I’m currently looking into WordPress page builder plugins. I love doing things custom, but some clients have small budgets that don’t work with custom and I’m not a fan of purchasing themes just to end up feeling like we didn’t get our money’s worth. I’d rather get a powerful page builder and build sites from the ground up; well kind of.

Page builders can help fast track a WordPress build by giving you all the pieces and letting you create whatever you’d like. There’s actually a big market for smaller, quicker, WordPress sites that don’t need tons of customizations, and you can do a lot with WordPress without touching any code.

So far I’ve looked at SiteOrigin Page Builder. It’s really a great plugin for free, or $15 if you donate, however it seems harder to create the layouts I wanted in my testing. I feel like it’s missing some of the features and simplicity that other options have, but it’s free so you can’t complain too much. It’s also open source so I feel better about the code quality. Given enough time, I’m sure I could learn to do all the things I wanted.

I looked at Beaver Builder too and it is awesome. Everything about Beaver Builder seems to work just as I expected and I was able to create the layouts I wanted without a lot of confusion. The free version is very limited, but the paid versions have nearly everything one would need to build out some nice sites. The price is a bit high, but it may just be worth it.

Visual Composer is one of the most popular page builder plugins out there but it’s not for me. It’s got a lot of features, the price is decent, and everyone seems to love it. However, I’m not a fan of the shortcodes it leaves after you disable the plugin. At least the options above left HTML behind, not shortcodes.

Layers looks nice as well. It’s free, but it’s all widgets. I haven’t tested this one too much as I wasn’t a big fan of the way it was implemented.  Don’t know why, but it bugs me.

I’ve seen a few others as well, but these are the ones that have peaked my interest so far.

Which ever one I choose, I want to ensure that what I end up with is easy to use, leaves me with HTML if I disable it, can be flexible enough for nearly any layout, and easy enough for the client to use.

Do you use any? Which ones do you like?