Visual Composer vs. Page Builder

[Amy]

The theme I was using before came with Visual Composer, so I have a couple pages (like my sales page) whose design is really tied to VC, so I’m thinking of buying VC to allow me to continue to use it for the pages that are already designed instead of spending the time to redo them.

I see in the tutorial videos that you recommend Page Builder, which I also downloaded to try out, and it has some features I like as well. I’m curious if there are particular reasons you recommend it, besides the obvious benefit of being free!

I’m also wondering whether I might have problems/conflicts between the plugins if I wanted to use both. Is that a bad idea? Would I be better off just picking one and sticking with it?

Thanks for any feedback!

[Christopher Williams]

I like you had obtained several page editors before switching to using only buddyboss products

Finally discovering WordPress page builders was a bit of a revelation. I’d heard of them many times before but dismissed them as I assumed they were a bit of gimmick. Claims of being able to build custom page layouts without touching any code left me non-plussed. As you can do so much with WordPress without ever needing to edit any code, I was left wondering what these tools could really offer.

Once I finally spent some time with these tools, it become clear I had misunderstood them completely. What these page builder plugins can offer the user is far beyond the realms of what is possible for your average blogger, in terms of their coding ability or available time.

What Page Builders Offer

With some of the best WordPress page builders you can very easily build page and post layouts that combine your content with widgets to make interesting and engaging homepages for your blog or inner posts and pages. Things you can do with a good page builder include:

Create image and post sliders
Insert multicolumn layouts
Add Facebook, Twitter and other social widgets
Quickly build image galleries
Choose from a range of buttons and alert boxes
Insert accordions, tab boxes and responsive grids

All the above and more can be easily added to pages and posts with a simple to use drag and drop builder plugin. The new builder is added to the familiar new post and new page area in WordPress and elements are dragged onto the page.

I do find that they are a bit limiting giving problems/conflicts two different frameworks giving direction if you will and bumping heads or code causing random errors

I hope this helps if you need anymore help the community or I is happy to help

[Amy]

Thanks @cwilliams for your response. I’m clear on what a page builder does in general; I’m looking for specific information on

1) Why the BuddyBoss crew recommends Page Builder by SiteOrigin over other page builders

2) Whether it’s a bad idea to have two different page builders installed/active at the same time (specifically, Visual Composer and Page Builder by SiteOrigin)

On this second point I’m in a tough spot, because I have some things already formatted for Visual Composer but it looks like don’t work in the Boss theme because the widget areas are different, so being able to keep some pages in Visual Composer and redo some with Page Builder seems like the ideal scenario, except for my concerns that it’s a bad idea to have both active at the same time.

Hope that makes sense!

[Christopher Williams]

I would love to see where you are running in to conflict I had the same issue and it took me moving a few things around on more then one of my sites . I my self do not use any page builders however i do follow the golden rule its bad to have more then one driver in the car if you will. Look foward to hearing back one of the developers o am sure will weigh in on there Page builder selection

[Paul]

@amy-l-scott I would suggest you’ll find Page Builder a lot cleaner / less busy to work with. And while it does create markup, in my experience it’s less than Visual Composer. I’d say go with Page Builder.

[Michael Eisenwasser]

@amy-l-scott

Page Builder is just a recommendation. We’re giving people a good solution that we know works, and is free without any up-sells. But if you’re already using Visual Composer and have content set up there, you don’t have to switch over to Page Builder. Use whatever works for you! As for using both, it will probably work fine. But it may be redundant..

We recommend Page Builder for a handful of reasons:

1. It’s free. This is a big benefit as we can comfortably recommend it to 100% of customers.
2. It works well, very reliable code.
3. It’s really popular and well supported.
4. It integrates automatically with widgets, so it’s very flexible and extendable. We plan on building/styling our own widgets eventually and you can then pop them into your homepages with Page Builder.

[Amy]

Thanks for the feedback, @michael and @style960! Much appreciated.

Amy

[David]

I noticed that I haven’t been able to use the BuddyBoss widgets like “Recent Posts” and BP Global Search because it doesn’t convert the shortcode and all you see is

[vc_column_inner width=”1/6″][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”2/3″][ultimate_heading main_heading=”Why Hope361?” heading_tag=”h2″ alignment=”center” spacer=”line_with_icon” spacer_position=”middle” spacer_img_width=”48″ line_style=”solid” line_height=”1″ line_color=”#333333″ icon_type=”selector” icon_size=”32″ icon_style=”none” icon_color_border=”#333333″ icon_border_size=”1″ icon_border_radius=”500″ icon_border_spacing=”50″ img_width=”48″ line_icon_fixer=”10″ icon=”Defaults-double-angle-down” main_heading_font_family=”font_family:Comfortaa|font_call:Comfortaa” main_heading_font_size=”desktop:30px;” icon_color=”#3ccae1″]

Still Trying to figure out the work around, I’m having to remove the visual composer code and just use plain HTML for now.