Beaver Builder Review

hi guys Lewis here from Authority hacker and today we're going to be looking at beaver builder and beaver builder is a front-end visual page builder for WordPress and the guys behind this also offer a theme and a theme builder but this is just going to be an overview of the page builder plug-in itself now let's start with the interface and you know it's quite easy to use very intuitive but the problem I have with it is that it's not very efficient now I'll explain what I mean because at the top here we have a bar we have the logo and we have some buttons on the other side now to me this is just not a very good use of space and I'm on a 13-inch MacBook Pro I'm in full-screen mode at the moment but I really need all the space I can get when I'm working on this kind of machine and I think they could do away with this bar entirely they could move the buttons somewhere else and the only time that it really comes in handy is when you lose this side bar and that does happen whenever you drag a module onto the page and the only way to get that back into view is to click add content up here now I don't really like the way that system works I know that Elementor has a much more elegant solution and I think that beaver builder should maybe looking to rework in that back there because it just doesn't quite work for me the sidebar here also covers up content so whenever you're building your page the sidebar will cover up a percentage of that which again is not it's not the the best way to handle it in my opinion I prefer a compressed view so I'd rather have the content be squashed onto the page than to lose some visuals there so that's another that's another thing that I think they should work on the panel is also very rigid you can't adjust it or move it there's no way to contract or expand which would be handy considering that it does cover up the content behind adding modules onto the page and these are modules here so if I drag a button over you'll see that it's not very streamlined so what I get here is a Settings box and if I just want to have that button on the page for now and I just want to save it it won't let me because it's actually asking for a link before I can insert that and just happen with buttons it happens with other modules here they some some of them require certain information before you can get them onto the page which again it's not really ideal because sometimes you just want to see how it looks you want to build your design before you worry about those finer details so I mean overall it's not bad but there's definitely a lot of room for improvement when it comes to the interface and the overall user experience now let's talk about the modules and I just quickly skimmed over this a minute ago but modules are the elements that you drag onto the page and that's that's how you build your page essentially now beaver builder does you know cover all the basics here it has audio buttons headings images but it doesn't really venture too far out of that so for example it doesn't have a portfolio module a price list module a forms module even under the advanced modules here I mean there's a good amount of stuff here but if you want any of the things I just described and probably a few more that I've missed you're gonna need third party plugins and that often breaks the the visual experience of using a page builder now the modules are also limited in terms of customizations so for example I can't add a drop shadow to a button so let me just get a button on the page here and I'll show you what I mean drag that on P go to style we have background color background hover color there isn't really a whole lot going on here and there's no drop shadow option so that's one thing you also can't adjust the roundness of an icon that you can't you can't even apply a border to an image without resorting to CSS and that's really the problem with the Builder is that it relies too much on custom CSS and again that's not what page builders should be about and there is an alternative you can use something called ultimate add-ons for beaver builder and I have the website open here and what this does is it adds 40 over 40 new modules and almost 200 templates to the standard beaver builder plug-in it's not free though it does cost $69 for a one-year license and you don't I don't believe you have to renew that every time you just you just won't get the updates so let's head back over to beaver builder and let's talk about flexibility so in terms of creating layouts I do like beaver builders Roe system so I'm going to show you how that works here if I bring the sidebar back into view and I click row layouts you can drag in a column a column amount so that's a free column layout and then I can drag below that a two column layout and you can build your page that way and I also like how you can adjust the row width here it's quite a robust system and it really doesn't take long to get used to how it works now I still run into some limitations so you know in terms of flexibility there were some things that just really didn't make sense to me so for example I couldn't manually resize images I couldn't apply any custom fonts and I couldn't manually set a width for individual rows you can see here the width of these rows are the same and the only way to change the width of the of the row is to go to tools global settings which will apply everywhere you cannot set these individually so for me that was a really big problem and the only way around it is to use custom CSS so there is a definite CSS dependency with this plug-in which is worrying especially if you don't know how to how to use CSS you'll probably have a lot of trouble with this let's move on to templates so the temporary library can be found up here if you click templates it will bring up the selection now there aren't a whole lot in here they are categorized which is nice and again these are not amazing but a good that I think they provide a good foundation to work from and one issue I found here was that you need to have a full width page template for these to work so to give you an example I'm going to drop this one in replace existing layout and you'll see that it fills my entire screen here as you can see it's fit onto the page nicely now this only happened because I have a full-width page template active and this doesn't come with paper with beaver builder this is something you have to either install separately or use as part of your theme if you don't have that option as part of your theme you can use something like this which is the full width templates for any theme and page builder plug-in you can find this in the WordPress plugins repository and it is a free plug-in so I would recommend that now aside from choosing the templates from the beaver builder library you can also create your own you can customize the ones that beaver build a house and then resave them as your own and you can also save individual sections or rows so let's say I wanted to save this row over here I click this spanner icon and save as and that would allow me to save the entire row and you'll notice here that I can also save this as a global row which means I can use this anywhere on my site and I can change it from one central location which is a really powerful feature and it also extends to individual modules so that's really really happy ok let's talk about speed easily one of the biggest flaws of this plugin for me is that it's painfully slow at times when you drag any element onto the page you get a loading screen I'm sure you've seen that so far so I'm going to just show you one more time drag that in and there we go we get a loading screen and this is anywhere from a couple of seconds to maybe five seconds every time you drag an element onto the page it also happens whenever you're editing an existing element and it happens when you're trying to preview changes let me give you an example let's scroll down let's change the position of this image here so I can drag this over which is quite nice by the way and I can align this to the left and you'll notice that it doesn't move for a few seconds and then it moves so there's definitely a few second delay there which can be really annoying when you're just trying to experiment with it with a certain element on the page and you're having to wait every time you make a small change and if that doesn't seem like a very big deal you have to consider that it does get old very fast and all of those seconds really start to add up in the long run so if there's one thing they need to fix it's this in my opinion okay in terms of support I've really really liked the support that came from beaver builder especially the pre-sales support they have a dedicated support forum detailed documentation and they have an active Facebook community group which has over 6,000 members and the good thing about the group is that they are other beaver building users they can recommend workarounds and alternatives and it's also a collaborative effort so overall the support options with this plug-in are really really good and finally let's talk about the price so I've got the pricing page up here there is a free version of beaver builder and you can find that in the WordPress plug-in repository it is very limited more so than the paid version so I really cannot recommend it especially over something like Elementor which is just head and shoulders above what what beaver builder offers some might even argue at the paid level so the lowest paid plan is the standard one here and back that's $99 for a one year license but the good thing about this is that it's for unlimited sites and that's quite generous in my opinion you can also still use this after the year has expired you just won't get the dedicated support and the and the updates but you can continue to use the Facebook group so I don't think that's a huge deal so it's not something that you that you necessarily have to do it's not the cheapest but it's still reasonable considering what you get so to wrap this up beaver builder really isn't a bad plugin but unless you're willing to you know buy add-ons or go to go to town with CSS it honestly just feels a bit too limited for my liking and in my opinion there are currently better options out there so I recommend you check out our page builder comparison post which you can find on the blog over at authority hacker comm and I hope you enjoyed this video and I will see you in the next one