Brizy review – Brizy 2.1 update
Lately, I’ve published reviews about Elementor, Divi, Thrive Architect and Oxygen, which are all really extensive page builders for WordPress. And they’re not the only ones, there’s also Beaver Builder, SiteOrigin and WP Bakery (formely known as Visual Composer) to name a few well known page builders.
You would think that market is pretty saturated by now, but the team behind Brizy still seem to believe they can conquer a spot in that market as well. And given the fact that Brizy has an impressive 60.000 active installs on WordPress.org just 2 years after their initial launch, they just might be right…
Really extensive free version
Those are impressive numbers, and the really extensive free version of Brizy might have had something to do with that. and when I say really extensive, I do mean really extensive…
Think Elementor, but then including a bunch of features that are only in Elementor Pro. For example, the free version of Brizy offers a simple but effective contact form, a countdown module, multiple WooCommerce widgets and you can save every “block” as a global module, or turn it into a slider.
The latter requires a little more explanation. The structure of a Brizy page is build up with blocks. Blocks are comparable with sections in Divi and Elementor. In such a block you drag one or more “design elements” (other page builders call these modules or widgets).
A design element is for example a text block, icon, image, video, button, Google Map, counter, tabs, accordion or form. At the time of writing there are about 20 of these design elements; that is a bit thin but keep in mind that Brizy just launched about 2 years ago so there will more elements in a while.
Pre-made blocks
For that reason, some modules that you might expect from other page builders are missing in Brizy for now, such as testimonials, price tables and social media buttons.
However, there are quite a few pre-made blocks available – professionally designed blocks that already contain a number of design elements that you can add to your page.
At the time of writing, there are around 385 of those blocks (of which about 200 are available in the free version), all of which are available in both a light and dark design. You can choose from more than 20 different price table templates, 25 testimonial templates, 90 hero templates and so on. You can of course easily adapt those templates to your own wishes.
Like most page builders, Brizy also lets you save your own blocks in a library so you can easily reuse them on other pages. At the moment, you can only store complete blocks, so no individual design elements such as a button or contact form. However, you can sync those blocks to Brizy’s server, so you can access them from any Brizy website after logging in to your account.
Styling and other options
The way you set the styling and other options is one of the things Brizy does different from other page builders. In most page builders, those options appear in the sidebar when you click on a module, but Brizy shows a subtle toolbar near the module itself, that only displays the elements that you need at that moment. They call that “smart & clutter free”.
The Brizy way does take a little getting used to, because you have to do all your adjustments in fairly small popup windows and you have to learn what the different icons do. Those icons are pretty clear though, so you’ll get used to them pretty fast. You can adjust things like colors, fonts, borders (with border radius) and shadows. More advanced settings like margins, paddings, animations, shape dividers, z-index and CSS classes and ID’s are done in a sidebar, but that only opens when you need it.
Brizy also features an advanced global styling feature. As you can see in the image above, you have a color palet with 8 standard colors below the color picker. Other page builders have that too, but with Brizy, these colors are saved as “linked color”. If you adjust one of those “linked colors”, that color will change anywhere you’ve used it: in a header, regular text, on a button, a background, an overlay… and not just on the current page, but on your entire website. Really handy! The same goes for the font (Google Fonts), the size of the h1 till h5 tags, paragraphs, and you can also save your own profile.
Really user friendly and flexible
Those kind of things make Brizy really user friendly and flexible. You can adjust your text inline – just click and type – and you can also change the size of an image by dragging it to the size you want. The same goes for other design elements as well, like borders, spacers and counters, and the width of a column or padding of a block; just click on it and drag it to the size you need it to be.
Of course, you can also drag all design elements to wherever you want them, and ordening blocks and columns works the same way too. Further on, you can add almost anything to modules like sliders, tabs and accordeons; not just text or images, but also videos, icons, buttons, contact forms, Google Maps and any other module.
Last but not least, al your adjustments are saved automatically, so there’s always a recent backup if something goes wrong.
Brizy Pro
The free version of Brizy contains some interesting modules that are only available in the paid version with other page builders, like contact forms and even a header and footer builder.
But of course, the people at Brizy have to make money too, so they also have a Pro version.
Even though the free version offers a lot of modules already, the Brizy team still saved a good amount of modules for Brizy Pro. In pro, you’ll find a photo gallery module, a carousel module, a timeline module, a comments module which lets you replace the default WordPress comments with Facebook comments or Disqus, a Lottie module and a post module.
These modules are fairly standard, but still offer some cool options; for example, you can drag the height of an image in the photo gallery module so you can create your own masonry grid, and in the carousel module, you can add any module you want – same as in tabs, sliders and accordions. The post module let’s you create your own blog layout.
The post module uses Dynamic Content, another really important feature that’s only available in Brizy Pro. With dynamic content, you can for example display the featured image, post title, post content, author and publication date wherever you want. That’s a must-have feature for a custom blog archive, but you could also use it to add a featured image as a header image or the title in a page template. In addition to the standard WordPress fields, it is also possible to automatically add content from custom fields in Toolset, ACF and Pods.
Dynamic Content is at the base of every Theme Builder, but Brizy’s Theme Builder works a bit different from other theme builders. With other theme builders, the templates for the theme builder are not a part of the page itself, so if you want to change something in the header or footer, you will have to exit the page builder, open the template you want to edit, make your changes, close the template, go back to the page… it’s all a bit too cumbersome.
But in Brizy, you have a feature called Block Conditions. This allows you to set where to show – or hide – any (global) block. So you can just insert a header and footer as a global block, and set it to show on every page and post. Do you want to use another header for the homepage? Then just add another condition to exclude the homepage. Want to show the same call to action under every single post? Just add that as a condition. Want to show testimonials on every sales page? Well, you get the picture.
The beauty of global conditions is also that those blocks are part of the page, so when you’re editing a page and want to change something in the header, just edit the header right there and then.
Talking about headers, Brizy Pro also comes with a Mega Menu feature. Just like most other things in Brizy, that works really intuitive; you just click on a menu item, click a switch to make it a mega menu, and just add any module to it.
Since version 2.1, Brizy Pro also includes a WooCommerce builder, so you can design your WooCommerce product page and archive page exactly the way you want.
Next to that, there are some enhanced options available in Brizy Pro, like image and video filters and integration for Mailchimp and other e-mail providers in the contact form.
There are also quite a few premium designs available in pro – not just blocks (like in the free version) but also complete demo websites. For example, there is a demo website for a construction company with a homepage layout, a contact page, an about us page and so on. There are currently about 20 different demo sites.
The last really cool feature of Brizy Pro I want to address is their popup builder. Next to the standard URL, you can also add a popup window to a link or button. In that popup window, you can add any module you want. You can activate the popup by clicking on a link or button, but you can also show it automatically, for example if the visitor is on the page for 10 seconds or if he wants to click the page away.
Brizy Pro price
Brizy Pro costs $ 49.00 for 1 website including 1 year of updates and support, just like Elementor. However, for web builders and other people who build multiple websites, Brizy is priced a bit more attractively than Elementor: for $ 99.00, you can use Brizy Pro on an unlimited number of (client) websites.
In addition, you can still opt for a lifetime license ; for $ 299.00 you can install Brizy Pro on an unlimited number of websites, with lifetime updates and support.
That lifetime license is only temporarily available; there are only a few hunderd licences left so get yours now!
Brizy Cloud
In April 2019, the Brizy team suddenly announced a new project: Brizy Cloud. This is comparable to Wix, Weebly and Jimbo; an online tool with which you can easily build a website yourself. Unlike the WordPress plugin, Brizy Cloud is not based on WordPress, but a standalone application (Sofware As A Service, SAAS).
The big advantage of this is that you don’t have to install anything and you don’t have to worry about things like security or updates. The disadvantage is that you can only build static pages, so no web shops, blogs with a comments options or websites that use dynamic content. However, this is not necessary for landing pages and so-called brochure websites.
Brizy Cloud offers several options for publishing your projects. The first option is a subdomain on Brizy.site, for example, yourwebsite.brizy.site. The big advantage of this is that you have no hosting costs, because this option is completely free. But such a subdomain is of course not very professional, so Brizy also offers the possibility to link your own domain name to your project. The costs for that? $ 49 per year for 3 domains, and $ 99 per year for an unlimited number of domains. You have to register the domain name itself somewhere else, but unlimited hosting space is included so it’s a great deal.
Another very interesting option to put your Brizy Cloud project online is the Server Sync option. With this option you do need a hosting account yourself. Then you can download your Brizy Cloud project and put downloaded files on your server. An automatic script then installs the entire trade and after that the site is online on your own server. However, you still edit your website in the Brizy Cloud environment, and any changes you make there are immediately visible on the live website – which is therefore on your server. Cool!
If your website is completely finished (although a website is never completely finished) you can also choose to export it as a static HTML / CSS file. So old school! 😎
Conclusion
If you’re looking for a good page builder, I would certainly consider Brizy. Their team looked really well at other page builder like Elementor, Divi and Thrive, and integrated the best elements from those builders into their own plugin. Even the free version of Brizy can measure itself with paid page builders – just like Elementor can.
I used to advise Elementor every time someone was wanted a good free page builder with lots of possibilities, but now I would advise you to give Brizy a try as well before you choose.
Personally, I prefer Brizy over Elementor.
Brizy Pro for 1 website costs about the same as Elementor, which is a fine price point in my opinion. The yearly licence for an unlimited amount of websites is even more competitively priced, which makes Brizy a really attractive choice for web builders.
The lifetime licence is a little pricey compared to the yearly licence, especially if you know that a lifetime license for Divi “only” costs $ 249.00. But for web builders like myself, a lifetime licence for an unlimited number of websites is just a too attractive deal to pass so I did buy the lifetime licence 😉
If you just want to build one website for your own business, the lifetime licence isn’t that attractive in my opinion. In that case, I would stick with the yearly licence.
Need help with Brizy or another page builder?
Do you need help with Brizy or another page builder like Divi, Elementor or Thrive Architect?
Or are you looking for someone that can build you a website with one of those builders?
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