Using WordPress with premium page builder plugins can put beautiful, professional, and dynamic websites right at your fingertips – regardless of your website development experience.
However, this brings in another problem: How do you choose the best tools for the job? When dealing with three highly popular and capable builder plugins like Beaver Builder, WPBakery, and Visual Composer, this question is particularly hard to answer.
However, there are some important characteristics that can guide your decision. First of all, Beaver Builder and WPBakery are considered to be page builders while Visual Composer is a full-fledged website builder – the difference which we’ll explain more clearly in the following sections.
Secondly, these plugins are drastically different when it comes to pricing, licensing constraints, and the free templates and elements you get with them.
While we’re at it, we’ll also break down the difference in terms of the user experience, features, and support for you so that you can make your decision with confidence.
For ease of navigation, use the executive summary below:
- A Quick Overview of Beaver Builder, WPBakery, and Visual Composer
- Beaver Builder vs WPBakery vs Visual composer: The Key Takeouts
- How Does the Page Building Experience of Beaver Builder, WPBakery, and Visual Composer Compare?
- What Other Website Building Capabilities Does Beaver Builder, WPBakery, and Visual Composer Provide?
- What Free Templates and Elements Do You Get With Beaver Builder, WPBakery, and Visual Composer?
- The Pricing Battle: Beaver Builder vs WPBakery vs Visual Composer
- What Support Can You Expect with Beaver Builder, WPBakery, and Visual Composer?
Quick Index:
So, let’s drive into the details.
Beaver Builder vs WPBakery vs Visual Composer: A Quick Overview
To give you a glimpse of what each WordPress plugin is about, I just quickly want to introduce each with a brief overview of their origins and main talking points:
An Overview of Beaver Builder
Launched in 2014, Beaver Builder has always been committed to making publishing on the web accessible to all.
It was founded by three friends, web developers, and active contributors to the WordPress ecosystem – so you know the brains behind Beaver Builder know what they are doing.
Beaver Builder has already surpassed 1 million users, cementing its place as one of the most popular WordPress builders today.
It has gained that popularity thanks to its superb technical support, no-nonsense approach to being a WordPress page builder, its compatibility with other WordPress plugins and themes, and its handy collection of add-ons.
Check out our in-depth Review of Beaver Builder to get the detail insights of Beaver Builder.
An Overview of WPBakery
WPBakery is easily one of the very first WordPress page builder tools and a pioneer in the field. In fact, it’s the same team behind WPBakery that also developed Visual Composer later on.
With a cheap lifetime access plan, simplicity, and a long history on its side, it’s still no wonder WPBakery is so popular.
WPBakery is still a feature-rich, beginner-friendly, and great value-for-money option for anyone that wants to build a WordPress website.
WPBakery is also somewhat unique because they offer both a backend and frontend website builder, allowing you to choose your preferred page building technique.
Check out our in-depth review of WPBakery to get the detail insights of WPBakery.
An Overview of Visual Composer
Visual Composer is a bit different from both Beaver Builder and its predecessor, WPBakery. It’s a complete website builder as opposed to simply a page builder.
That means it brings a lot of extra capabilities to the table to customize and manage the look and feel of your entire WordPress website with global and reusable tools.
For the last number of years, there has been considerable confusion between WPBakery and Visual Composer.
This was due to the original Visual Composer Page Builder being rebranded as WPBakery due to licensing issues with selling the product through the third-party Envato marketplace.
Subsequently, its creators came up with Visual Composer as a completely separate product – a fully-fledged website builder. The difference between these two will become clear over the course of the comparison.
Despite that, Visual Composer is available at a range of price points, not only with a free version but with amazingly affordable premium packages as well.
Combined with an absolutely HUGE amount of free content, it’s an option few can ignore.
Check out our in-depth Review of Visual Composer to get the detail insights of Visual Composer.
Beaver Builder vs WPBakery vs Visual Composer: The Key Takeouts
Before we get really stuck into the details, let’s look at the key things you need to know about each of these WordPress builder tools.
Key Takeouts for Beaver Builder
With a robust set of features and capabilities, Beaver Builder is one of the stalwart WordPress page builders for a number of reasons:
- No limits on the number of websites you can use Beaver Builder on
- Comes with white labeling tools plus the ability to set up Beaver Builder on multisite or networked multi-site environments
- A team of U.S.-based representatives that offer knowledgeable and expert technical support
- A robust collection of landing and content page templates that are easy to customize
- A handy selection of around 30 modules and elements that can be used in the builder to create your WordPress pages
- Built on the highly optimized and lightweight Bootstrap CSS framework for better performance and SEO
Key Takeouts for WPBakery
As one of the first WordPress page builders still around, WPBakery has expanded with tonnes of features over the years:
- You can choose between either the backend or visual frontend editor to build your pages, offering two page-building methods that work separately or together to build your WordPress pages.
- WPBakery provides a handy collection of 100+ page and section templates that you can use to quickly put together entire website pages with well-thought-out designs.
- WPBakery ships with 50+ content elements to add a variety of visual and functional elements and widgets to your pages with just a click.
- An easy-to-use and simple tool to choose global brand colors for consistent styling across your WordPress pages and create preset elements.
- All WPBakery templates are mobile-ready and you can switch the builder to mobile or tablet mode to make sure your pages are responsive.
Key Takeouts for Visual Composer
Visual Composer is a well-rounded website building tool that comes with everything you need to get started, and beyond:
- Built on clean and performant React.Js – no slow-loading or unoptimized shortcodes
- A powerful theme builder with comprehensive header, footer, and sidebar editing tools
- A massive library of 200+ website, page, header, footer, sidebar, and block content templates
- A robust and feature-rich page builder tool that allows you to design responsive pages for a variety of contexts
- A built-in analyzer to analyze your pages for SEO, errors, and performance
- A developer-friendly API for extending and unlocking the full potential of your WordPress website
- 300+ Elements to help you quickly and easily put together attractive and dynamic pages
How Does the Page Building Experience Differ for Beaver Builder, WPBakery, and Visual Composer?
The Beaver Builder is a relatively straightforward page builder tool, you can click the “+” button in the top right to open the menu with modules, row layouts, and templates to add to your pages.
In the top left, you can find another menu related to customizing the editing experience, such as changing to responsive editing mode, changing the brightness, adding custom code, etc.
And, a contextual menu will pop up on the customization area if you select a module to customize. Whenever saving changes, you’ll have to wait one or two moments for it to take effect.
WPBakery is similar in sophistication to that of Beaver Builder. Elements can be added from the “+” icon to the left in the toolbar.
Elements themselves can be edited and repositioned using the frontend drag-and-drop interface. The general and design options are relatively straightforward as you can see below:
The one downside to this builder is that whenever you save changes, the entire page needs to reload for them to apply. This makes it a somewhat slow and cumbersome experience on occasion.
Somewhat uniquely, WPBakery also provides a backend builder that looks like this:
While most will prefer the frontend version for design, the backend version is somewhat easier to learn and focuses on helping you establish the layout for the page.
The Visual Composer builder is an extremely powerful and refined builder compared to the previous two. It uses a left-hand menu with the main viewport structure.
Controls like adding elements, editing their contents and style, getting page-related insights, adjusting page-wide layout settings, or toggling between responsive editing options can all be done from the left-hand menu. You can even reorient it to a top bar menu if you prefer.
The WYSIWYG reflects your changes almost immediately and allows for smooth repositioning, column adjustments, and editing elements. Some tools, like the spider padding, margin, and size customizer will be familiar to Beaver Builder users.
Visual Composer also features a very useful Tree view built into the page builder. This allows you to quickly get an overview of and navigate your page using a tree-like hierarchy structure.
You can even edit, delete, , duplicate, or use drag-and-drop to reposition elements straight from the tree view:
What Other Website Building Capabilities Does Beaver Builder, WPBakery, and Visual Composer Provide?
The main difference between a page builder and a website builder is that the latter allows you to also customize the areas associated with a website’s theme, namely the header, footer, and sidebar.
On the other hand, page builders are primarily concerned with the page content areas that are specific to individual pages.
In most cases, both Beaver Builder and WPBakery are considered to be page builders. However, as feature-rich products, they do come with some website-building capabilities.
The Beaver Builder Add-on, Beaver Themer, costs an extra $147 for an unlimited site license. It allows you to create custom layouts for posts, Woocommerce products, search and category pages, advanced post grids, and more.
You can also build partial layouts like headers, footers, and sidebars to use throughout your site.
For the Pro and Agency plans, you also get the Beaver Builder Theme which can be customized using the standard WordPress customizer.
This is useful as a blank framework that allows you to make wholesale changes to the look and feel of your entire website.
WPBakery probably offers the least extensive features in this regard. It does come with a built-in skin customizer that allows you to set site-wide colors and accents.
With an Extended license, WPBakery can be integrated with any theme that might provide some of these abilities. WPBakery also comes with an extensive developer API that can be used to extend its capabilities, but this is not out of the ordinary.
As a full-on website builder, Visual Composer has the most extensive features in this regard. You can create custom page layouts that can easily be reused throughout your WordPress website.
Similarly, you can individually design reusable headers, footers, and sidebars. In contrast with its predecessor, theme integration with Visual Composer is completely free and there is also a comprehensive API aimed at developers.
Going even further, you can design element, block, and template presets which should greatly help speed up large websites with numerous pages.
It doesn’t end there, you can also design and customize popups from scratch using the dedicated builder.
What Free Templates and Elements Do You Get With Beaver Builder, WPBakery, and Visual Composer Offer?
Let’s start with beaver Builder which also happens to have the most modest library of templates and elements. In terms of templates, you have around 25 content pages and 16 landing pages to choose from.
Although the designers have done an admiral job of trying to include a variety of designs and niches, there’s only so much you can do with those limited numbers.
The designs aren’t the most exciting or groundbreaking. Still, the templates are responsive, modern, and relatively attractive, so it’s not like they lack some good qualities.
You also get a collection of roughly 30 content elements. The collection is simple but covers most of the basics, such as separators, tabs, and media players.
Despite the simplicity of the selection, you do have a decent amount of freedom to customize Beaver Builder elements on the page.
WPBakery has a more significant library of templates with almost 100 templates covering full pages.
With many of the pages obviously meant to be used together, it is possible to put together an entire, consistently designed website only by importing page layouts. Like Beaver Builder, the templates are not the greatest but are also not disappointing.
You also get around 50+ content elements. This is a more robust collection that contains all the basics you need, such as FAQs, charts, Google Maps, social widgets, tabs, and grids for galleries and posts.
However, it still falls somewhat short of Visual Composer’s massive selection.
Visual Composer comes with an absolutely massive amount of free content, especially in comparison to its two predecessors. With all paid plans, you get a massive 300+ elements and 200+ templates.
The templates consist of full website templates, page templates, section templates, as well as headers and footers. This means you can import them as you please to help build out your pages.
Visual Composer’s designs are also slightly more impressive in terms of the quality of design and the variety:
Obviously, the selection of 300+ content elements is incredibly impressive. These consist of content, dynamic WordPress, social media, WooCommerce, and a whole range of other elements.
True to the power of the builder, they are all highly customizable and configurable. Simply put, few builders can beat Visual Composer when it comes to this aspect.
The Pricing Battle: Beaver Builder vs WPBakery vs Visual Composer
At first glance, Beaver builder’s pricing starts at a relatively high $99 per year. However, Beaver Builder gives a 40% discount to renewing customers which means you’ll pay only $60 per year for the Standard plan after the first year. The three pricing plans look as follows:
- Lite: Free
- Limited set of 5 modules
- Standard: $99/first year, $60/year thereafter
- Unlimited sites
- All premium modules and templates
- Premium support
- Pro: $199/first year, $120/year thereafter
- Beaver Builder theme
- Multisite-capable
- Agency: $399/first year, $240/year thereafter
- Multisite network settings
- White labeling
Although Beaver Builder offers a free page builder plugin, it’s extremely limited with only the page-building capabilities and very little extra content. All plans support unlimited sites which are great value for money.
There is also a 30-day money-back guarantee for all plans. The Standard plan is still the best plan if you’re purely looking for a page builder with the other two adding features that are significant for more serious website creators and professional agencies, respectively.
Check Beaver Builder Pricing Details Here
WPBakery’s starting price is less than half that of Beaver Builder per year. What’s amazing is that this is a lifetime access package and you’ll only need to renew premium support (if you want it) after the first free 6 months.
Updates are free forever. However, you do only get limited site licenses which is an important consideration depending on how many websites you intend to build. Here is a summary of WPBakery’s two plans:
- Regular: $45/once-off
- 1 website
- All templates and elements
- 6 months premium support
- Free updates for life
- Extended: $245/once-off
- Everything above
- Theme integration
- For use across a SaaS application
Unfortunately, there is no free trial, plan, or version, although you can sign up for a demo here. There is also a relatively short 15-day trial period.
Check WPBakery Pricing Details Here
Including the free plan, Visual Composer actually has 4 plans to choose from, conforming to the largest variety of budgets.
Pricing is relatively affordable with great discounts for your first year and the cost is mostly based on your website licenses. Here are the available plans:
- Free:
- 1 website
- 30 elements
- 10 templates
- Singe website: $29.40/first year, $49/year renewal for 1 website
- All 300+ elements
- All 200+ templates
- Theme and popup builder
- Header, footer, and sidebar editor
- WooCommerce support
- Dynamic content, global templates
- Premium support
- 3 Websites: $59.40/first year, $99/year renewal original for 3 websites
- Same as Single website
- Developers: $209.40/first year, $349/year renewal for 1000 websites
- Same as Single website
- Singe website: $29.40/first year, $49/year renewal for 1 website
- All 300+ elements
- All 200+ templates
- Theme and popup builder
- Header, footer, and sidebar editor
- WooCommerce support
- Dynamic content, global templates
- Premium support
- 3 Websites: $59.40/first year, $99/year renewal original for 3 websites
- Same as Single website
- Developers: $209.40/first year, 349/year renewal for 1000 websites
- Same as Single website
Except for the very limited free plan, you can base your need for the other plans exclusively on how many licenses you need. Like its cousin builder, you’ll only have a 15-day refund period.
Check Visual Composer Pricing Details Here
What Support Can You Expect With Beaver Builder, WPBakery, and Visual Composer?
Beaver Builder’s support team is still headed by a small and intimate group of U.S.-based experts. This means that you can expect top-flight quality and consistency from your support interactions.
However, it also means that availability isn’t the best with only ticket support that’s not available on the weekends or U.S. public holidays.
Things look better when considering the self-help resources. The knowledge base is incredibly extensive with a huge number of topics, even covering advanced topics such as building your own plugins.
As you might expect from such a long-standing theme, there is a very active community behind it where you can get additional assistance on Facebook, Slack, and the official community forum.
Although WPBakery is essentially a lifetime access plan, you only get premium support for the first 6 months. You can access one-on-one support via the ticketing/email system.
Although it’s not exactly 24/7, you can usually get in touch with support staff in a decent amount of time (less than 1 day).
The self-help resources are also pretty decent with around 50 WPBakery Video Academy Tutorials that also cover more technical subjects as well as a large number of written tutorials and guides.
Visual Composer offers premium customer support via one-on-one ticket support from within your Visual Composer account dashboard or via email.
However, like the other two, there are no instant support channels like live chat or email available. Visual Composer also lacks somewhat of a community with no official forum, yet.
That being said, you’ll be well taken care of if you prefer using self-help resources for your issues. Visual Composer provides pretty comprehensive documentation that includes a lot of helpful video tutorials that can also be found on their official YouTube channel.
The documentation is easy to navigate as it’s broken down by facets of the plugin which is then broken down into specific features and capabilities.
Beaver Builder vs WPBakery vs Visual Composer: Which is the Best WordPress Builder Tool for You?
As they are more similar in terms of capabilities, it’s perhaps more straightforward to choose between Beaver Builder and WPBakery. However, it’s hard to argue with just how much you get for WPBakery considering how little you pay.
For $45 dollars only, you can get lifetime access to one of WordPress’ favorite page builders with a robust collection of elements, templates, and other features.
You also have the option to upgrade Beaver Builder with add-ons to be similar in capabilities to a full website builder.
That being said, if you’re willing to pay a bit more, it seems hard to justify not jumping ahead and going with Visual Composer.
For a relatively low yearly price, you get a powerful and intuitive WYSIWYG builder plus full website-building capabilities with an incredible theme builder.
The only concern is whether you can do without the unlimited website licenses that the other two builders provide.
Regardless, Visual Composer is definitely the superior plugin in terms of raw customizing power as well as the massive amount of predesigned content you get to get your website up and running quickly.
So, what do you think? Do either of these 3 website-building tools stand out for your next WordPress website project? Or, have you used any of them before and agree/disagree with your findings?
We, and the rest of the community, can’t wait to hear your opinion in the comments below.
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