Welcome to the fifth part of this six part series on pagebuilders.. In the previous post we covered the different types and names of some popular pagebuilders for WordPress. @Ympker also included a details review of Divi, and a brief overview of Thrive Architect.

In this post, we will focus on breadth over depth. That is, we will cover a larger pool of pagebuilders rather than a detailed review as was the case in the previous post. We will also talk about about the advantages and limitations of pagebuilders for WordPress.

What we will cover in this post

There are three types of pagebuilders: Free, Freemium and Premium. Free are the ones that are open sourced or come at no cost. Freemium are the ones that have two versions: a lower spec/ less feature laden gratis version; and a full blown, paid version. The payment can be one time or a recurring subscription. Finally, a premium pagebuilder is one that requires you to pay up front before you can use them. The table below gives examples of the three types:

This post covers three types of pagebuilders: Free, and Freemium. The premium Versions were covered in the previous post.

Before we dive into more reviews, Lets' do a sanity check

Question: Are pagebuilders for Wordpress really useful?

One of the biggest advantages of Wordpress is the large selection ot themes and plugins. In that case, why would one require Pagebuilders for WordPress? . This becomes even more important question to answer, considering that Gutenburg, the pagebuilder is a core part of Wordpress version 5 and onwards. In recent times, there have been many discussions about the future of pagebuilders with the arrival of Gutenburg.. You can read some posts about this topic on this blog and Quora

Some pagebuilders offer a base theme on which you can build the rest of the site. Screenshot from LiveComposer pagebuilder shown here.

Merits and disadvantages of Pagebuilders

Pagebuilders do offer certain advantages: they reduce the need for installing some plugins, they are easy to use, offer drag and drop functionality, and so on. They are cheaper (some are free). For agencies, they become a productivity tool!

Among the disadvantages, not all pagebuilders are created equal. Quality of code, complexity, and most importantly any security issues. Pagebuilders can slow the performance of the site, or can limit the number of pages for the site. Finally, many pagebuilders do not have a blog functionality. They focus on features like image gallery or portfolio, appointment scheduled, or one page websites. (ironic, considering WordPress began its life as a blogging platform.

A point to note: a pagebuilder for WordPress is different from a WordPress theme. This discussion on Quora covers this point well, so I will leave it at that.

Another point to note that there are services that use the WordPress platform for catering to specific audiences.
-WP One Pager for example exclusively provide one page templates for WordPress. These useful for creating sales funnels or landing pages.
-Happyforms provides form builders for Wordpress. You can use these forms for customer feedback, newsletter sign ups, or for surveys.

Let's Get on with the mini-reviews

As mentioned in the introduction section, our focus will be on breadth and not depth. That is, my reviews in the below section will not be as comprehensive as the review for Divi that was published in Part V of this series.

Elementor

Elementor is arguably the most popular pagebuilder for WordPress. (Sorry, @Ympker! ) It is available as a free plugin in the base version, and also has premium plugins like Essential Addons for Elementor the features of Elementor are quite similar to Divi, which was covered extensively in Part IV of this series. I have included a couple of screenshots in the section below
to give you an idea about the drag and drop functionality. One of the advantages of Elementor is that it doesn’t require any HTML/CSS/PHP/coding skills — everything can be done through a handy user-facing interface.
It has a 'live preview' that is, it shows you the outcomes of your work right away. Elementor has a large established based. According to this post on bloggers passion](https://bloggerspassion.com/elementor-review/#Elementor_Review_Is_It_Really_the_Best_WordPress_Page_Builder)
Because of its "freemium" nature, Elementor has a larger ecosystem of plugin developers, theme creators, and services that are built on top of Elementor. Example include:
-Theme Hello Elementor


-Plugins Essential Addons - Premium, Anywhere Elementor- Freemium

-Services that are built on top of Elementor:
Sassy Landing Pages

One of the main advantages of using Elementor is that you can create page layouts or designs with ease. Even novices who have little design experience can use it with aplomb.

Brizy

I wrote about Brizy in part II of this series. There, we covered Brizy cloud In this section, I will provide a brief overview of the WordPress plugin pagebuiilder. The basic building blocks and interface is quite similar, except that the pages created become a part of the WordPress site.
Note that Brizy does have a basic, 'free' plugin, but in order to use the Brizy Pro Plugin, you will need to use the free plugin as well. This feature is similar to Elementor, where plugins like Essential addons require you to install the Elementor plugin first.

Creation of a page is quite easy. Using the drag and drop builder, you can create blocks of text. images, maps, and so on; or use one of the pre built templates. In terms of ease of use and short learning curve, Brizy scores very high. Its is slower in page loads and overall speed compared to Elementor though.

'Free' Pagebuilders

Some good things in life come for free.

Some pagebuilders for WordPress fall in that category. In spite of the pricepoint and the perception associated with it, they have received good reviews. Some are more in depth and appreciative than some paid ones! Siteorigin and Live Composerare two such Free Pagebuilders for WordPress.

SiteOrigin Panels	Live Composer

Gutenburg

When you log on to the admin panel of a fresh WordPress install these days, you are greeted by images similar to the ones below

Page Formatting in Gutenberg Builder	Blocks in Gutenberg

These images are from the Gutenberg Pagebuilder and editor. Gutenberg uses a series of blocks for content in a page, including images, text, video, galleries, audio, quotes, tables and much more.
As per the Wordpress site,

Blocks are a great new tool for building engaging content. With blocks, you can insert, rearrange, and style multimedia content with very little technical knowledge. Instead of using custom code, you can add a block and focus on your content.

Below is a screenshot I took when I was creating a new post for my blog.

Gutenburg Blocks have a variety of features. Better yet, the list of integrations with third party sites like YouTube, Dailymotion, and imgur makes it extremely convenient. Simply add the link to a video, no need to copy the link to the embed player and past it into the blog post. For example, here is a video I had made about fast.io a CDN service.
In most content management systems, one would have to past the HTML code as iframes.
(note: Vanilla Forums also has this feature).

Gutenberg is free and it comes default with a new install of WordPress version 5 and above. It is gaining acceptance among the developer community. You should give Gutenberg a try - it may be too simple for some persons' tastes, but that could be its strength.

Generateblocks

Generateblocks is another free pagebuilder that is extremely simple and fast to use. It is a plugin for WordPress, similar to other pagebuilders, but the installation is simple and easy to use. As it is a free version, there is no need to install the 'base' and 'pro' versions of the plugin. It is under active development by the creator, Tom Usborne. He is the person behind the popular GeneratePress theme.

This video illustrates how convenient it is to create a page using this plugin.

Other Free pagebuilders such as Livecomposer also have a good user base and a following. Below is a screenshot for Livecomposer pagebuilder page on WordPress site.

WordPress is the most commonly used content management system (CMS).It is natural that the ecosystem of developers, plugins and them builders, and pagebuilders will be the largest for this platform. Since it is practically difficult to cover every pagebuilder that exists for WordPress, we decided to focus on some of the known ones. Keeping in ming the LES audience and their preference for frugal options, I also included the free or freemium options that are available, such as Generateblocks. Hope that this introduction to the world of Pagebuilders for WordPress will help you in deciding whether you would want to use a Pagebuilder for your next project or not.

Finally, let me conclude this section of the post by mentioning briefly about security.

A Note on Wordpress, Pagebuilders, and security

Due to popularity of WordPress, and its inherent design structure (dependence on plugins) there are many attacks and vulnerabilities on Wordpress sites. Many Pagebuilders are essentially plugins, and the pagebuilders themselves can sometimes have vulnerabilities. For example, Elementor, which is supposed to be the most popular pagebuilder, recently had a security issue. While it was addressed quickly, be careful while choosing a pagebuilder. In particular, avoid the lesser known brands or ones that have not been updated in recent months.

Concluding Remarks

This concludes the fifth or the penultimate part of this six part series. In the next part, we will talk about Landing pages. These are specialist pagebuilders such as lead pages or forms for email subscription, surveys, etc.

Introduction:

In Part II of this series, we covered services that offer a custom pagebuilder as a part of their web hosting. In part III, we will discuss pagebuilders that are in the form of desktop apps. This is an interesting category in itself.

Most of the apps are for Windows or Mac. In particular, we will cover two of these: Mobirise and Pinegrow.

The below reviews for Mobirise and Pinegrow have been written by @Ympker, with inputs from me, @vyas, as applicable.

In addition there are pagebuilders like Publii and Pagekit which can be installed on Linux as well. And one particular "pagebuilder with a twist" that I use: and Reboo. In a subsequent post, we may cover these rather interesting apps. But for now, let us dive into the desktop apps.

Mobirise

Mobirise - HTML&CSS + Bootstrap Page Builder Software

What, now, is Mobirise?

Mobirise is actually a piece of software, or a desktop app. This is in contrast to themes or pagebuilders like Divi that are web browser-based. It requires the installation of a Desktop client either for Windows or Mac. Furthermore Mobirise is not a WordPress pagebuilder but instead a Drag&Drop Pagebuilder GUI Software that outputs pure HTML&CSS Code and comes with templates & blocks based on Bootstrap 4. The content it outputs is super mobile friendly and you can publish your project locally, to FTP, Github Pages and other solutions which is super convenient

Features of Mobirise

Here is a short preview of the blocks you can choose from and the respective block categories covered (see list to the right on the image below the GIF). Once you dragged the block of choice to the canvas it's just exchanging the sample content with your own (media/text) and adjust some styling parameters:

Blocks in Mobirise

It is worth mentioning that it is really convenient that Mobirise integrates flawlessly with royalty-free stock image site "Pixabay" making it easy to import required media for your projects

There is some other gimmicks worth mentioning making for a useful addition:

addition of blocks like calendar and maps

Pricing:

As for the pricing, you can the Mobirise core functions entirely for free. Personally, I haven't paid a dime for Mobirise (so far). You can, however, browse through several plugins and HTML Templates that could make life even easier (it is already easy enough, believe me). Usually when you look at the prices of single templates (some 40-50$ usually) you will quickly realize that it may be more profitable to purchase the AIO kit (all templates&plugins) for some 100-200$ (depending on the sale). There are a lot of cool templates and plugins and you could very well find some worth for your money there.

What I didn't like in particular about buying Mobirise AIO kit, is that it only entitles for updates for 1 year before you need to pay again. With the pricing being at 150-200$ most of the times I can't compare it to other Lifetime Deal pagebuilders though and Divi and Hestia Pro (Theme Isle), as well as AstraWP sell on similar pricing on sale and that's on a license with lifetime updates (ofc these are all WP page builders/themes but still..).

While I don't mind if after one year I won't get any template updates or new templates, things become a bit more problematic with some plugins: The "HTML/CSS Editor" plugin (69$ plugin only or included in AIO Kit) takes care of one of the features I am missing the most in the free core builder and I'd almost consider it essential: Editing the HTML/CSS code live in the program (by simply selecting a block). It also removes all "Mobirise" backlinking in the HTML code (this is not so important for me tbh).

HTML Editor im Mobirise

I wouldn't mind paying for that plugin but if after 1 year they change Mobirise software in a way that requires an update for the plugin to properly work again, I'd have to purchase it again. Same with some other plugins.

My experience using Mobirise:

I will keep this one short. Overall, Mobirise does a great job in allowing you to quickly build a mockup HTML+CSS Bootstrap powered website in little to no time. The code it outputs and the website's performance appears to be clean and the "automagic" in terms of mobile compatibility for websites created with Mobirise is great. The tools available to you (such as Pixabay integration and Cookies alert) are a nice addition to ease your workflow. The little shortcomings it has don't really justify for being called "Cons". Go, give it a shot. The following image shows a mockup webhost one-page site I created in a "build a website in 20 minutes" challenge using Mobirise. While I didn't get as much done as I would have wanted I am still very happy with the result in this time frame:

Potato Hosting Theme/ Site created by @Ympker

Conclusion:

Ultimately, the "Cons" (if they can even be considered Cons at all) for this freely available software gem that is Mobirise are just some nit-picking on my part I believe. Go, give it a try. Pay to support the developers if you love it. It won't be your worst purchase either

As far as I am concerned I make up for the lack of a live Code Editor in the free version of Mobirise by just editing code in Sublime Text and push the update to Mobirise. While this is a little inconvenient it's still doable.

Pinegrow Web Editor - HTML & CSS Website Builder

What, now, is Pinegrow?

Pinegrow is a bit different than your average Pagebuilder in the sense that it isn't really a pagebuilder. Let me explain below. Because it is that different and maybe kind of hard to grasp by just explaining it shortly, I'll leave the following video here as a starting point. It's up to you to decide if you want to continue reading without it or not. For the sake of getting a better idea of what Pinegrow is, I recommend doing so.

Video: Introduction to Pinegrow

You may or may not have seen the above video. But it can probably be said that Pinegrow is targeting a rather "advanced" audience. That audience is Developers, so to speak. Pinegrow is built for Frontend usage, and it focuses on HTML and CSS. Oh, and you can also quite easily create WordPress themes with Pinegrow, define editable areas etc... (I won't go into detail here).

Getting started with Pinegrow

Three ways to use Pinegrow Website builder

Basically, when you start up Pinegrow, there are 3 main ways you can proceed. I will explain these, mention some features along the way, and then continue with the Pricing.

a) Starting a new project from scratch

b) Editing an existing website/project

c) Importing a site

Let us take a look at each of these options in detail

a) Starting a new project from scratch

If you choose this option, you will be presented with the following prompt:

Once you have picked your poison, you can then proceed to "building" your website. Again, however, Pinegrow is different than other Pagebuilders in the following way: The pre-built components/items it offers for Pagebuilding are not made to look fancy or anything. Everything looks rather "professional" and "efficient". This, however, is one of Pinegrow's biggest PROs imho. For a Web Developer that knows his ways around the items/components available are just easy to find and use. I'd even go as far as saying Pinegrow is meant to be used to simplify your coding workflow, not to replace it. It's a back and forth between using the prebuilt items/blocks, hacking your own (Pinegrow live syncs with Atom.io and other Code editors so all edits become immediately visible), and using Pinegrow's powerful toolset to quickly style/edit certain page elements.

Here are some examples of the "List"/"Components" tab when building/editing a website with Pinegrow:

You can always jump right into coding in Pinegrow (if you want to do some small edits you don't need your code editor of choice for). Just click on the are on your website and the respective code will be highlighted in the code box below. This is super convenient. On the right panel, you can also see how you can jump straight to styling.

Styling options in Pinegrow

So, you can definitely quickly build new mockup pages from scratch with Pinegrow if you know your ways around in coding.

b) Edit an existing website/project

You can also open & edit any existing project. Naturally, coding offers way more possibilities than your average Pagebuilder and it wouldn't be fair to compare. That's why I said, Pinegrow is a bit different in the sense that your coding skill and understanding of certain parameters/syntax/properties is highly decisive for the kind of result you can expect with Pinegrow. If you don't fear the code though, Pinegrow makes your workflow much easier (once you get used to it). Obviously I'd rather quickly code a list item than go to components and drag a list, but when it comes to styling or other stuff Pinegrows built-in padding/margin/background/RGB selector/gradients.. are hella fun to play around with!

Here's an example of how an overly crowded Pinegrow panel can look like (I know, I am crazy). Oh, and I don't know if you noticed in the top left, but Pinegrow integrates with Unsplash stock images.

Search and find images directly in Pinegrow.

c) Importing a site

This is one of my favourite features in Pinegrow

Open/import any HTML/CSS based website's frontend via URL. Choose any website you like and learn how it is set up. I had a look at Vultr's website a while ago for example. Of course, you can view the code in chrome dev tools or copy it into any code editor. The thing that makes Pinegrow so great (especially for people learning to code but also advanced users alike) is that it directly shows the connection between a certain website element or area to the code. Click anywhere and the relevant part of the code will be highlighted and relevant modification Parameter/settings will also be shown. Play around, have fun (for example Pinegrow's website).

Pricing

Pinegrow offers three different pricing models

1) Monthly pricing

2) One Time Payment - without interactions

3) Annual subscription - with interactions

We will discuss the pricing options below.

Monthly Pricing

Pricing for monthly plans starts from 11€/month (cheaper on sale). I won't dive much more into this one.

One Time Payment- Without Interactions

This is the plan I am on. Depending on current discounts and license type you will pay between 40-150€. In my opinion, it's your best bet and very affordable at the same time.

The "Pro" version is basically the Pinegrow Core software without the "WordPress theme creator" toolset. If you don't want to have anything to do with WordPress theme creating you can just get that one. If, on the other hand, you'd like to convert your HTML&CSS into a working WordPress theme (it still takes work; this is not a 1-click converter but still eases the workflow tremendously; you can e.g. assign areas wp-tags like "editable", "login", "blog" etc) get "Pro with WordPress". I have "Pro with WordPress".

With the purchase of any of the two plans, you get 1 year of updates by default.

The big PLUS of this pricing plan: You own the software. It is yours to keep. I can’t stress this enough but since Pinegrow doesn’t rely on Pinegrow infrastructure or an online infrastructure like many other tools. the advantage is that if the company was to shut down one day the software would keep working for you forever.

Only recently, I renewed my owned (one-time) Pinegrow license for another year of updates. My last update had been in 2017 and while it still was working perfectly, I’ve seen some new features in the new versions that I’m really looking forward to such as Stock photo integrations and Bootstrap 4.
I could have just kept using the old version as well, though.

Oh, and one more thing: The "interactions" part you apparently miss out on (notice how it says "Interactions are not included" refers to this new addition to Pinegrow that was added a couple of months ago. This one is not included in the one-time payment plan. Apparently, it can be added as a 50€/year subscription apparently, though.

Annual subscription with interactions

This is the annual subscription which is also ranging from 40€-140€. Although that is, obviously, per year. It includes interactions (see above) by default and here you can also choose between the Regular Pro version and the one with WordPress.

I never used this one but to me, it sounds like if you don't renew the sub you can't use Pinegrow anymore at all (not even the version of the last update you were entitled to).

Verdict on pricing: Since the one-time payment plan and annual subscription is priced the same but the one-time payment allows for continued use only missing out on Interactions, I will choose the one-time payment any day.

My experience using Pinegrow

Remember how in my Mobirise review I mentioned Code Edits are a pita without the paid plugin? I usually create a quick mockup site with Mobirise then open it in Pinegrow and tweak it the way I like ;)I also use Pinegrow to convert WordPress sites to static HTML&CSS (especially one-pagers).

Overall, I don't think I have even grasped all the features Pinegrow has to offer and I'm not that advanced of a coder to make full use of all of its' possibilities but it has been a tremendous help so far and I'll happily continue using it. If I feel like new features that I absolutely want have been added, I'll renew for a year of updates to support the developers and get the features I want.
Last time I renewed for 18€ (since there was a discount going on + I was given a personal discount which kinda stacked with the public one lol).

Conclusion

The learning curve is steep and although I love it I don’t use it frequently enough (mainly because 80% websites I deal with are Wordpress based and I use Divi for that) to consider myself a Pinegrow expert. But when I work with it, I get into it. And every time I do that. I love it. I recommend you check it out, especially if you are an advanced Web Developer/Coder this will be a great tool at your disposal!

This wraps up part III of this 6 part series on Pagebuilders. In the next two parts, we will cover the most popular format: pagebuilders for Wordpress.

This is the first in the PageBuilder series guest-written by Forum members @ympker and @vyas

Please be sure to leave a comment thanking them for the time they have put into this series, I have had the pleasure of previewing the whole series and it is very large and comprehensive.

Part I: Introduction

The title, in case you were wondering, is a play on words on a movie by Woody Allen. And as the title suggests, this post is an introduction to the world of Pagebuilders. It is also the first of a multi-part series on pagebuilders that I have written in collaboration with @Ympker. The idea behind this initiative is to pool our experiences together and create a reference of sorts for the LowEndSpirit community. Lets' call this an original content for LES. 

Image: Pixabay

Some of the posts in this series will focus on one or more available tools for a given category of pagebuilders. Others would be more generic in nature, and provide an overview of a particular tool or category. Without further delay, lets' dive into the topic right away.

So you are interested in knowing more about Pagebuilders, Eh?

If you look up discussions on sites like Quora, you would be inclined to believe that page builders exist for one type of Content Management System: Wordpress. This perception might be mostly true. Indeed, the majority of page builders exist for this most commonly used content management platform. But if we look at the Universe of web hosting, or its subset, Content Management Systems, you will realize that page builders cover a much wider territory.

What is a Pagebuilder Anyway?

In a nutshell, a page builder is a visual tool, which will help in creating web pages. The most common names that come to mind are:

• Site builders offered by Squarespace or Wix or
• add-ons or plugins for WordPress, such as elementor, Divi and Brizy.

But the story does not end there. Over the years, I have even used some pagebuilders, without realizing what I was using. Here's an example:

Remember this Logo?

Hint

Image: Pinterest

or

Another Hint

Image: Betaarchive

if you are not prone to getting too nostalgic, Wikipedia has a great list of HTML editors that I believe were the pre-cursors to today's website creation tools. You may be familiar with some of them: Bluefish, Google Web Designer, Dreamweaver, and Seamonkey.

Okay, but...who uses Pagebuilders Anyway?

This category of web design tools caters to two sets of audience. One category is people who are not comfortable with or familiar with coding. Particularly with the rise in the no-code movement, the usage of such drag and drop tools has gained popularity.

The second is website designers and digital agencies, who would rather focus on customizing the websites for speed, security, efficiency, and so on. For them, the ability to utilize existing tools helps them utilize their time more efficiently, which ultimately has a bearing on the cost.

What are the advantages and limitations of Pagebuilders?

Advantages

One of the biggest advantages of using pagebuilders is they speed up the creation of pages. Flexibility, responsive. Many pagebuilders come with inbuilt image search, codes for embed players, etc. This really adds to their appeal. In addition, there are features for greater user engagement, such as surveys, forms, etc.

Disadvantages or Limitations

Now we move to the disadvantages. First of all, you're relying on third-party systems, many of which involve creating an account and entering payment information. For poorly designed or maintained systems, this could lead to security issues. Next, depending on the pricing plan, the scope of customization may be limited. A lot of providers offer free subscription plans, but they come with many limitations.

The level of control a user may have on the layout, features, etc. may be limited. In addition, many of these applications use closed source or proprietary software. This makes the user dependent on the provider for updates, security patches, and so on. Which is exactly the game some providers play.

As you will read in some of our subsequent posts, many of the Freemium models offer paid annual subscriptions. In other words, if you end the subscription, you are no longer able to use the service. Worse, you might be stuck with an older, unpatched version of the software.

Are All Pagebuilders Created Equal?

The short answer is no.

Image: A VYas

For the sake of simplicity, I would like to classify pagebuilders into six categories:

1.The Big Boys These services are commercially available to a very wide group of audience, and have a large user base. These large web hosts offer web hosting and have custom web builders. Examples include Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, Jimdo.

2. The Rising Stars These cater to a smaller audience base. Examples of such service providers include (Carrd.co, Tilda.cc, Bookmark, Epicpixls, Voog).
3. Page builders offered by hosting companies such as GoDaddy, Namechaep, Dynadot, etc. are also included in this list. The pagebuilder offered by Softaculous (Sitepad) also features in this list. Installtron or Cloudron might also offer similar applications.

4.Desktop apps such as Mobirise, 8b.

5.Pagebuilders for Wordpress As mentioned in the first half of this post, there are numerous options for pagebuilders for Wordpress . Examples include Elementor, Divi, Brizy. We will cover some of these in detail in a subsequent post.

6.Landing page creators This is the broadest category in our list, and can include mailing list; video hosting; and CRM services. Some of the examples in this list include Mailchimp, Hippovideo, Hubspot, and builder.io.

Bookmark.com 

Intrigued (or confused) enough?

Don't worry, we will cover the above categories in sufficient detail in the following posts. We hope this will help you clear the air on the topic of pagebuilders.

How This Series is Structured

Most blogs, tutorials, and review sites cover the "Big Boys" in sufficient depth, therefore we will not talk about them in this series. We will also not cover the pagebuilders offered by hosting companies for similar reasons. We may, however, include a short review of Softaculous in the last part of this series.

The subsequent posts will be as follows:

Part II : Pagebuilders: The Rising Stars

Part III : Pagebuilders: Desktop App

Part IV: Pagebuilders for WordPress - Part I

Part V: Pagebuilders for WordPress- part II

Part VI: Landing Page Creators (This will also be the concluding part of this series)

Note from @ympker about this project

So, the other day @vyas asked me if I wanted to collaborate on a joint-post about various Page Builders with him. Given that I have used a bunch of different page builders already, I thought this might be a nice little addition to our forum.

I will give you guys a short summary of my experience with:

-Divi (ElegantThemes; WordPress),

-Mobirise (HTML&CSS + Bootstrap Pagebuilder),

-Architect (HTML&CSS Pagebuilder) and

-Pinegrow (HTML&CSS + Bootstrap, Foundation and WordPress Theme Maker Addon).

All of these are great Pagebuilders and I appreciate them for what they are. Like with many things in life, I wouldn't call any of them perfect. I'm still waiting for the Ultimate Pagebuilder that unites all of my favourite features of these in one Pagebuilder but I guess that's not gonna happen. Anyway, I will try to give you an insight on what you can expect from each of the Pagebuilders I mentioned and perhaps get a better idea of which Pagebuilder might be suitable for your project.

Screenshot of Brizy Pagebuilder by A Vyas

Introduction to part II of this series

In this post, we will briefly mention the leading web hosting companies who also have their custom pagebuilders. But the main focus of this post will be on the "Younger Siblings" as we had described in Part I of this series. Specifically, we will talk about Carrd.co, Brizy, and Bookmark pagebuilders. I have used each of these services quite regularly over the years, and am quite confident that you will find them useful.

The Big Boys : Webhosts with Pagebuilders

The Younger Siblings

Younger siblings are companies that cater to a smaller audience, or a niche market. Some of these services include:

-Carrd
-Bookmark
-EpicPixls
-Tilda
-Voog
-Weblium
-Sitepad

Stacksocial has a list of many new and relatively unknown page builders. You may check it out here.

A rough estimate shows that are over 100 different types of pagebuidlers.

We will cover three of these services in detail in the sections below.

Carrd.co

Carrd.co is a page builder, as well as a web hosting platform. It is great for designers. freelancers, and professionals looking to create their portfolio or personal sites. It is a fairly popular service among those who are familiar with the world of pagebuilders. Its servers are in the United States, which has caused a headache or two for me due to low network speeds. More on that later.

I came to know about this service through one of the mailers. Initially, I was rather skeptical but when I looked it up, I was actually impressed and I signed up for it.

Kicking the Tyres

Carrd.co offers a freemium service. You can start with the free model to try this service out. In order to do so, you can choose one of their pre built themes or pre built templates. There are templates for a Landing Page, a signup or a feedback form, a portfolio page or a personal page.

Once the layout is selected, you are taken to a page where you get the basic instructions where you can change the text, the font size etc. You can simply edit the fields and you will be good to go in minutes! Note that the fields are customizable.

Customizing the fields

From "Alex Smith", I change that to my name. Next I changed my image-I put my same image as my avatar on LES. You can change the font size and also change the pattern by adding a drag and drop shadow.

You can preview the draft site in desktop mode and mobile more. Once you are ready to publish, you only have to enter your contact details.

Click to see the test site

Information on the tiers, features, for the pricing plans, is available here: https://carrd.co/pro

Carrd.co is under active development- most recently it was updated about three weeks ago the time of posting this message. AJ, the founder and creator of Carrd.co, is the person behind html5up.

Give carrd.co a try, you will be pleasantly surprised!

Tip: If you are considering a paid plan, lookout for the deals around Black Friday. You get a 50% discount on the pro plan which typically cost, 20, US dollars, will end up costing you less than 10. For that amount, you can get 10 one-page websites.

####What is this service best for
1. Carrd is great for making a portfolio page, a landing page, and you can also have your resume up there. Or you can just create quick one-page site for your friends, your family, your girlfriend, boyfriend, as the case may be.
2. You can clone a site, that it, create a staging site and a production site if you wish. that gives an advantage of creating multiple options inc are you want to seek approval from the client or the person(s) you are creating the site for.

Quirks and limitations

I have two problems with this service:
1. In India, I get low speeds. This makes the creation and loading of the site very slow. I had reached out to AJ back in December 2018, and he had suggested that I use Cloudflare or any other CDN. I did try that, but to no avail. In Europe and North America, speeds might be better.
2. Sometimes, the sites go into something called as 'initialising' mode. This happens probably for 5 minutes every month. For that period, the sites are inaccessible. Recently, I received a mailer from AJ that required me to change the servers for my sites. Maybe with the new server(s) this problem will go away.
3. You can export the site in the higher price tiers only (Pro Plus and Pro Max)

Summing it all up

I am a very happy user of carrd.co, and would recommend it if you are looking for a no-frills site that is quick to set up.
In spite of the minor quirks, I give it a thumbs up.

Carrd.co also has good documentation, I am adding the link to their support page for reference.

Bookmark.com

Introduction

Let us take a look at bookmark.com. I learnt about this page builder + web host through a Facebook group. The specifications they offered did not impress me much initially. But upon closer look, there was one feature about bookmark made me sign up: the AI-backed website builder (AIDA).

Signing up and pricing plans

Bookmark also follows the freemium model. Like other services, in order to use a custom domain, one has to sign up for the paid plans, which start at 12 US dollars a month on an annual subscription. This tier puts you in the 'unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage' category. Like many members of LES, I am also sceptical about anything 'unlimited'. Inspire of my reservations, I had purchased the 2 website plan. It made the pricing attractive.

Creating a website

Initially, I found AIDA to be gimmicky! But creating a website is fast and super easy with AIDA. In the included video, you can see how I have created a sample website in a very short time.

Customizing the fields

Once the website is created, you can change the fields to your liking: fonts, colours, images and more. This can be done manually or using AIDA, again. It is difficult to change the type of website- for example, from a blog to a photo gallery. Also, the layout cannot be changed easily once it has been chosen. You might be better off re-creating the website. You can save as many sites as you like, until you publish them. The upper limit to the number of published sites is the number of sites included in your plan.


Images and videos

Bookmark offers integration with stock image websites, and you can replace the images that come with the stock website. You can also upload your own images, or save them from google drive onto your bookmark.com folder. The site claims there is no upper limit on the number of images or their size. I have not stress-tested the system, so I cannot comment on the actual limits if any.

e-Learning Courses

Bookmark.com offers some e-learning courses as a part of their paid packages, or you can subscribe to them independently.

Concluding remarks

Bookmark is largely catered towards web designers and agencies who want to use the white label service for their clients. But the ease of creating a website using AIDA may make it an attractive option for the non-technically-inclined user. Pricing wise, it becomes quite expensive for the causal user beyond the $12 a month plan.

Brizy

Brizy is an interesting beast, I mean it in a good way. This service can be called a hybrid. It is a pagebuidler and a web host. In that sense, it falls under the "younger siblings" category. They also offer cloud hosting, which uses their custom page builder.

a. You can download the .zip file that has the readymade site, simply upload it on your server, unpack it, and you are good to go. This is a great option if you are not planning to update the site regularly. That is, you are looking to create a static site. This is the "Export HTML" option.
b. The other option is to use your website as a 'front' face, but the page creation, image hosting, etc. happens from brizy. You can update the pages or the data on the webpages, and the content will be synced dynamically with your website. This is the "Server Sync" Option.

The other two options- allow you to host on brizy using your own custom domain, or use a subdomain with a "subdomain.brizy.io" extension. This option is the default for the free tier. Brizy also offers a WordPress plugin, which we might cover in a subsequent part of this series.

The real interesting option is the way in which you can host a website on your own server.

You can read the page Publishing options for Brizy
for more details.

Pricing plans

Brizy has three pricing tiers: Free account, Pro Personal Plan, and Pro Studio Plan. The pricing is at the mid-segment : US $ 49 / year for Personal Pro and $ 99 for Pro Studio.
Here is the interesting part: under the free account, you can link 1 custom domain or subdomain. That is, you get one website hosted for free.

Similarly, under the Pro Personal Plan, you can link up to 3 custom domains or subdomains. In the Pro Studio plan, there is no upper limit. You can visit the pricing page on their website for details.

Brizy currently has a 'lifetime' deal running, something you can notice in bold at the top of their website.

SSL

Both Custom Domain and Brizy Subdomain publishing options come with free SSL included. According to their website, SSL "Takes up to 24 hours to be installed." In my experience, it DOES take 24 hours for the ssl to be set up.

CDN

Brizy has a list of POPs on their website, which they use for free and paid tiers. Particularly under the paid plan, the CDN locations in Asia Pacific region is quite extensive. This makes it an attractive proposition.

Hosting is on amazon EC2, image processing by Fastly, and their CDN provider may be a name familiar to most readers in the ES community: BunnyCDN.

Overall, they seem to have chosen some good Infrastructure providers, which means that eh performance is expected to be above par. One concern I have about such services is the price they have to pay to the providers. Amazon' s AWS in particular can get expensive. This aspect is best-illustrated in the below video.

Video: AWS fees can quickly turn expensive!

Further reading:
1. Basic and Global CDN for Brizy

2. Specifications for cloud hosting

Brizy Cloud

I really like this option. For this review, I have included a video made from screen captures. I created a test site on Brizy cloud, and hosted it on the shared hosting site. I thought this was a good way to put to use the Black Friday offer from 2019 by Gullo's Hosting.

Watch the video

https://gaathastory.hippovideo.io/video/play/idjtxkG6bFT3nJxJKbfNUcFlmwywclicW25lWKIwLk0

Summing it all up

I really like Brizy and the simplicity and options it offers. In particular, you can create a rather complex page (or series of pages) and publish them in a variety of ways. This product is under active development. On the flip side, there are bugs, and the Wordpress plugin had a security incident a couple of months ago.Brizy is worth a try- heck, they offer free of 1 website.

Conclusion: Part II

This wraps up part II of this 6 part series. Hope you found the site builder options discussed in this post useful. The list I have posted at the beginning of this article is by no means exhaustive. But I thought the best way to create value for the readers was by writing about services that I have used first hand. With that logic, I should have even covered Sitepad, but that is a post for another day. Hope you find the mini-reviews useful. As always, looking forward to your comments, feedback and recommendations if any.