Best 7 Free Flipbook WordPress Plugins!

Aarati Parajuli
Dear WordPress
Published in
14 min readJul 9, 2019

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Do you want to replace your traditional pdf files with stunning 3D Flipbooks? Creating a 3D flipbook in WordPress has been made easier than ever before by a few Flipbook WordPress Plugin developers. Kudos to them! 👏

Here, the best 7 Free Flipbook WordPress Plugins are described based on almost every aspect that makes them better than other WordPress flipbook plugins. For newbies, We’ve included some backgrounds of flipbooks and their impact on your readers. You can still skip these basics and directly go to:

  1. DearFlip
  2. DearPDF
  3. Real3D
  4. Interactive
  5. Issuu
  6. Yumpu
  7. FlowPaper

Jump to the conclusion!!

Firstly, What is a flipbook?

If you have ever experienced reading a flipbook you might have noticed the difference between a pdf and a flipbook. In case you don’t know what’s exactly a flipbook is, just continue reading then you will be clear for sure. For now, look at the animation below.

3D Flipbook — Created with dearFlip

✔ Normally, a book flipping its pages is called a flipbook. In WordPress, Flipbook is a pdf file or set of images that are converted into a real book-like structure. The page-turning effects and animations give you the real feel of reading a physical book.

✔ Similarly, Flipbooks are far more intuitive, interactive, as well as more engaging than traditional PDF viewers. The concentration level of a reader is higher in a flipbook than in a pdf.

If you have already decided to use WordPress flipbook plugins for your site, that’s great! Flipbooks that are responsive, realistic as well as highly-customizable are awesome. Right?

But are you confused? Which flipbook WordPress plugin can create such stunning flipbooks? Here you can see the comparison between the competitive flipbook plugins in today’s market!

Why Flipbook WordPress plugin?

✔ In today’s internet business there is a huge competition between websites. And the powerful weapon for you to win the race is powerful content. As you know, Google loves SEO-friendly content, we must focus on SEO. Unlike PDFs, Flipbooks are far better for SEO because they are easier to index by Google.

✔ Meanwhile, a good WordPress flipbook plugin should help you to create a responsive, realistic as well as highly-customizable flipbook. You can use them to give an attractive look to your content, showcase your portfolios, or display beautiful magazines on your websites.

However, selecting the right plugin among dozens of free WordPress flipbook plugins might be quite confusing. Therefore, we are going to list the Best 7 Free Flipbook WordPress Plugins with their comparison. Let’s start,

1. DearFlip: REALISTIC 3D FLIPBOOK WORDPRESS PLUGIN

Updated: Dflip has changed its name to Dearflip!

Dearflip WordPress flipbook plugin

Bring life into your pdfs.

DearFlip helps you to give your dead-looking pdfs a new life. It uses WebGL for 3D and HTML5 & CSS for 2D WordPress PDF Flipbook. Hence this WordPress Flipbook plugin can assist you to create an eye-catching realistic WordPress Flipbook.

With this plugin, your PDF is reborn with an adorable look. And it gives the “real” feel of a real book with a realistic page-turning effect on all devices. Similarly, DearFlip is effortlessly easy to use. You just need to add a link to your pdf and this plugin changes it into a stunning flipbook.

Among dozens of Flipbook WordPress Plugins, DFlip offers great customizability. Along with that, it is compatible with both older & newer versions of WordPress. You can download the flipbook as well as translate it into any language. Also, you can share your flipbook on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail as well.

Why DearFlip?

DearFlip lite is free of cost. Yet, 25,000+ customers love DFlip’s cost-effectiveness as its annual license costs only $39. This WordPress flipbook plugin offers more advanced features in its premium version. While all other plugins listed here support yearly licenses, Dflip offers lifetime licenses and multiple site licenses as well. Additionally, DearFlip has been known for its excellent customer support and frequent updates. See more about the premium version of the DFlip WordPress flipbook plugin.

Impressed? After all, trying by self is a stroke of genius ;) Just download it now and clear your confusion.

How to use the Dflip flipbook plugin?

In the video below, we have tested DFlip with two different pdf files. It was really easy to create flipbooks with this flipbook WordPress plugin. And your books are kept organized inside the dearFlip books menu.

Pros:

  1. WebGL 2D and 3D flipbooks
  2. Highly Customizable if the pro version
  3. Cost-Effective
  4. Compatible with both older and newer versions of WordPress.
  5. Well-prepared documentation and tutorials

Cons:

  1. No HTML Flipbook (If you want to add HTML content as flipbook pages, then sorry!)

Download the free version of Dearflip

Download the Premium Dearflip WordPress flipbook plugin!

What do users say about DearFlip?

for Customizability

by Mickymoo 1 year ago

I really like your plugin — it’s saving me a huge amount of time in terms of creating and displaying flip books as well as being lightweight, attractive, controllable and working on all my devices. Thanks also for your prompt support.

for Customer Support

by Asbjoern 1 year ago

Buy this plugin! It’s fantastic and will present your documents in the most beautiful, intuitive and the fastest possible way. Save the money on your budget for monthly subscriptions to online presentation providers such as Issuu and showcase your own documents and retain total control. Deip provides excellent customer support.

2. DearPDF WordPress FlipBook Plugin:

DearPDF is a boon for you if your site contains multiple PDF files. Fully focused on PDF only, you can use this flipbook plugin as a normal PDF viewer to an amazing flipbook maker. This WordPress flipbook plugin is a complete solution for a PDF-based content creator. You can showcase your product catalogs, user manuals, e-books, menus, annual reports, portfolio, and what not?

After years of experience from Dearflip, DearPDF is a new yet matured flipbook plugin. It has been tested with more than hundreds of PDF files, as a result, DearPDF can smoothly display irregular pages and text-oriented documents as well.

Using DearPDF you can provide 3 different tastes of reading a PDF to your visitors. Vertical reader as a normal PDF viewer, 2D flipbook, and 3D flipbook as an eye-catching way of display. But unlike other flipbook plugins, DearPDF doesn’t support Images as a source and cannot create image flipbooks.

Download the free version of DearPDF!

Download Premium DearPDF!

What do users say about DearPDF?

Nice, Perfect, Useful
miladesmaili
August 29, 2021

I spent many days looking for a suitable PDF Viewer plugin, and finally I can boldly say that DEAR PDF offers features that are not available in other plugins and this plugin is a very desirable option in terms of beauty, speed and simplicity. Let me make a few points: — In most existing plugins, the link to the original file is displayed but there is no problem with this plugin. — The file is partially loaded and the user does not have to download it all first, this helps to increase the speed and improve the user experience. — In addition to the Shortcode for displaying documents in tabs and posts, the designers have provided other Shortcode for providing a button for reading and can be used in tables or lists. I hope this plugin continues in the same way, and if so, I think it is one of the best options available.`

3. Real3D FlipBook WordPress Plugin

This is a highly rated plugin in the Envato market with 4.56 stars(454 ratings) and has the highest number of sales there. Real3D creates WordPress flipbooks that are fully customizable. You can change the skin type, background, UI colors, layout, font awesome icons, and material icons as well. It is highly responsive, saying that you can display the flipbook anywhere inside the post or page and can view it from any device.

Real3d comes with tons of features such as a lightbox & full-screen mode, single page view, table of content, thumbnails, image swipe book, and so on. Similarly, it uses the following modern technologies to build your flipbooks.

  • Retina-ready icons: Uses font awesome icons that are suitable for retina display and look amazing on high-resolution displays.
  • Smart page loading: only current pages are loaded to optimize performance
  • Touch-friendly: supports touch swipe and pinch-zoom
  • Advanced zoom: Zoom with a mouse, pinch-zoom, double tab zoom as well as keyboard zoom. Additionally, zoom-in & zoom-out buttons are also available for ease.

Download Real 3D Free Version

Download Real 3D Premium Version

The professional version of this WordPress flipbook plugin costs only $49. Additionally, this plugin also supports videos and audio inside your flipbook. It helps you to create beautiful bookshelves as well. But for these features and many more features to work, you’ll need to buy extra add-ons. Real3D FlipBook Addon Bundle is a pack that contains all 6 add-ons for just $39 only.
The bundle includes PDF Tools Addon, Page Editor Addon, Book Shelf Addon, Elementor Addon, WPBakery Addon, and WooCommerce addon.

4. Interactive 3D Flipbook or WordPress Flipbook (name changed)

Interactive 3D FlipBook is another Flipbook WordPress plugin that allows browsing images, PDFs, or HTML as a flipping book. The flipbook created by this plugin also helps to attract users’ attention as well as make a great impression on its users.

Similar to other plugins this Flipbook WordPress plugin is also able to perform the book opening, book closing, and page-flipping animation. What makes this plugin unique from the others is its specially designed physics engine that interacts with its users. The use of the physics engine solves the collisions as well as makes the model look natural.

Additionally, Interactive allows customizing the shape of flipping pages. But it is not compatible with lower than 4.3 versions of WordPress. So it might not be an option if you are using an older version of WordPress.

Interactive is available in both free and pro versions. From version 1.0 to 1.8, it has been evolving as an excellent flipbook plugin for WordPress. Interactive is also cost-effective. The regular license costs $35 and the extended license costs $85 with 6 months of free support. See more about the premium version of the Interactive WordPress Flipbook plugin.

Download Interactive Flipbook Plugin For Free!

Download the Interactive WordPress Flipbook plugin!

Pros:

  1. Supports both pdfs, images, and HTML
  2. Cost-Effective
  3. Highly Customizable

Cons:

  1. Not compatible with the older versions of WordPress

What do users say about Interactive 3D Flipbook?

INCREDIBLE!

lojisasu July 1, 2019

This is a really fantastic plugin. It looks and functions perfectly and the layout is very user-friendly. Can’t recommend it enough! THANK YOU!

for Feature Availability

by meletha 2 years ago

I use the 3D Flipbook plugin in my website for students to study. It was easy to install and set up. The teachers and students are excited to use the book in study. The plugin with the new features add to the developer/author control of secured pdf material.

5. Issuu PDF Sync WordPress flipbook plugin

Issuu PDF Sync

Similarly here you have another option for creating stunning flipbooks on your WordPress site. Issuu PDF Sync is a Flipbook WordPress plugin that allows you to create Flipbooks with the http://issuu.com service.

Issuu PDF Sync is pretty simple to use. You can create your brand new flipbook with this Flipbook WordPress plugin within a few steps. Just get a free key that synchronizes all your PDFs on the site. Then you’re good to go. You can insert flipbooks inside your posts right from the WordPress admin panel.

Download the free version of Issuu WordPress Flipbook Plugin!

The new Issuu API has fewer customization parameters than the old one but it works on mobiles and tablets. Old API lets you customize more options but works on desktop only. This Flipbook WordPress plugin offers 3 types of licenses. You can choose one from them.

  • Starter for $19
  • The premium of $35
  • Optimum for $269

What do users say about Issuu?

Works fine (if Flash is OK with you)

(@netbjarne)

6 years, 3 months ago

Once setup, Issuu PDF Sync works very smooth here, making it extremely easy to include PDF as “flipbooks” in my posts.

Sample: http://www.kegnaes-friskole.dk/penalhuset/

So if you can live with the Flash based (and thus less mobile friendly) results of Issuu, Issuu PDF Sync may be just fine for you…

Lack of support lets this plugin down

(@hennyc)

5 years, 5 months ago

It looks to be a very good plugin, however there appears to be no-one responding to support issues. I have an issue where I cannot get the pdf to sync with issuu, but have had no response to my log.
I will have to find something else if this lack of response continues.

6. Yumpu ePaper Publishing

Yumpu ePaper Publishing

Update: It seems Yumpu is now not available for free. Whenever you enter the API key you get an error message.

yumpu error message

This flipbook plugin is also open-source software. There are two different ways you can use Yumpu on your site. The first one is by publishing your e-paper to yumpu.com and integrating it to your site using embed code and the second one is by using the Yumpu e-paper publishing WordPress plugin.

To publish your e-paper to yumpu.com, you need to create a Yumpu account which is free. And then immediately you can upload your pdf file and convert it into a powerful magazine. But your free account will only let you publish at most 3 magazines. For more, you’ll need to see Yumpu’s pricing list and buy it according to your needs.

This flipbook software enables you to upload your pdf file and converts it into an online readable ePaper on your website. Every Yumpu ePaper can simply be integrated into your website by using an embed code. There are many options you can choose from when generating the embed code. For example, you can define color, size, border, and much more.

Meanwhile, to use the Yumpu e-paper publishing WordPress plugin you need to download the flipbook WordPress plugin from wordpress.org and activate it. and then you will see a message saying:

Get your Yumpu.com API Key from your account and add it here. You can get more informations here.

This message clarifies that the Yumpu flipbook plugin expects you to create an account on yumpu.com. You can only get access to the functionalities of the plugin after creating the account and getting the API key token from your account.

Yumpu API code

To be honest, when we first tried Yumpu, We felt this process was unnecessary. But yet, went through it because we were in need to experiment with the plugin.

Using this flipbook WordPress plugin, you can insert the ePaper into your posts and pages via shortcodes. Your visitors can then read your publications, without having to download the whole document. No installation of any browser plugins is necessary. You can read the ePaper with Flash or HTML 5.

What do users say about Yumpu?

Would recommend

(@timmytopaz)

1 year, 7 months ago

Does the job really well and it is straightforward to use. Definitely one of the most reliable emagazine plugins out there. Would recommend 

Installation was super easy!!

(@ankitraj30)

1 year, 8 months ago

Installation was a breeze. I actually thought it will slow down my WordPress site but speed of my site is literally the same before and after installation.

7. FlowPaper WordPress flipbook plugin

Flowpaper

This is another good flipbook WordPress plugin. It is a PDF viewer plugin that allows you to embed your PDF catalogs, magazines as well as brochures as flipbooks on your website in HTML5 format. This Flipbook WordPress plugin supports both light and dark themes.

FlowPaper also supports the majority of browsers and devices. It is currently limited to PDF documents that are 15 megabytes or smaller for PDFs that are not uploaded to the FlowPaper cloud.

FlowPaper is a free flipbook WordPress plugin but you’re only allowed to use up to 10 pages. Unlike the previously discussed plugin, this plugin is a bit costly as it costs a $99 fee for the basic upgrade, $145+ for more advanced versions.

Download the free version!

Click here for premium!

How to use the Flowpaper flipbook plugin?

It is very simple to create a flipbook in WordPress using the Flowpaper flipbook plugin. Just upload a pdf file to your media; download, install, and activate Flowpaper; create a post and write a shortcode. The shortcode looks like this

[flipbook pdf=”http://full-url/document.pdf"]

Where the URL should be the URL of your pdf file. We have tested Flowpaper with two pdf files. Watch the video below to learn how to use this plugin.

What do users say about FlowPaper?

Easy to use forever to load

AgentP90 May 30, 2019

This tool is easy to use, however it takes a while to load on the site.

Not working with Thrive Apprentice

annssi June 30, 2019

Does not work with Thrive Apprentice (Rise Theme). I tried inserting the code in html box and in text box. Tried https and http Received the following error: Proxy Error The proxy server could not handle the request GET /flipbook/. Reason: Error during SSL Handshake with remote server

Conclusion:

There are very few deserving WordPress flipbook plugins, we can count on our fingers of one hand, that can create realistic flipbooks for our site. Above listed plugins are capable to create stunning responsive flipbooks that are easy to use as well. When you call a flipbook plugin ‘perfect’, is when it meets your requirement criteria. From the above list, I hope you found the best free Flipbook WordPress Plugin for your purpose.

However, if a 3D flipbook with the real feel of page-turning effect is your priority then dearFlip and Interactive can be good options for you. Similarly, if CSS fallback is on your must-be list, DFlip can be your cup of tea. It can switch 3D flipbooks to faster and less CPU-intensive CSS flipbooks so that you can offer your service for very old browsers as well.

During the experiment with each plugin, I went through the reviews of these plugins. Here I want to share one review with you all which is very impressive.

for Customer Support

by Modelitup 1 month ago

Fantastic plugin, quality code (no bugs), and very fast support.
Packed with useful features, works responsively and with ease.

I sent in a question asking if an option was available though it wasn’t the plugin developer sent me a fast revision & response on how to make it work the way I needed it too.

5/5 highly recommended.

Awesome! Right? This review was posted on Codecanyon for DearFlip. It made me think about DFlip one more time. We suggest you use DFlip because of its great customizability as well. We can experience great support from the development team of DFlip for sure. Moreover, it is the best-rated plugin in Codecanyon and has frequent updates.

After experimenting and writing about different WordPress plugins, today we wrote about Best 5 Free Flipbook WordPress Plugins!

There was a time, We were in your place. Confused and scrolling throughout the web to find the right plugin. Then we started testing each flipbook plugin with two different pdf files and then found the suitable one. We hope this article will help you optimize your time on finding a suitable flipbook plugin.

Thank you for reading. 🙏 Eagerly waiting for your feedback!

Discloser: This article includes affiliate links.

Read more: Best Joomla Flipbook Extensions

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