Bricks vs Greenshift

Gutenberg is the core editor in WordPress, and it comes with a good number of standard blocks for things like normal text, headings, images, buttons. It also has a row block for layout building (which utilizes flexbox) and a CSS grid block which is in beta at the moment. However, core Gutenberg block offer very little (styling) options

Gutenberg addons like Greenshift add their own versions of those blocks, but with way more (styling) options and other features. And of course, also dozens of new blocks that aren’t available in the core version of Gutenberg.

A BIG advantage of using Gutenberg is that you can mix & match blocks. So I can use the CSS grid block from Greenshift to build my layout, and put core Gutenberg paragraph and image blocks inside that. followed by a Greenshift button block. Or a button block from another block plugin like Kadence, Spectra or Stackable. Or any other block from a Gutenberg compatible plugin… 

You can set entry animations in Bricks via the interactions panel, but it’s way easier and way more powerful in Greenshift,
especially if you have the animation addon. That adds he GSAP animation library, which is also used in the popular motion.page. 

In Bricks, you can only choose from a few dozen presets, but you can’t tweak those much.
You can set how long the animation should run, set a delay, and if you want the animation to run only once or continuously.

In Greenshift, you can also select a preset, but you can tweak that any way you want to. You like the flip effect, but want it
to rotate 90 degrees on the Y-axis as well? You can do that. Add a scaling effect to it? No problem. The same goes for opacity,
skew, x and y translate etcetera.

The animation addon also adds different animation types, like stagger (inner blocks get animated with a delay between each block, without having to set that for each inner block), text animations (like show letters one by one), SVG drawing, and mouse interaction effects. 

Of course, you can also choose the trigger you want to use; on load for simple entrance animations, but you can also use scroll effects or use an “observer” like hover, click, drag or press. You can even set a custom trigger and chain multiple animations.

Also, the animation addon add a number of blocks to your collection, like a real parallax background (not just fixed position), Lottie, Rive, Apple style image and video effects etcetera. All with smart loaders so they won’t affect your pagespeed score.

Carousels are another super power of Greenshift; you can turn anything into a horizontal (or vertical) scrollable carousel. You can even choose if you want that to happy only on mobile, or on desktop as well. For example, you can have 6 testimonials in a grid on desktop, and have them as a  carousel on mobile with just one click. 

Earlier, I mentioned a number of advantages of Gutenberg. But as with everything, there are some disadvantages as well. For one, Gutenberg is a backend builder,
in which the design doesn’t always look exactly the same as in the front-end. 

But a lot of people just hate Gutenberg for numerous reasons. The Gutenberg plugin, which gives you access to new features months before they’re added in WordPress core, has a rating of 2/5 stars, and the classic editor plugin which disables Gutenberg on your site has over 5 million active installs.

Bricks has a large ecosystem / community around it. There are dozens of addons for Bricks available, as well as a number of templates libraries (that’s a weak point in Greenshift; they do have a template library but it’s way too small at the moment). 

Next to that, you can find a LOT of (video) tutorials for Bricks, WAY more than for Greenshift at the moment. Documentation is still a weak point of Greenshift too, 
even though that already has improved dramatically in the past year or so.

Automatic CSS is a CSS framework which makes it easy to keep your styling consistent and maintainable. Even though both Greenshift and Bricks support Core framework, which is another CSS framework, but ACSS is by far the most popular option under Bricks users. 

PS ACSS is founded by Kevin Geary, who’s YouTube channel I highly recommend.