This Beaver Builder review is not paid or commissioned by Beaver Builder or any other company. This is my honest opinion as a professional WordPress developer, who builds and manages WordPress websites for a living.
This review is part of our full WordPress page builder comparison, which gives in-depth reviews and comparisons of WordPress’s largest page builders.
Let’s start with the executive summary.
Is Beaver Builder Good?
Heck yes. It’s our favorite page builder in WordPress.
The Best Page Builder in WordPress
Beaver Builder
More than any other single plugin, Beaver Builder has changed how I do my work as a WordPress developer, and made good front-end layout building a reality.
Hi Fred. Thank you very much for this helpful review. Your descripions contains the daily real developer troubles that exist. Iam to 99 percent agree with you. But the Beaver Themer extension i love also like BB. Custom Blog Layouts and awesome Woocommerce pages are setup in few of minutes. I never want to miss the BB system in my WordPress Sites. Regards, Christian.
As a financial advisor, one of my roles is helping others establish their new businesses. An online presence is obviously necessary. I purchased Beaver Builder because it offered drop and drag capabilities in Word Press. It also appeared to be a cost-effective solution when compared to subscription-based solutions.
This is not the case. Shortly after my license expired, Beaver Builder lost all functionality. The company’s website claims that “Beaver Builder doesn’t stop working just because your license expires.” After a Word Press update, I was left with zero ability to make any changes. In fact, the software doesn’t even start after the change.
When you look at other services, they start with monthly subscription fees running from $5 to $12 a month. Beaver Builder costs $16.66 when you consider that updates are required (and yes, the only solution the company offered was for me to pay for an upgrade). Considering how tight the budget can be for a new business, I can’t justify recommending Beaver Builder.
Hi,
I have heard the same story elsewhere also. If that is the case, then it is not acceptable.
Normally, the software should continue to work after the license has expired except that people don’t get any further support or updates until the license is renewed. This is how the licensing modal works.
I will bring this to the attention of Beaver support to confirm if this indeed stands true.
Great article, thanks! Curious what you meant by “for a person who wants to create a brochure site for her dog walking business and has $500 to spend: those days are probably over”. There are still lots of brochure websites, both existing and needed, no?
Good question, Frank! I’ve just altered that sentence to be clearer meaning-wise.
Makes sense! Thanks for clarifying that Fred.
Oh and your thought son toolset…. 🙂
I’d like to hear you thoughts on Oxygen and also wonder what your workflow or dev stack would consist of if you decided to use Beaver builder – what sort of dev environment would you create to amke a good workflow using BB and devloping locally then pushing live?
Thanks for the post and video – I’m going to watch it now.
Hi Nathan! I’ve never tried Oxygen, but I’m curious. Have you?
On workflow, pasting this in from your question on YouTube:
I honestly can’t see how Beaver Builder would affect your stack much one way or another. It’s just a way of managing post content for posts that need complex layouts. Whether you’re on remote or local, how you do deployments, use of a CSS preprocessor, your choice of code editor, etc., are all pretty unrelated. Unless there’s something I’m not thinking of??
So for me, on a new project that involves a page builder, I’d use:
-Sublime Text
-WAMP
-A starter theme (I like UnderStrap)
-Maybe SASS if it’s complex enough on the design side
And I think that’s about it?
[…] come leaps and bounds and are definitely worth consideration. Even expert WordPress developers have admitted to loving these tools for a variety of reasons—so what are their benefits, why should you […]
+1 for Elementor page builder. So intuitive with lots of templates. Works great with lightweight themes like GeneratePress, Astra and OceanWP.
Re: “There are about a million WordPress page builders out there.”
This highlights a much bigger issue: that WordPress was created for blogging, not to build websites. So although building websites using WordPress has become a popular option, doing so requires a commitment to constantly researching and mastering a bunch of plug-ins and work arounds.
Interesting perspectives. I could see SquareSpace for simple sites but WP does set it self apart beyond that.
Have you tried the alpha version of Beaver Builder 2.0? It has a much faster load time for the builder and an awesome new UI to boot.
I agree with Michele’s suggestion to check out Elementor, and I meant to also make that suggestion earlier!
Fred,
Thanks for writing such a detailed and candid article! The WordPress community could use a lot more open-minded people like you. Too many WordPress pros react very defensively when confronted with WordPress’s numerous issues, instead of focusing on improving WordPress. Speaking of improving WordPress, I’m continually amazed by how many plugins are required to build a proper WordPress site. I’m unaware of any other popular application that requires so much 3rd party help. And why is the WordPress community so proud that 25% of sites use WordPress? That of course means that an overwhelming majority (75%) of site owners chose not to use WordPress. Not even Trump would claim that 25% is “huge.”
Great article, thanks. Your take on Beaverbuilder is pretty much the same as mine after using it for 1 year+ on about half the sites I build. I find it is great for building relatively complex page layouts really quickly. I’d agree it is not a totally seamless experience compared to all-in solutions like Squarespace or Wix, though I’ve only done very minor bits of ad hoc maintenance on either of those, but it’s pretty damn good and well worth paying for a standard licence.
It would be interesting to hear any views on the merits of upgrading to the more expensive BB Pro licence giving access to their own theme which might be expected to be more tightly integrated. I’m using BB with Genesis framework which works pretty well and I’ve held back from moving away from Gesesis to the BB own theme due to the great community resources around Genesis.
Any thoughts on the BB Pro upgrade and the BB theme?
You should check out the v2 Alpha. It’s been amazing so far. Very few bugs, and the UI is 10x better.
Yes, Beaver Builder (or Elementor if you prefer) fills a hole in WordPress and shrinks the distance between a developer and an end user. As a fellow developer, I applaud your willingness to embrace tools like Beaver Builder (and Square Space). Not everyone is so open-minded.
Your forgot about Elementor.
No, he didn’t. Elementor isn’t one of the plugins recommended at the end of Pippin’s Page Builder review post so it wasn’t included in this.
That review is a starting point of sorts , but it is also almost a year old . Elementor isnt perfect (I’ve had issues with it) but it has moved on as no doubt other page builders have, for better or worse.
Definitely agree that a developer’s experience is needed as some point, whether is for design decisions, technical issues or to achieve a specific goal.
Regardless of the page builder (I use another one for WordPress), end-users would benefits from training or support from a developer for the specific page builder they use.
Beaver Beaver is great for site owners and can be great for clients. However, professionally it’s quite antiquated. It’s still using a Bootstrap 3 grid for example. Yes, I know even a BS4 rc is nothing where close to being released but there’s no reason why they need to pigeon hole themselves to one frontend framework. There’s Foundation or even better IMO Semantic UI.
They’ve managed to create a product that people like and are willing to pay for that empowers novices to do what they otherwise couldn’t. As a professional, the BB standard was too low for me and I don’t expect that to change with the coat of paint that v2 will come out with.
It’s of course very opinionated stuff like most development decisions these days. Which is why I’ll stop there. That’s my 2 cents.
Actually Beaver Builder does not use Bootstrap 3 or any other frontend framework apart from it’s own. You may be confusing it with the Beaver Builder Theme, which is simply a companion theme that can be used with the plugin to get started quickly. The theme does use bootstrap. The content that the page builder produces does not.
Actually no, I was referring to the plugin itself…
On April 27, 2015 at 12:55 am Ben Carlo (Keymaster) of support said…
“Beaver Builder is using Bootstrap 3 which uses a “Mobile First” approach. So for your case, we need to create the BB layout based on what we want the mobile view to look. Since you want the ‘address column’ to appear first on mobile, put that on the left side of the row then the ‘contact form column’ on the right side. Give the ‘address column’ a class of col-lg-3 col-lg-push-9 and the ‘contact form column’ a class of col-lg-9 col-lg-pull-3. From there, you should be able to add/modify the classes to suit your needs.”
You can simply google “beaver builder bootstrap 3” to see for yourself as the forum link is there in the results. I’d love to be wrong but I don’t yet see any proof of that though.
Ben is referring to the theme there, I just spoke to him. Page builder doesn’t use Bootstrap grid. Only the standalone Tour component. You can also check out the CSS directory in the plugin if you’d like to confirm it.
Excellent. Glad to hear it! ?
I’d be interested in your take in comparing Beaver Builder to Cornerstone and Fusion Builder.