Best Page Building Plugins For Membership Websites in 2025
Looking for the best page-building plugins for membership websites in 2025? Explore top picks to create stunning, user-friendly pages easily.
Discover the top page-building plugins for membership websites in 2025! In this video, we dive into the essential tools to elevate your online community, streamline user experience, and boost engagement. From user-friendly interfaces to advanced customization options, we cover everything you need to know to make an informed choice. Don’t miss out on optimizing your membership site. With host Jonathan Denwood and Kurt von Ahnen.
Best Page Building Plugins For Websites in 2025
WordPress Gutenberg Technology-Based Builders
Kadence WP
Prices Express $69 | Plus $169 | Ultimate $299 per year
GeneratePress
Prices: One $149 per year
Spectra
Prices: Spectra Pro $59 | Essential Toolkit $99 | Business Toolkit $199 per year
None Gutenberg Page Builders
Elementor
Prices Essential $60 | Advanced Solo $84 | Advanced $99 | Expert $204 per year
Bricks
Prices $79 per year
Breakdance
Prices Free | Pro $99 per year
Divi
https://www.elegantthemes.com/gallery/divi/
Prices Divi $89 | Divi Pro $277 per year
https://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/general-news/the-future-of-divi
Brizy
https://www.brizy.io/
Prices Personal $59 per year
Beaver Builder
Prices: Starter $89 per year
This Week’s Sponsors
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Convesio: Convesio
Omnisend: Omnisend
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:42.470] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the… Three, two, one. Welcome back to the Membership Machine Show. This is episode 120. In this episode, we will discuss some of the best WordPress page-building plugin solutions. Suppose you want to build a Membership Community Focus website in the first half of 2025. We’ve discussed this before, but it was a while ago. It’s an important subject. It’s a key part of the technology stack that you must choose if you build on WordPress, and we think you should do that. My great co-host, Kirek, is with me. So, Kirek, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers quickly?
[00:02:01.970] – Kurt von Ahnen
Sure. Kurt von Ahnen. I own Mañana Nomas. We focus primarily on membership and learning type websites and work directly with the good folks at WP Tonic.
[00:02:12.250] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. It should be a great show. We’re looking at the leading page-building and website-building solutions on WordPress. We’ve tried them all ourselves, so we got some great insights. But before we go into this great show’s meat and potatoes members, I’ve got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. Also, I want to point out that we’ve got a great resource. We have a highly discounted course that will show you how to build your membership website from beginning to end on WordPress, utilizing the most modern best plugins and technologies. This course costs typically around $50, but you can get it at half price. Plus, we created a list of the best WordPress plugins and services with special offers from the sponsors. So loads of great goodies. You can get all this by going over to wp-tonic. Com/deals, wp-tonic. Com/deals, and get all the goodies there. So let’s start, Kirek. So, where do you think we are building a membership, Stroke Learning Management System using Lifter LMS or LearnDash, or about three solutions I would recommend?
[00:04:02.640] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s the second probably biggest, you could say the first biggest choice regarding WordPress technology, what page builder you will use. How would you broach this topic initially if you were consulting with somebody?
[00:04:25.840] – Kurt von Ahnen
It’s such an interesting topic, Jonathan, and you’re right. We have covered this before, but when you look at the conversations you have as an agency, week in, week out, it’s like it’s got to be covered again. We’ve got to keep the conversation going. When I consult with a customer about how to build their project, their website, or what page builder to consider, it comes down to use case. Am I talking to somebody who understands WordPress and the Internet and manages a website? And do they have the mental bandwidth to add something else to their box of tools?
And in most cases, course creators and business owners might say, so you have to be clear, they might say that they’re up for it, but realistically, they want to do what they do best. They want to run their business. They want to focus on what they do and not have to learn a whole new IT vertical to be able to provide it. That usually determines the pathway my agency will take in building a project for a client. I might prefer to use Bricks, but realistically, they can’t make the edits after I’m done using Bricks, so I’ll stick with something like Cadence and still use the block editor.
[00:05:45.120] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I see where you’re coming from, but I think there are two areas that I would like to add. Number one, if they’re utilizing their existing page builder and are happy with it, asking them to move to another page builder is probably not good advice. The only argument against that is that there’s one or two solutions on the list that we’ll probably be talking about, and I would feel that I would have to advise the person if they could not use them. But it’s a debatable argument because if they invested a lot of time and they’re happy with it, there’s a good argument for staying with the devil that you know. The second insight, I think, is that there are two fundamental buckets here. There’s the Gutenberg-based technology solution. Gutenberg is the underlying technology that has developed over the past six years. It’s a new metaphor for building a WordPress-powered website. It’s in the core of WordPress. You can create a website using Gutenberg technology without an additional plugin. I would strongly advise against doing that. I think you can use Gutenberg, and I would recommend it to the majority of clients that I consult with.
[00:07:40.560] – Jonathan Denwood
I think, a Gutenberg solution plugin can provide a great solution. But then there’s a second bucket that are non-Gutenberg page building solutions, and they’re fine as well. As long as you understand what you’re getting involved in. They are aimed at different types of end users, in my opinion. And there’s strengths and weaknesses in each of these separate buckets, as I put it. Do you think I’m correct in this saying that it is these two buckets, really?
[00:08:30.010] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, and I really want to commend you on the way you sidestepped around what I would… We’re going to talk about it later, what we would recommend or not recommend. If someone’s already using a certain tool and they’re comfortable with it and they have that knowledge base, then absolutely, stick with it as long as it matches the growth strategy that you’re looking to forward.
[00:08:53.090] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, there’s one particular one that we’re going to talk about where I think is clear performance and usability consequences. Well, there’s two actually, but there’s one that I think unless the client… We can only advise, we don’t insist, we provide some of these solutions. There’s one that we generally recommend, but we can provide a couple of the others in our hosting plans. But there’s one particular one I would strongly advise a person not to use it, the present version and this upgrade, but that’s in flux. It’s not clear when that will go public anytime soon, fully public. So it’s a difficult one. Are there any things, obviously your experience on all the leading WordPress learning management systems, but you have a very detailed knowledge of utilizing it on Lifter NMS. Are there any of the ones that we’re talking about that you think people will have to understand strengths and drawbacks when it comes to Lifter NMS, specifically?
[00:10:22.080] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, there’s a couple of things, a couple of consistent things that come up. For instance, with Lifter And that’s on the dashboard page, there is a menu full of endpoints, and the display of those endpoints in cadence in certain templated formats doesn’t break out very well. So you need to use some custom CSS to straighten that out, at least until they fix that in a patch. The other thing that typically happens is people will get all excited about Elementor, for example, which we’ll discuss later. But in certain cases, you have to remember, Lifter LMS is like other platforms. It’s using dynamic content to populate a content space or a placeholder inside a template, right? And so in some cases, you’ll have a duplication of that dynamic content in your forward-facing pages, and you’ll need to go in and delete that through the builder so that your forward-facing content looks correct. Neither of those are dead ends, right? It’s not like, Oh, my website’s broken. But there are friction points that an experienced user can get through pretty quickly, but an inexperienced user may find to be quite the obstacle.
[00:11:43.420] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think that’s fantastic. I think there’s a bigger area, but this is just my view. Specifically with Lifter LMS, they provide their own theme, which they’ve developed internally. But I cannot, in all, honestly recommend it, not because it’s not been coded well. I’m sure it’s up to the highest standards, but there’s a subdivide, even in Gutenberg technology, folks, and this divide is called full-site editing. And Cadence, thank God, in my opinion, they’ve been discussing it, but I think they, I might be wrong about this, folks, they have decided to back off on it. It’s using Gutenberg technology, but it isn’t utilizing full-site editing. We could spend a whole episode explaining the ins and outs of full-site editing. I have no… And I think Kirk is in agreement, we’re not going to go there because I think unless you’re a web developer, WordPress professional, you would not find that conversation totally useful. But take it to me, in my opinion, full-site editing isn’t good enough, hasn’t been fully worked out and built out. So I, in all consciousness, could recommend it. Other people would have a different opinion, especially when it comes to certain features.
[00:13:28.490] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s my position on it. There was something else, but I’ve just forgotten what that was, actually. The other factor is that how a page builder or a theme works with a Pacific learning management system or a membership plugin is important. But A page builder is much more than that, because in a successful membership website, it’s much more, how can I build landing pages quickly? How How can the… If it comes with a form builder as part of the package, how easy does that work with something like Fluent CRM or W WP Funnel, which are the two that we supply and we recommend. How easy does that page builder work with other plugins, key plugins, that should be part of your technology stack for your membership website. Marketing, optimization, landing page, building functionality are two key things that you would find in any competitive SaaS software as a service platform competitor. To me, it’s not just a question of Even if you were dealing with an organization that wasn’t directly interested in direct sales, they still probably need landing pages or unable to send email and communication. So these extra features are important in the discussion, in my opinion.
[00:15:37.120] – Jonathan Denwood
What do you reckon, Kurt?
[00:15:39.750] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’m tracking most of what you were talking about. I got a little held up on the full site editing references that you were making, to be honest. I keep going back to use case and who the audience is, and I let my brain get these gears mixed up. But I think for a general marketing level website, right? So general, I want to put a picture in. I want to change the heading. I want to add the text. And even from an LMS perspective, and you were talking about the CRM tools, interoperability with the different plugins. Full site editing, for the most part, does that. I think where full site editing is, one of your terms, misses the plot or something like that, or is a with the fairies. Where it gets where it’s missing is people that want to take it to the next level and want to customize this and customize that and move this and modify and and do things other than just add or subtract content. And I think when you try to get like super pixel perfect design, then yeah, full site editing is probably a little bit more than people want to bite off.
[00:16:55.630] – Kurt von Ahnen
But talking about the interoperability with, I can’t even say it right, with the different plugins and stuff, most of the tools that we’re going to discuss, I think, are pretty compatible with each other, right? So it’s not too much of a thing. Where I get lost in the weeds, and bear with me on this tangent or this branch, is clients that send me some link to some theme forest theme or something like that with built in, God knows what in their walled garden. And then those things don’t work correctly. But that’s not referring to the page builder. That’s referring to the theme and the weird functions that people tried to add to their site through the theme process instead of using plugins. I think that’s where things get lost, especially for new people in the market space.
[00:17:46.960] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, it’s very confusing, folks, because there’s still the whole market of traditional themes. But most page builders have a set of internal or with Cadence, we’ve built at WP Tonic a number of themes that are offered as part… Well, themes, Cadence calls them starter websites, but each page builder has a different terminology for starter websites or themes, and that adds to the confusion, folks. But I tend to say that you have classic themes and you have full-editing themes. One of the problems with full-editing is the number of themes that are being designed to utilize that technology is still very small, folks. Most page builders have what I call starter websites, and the bigger ones have quite extensive libraries, and then they have third-party providers that build on it. So that’s one of the other criticisms. It’s not slightly unfair, but full-site editing has been around for the past couple of years, and still the number of themes that are compatible to it are quite minimum. I think most people now are looking at page builders, Gutenberg or non Gutenberg. That’s one of my criticisms of full-site editing, because I think unlike people like us, most end users aren’t aware of the situation.
[00:19:49.940] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s why I have a problem. I think in the second half, we’re going to look at some of the main page builders that you can utilize. I think we’ve had a good initial discussion of the main things that you’ve got to understand to make an educated choice, folks. We’re going to go for a mid break and we’ll be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. We’ve had a great intro about page builders in this second half. We’re going to be looking at some of the main ones that you should consider But before we go into the second half of the show, I want to point out, if you’re looking for a great resource, a great free resource that will help you build your membership website, if you’ve got any questions, We’ve got a great resource at WP Tonic. That’s the Membership Machine Show Facebook Group. It’s totally free. You go to Facebook, put the Membership Machine Show into Facebook search, The group will come up and you can join for free. I’m always putting new content on there. It’s got a small but really great group of people, developers and people like yourself.
[00:21:12.670] – Jonathan Denwood
Like I say, if you got any questions, that come into your mind after you’ve listened or watched this show, you can go there and put your questions and we will try and answer them. So let’s go straight into it, Kurt. Cadence WP, the one that we recommend the most at WP Tonic, what do you think of its strengths and weaknesses?
[00:21:41.790] – Kurt von Ahnen
First off, I want to be very clear that there’s a difference between Cadence and then Cadence Pro, Cadence blocks, Cadence, right? Because it has those different elements that-It’s not confusing, is it? No. So let’s be super, super clear about what we’re… Because we’re getting a pretty big pat on the back to Cadence and bragging about its capabilities. But we’re using Cadence Pro with Cadence blocks with the suite, right? It’s the whole thing. So people will get confused. They’ll say, what What’s Kurt even talking about? Cadence is a theme, and you can load Cadence into a WordPress build and use the Cadence theme, no problem. And you have the standard block elements and block editing features in the block editor. But Cadence Pro basically enhances all of those editing tools and gives you much more control over the front-facing design of your website. And so to say it’s intuitive, I think, is an understatement. The more I work with it, the better it gets, to be honest with you, Jonathan. If you want to change the padding or the margin or the size of something or have something size in a responsive way to the size of the block I mean, it just works.
[00:23:02.740] – Kurt von Ahnen
It’s simple. And I might be going out on a limb here, but I mean, it seems super lightweight. Page speeds are good. It’s effective and it’s easy. And I’m going out on a limb, because we onboard the clients at WP Tonic. So when someone’s completely new, we give them a little bit of training like, Hey, here’s your website, and here’s how to make some changes to it. And we have that course that you mentioned. So we make it easy. And it seems like the adoption ability of that as a page builder, if we call it a page builder, the adoption is very easy and intuitive.
[00:23:44.940] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it’s drawbacks or more around Gutenberg because it adopts the Gutenberg interface, which isn’t terrible, but it isn’t, to be honest. After a couple of hours and watching some videos, you’re going to be okay with it. And the more you use with it, the more you’re going to like it. But it’s not one of those intuitive interfaces that you practically know from almost the minute you start using it. But Kirk disagrees with me there. He thinks I’m a bit harsh on it. And he might be right because I’ve got baggage. I’ve got baggage from using other… Sorry, go on.
[00:24:26.070] – Kurt von Ahnen
I was just going to say, if we think about the actual steps of editing between Cadence and a different builder, like Beaver Builder, Elementor, Bricks, any of those. There’s that extra friction step where you have to say, Edit in the WordPress editor or edit in this builder, right? When you have Cadence, you just click You edit the page, and then you just click on what you want to edit, and you edit it right there. And I think that that is part of where that intuitive nature of it steps in, because you’re not having to activate or open up another tab or something. It’s right there on the page. And Then you can easily click Preview to open a new tab and preview the front-end to see what it looks like when you’re done.
[00:25:05.840] – Jonathan Denwood
Before we go on to the next one, folks, they do offer a free version. It’s the blocks, different sections, different functionality you get from a library of blocks, and Gutenberg native provides a set of blocks, widgets, whatever terminology you want to use. With the free version of Cadence, you get an extension on that library of widgets blocks. But with the paid versions, you get the theme and access to their own starter theme It makes the whole process more intuitive and more easier. That starts with the Express at 69 plus is 169. At the ultimate, it’s 299 per year. I think it’s not just how many websites you can do. I think you get access to extra add-ons and extra functionality at the different levels. Some of the other solutions, we just quote a single website because the extra price is you don’t get any extra functionality. You just get access to being able to build out extra websites. On to the next one, another popular one, especially for more technically-minded quasar professionals or professionals using Gutenberg technology, but they provide their own blocks and their own websites, starter websites, is Generate Press. It is very popular in the WordPress semi or full professional community because it’s got a reputation in building super fast websites.
[00:27:10.720] – Jonathan Denwood
I have a smaller team behind it, but I’ve got minimum experience on using it, but the team behind it are enormously experienced. It was lacking in starter websites. They don’t exactly use that term, but they are I’ve built that out, actually. I don’t think it’s as extensive as Cadence, but they have built it out. It’s got other features that really appeal to the WordPress designer, developer, to a level of control that Cadence doesn’t have. What would you say about Generate Press?
[00:27:55.630] – Kurt von Ahnen
Generate Press does something that I really, really enjoy, and that is their selection of patterns is not like starter sites. So let me be more descriptive. A starter site is like a templated page or templated series of pages where the graphics are in place and placeholder images are in place and text is already in place. And so a lot of beginners really like startup templates like that, because honestly, beginners have a hard time visualizing How do I build a website on a blank page? And so it’s all there. But what Generate Press does, they have the starter sites and the template and examples. They have that, but they also have this pattern library. And the pattern library is not styled with colors and graphics and sample pictures and text. It’s just the layout. And when you have a series of layout templates, to me, this is the next level of of professional builder. This is the next level from you have a beginner and then you have this next level. That’s, Hey, just give me the format and I can put the graphics and text in. I think Generate Press is a really efficient, elegant way of giving you that content and giving you that head start without putting all that extra colour-enforcing style and fluff on you, if that makes sense.
[00:29:24.960] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s great. On to the next Gutenberg one and the last one in the Gutenberg bucket, Spectra. It’s full-site editing, so it gets a black mark straight away for me, but it comes from a very good company. It’s going to be fast. I don’t know if it’s going to be as fast as Generate Press or Cadence. Starts at $59, Essential, 99, and business, I know. I think like Cadence, you do get additional functionality at these different price levels, not just the amount of websites you can build out. I wouldn’t have any problem I’m already using it. I think the other two that are in the Gutenberg bucket, I would recommend more than them. But other people disagree with me. What would you say?
[00:30:29.670] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, Well, this is where I get to be a little more transparent about myself. I am a Spectra user. It’s one of the tools that I keep in my little quiver of tools. I was an ASTRO Pro client for a long time, and I have a lot of projects built in ASTRO and ASTRO Pro, and Spectra was their sister product. And so ASTRO, ASTRO Pro, Spectra. And to be more transparent, if you’re into those templated website ideas that we were talking about with the starter websites, ASTRA was one of the first I knew of that had a real AI builder with that ZipWP connection. And man, with ZipWP and a paragraph about what your business is about and Spectra and ASTRO Pro in place, I was like, bada boop, bada bing. I got a sample website to show a client pretty dang quickly. And then you can work on filtering in what do you want for real content. What do you want for copy pictures and images and stuff? So I find Spectra to be a really great tool for what you’re doing in that space. But then working with Jonathan the way that I have, I’ve become much more segmented in my thinking.
[00:31:45.790] – Kurt von Ahnen
So if I’m working with a customer that is an ASTRA customer, ASTRO Pro, I stick with the Spectra. If I’m working with Cadence, I do the Cadence, Cadence Pro, Cadence Blocks. Even though Cadence Blocks can be added to almost any other theme in the blocks arena, I use it with Cadence and Cadence products. I seem to be very compartmentalized in my usage, even though that’s not a requirement. That seems to be the way that my brain works.
[00:32:12.500] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m going to put you on the spot. If you had a new client and they were saying they were looking at Cadence or Spectra, which one would you recommend them?
[00:32:23.980] – Kurt von Ahnen
It really is a toss-up because I have access to both. I Well, you did put me on the spot, so I’m going to give you the real answer. I have them look at the sample websites, right? So take a look at the starter website. If there’s one that really pops off for you, that’s the direction we’ll go. If they don’t have a choice, if they don’t have something that just really pops off, I’m probably going to put them on Cadence. And the reason, and this speaks to my laziness, is I’m already doing so many projects with you and Cadence that my comfort my confidence is that much higher in Cadence. I know where everything is. And when you don’t use something for a while, you tend to get a little lazy on it. And so every time I get into an astrocyte, again, I have to relearn where some of the controls are. But that’s with any page builder.
[00:33:17.000] – Jonathan Denwood
I don’t think there’s much. Some people say cadence inherently is a bit quick in the spectra. I don’t actually know be quite truthful about it. The only thing that pushes me to it is that I like cadence. The only thing that you don’t have that baggage, you really don’t see it, is the full site editing because I just don’t like it, but it doesn’t bother you.
[00:33:43.140] – Kurt von Ahnen
There is one thing In the Spectra, Astra family that is incredibly annoying. So if they’re watching this, maybe they’ll pick up a nugget from me. When you use Cadence, you need one license code and it activates the whole thing thing. When When you use ASTRA, you have to keep that website open in another tab and you have to go, okay, activate ASTRA Pro. Okay, activate Spectra. Okay, activate essentials for Elementor, if that’s something you put in. Activate Each thing has its own license code, which is mind boggingly annoying when you have a multitude of sites that you’re working on. Whereas with Cadence, copy, paste, done, get on to build the website.
[00:34:28.770] – Jonathan Denwood
I forgot about that. It’s extremely annoying. It’s minor, but it’s annoying.
[00:34:33.350] – Kurt von Ahnen
Minor, but annoying. Yeah, so it’s good.
[00:34:34.720] – Jonathan Denwood
Very annoying.
[00:34:36.110] – Kurt von Ahnen
If I had to leverage a choice, I’d probably be in the Cadence Park.
[00:34:39.790] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. We’ve got another 20 minutes. I think it would be okay. So on to the non-Gutenberg page builders. The big daddy, the big beast is Alimator. They’re bringing out version 4 right now, and that’s bringing some CSS technology because Alimator, it was mostly had a bad rap about page speed, but this was mostly around adding a load of third-party widgets. But the only area where it had some real truth was mobile. It was extremely difficult to get an animator website to load fast on mobile. They’re bringing out versions to using some modern CSS elements to overcome, especially mobile, and they’re bringing in some others. It’s not bad, and it used to be my weapon of choice, and loads of people love it, and it’s got an enormous user base. I just think you’re just going to be better off using Cadence WP. But if you’re used to using it, we provide it at WP. It’s on it, we’ve got no problem. It does need good quality hosting, in my opinion. But whatever you do, it’s always going to be a little bit slower on Marble, in my in my opinion, and hopefully this new versions will overcome it.
[00:36:20.330] – Jonathan Denwood
It had something called divaritus. It just utilizes… This is a bit of web language here, folks. It just produced a load of unnecessary div containers everywhere. What’s your thoughts on Animator?
[00:36:42.230] – Kurt von Ahnen
I I bought in Elementor years and years ago, and then I struggled to figure out how to be decent at it. I had a big learning curve for me. And all of a sudden, I was paired up with someone that was using it almost exclusively, and I I picked up maybe confidence from them, but I started to get better and better with it, and to the point that it became a crutch for me, and I used it for a ton of projects. And then Elementor, a few years ago, went through this phase where every time there was a major update, all of my websites would break. And that happened for a while. And I said it publicly at the time, and I need to take some of that back. Maybe I amplified it more than it needed to be. But when you’re hosting 45, 50 websites and 12 of them go down on a Tuesday, that’s an exciting day, right? And so I got in the habit of not doing automatic updates, not being really paranoid about updating things and backing things up. Then other tools started to come out and I got more comfortable, like with Cadence or with Bricks or with something.
[00:37:52.940] – Kurt von Ahnen
I find it’s very rare for me now to do a new project in Elementor unless the customer requests it because of what we mentioned at the on top of the show, where they’re familiar with it and they want to use Elementor.
[00:38:04.570] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think there’s loads of people with very limited knowledge of web development that there’s millions of end users. Well, they say there’s millions, and I think it probably is. I don’t really see it as a beginner tool in any shape or form. I think you’d be better off with Gutenberg Glocks. It’s a quasar professional tool. The problem is they know that the professionals or semi-professional market that initially drove their growth, it’s not the flavor of the month anymore. It just isn’t.
[00:38:45.830] – Kurt von Ahnen
I want to bring something else up in this. Maybe I’m crossing a line and maybe it doesn’t make a difference, but some of these companies that are billed as page builders also became, they wanted to become hosting companies.
[00:38:59.960] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, they have definitely.
[00:39:01.960] – Kurt von Ahnen
When you go to their website now, like when I signed up for Elementor, I signed up for it, agency level web design. I got the thing, 399 a year, 299 a year, whatever it is, bills me every year, 50 websites. I still have that old grandfathered-in pricing package, and I’m thankful to have it. But when you go to their website, you get lost with, What are they actually trying to sell me? There’s other page builders that we’ve discussed or will discuss today.
[00:39:28.730] – Jonathan Denwood
You’re a newbie. I’ve got I’ll grab half a license that gives me a thousand websites. Especially how long- That’s the website. Yeah, it’s actually how long I’ve been doing this. So yeah, got nothing against it. On to the next one, Bricks. Now, Bricks, small team, really has become the flavor of the WordPress professional developer, designer, power implementer. Great tool. In my own opinion, In no shape or form is it a beginner stroke intermediate DIY product. I don’t know if you can customize it and then give it to… I just wouldn’t really I really wouldn’t want to give Alimator to a client in full admin usage. I definitely wouldn’t want to give bricks to a client, really. But you love it, and it’s a great tool, and I’ve got a… It is a great tool, and it’s great price for one site per year, $79 per year for one site license. Yeah. Yeah. What’s your view? You’ve been using it a fair bit. What’s your thoughts on it?
[00:40:48.430] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, this is one of those moments where it’s a really good thing that we do, redo these topics or rediscuss things. Because if you remember, the last time we covered bricks, I told you it didn’t work, right? Right on there, I was like, All I get is these yellow boxes all over the screen.
[00:41:02.310] – Jonathan Denwood
I don’t even-I think you were a little bit disperse. Yeah, that’s right. When did we do this? Over a year ago or something, wasn’t it?
[00:41:09.830] – Kurt von Ahnen
About a year ago. I’m one of those people that I’ll periodically give someone another shot, another shot, another shot. I went in and I rebuilt the Manana Nomas website on bricks as an experiment for myself, just to say, Hey, I can use this thing. And it really came together well. And there’s some other tools that I augmented it with. I started to play with automatic CSS and frames and all kinds of things. And as I dive deeper and deeper into bricks, I’m more and more appreciative of what it can do. But to your point, not for beginners. My learning curve was steep and is steep. I still have a way to go. And the things that I like bricks for are things that probably aren’t important to newcomers in the space. For instance, in bricks, I like the idea that I can make something class-based, and then I can fix it so that if I make a change to this block, it’s going to change for similar blocks throughout the whole website. Whereas when I’m in Elementor, when I edit that block, it’s that block, and then I have to copy the style and paste the styles, right?
[00:42:24.140] – Kurt von Ahnen
People entering the space, Jonathan, they don’t care about that because they’re building enterprise-level websites, 3,000 people.
[00:42:32.430] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s a total quasar professional discussion. Exactly. That’s what a lot of people, a lot of people in the WordPress professional community don’t get or they’re not being totally, I was going to say honest, or I think that would be unfair to say honest, that they choose to be semi-blind about the obvious. And we all can be We don’t see the obvious, and I think they’re not seeing the obvious. There’s certain tools that they’re pushing that are not aimed at the beginner, straight, intermediate person. No.
[00:43:16.110] – Kurt von Ahnen
Like I said, what I just talked about for me is enterprise-level websites, hundreds or thousands of pages deep with content, with this, with that. In those situations, what a blessing to have that tool at hand. But Again, very few, very few projects would I need that on.
[00:43:35.830] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. On to the next one, breakdance. I’m going to be controversial there. There’s some bits about breakdance, I don’t, but it’s nothing to do with the actual page builder. The actual page builder is fantastic if you’re a beginner intermediate. It’s got one of the best interfaces. It’s fast. I don’t think it’s as fast as Cadence WP or the Gutenberg solutions out there. Other people disagree with me. They’ve got a free product, and they’ve got the pro version that starts at $99 a year. They don’t really involved in the WordPress community. They don’t care. They’ve done their own thing. They have got a product that was aimed at a community which they peeved off a bit. This is really aimed at the beginner intermediate, and it’s a good product. I personally would recommend Cadence. It’s got more integration than that. But they’re also going back to try because they’re I’ve brought an update where they’re building a theme builder, and I think a API generator or something. They’re trying to claw back their more professional market. But I don’t know how successful they’re going to be about that. But for the beginner, I understand why it’s popular at the beginner and intermediate, even though I have problems with the parent company.
[00:45:16.750] – Jonathan Denwood
What’s your thoughts?
[00:45:18.650] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, it’s a winner on price. If you’re a budget shopper, the price is super affordable. There’s two things that I like about Breakdance that I really like about Breakdance. You already mentioned the user interface.
[00:45:33.330] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s very good, isn’t it?
[00:45:35.770] – Kurt von Ahnen
As part of that interface, the ability to place, size, and configure an image for display on the front end of the website, I think is one of the best that’s out there. It’s very intuitive. You can move the picture around this way, you can shrink it, you can expand it, you can put an ellips around it, you can do whatever you want with it. Their controls for image placement and display is to me is top-notch. And then the other thing is the templates, because if our target audience for this message today is on beginners and newcomers or single site owners, having that library of templates they have They have over 300 templates in there to choose from. There’s all kinds of content in there that you could copy, pick, and choose from, which I think is really cool. Is it a professional level builder? I don’t I think so. I think it’s great for one-site projects or people new to the industry or people looking to build something quickly, but it’s not something that I would use as an agency to build out other people’s stuff on.
[00:46:41.740] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I don’t know enough about it to pass that comment. I think for each initiative, I think they had another product called Oxygen for various… It was a good product. It’s still about, folks. It’s still active. It’s just that Most of the resources from the parent company went into this product at the present moment, it will be that way. And they’re adding more professional elements to it. I think they’ve burnt some bridges with their antics around the other product. I’m not sure how, but it’s an enormous market. So there’s probably hundreds and hundreds of thousands of quasar agency power freelancers will never listen to this and don’t know anything about the background, so they probably will. But I see, even though I have problems with the owner and the parent company, It doesn’t make me blind to why it is a success. On to the next one, Divi. Now, Divi has got a great team behind it. They are great people. I’ve met a lot of them at various events, and they’re some of the nicest… I’ve always been impressed with their aptitude. As a product, I cannot recommend it. It’s highly popular, very aggressive in their pricing.
[00:48:16.000] – Jonathan Denwood
A single site starts at 89. They really knew their target market, which was the graphic designer, having a small local business that was doing graphics logos and building websites at a lower price level for small businesses, absolutely understood their target audience and marketed, got a load of YouTube influencers in the web design to plug. They are hard core marketers, and they provide great support. But as an actual page builder, it is clunky, it has short code Divyitus, as I call it, a bit like Alimator has Divyitus, they’ve got short codetitis. It’s a dog of a platform, for as I’m concerned. They’re building out a new Divvy5, that seems to go longer than Gutenberg, but it’s based on Gutenberg technology, and Gutenberg was changing all the time. It slowed down now, but they still haven’t, nor have they got a real release date. I cannot recommend it. What was your fault?
[00:49:40.400] – Kurt von Ahnen
It’s going to sound so harsh. It might sound more harsh than yourself. From an agency perspective, our policy, unless heavily negotiated, we don’t work on divvy websites any longer because there’s always… So understanding the nature of what our projects are, I think is important to to clarify that statement. With dynamic content-Membership and community websites. Membership, community, e-commerce. When you are leveraging all this dynamic content, it seems to be a nightmare inside the divi builder. Things don’t seem to land or space properly, or they have this weird thing, like in every other builder, you can put in the short code and the short code works. And then when you put it in divi, you have to use the text editor and not the short code, but it has a short code in better. There’s so many weird things that happen in divi that as an agency, we are just like, you know what? If we can’t work on this with confidence and know that we’re going to get something done in a certain amount of time and get the right result, we can’t offer that. And so we just don’t. Now, that said, we do have a couple of grandfathered clients that are on divvy, and they love divvy.
[00:50:53.220] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, got a couple, and I don’t even bother trying to persuade them. They just add them, I love it. They want to use it.
[00:51:00.710] – Kurt von Ahnen
To your point, Jonathan, one of my clients that’s really that loves their Divi is he would consider himself an artist. He’d like pixel perfect Figma type layouts, and then I said, I want to convert these Figma things to Divi. And I went, Okay, great. And he made it work. But when you start laying in dynamic content and Woocommerce stuff, we had to use separate third party tools to actually customize their Woocommerce pages.
[00:51:30.110] – Jonathan Denwood
I think if you’re not building a membership community, e-commerce, like everything Kirk just said, you’re probably going to be fine with Divi with the right host. It is resource hungry, in my opinion. You’re not going to have that problem with WP tonic. On to the next one because I don’t want to over throw, because I like the divvy people, and they probably don’t like me because I-They’re some of the nicest people I’ve ever met at WordCamp. Yeah, they’re great. And the owner, the founder, they are superb marketers, aren’t they? And they market without rubbing other people. They’re not negative marketers. There’s a few other people that I admire as marketers in the WordPress space, but they use negativity to market themselves, where Divi has never done that, have they? But they are superb marketers, aren’t they? Yeah. Breezy. I know the owners of Breezy, it’s really nice people. I think they’re Czechs of Aqia or Slovakia. I don’t want to upset them. Really nice people. They brought this out and got It’s an attraction. Then I think it’s especially around the WordPress professional, the freelancer, the power user, the implementer. I think it was their pricing structure on their cloud above the one license wasn’t attractive compared to what Alimator and Divi were offering.
[00:53:06.750] – Jonathan Denwood
I think their price positioning wasn’t correct. Then they built out this hosted solution, which isn’t used. I’m not sure it’s using WordPress. I think it is similar to Animator. I think they are, but they don’t make it clear. Then they’ve got the WordPress plugin. It’s all a bit confusing. The actual interface, I’m not I haven’t used it for a while. It’s $59 for a one-site license. The interface is really easier. Their problem is breakdance, in my opinion. That’s their problem. They’re up against breakdance at that beginner. Then their pricing structure, they’re up against bricks, animator in the quasar professional market. They’re stuck in the middle, and I don’t think that’s a good place to be. What’s your own thoughts?
[00:54:03.200] – Kurt von Ahnen
There’s a couple of miscues for me in the Brizzy presentation. And that said, I know a lot of people in the WordPress space, and they talk about Brizzy Builder in a very positive light. So I don’t, whatever I say, let’s sprinkle a little juju on there that, Hey, I’ve heard good things. But when I went to their website, I was instantly confused. What are they selling me? Because the first thing they show you is this hosted example where the pricing just seems like it’s through the roof. And then you look at, Oh, there’s a tab here. Then you click the tab and the price seems super competitive. I think it was 199 for 50 sites or something like that. And so I’m like, Hey, okay, that’s pretty good. And then I was in the back end of a Brizzy site maybe a year, year and a half ago. So I wanted to refresh myself for the show. And I went and looked at, okay, let’s take a look at some samples. Let’s take a look at this. What’s the experience look like? I like that you can edit in what seems like it almost feels like a front-end editor when you’re in there.
[00:55:09.740] – Kurt von Ahnen
You see the page and you click on it and you edit the element. Very blocks-like in that way. And then it’s got this fly out menu that comes in that gives you almost that elementor/bricks experience. And so in a lot of ways, I just get confused with it, to be honest with you. I feel like anything I edit in the edit page, I definitely need to preview it in a new tab because I really don’t know what effect I’m having in a responsive editing window, if that makes sense, because everything’s moving around.
[00:55:45.460] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I’ve got no experience of building a dynamic membership community using a breezy setup. I just don’t have that experience. I just think they’re stuck in the middle, but they’ve stuck at it, and I think they slowly are getting growth, and they’re building out, updating it, improving it, and I wish them well. I think their problem is they’re stuck in that middle ground where at the beginner market, they’re up against like Cadence WP or Breakdance. And in the professional market, they’re in the middle, they’re against Bricks and Alimator. But I think people probably look at it because they got fed up with Alimator and all these updates that kept breaking websites. It must… And then that’s why… But then Bricks appeared. But I might be wrong because when you think about it, maybe they’re aiming it at the market, at that divi aimed at that graphic designer, which Divi identified and really captured. But the problem is that crowd still loved divi. Why would they move to Brizy? I think as our conversation seems to be oscillating a little bit back and forth, we need to come back to, is this for a beginner doing one site, one project?
[00:57:16.540] – Jonathan Denwood
Sorry, you’re right.
[00:57:17.590] – Kurt von Ahnen
Or is this someone that wants to build their agency? If you look at what Brizy really brings to the table, they bring a lot. They have a ton of templates, they have a ton of patterns. They have a ton of… Every menu you go into for them says 500 plus of this and 500 plus of that. It’s almost like you get too much to choose from to be efficient or productive in your work. And From a beginner perspective, what I said was something that causes me hesitation, would actually be something a newcomer would love. To be able to jump into an edit screen, have it look like the front end of the website, click on it, edit it, boom. That all makes sense.
[00:57:59.540] – Jonathan Denwood
Would you say the interface usability is as good or better than breakdance?
[00:58:07.860] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I think breakdance is the winner in that category.
[00:58:12.960] – Jonathan Denwood
You’ve actually played around with this a bit more than I have. Let’s get to the last one, and then we can wrap. We can have ended. Beaver Builder. Kurt doesn’t like Beaver Builder, I don’t think. I like BeaverBuilder. But they’re like They’re like divvy, is that the founders, the people, the company, the people that own the company are some of the nicest people I’ve met in WordPress. I still use Beaver Builder on some. They’ve got the actual editor, and then they got a fiend builder. They were in the early days of revolutionizing building websites on WordPress. They were head to head with Alimator in the early days of this fundamental change in WordPress, because before that, you really… To do changes in WordPress were a bit painful unless you were a power user, a low-end developer type implementer. It I’ve euthanised the whole market. But the truth is, Animator, they decided to keep it bootstrap, owning it. Animator took external investment, VC investment, and they had the marketing budget. To be truthful, I actually think it was a better product, also, to be truthful. But I say that. I say it’s a better product, I want to pull When you look back on that, it was a better product if you didn’t know anything about divitus and the mobile consequences, because actually the background code of beaver builder is much more superior than Alimator.
[01:00:16.360] – Jonathan Denwood
But yes, you get used to it and it’s fine, but it has a bit of a clunky interface, to be truthful about it, compared to bricks or breakdance or breezy or cadence. They’re stuck at it and I use it still a bit. It’s still got a low and large community. What’s your thoughts on Beaver Building?
[01:00:45.680] – Kurt von Ahnen
The first time I really had to use Beaver Builder was doing some internal work at Lifter LMS because they were originally Beaver Builder, and now they’re on something else. And then editing stuff with WP Tonic using Beaver Builder. So we still get to actively use it. From the interface perspective, it’s not my go-to. It’s not what I would choose, which is sad because like you said, everyone I’ve met that works on the Beaver Builder team is a Class A individual. Every single one of them. They’re supportive, they’re friendly. I think it’s Chris Lima actually put on his testimonial, says, once you start using Beaver Builder, you’re part of the family. And I would absolutely 100% take that to heart. And the pricing is aggressive. The pricing is right in line with what you see with Elementor and stuff like that. And they’ve got a good selection of products, meaning a good selection of templates and things to help. They’ve got assets to help you put things together. That said, it’s just still not my choice.
[01:01:51.060] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. Let’s finish up because I think you’ve capitalized it very well. Let’s end this. If you were beginner, low intermediate, and you were looking to build a membership, straight community website using something like Lifter LMS or Flirt Community, which they They’ve issued an update statement today. They’ve got a lot more of these page builders that they’re supporting now, and they support Gutenberg, so Cadence WP. So beginner, lower, intermediate. Of what one or two would you recommend from everything that we’ve discussed? Which two would you recommend to that beginner, intermediate?
[01:02:47.020] – Kurt von Ahnen
From a beginner’s perspective and knowing that they wanted to use these other dynamic tools, I would put them in the Cadence Arena for sure. If they wanted a little bit more design freedom or something a little more flashy and feature-packed, I would probably lean them towards breakdance.
[01:03:08.700] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I just don’t know enough. I haven’t used it. I don’t know how it works with Lifter LMS or LearnDash or some of the other membership. I don’t know what breakdance, how it works. But if it does, yeah, I totally agree. On the more power user that we get, We have a very diverse group of people that host at WP Tonic, from agencies to power users to beginners. We get a very diverse crowd. So the more power user, quasar, implementer, which is another big part of hosting clients, what would you recommend?
[01:03:57.670] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, it sounds like I’m almost with forked tongue here, but Cadence Pro is still super capable for people that are the Quasar Pro, right? If you want to build something where the design’s not crazy, but you want great interactivity with the dynamic content, and you want it to be light on the server resources and retain performance, I think Cadence is the answer, Cadence Pro in that regard. But again, if we’re talking about somebody that wants to to go to that next level of something, it depends on the person, their experience level, but I might steer them towards bricks, but realistically, they would probably end up in the elementor space.
[01:04:43.730] – Jonathan Denwood
You must have read We do agree on a lot of things, don’t we?
[01:04:47.810] – Kurt von Ahnen
Over time, you must be rubbing off on me.
[01:04:51.050] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, you worded it. I would prefer because that thing with the elevator, which they’re trying to deal with, they’ve got an enormous It’s legacy base. But it is divotitis on steroids with Alimator, and it has a consequence when it comes to mobile, and you can’t… And that’s important. Where bricks is great on mobile, the speed, it’s all bit junky because they’re not real-world tests because it depends on the hosting, the caching, the plugin, It’s a gin mixture. There’s so many variables that a lot of these speed tests are meaningless, but they give some signs. The speed test that I’ve seen with bricks on mobile have been quite impressive for a non-Gutenberg page builder. But Cadence WP, it’s great for the higher individual we’re talking. I think I probably would go with Cadence, and then I’ll go with Bricks because I just have problems with Alimator, which they’re trying to deal with. But then you still got this third part, and people tend to go potty with all the third-party widgets. If you go potty, you’re going to end up with a real dog in performance terms.
[01:06:24.530] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, and just to be clear, Bricks is the same playground. There’s a ton of add-ons for Bricks now. Everyone says, Oh, get these for these extra blocks or for these extra things.
[01:06:34.830] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, they got the same problem.
[01:06:36.750] – Kurt von Ahnen
And steer away from some of that stuff because it is just not great content, not good stuff.
[01:06:44.690] – Jonathan Denwood
No, you got to control yourself. So it’s probably Elemator, but this hope with version 4 that they improve the Differ type as element, which affects mobile, and they sort out the… Because it was driving Lodging people crazy, all these updates of breaking websites, left, right, and center, when it was driving the elevator crew.
[01:07:07.600] – Kurt von Ahnen
That’s gotten much better in the last year, I think.
[01:07:11.140] – Jonathan Denwood
Because I think that some people were saying they were doing it on purpose. Some people know a certain individual who publicly stated that he thought they were doing it to drive people to their hosting environment. I always thought that was pushing things a bit too far.
[01:07:27.890] – Kurt von Ahnen
They do want to sell hosting.
[01:07:30.170] – Jonathan Denwood
I think it’s the same thing when it comes to the pro, the power user. It will either be cadence, elevator, or bricks. Maybe bricks rather than the elevator. Then you might say they wouldn’t use cadence, but they’d probably use generate press. It’s perhaps generate press that they would go to.
[01:07:52.430] – Kurt von Ahnen
Generate press, again, with their pattern library is super attractive.
[01:07:58.570] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, but they also got this Class-based, which is the other thing I forgot about Elementor. They’re introducing a Class-based system, which wouldn’t mean anything to the average person, but it just means you can customize things to a higher level. Generate press as a car system as well, based on a system. It will appeal more to the power user and the professional. Well, I think we covered everything before we end it? I think we’ve done a pretty good job, haven’t we?
[01:08:32.880] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, I think the biggest thing is if you’re new to the space or you’re not a web expert, but you have an idea or something you want to present online to an audience that you want to build, it’s as simple as best. Keep things as simple as possible. Reach out to experts, schedule a meeting with Jonathan, and pick a solution that’s going to be simple, direct, and get you launched. Time and time again, we talk to people who get so involved in the tech that they don’t launch. You don’t generate revenue if you never launch.
[01:09:06.020] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. Got a great tender show, folks. We got a great free resource. We got the WP YouTube channel that covers… We upload these podcasts so you can watch us. Plus, I’ve got a load of other videos. I’ve got over 1,600 videos up on that channel, folks. That covers every aspect of marketing, website, and build-out for membership community. It’s all up on the WP YouTube channel. Go over there and subscribe to the channel if you find it useful. That would be much appreciated. We will be back next week with another great show. We’ll see you soon. Bye.
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