Are you looking for a new WordPress page builder?
If so, you may have heard of Beaver Builder during your research. Since its release in 2014, Beaver Builder has become one of the most popular drag-and-drop page builder plugins for WordPress.
In this article, we’ll conduct a Beaver Builder review to see if it’s the best solution for your WordPress website.
How Beaver Builder Works
Beaver Builder is a WordPress plugin that makes customizing your website easier. It features a visual interface where you can drag and drop page elements to build out your webpage without CSS, Javascript, and other coding languages.
Once you enter the Beaver Builder interface, you’ll see a minimal layout. From there, you can explore the different settings, widgets, and templates and start adding content to the page.
Let’s say you want to add a heading with an image and some text and spacing. To do this, click the blue plus icon and drag a content block from the panel onto your page.
As you add new content blocks, you’ll see a popup with content and styling settings. You can drag the popup to anywhere on the page to move it out of the way of the website builder.
In addition, you can click the Templates and Rows tabs to import premade templates and access more settings. We’ll go into these features and explore the ease of use in more detail next.
Beaver Builder Features
The Beaver Builder plugin has both a free standard plan and pro paid version. And like many free and premium WordPress plugins, each version has different features, add-ons, and requirements.
The Lite version of Beaver Builder has limited page-building features. This means you can only make simple pages. In contrast, Beaver Builder Pro has everything you need to make powerful pages for your business and use it on unlimited sites.
In this section of our Beaver Builder review, we’ll mainly focus on the features of Beaver Builder Pro.
Basic Content Blocks
Both Beaver Builder Free and Pro offer a set of basic content blocks similar to the WordPress editor (or Gutenberg), which include:
- Audio
- Button
- Heading
- HTML
- Icon
- Photo
- Text Editor
- Sidebar
- Video
Advanced Content Blocks
In addition, the premium version of Beaver Builder offers many more features. It includes all the basic content blocks, plus modules for:
- Media
- Actions
- Layout
- Info
- Posts
For instance, you can add content sliders and galleries to showcase your images. Or you can even build custom Call-to-Action buttons to improve your conversions.
Moreover, you can customize any row or column with background colors, a custom background image, and more.
Beaver Builder Templates
Alongside the various content blocks, Beaver Builder allows you to import premade templates. This makes it a lot easier to build your page without starting from scratch.
You can choose from over 30 landing page templates and 33 content page designs.
You also have the option to save your own templates, including rows and modules. This is excellent for web designers as you won’t waste hours re-creating the same modules. Instead, you can save them as templates and reuse them anywhere.
Mobile Responsive Editing
Responsive editing in Beaver Builder is relatively straightforward. Just click the Tools dropdown menu and select the Responsive Editing option.
From there, you can see how your page looks on tablets and mobile phones by clicking the relevant icons at the top of the page.
Access and Restriction
Another useful feature included with Beaver Builder is User Access. These settings allow you to grant or restrict hands-on access to specific builder settings based on their user role. This is helpful if you want to lock your design and only want certain people, such as writers, to edit the content.
For example, you can allow specific page roles to edit:
- Rows
- Columns
- Modules
And access the builder admin menu and template exporter.
Beaver Builder Pricing
Beaver Builder offers 3 different pricing options: Standard, Pro, and Agency.
Each tier allows you to use Beaver Builder on as many websites as you like. They also provide priority support until your license expires in a year. In addition, you can access premium modules and templates to use on client sites (and your own).
The only real difference between each plan is that you can only access the Beaver Builder Theme with the Pro and Agency plan. Plus, multisite support is only available in the higher plans.
In essence, the Beaver Builder Theme is a framework integrated with the page builder plugin. It makes it a lot easier to build a page with Beaver Builder without any of the incompatibility issues many users experience.
For instance, without the Beaver Themer, some WordPress themes don’t display correctly, and some settings are incompatible. But with the Beaver Builder Theme, you won’t experience any of those issues.
Lastly, Beaver Builder’s Agency plan offers white labeling. This means you can remove the Beaver Builder branding and replace it with your own.
Beaver Builder Review: Pros and Cons
After researching this Beaver Builder review, let’s look at the pros and cons so you can make an informed decision.
Beaver Builder Pros
- User-friendly interface that’s easy to navigate
- Variety of customization options
- Drag-and-drop front-end editing
- Responsive and SEO-friendly design
- Doesn’t use shortcodes, so no messy code is left behind
- Lets you work with custom post types
Beaver Builder Cons
- The cheapest plan is expensive
- WordPress theme compatibility issues
- Limited landing page templates
- Lacks animations
- No undo and redo options
- Slow development with a lack of new features
Despite Beaver Builder’s limitations, it’s still an easy-to-use WordPress page builder plugin you can use to create amazing-looking websites.
Best Beaver Builder Alternative: SeedProd
If you’re still unsure if Beaver Builder is the right plugin for your WordPress website, we have an alternative that’s both easy and powerful: SeedProd.
Let’s dive in and learn how SeedProd works in comparison to Beaver Builder.
How SeedProd Works
Like Beaver Builder, SeedProd is a drag-and-drop WordPress theme builder. You can do everything in SeedProd that you can with Beaver Builder, yet it also offers a lot more functionality.
First off, SeedProd is a fully functional WordPress theme builder. Unlike Beaver Builder which requires you to download a separate theme, SeedProd has theme building functionality built right into the plugin.
SeedProd’s user interface is also different. When opening the visual editor, you see a 2 column layout. On the left are the different content blocks and sections, while on the right is a live preview of your landing page.
This is a much better layout than Beaver Builder because there are no popups to move around the screen, which block your view of the page. Instead, everything is visible in a single glance.
That said, SeedProd works similarly to Beaver Builder by dragging content onto your page visually. As a result, you won’t need to hire a developer to get things looking how you want.
Plus, if you make a mistake, you can easily undo or redo changes instantly. This is a feature that Beaver Builder lacks.
SeedProd Features
Since SeedProd has a lot more functionality than Beaver Builder, here’s a side-by-side comparison of its key features.
Basic Content Blocks
SeedProd’s standard blocks include everything you need to make a landing page for your WordPress site.
For example, it includes:
- Headline
- List
- Image
- Divider
- Column
- Text
- Button
- Video
- Spacer
You can access all of these blocks in the free version of SeedProd, which is available from the WordPress repository.
Advanced Content Blocks
SeedProd also offers a wide variety of advanced landing page blocks, such as:
- Animated Headlines
- Contact Form
- Countdown Timer
- Giveaway
- Optin Form
- Social Media Profiles & Buttons
- Pricing Tables
- Dynamic Text
- And more
It also integrates with WooCommerce to offer blocks dedicated to online stores. For example, you can use the checkout block to create custom checkout pages, the Cart block to create a custom shopping cart, plus product pages, and more.
Moreover, it includes blocks that center around building your WordPress theme, including:
- Blog posts
- Post title
- Post content
- Author box
- Comments
- Featured image
In addition to blocks, SeedProd also allows you to use Sections. These are premade block and column layouts that are designed for you.
For instance, you can add Header and Footer sections, Call to Action areas, FAQs, and even a Features area to your landing page. Plus, if you love a particular design, you can save it to reuse later on another page.
If that wasn’t enough, you can completely customize your design with Global Settings. Here you can set custom fonts, colors and even add a full-width background image at the click of a button.
SeedProd Templates
SeedProd comes with over 170+ professionally designed landing page templates. And unlike Beaver Builder, it offers several starter WordPress themes to build an entire website from scratch.
Additionally, SeedProd’s templates can be filtered by landing page type or Industry, such as:
New templates are added to the library every week, making it even easier to design beautiful pages. And just like its landing page blocks, you can save any SeedProd template to use again.
As well as templates, SeedProd also has 4 built-in page modes:
- Coming Soon – Instantly add a coming soon screen to your website.
- Maintenance Mode – Put your WordPress site in maintenance mode with a single click.
- 404 Page – Display a custom 404 page for broken web pages.
- Login Page – Customize your WordPress login page.
The beauty of page modes is it adds advanced functionality to your website without the need to install multiple WordPress plugins. SeedProd handles it all in a single plugin.
Mobile Responsive Editing
Mobile editing with SeedProd is super easy. Just click the mobile icon along the bottom of the builder to switch back and forth between mobile and desktop mode. From there, you can continue editing your page until it looks perfect.
In addition, you can adjust the typography of any page block by device type without switching previews. Just click the mobile or desktop icon in the block typography settings to adjust the text for that screen size.
Access and Restriction
Like Beaver Builder, SeedProd offers advanced Access Controls for its Coming Soon and Maintenance Mode pages. You can restrict access by User Role, IP address and even choose the specific URL where your coming soon page should display.
The good news for website developers and designers is it also allows you to set a Bypass URL. This means you can create a password-protected link that clients can use to preview your work, completely bypassing your coming soon page.
SeedProd Pricing
SeedProd offers plans for a range of budgets, starting from only $39.50 per year.
The Pro plan is one of the most comprehensive, offering every SeedProd feature in basic and plus, along with the addition of:
- WooCommerce Blocks
- Domain Mapping
- Dynamic Text
With the Elite plan, you get all of the above plus a Growth license for RafflePress, the #1 Giveaway, and Contest Plugin for WordPress.
SeedProd: Pros and Cons
To help summarize what SeedProd offers, here’s a look at the Pros and cons of this powerful WordPress page builder.
SeedProd Pros
- Easy drag-and-drop builder
- Create whole WordPress themes without code
- Extensive template library
- Endless customization options
- Content blocks for every need
- Premade page sections
- Premium email marketing integrations
- Powerful access controls
- Domain mapping
- Dynamic text replacement
SeedProd Cons
- You can only use it on WordPress websites
- Limited free version
Beaver Builder Review: Is It the Best Page Builder?
After conducting this review, it’s easy to see there are better alternatives to Beaver Builder on the market compared to other page builders. In our opinion, SeedProd is hands down the best page builder for WordPress.
It has all of the features you’d get from Beaver Builder, with the addition of an integrated theme builder, more templates, better customization options, 4 page modes, and advanced functionality.
Even better, SeedProd won’t slow down your website and comes with a more attractive price tag.
With SeedProd, creating high-converting landing pages is a breeze.
So what are you waiting for?
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