Raise your hand if you’ve already worked with different website builders and hopped around – just think of Squarespace, Wix, and all the big names out there. Well, me too. As a marketer and programmer, I like to launch fast and see how a website does.
Yet, I don’t like to be restricted by the design and customisability. But it’s the known tradeoff of the drag-and-drop website builders. In order for a user to always build a professional looking site, the website builder limits their degree of freedom and options.
Queue in Brizy. It was developed by the same team that created ThemeFuse – you know the website where you can find all sorts of themes and plugins for WordPress. Its roots are all evident when you look at how you can use Brizy:
- Brizy WordPress (an installable WP plugin)
- Brizy Cloud (a cloud service)
Pros and cons of Brizy
For this review, I’m going to only look at Brizy Cloud. Using a cloud solution has many advantages such as you don’t need to install it or maintain it or you can just use it via your browser making it literally easy to use.
As you’d expect, Brizy Cloud is a drag-and-drop website builder. It makes creating and launching websites a breeze, hence its name. But in contrast to its competitors, you still get the flexibility. You can build a blog, a membership site, a landing page, and it even allows you to create sites in multiple languages – but not an online store, at least not out of the box. But as you see, you can embed any external third party service and it offers Woocommerce integration.
A short detour here: Brizy WordPress is a plugin that you can install on your WordPress and then it gives you drag-and-drop similar to Divi or Elementor but it’s much faster, smoother, and less clunky.
Pros
- Forever free plan, although with a severely limited feature set
- You can launch multi-language websites
- Collaborate with your team members and clients
- High degree of flexibility
- Readymade blocks and templates speed up the creation process
Cons
- Limited integrations
Who is Brizy for?
If you want to launch a website fast, Brizy not only lets you do it without writing a line of code but you can also design your site just as you have imagined it.
A look at its prices tells you that organisations of all sizes can use and appreciate it. Brizy is especially interesting if you build websites for your clients and want a white label solution. The following features make it a no-brainer for agencies or freelancers.
Really useful is that Brizy lets you manage multiple accounts at once and easily for that. You may want to have a separate account for your client work, for example. In the same vein, collaborating with your team is just as easy and seamless. Moreover, you can give each team member a role and with that, they got different rights.
How easy is Brizy to use?
It’s a good sign to see you can signup without having a credit card and/or you don’t need to go through a lengthy questionnaire.
When you want to build a new project, you start by creating a new project, and then as with most other website builders, you choose a layout template. You can also start with the blocks and add as many blocks as you need to your page. Regardless if you started with a layout or a block, you can always add more pages, even stories, and popups.
The editor is clean and easy to work with. If you want to get your work done fast, you add blocks to your page. To fine-tune it, you drag and drop the desired customisable elements like buttons, images, counters, etc to where you want them to be on the page. Once they’ve “landed” you can customise them.
Brizy has the redo and undo buttons to make your life easier. Also very nifty is that you can change the entire look of your site with just a click – you don’t need to go through each page or element.
Remember how Brizy allows you to build multi-lingual sites? You can even get it to auto-translate for you. Of course, you can tell it to automatically redirect visitors to the right version based on their browser language.
Even though Brizy comes with a sizeable feature set, you can still get around without too many clicks/steps/pages.
Brizy design and templates
Brizy’s templates are beautiful and out of the gates, they’re optimised for all screen sizes. You’ll find it has free and paid templates for different industries such as food, travel, and education.
Brizy also comes with a template gallery for landing pages and popups. This is the secret sauce of Brizy. The one that makes you build attractive, crips websites in a jiffy: Blocks. Brizy offers predesigned block templates and it really makes it a breeze to create a page. You can save blocks to be reused.
You can also make it a global block. When a block is saved as global, any changes you make will automatically be applied on every page you’ve used that global block.
How to manage your ecommerce store in Brizy?
Brizy doesn’t offer a shopping cart feature. But fret not: You can use the embed element and add custom code where you need it. The embed element gives you the power to add a shopping cart such as Ecwid or Snipcart to Brizy.
Brizy integrations
Brizy’s integrations are concentrating on third party marketing services such as MailerLite. It also offers a Zapier plugin and that opens up your options. Remember how you add a shopping cart with the embed element? You can embed any third party service as long as they offer an embed widget.
What marketing and SEO tools does Brizy have?
You can add custom code at the website level, which means, you can add services such as Google Analytics to keep track of your Brizy site.
SEO
For SEO, it’s not just one single silver bullet to make you rank #1. It’s a combination of many different factors such as loading speed, design quality, having SSL, which is taken care of Brizy. You can further add SEO titles and SEO descriptions as well as alt tags for your images.
Blogging
If you want the blogging feature in Brizy Cloud, you need to subscribe to any of the paid accounts. Then you get the blog element so that you can add blog posts and other content types.
Payment options
Since Brizy is not the standard shopping cart tool, it doesn’t include payment options but you can use the embed element to add any of your favourite payment gateways on your site.
Brizy security
Having SSL should be standard nowadays and Brizy Cloud doesn’t disappoint. All projects you create and launch with Brizy have SSL.
Brizy customer support
You can browse or search Brizy’s knowledge base. If you don’t find the answer, you can also ask a question but there’s no chat, email, or phone support.
Brizy pricing
There are 2 separate plans for Brizy Cloud and Brizy WordPress. Since this review is concentrating on Brizy Cloud, I’ll also only talk about the Brizy Cloud prices.
You get to choose from 4 paid and 1 free plan. The more features you need, the higher you go.
Is Brizy the right tool for you?
Not unlike other website builders, you get a template (and block) gallery. But unlike others, you can have a website with pages that have different layouts. If that makes you cringe, worry not, the result is always a beautiful website. Even if you get to customise all elements to your heart’s delight. And then, Brizy still gives you to customise the CSS as well as webhooks to send real time data from your Brizy site to any other application.
What’s not to like? There may be some things that might deter you such as that it has a limited collection of builtin integrations or plugins. But you can still get around them by adding them via the embed element. You may also not like that it has not chat support. But it’s really really easy to use and you can still ask for support.
All in all, Brizy is a wonderfully simple website builder that makes great looking websites in almost no time AND that has a few negligible downside. What are you waiting for?
If you need a website builder that builds everything for you just with a short description of your idea, check out Mixo.
Original post here: Brizy review
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