January 2020: Do you even need a page builder anymore?

This meetup features a head to head competition between Beaver Builder, a popular page builder plugin, and the block editor (formerly known as Gutenberg) as it’s been released in WordPress 5.3. We’ll build identical (as close as we can get, anyway) landing pages and compare notes on the process and outcome.

Block Editor Feedback (Robin)

In general, I feel like I’m able to accomplish what I want with the block editor. The page we were duplicating had quite a bit of custom output, like lists with icons as bullets, which would require custom work to replicate, so I didn’t bother.

I had to do some creative columns within columns to get the desired output in some places (three columns, each of which had an image and text…the sample theme has aggressive margins on images, so a standard image/text paragraph didn’t work. Instead, I did two columns, with the image being small–however, on mobile, that backfired, because the columns went to full width by default).

I will say that one tool which would have helped me, but which I did not use because we were trying to keep things clean, is a plugin I wrote to make managing the block editor easier (it’s free so I’ll plug it here: Six/Ten Press Block Editor). It allows you to replace the default block editor styles with something a bit less opinionated, as well as manage custom color palettes and some other block editor related features. I’ve just added it to the WP Chattanooga site to allow us to switch the front page from a widget based page to a block based page–because the theme we are using here doesn’t include the support needed for that.

Page Builder Feedback (Beau)

I felt I was able to replicate most of the key pieces of the page we were building using Beaver Builder fairly easily using the standard Beaver Builder plugin. Beaver Builder allowed me to override the theme styles so I could make certain elements full width.

Making row backgrounds with colors and images was fairly easy while I did have to adjust the margins and padding quite a bit to display correctly on mobile. Duplicating modules and rows was easy which sped up content layout as I only had to tweak fonts and sizes once per section.

There are a lot more modules available in the pro version of Beaver Builder and if you also purchase Beaver Themer but what comes in the basic version of Beaver Builder is intuitive and easy to use.