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Visual Composer Page Builder

Visual Composer Page Builder

Updated on: 13th Oct 2021

Visual Composer is a WordPress-based plugin that provides a suite of creative options to allow users to create and customize their business’s website. The program is a variant of the company’s “WP Bakery'' program offering enhanced personalization, such as headers, footers, sidebars, and several other features.

Visual Composer allows businesses to fully customize their website with various graphic elements and integrations with other websites and apps. The plugin features options and plans ranging from individual creators to large agencies looking to manage hundreds of websites. Visual Composer is regularly updated and has a premium support system for paid members, along with a well-maintained help center and email-based customer service for free-level or prospective users.

What sets Visual Composer Page Builder apart

Free plan limitations

Visual Composer offers a free plan for users to immediately access a select set of Visual Composer’s creative hub. The free plan gives its users one website with limited customization options compared to premium sites. Visual Composer offers limited templates and element options for its free users, with only the premium plan allowing unlimited downloads of any element from Visual Composer’s library. Premium is required to access the library of stock images from Unsplash that you can use within Visual Composer’s creative hub.

The visual components for free users are heavily restricted, with 30 elements and ten templates instead of the hundreds provided for premium users. Features like the theme builder, header/footer/sidebar customization, and dynamic content are notably omitted from the free plan.

Ultimately, Visual Composer’s free plan is very restrictive when compared to the paid options. Many of the plugin’s most touted features are absent from the free program and what the free plan offers is a limited window into what Visual Composer is capable of. The plan may be usable for a smaller business not looking for a fully customizable experience, but companies looking for a unique site will need to look at one of Visual Composer’s premium packages.

Alternatives

Elementor

https://elementor.com/

Elementor is a similar program that allows users to customize and personalize their company’s website. Elementor offers widgets and options that are streamlined for companies that need to use their website as a marketplace, featuring WooCommerce support similar to Visual Composer. The program also features options geared towards marketing with the ability to create custom forms and a variety of templates centered around advertising products.

Elementor provides tools for learning the platform with a YouTube channel complete with several video tutorials to learn its various features. Elementor offers a limited free-forever version with over 40 basic widgets and more than 30 templates. Its five premium plans build upon those features with extra widgets, themes, a theme builder, and extra levels of customer support. These Pro versions start at $49 per year for one website and can include up to 1,000 websites for agency use.

Beaver Builder

https://www.wpbeaverbuilder.com/

BeaverBuilder is a drag-and-drop web design program that markets itself on the advantage of using its license on unlimited websites instead of the site restrictions imposed by other programs.

BeaverBuilder offers a premium add-on that contains some of the features already included in Visual Composer, such as archive page layouts, 404 pages, and header/footer customization.

There is no free-to-use version of BeaverBuilder, and it offers three premium plans starting at $99 per year, plus the “Beaver Themer” (for full site editing / theme builder functionality) add-on, priced at $147.

Themify Builder

https://themify.me/builder-pro

The Themify Builder plugin offers a free plan that is in line with the free plan of Visual Composer.

They both offer theme builder functionality, but this feature is limited to the paid versions of each.

Visual Composer offers more elements & templates for the paid version, in fact, getting more UI elements requires purchasing an Addon Bundle (at $39) for Themify, which adds another 25 UI elements.

One advantage of Themify is that a single license will grant it's use on an unlimited number of sites, whereas with Visual Composer, it gets more expensive as you add sites (although not as much as Elementor).

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Features

Visual Composer’s free version delivers the plugin’s much-touted weekly updates along with various design options and an intuitive drag-and-drop website builder. In addition, website editing features instant feedback, allowing users to actively see how their changes affect the site, making it easier to experiment with different options. Visual Composer also offers custom CSS and JavaScript, allowing companies to alter the site’s visual elements to their exact specifications. Also supported are WordPress’s default widgets, and it will enable all custom WordPress widgets without needing to leave the app.

When you upgrade to the premium version, Visual Composer unlocks the full creative library of over 300 elements and over 100 templates. Along with previously mentioned features, the premium version also adds Visual Composer’s popup builder and provides WooCommerce support for companies that want to conduct business through their site. You can find the complete comparison of offered features between Visual Composer’s payment plans on their website.

Pricing

Visual Composer offers three separate pricing plans alongside the plugin’s free version. For $49 a year, users gain access to Visual Composer’s complete website builder, allowed for use with a single website. The second tier of Visual Composer’s premium plans upgrades the contents to three websites while increasing the price to $99 per year. Visual Composer’s highest price point is intended for Developers and provides up to 1000 sites with the plugin’s complete offerings at a rate of $349 per year. Visual Composer also promises a 15-day money-back guarantee, allowing you to receive a full refund if it doesn’t work for your intended purpose.

Conclusion

Visual Composer offers WordPress users a broad suite of creative options to fully customize their business’s website. The plugin features a wide variety of elements and templates to start the design process and an entire library of stock images to use within a company’s site. The plugin has multiple tiers of payment plans, including a limited free-to-use plan, for companies of many different sizes and needs.