plus one extra Pro trigger for every WordPress hook an operator adds to the any-hook allow-list. Cascade Forge is built by Avakode; its landing is cascadeforge.app.
Quick facts
- Two plugins:
flowforge(Free; built to WordPress.org rules, but not in the WordPress.org directory yet — download it from https://avakode.com/download/ or the site’s pricing section) andflowforge-pro. Free 1.8.6 / Pro 1.6.7 is the current pair, and each needs the other at these versions or newer. - Free: the engine; the form builder and the recipe library; twenty-six triggers (WordPress core, all seven WooCommerce events, the Forge Suite events its siblings publish from their own free cores, and “a run was dead-lettered”); nine actions including the outbound webhook; the run log; the Failed view with retry-from-the-failed-step; and flows of any length. There is no step limit and no limit on how many flows may be active — an earlier version of this page said “single-step flows”, which was never true of the code.
- Pro: the wider trigger and action catalogue, conditional branching, the wait and wait-for-approval steps (a loop step is marked coming soon), scheduled triggers, a trigger for any WordPress hook the operator allow-lists, inbound webhooks, retrying every failed run of a flow at once, and AI recipes. There is no import/export — the code was never written, and no screen offers it.
- Free, and often assumed to be Pro: the form builder (no JSON required anywhere), the twenty-recipe library, the run log with per-step output, the three-attempt retry and the dead-letter queue, retry from the failed step, the “a run was dead-lettered” trigger, unlimited flows and runs, the dry run (“Test this flow”), and flow version history with rollback.
- Credits: exactly one thing in Cascade Forge spends Forge credits — the Pro AI recipe generator (“Draft the flow”), at 3 credits per draft. The price is resolved by
FLOWFORGE_Credit_Prices::recipe_cost(): the shared Forge credits widget’s price for theflow_recipeaction if it carries one, otherwise the documented floor of 3, and it is printed on the button before the click. Everything else — running flows, retrying them, importing recipes, approvals — costs no credits at all. - Safety by design: the condition evaluator executes no arbitrary code — it compares fields with equals, not_equals, contains, starts_with, greater_than and friends, grouped with AND/OR. Anything that would require
eval()is out of scope permanently. - Reliability: each step retries with exponential backoff up to three attempts and then lands in a dead-letter queue, where a run can be restarted from the step it failed on. Inbound webhooks are HMAC-verified and de-duplicated on a unique event hash, so a replayed delivery cannot run a flow twice.
- Pricing (annual, Forge Builder): Personal $49/yr (1 site), Professional $119/yr (5 sites), Agency $199/yr (unlimited). Set discounts: 2 tools 15%, 3 tools 25%, 4 or more 35%.
- Requirements: WordPress 6.5+, PHP 7.4+.
- Add-on floor: free 1.8.6 and later require Cascade Forge Pro 1.6.7 or newer (
FLOWFORGE_MIN_PROinplugin/flowforge.php; free 1.8.2–1.8.5 asked for 1.6.2, free 1.7.1–1.8.1 accepted any add-on from 1.2.0). Since 1.8.6 the licence code lives in the add-on, so an add-on below the floor is kept from starting: it adds no steps and no events, and a flow that uses a Pro step fails with “unknown action” until the add-on is updated. Saved flows and run history are untouched. An admin notice, shown to users who can update plugins, names the installed version and the required one and links to the downloads page of the Avakode dashboard; installing the current add-on brings it all back. The other way round, Cascade Forge Pro 1.6.7 needs Cascade Forge 1.8.6 or newer (FLOWFORGE_PRO_MIN_COREinpro/flowforge-pro.php): on an older core it does not start and says so, with the same downloads link, and the update server stops offering it to a site that reports an older core.