Thrive Content Builder vs. WPBakery Visual Composer

​Every visual editor is advertised along the lines of "save time and create webpages with ease". Without close inspection, it's near impossible to see which ones can actually back up this claim.

"What You See is What You Get", or WYSIWYG, was originally used to describe a content editor requiring little to no coding experience. Today a WYSIWYG-visual editor is expected to provide quick and intuitive editing capability, with results reflecting exactly what the end-user will see.

In this comparison we'll be tearing apart two visual editor-plugins, both advertised as WYSIWYG: The Content Builder from Thrive Themes and Visual Composer from WPBakery.

Building complex pages and websites involves hundreds of user actions. At first glance, a few extra clicks might seem negligible, but it soon compounds to create a huge difference. That's why each and every user action needs to flow effortlessly into the next, otherwise wasted minutes quickly turn into wasted hours.

Check out the videos below to see the editors in action!

The Visual Composer-user must navigate a complex menu layout. Even a simple task like adding a text element and a heading involves multiple actions through multiple sub-menus. This can be potentially confusing.

Using the Content Builder, everything follows the "click to edit" principle. Elements are added with a single click from a constantly visible menu, and editing is instant. Intermediary steps have been reduced to an absolute minimum.

As the videos illustrate - the more energy and time you need to use on figuring out the editor, the less you will have to complete your task.

Thrive Themes is obsessed with keeping everything as fast and immediate as possible, and it's easy to understand why. When the editor becomes an extension of your mouse pointer, you can spend all your energy on creating content.

With or without add-ons, both the Thrive Content Builder and Visual Composer provide plenty of elements to work with.

But all the elements in the world won't help if you don't know how to place them correctly onto the page. Since most of us aren't professional designers, it helps to have page templates as guidance.

Templates also massively reduce the amount of repeat-work in creating websites, which translates to time saved.

The Visual Composer includes 60+ layout templates, which are more like layout guidelines. The selection screen doesn't include preview images, which makes the template choosing a bit of a trial-and-error process.

You can piece together a landing page using VC's templates, but you need at least some understanding of design and copywriting to make it any good.

Thrive Content Builder comes bundled with 120+ professionally designed landing pages instantly ready to use or customize. The template library includes a handy search tool and every template is arranged into themed sets with preview images.

Thrive Themes has gone to incredible lengths to make their landing pages as turnkey as possible: no design expertise is required, and the pages include complete sales copy. It's actually possible to publish a sales funnel in minutes.

In standard form, the Content Builder has more features.

But WPBakery and the Visual Composer-community have created a huge selection of add-ons readily available for purchase, noticeably increasing the amount of features available.

Let's see how the features stack up when Visual Composer is complemented with three of the most popular (based on reviews and sales) add-ons from Envatomarket:

• Visual Composer Extensions​ (with 1 year support)
• Easy Tables (with 1 year support)
• Pricing Tables (with 1 year support)

A few add-ons immediately give Visual Composer some more feature firepower.

Now let's see how these add-ons affect the pricing.​

The add-ons rapidly form a dent the Visual Composer-user's wallet. Researching the market and finding suitable add-ons with reasonable features can also become quite time consuming.

With a huge selection of add-ons available, the Visual Composer won't fall short of features. But as the amount of add-ons increase, so does the price. Even just a couple add-ons can nearly double the price.

The numerous included layout templates are helpful, but leave the design and copywriting tasks to the user.​ Turnkey they are not.

VC's back end editor is a powerful replacement for the WordPress editor, but doesn't show changes in real time unless the user has a separate window open.

The front end editor's unintuitive submenu-based user interface makes workflow choppy, and the resulting additional user actions end up slowing work progress.

TCB is literally a one-click-one-change visual editor. Its intuitive user interface makes for a fluid workflow and quick results.

It's a single plugin with a huge amount of carefully picked features and functions as standard.

Every landing page from Thrive Landing Pages is part of TCB, so you have 120+ landing pages at your disposal, instantly ready to use and customize.