Comparison to free plugins

  • Resolved Dave

    (@5point)


    8 years, 4 months ago

    I’m always looking for the next best thing. So when I saw Forge, I thought I’d try it out.

    I know the author has to eat, so please don’t any of my observations or opinions wrong – you set up a pricing model that obviously works for you, and that’s awesome. But I’ve been using Live Composer, which is also a front-end builder, for almost two years. It’s full featured, and free, but since it was passed on to someone else by the original developer several months ago, updates have come to a screeching halt, and support has become less engaging, almost standoffish.

    So even with that mentioned, I’m having difficulty replacing LC for something similar like Forge for several reasons. Even in it’s current ‘frozen’ state, LC has all of the features the free version of Forge has, plus all of the Forge extensions, and then some.

    And almost immediately I was put off by Forge; ‘tools’ are not always visible – I have to click on what appears to be a briefcase at the top to display what appears to be only a few available drag-and-drop elements.

    My second concern was when I placed a Heading on the page, but could not find any way to modify the font type. I’m assuming my only option is adding it via CSS.

    So the stripped down version of Forge gives the average, non-CSS user the chance to build an extremely bare Website – some text and images, nothing more.

    Also, your Website is slooooow. I’m on FIOS, and I was waiting up to 30 seconds for some pages to load. And when I did get to the Advanced Elements page, none of the individual Element pages had descriptions. For instance, the “Login Forms” has, well, just a log-in form.

    My question is – you’re selling this plugin, but why should I buy it as opposed to using what I have?

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/forge/

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  • Thanks for your feedback Dave. It’s great to have these kind of comments and they help a lot.

    Regarding features: the elements are hidden by default so that the UI is as clean and ‘out-of-the-way’ as possible. You can simply type the name of an element you want, and it’ll immediately show it to you.

    I know there are few elements, but we will probably release some of the stuff that is currently on the Advanced Elements extension for free. Things like native widgets and basic design elements. The only reason I haven’t done so, is because we would not be able to backtrack if we released them for free. Taking away stuff is a no-no.

    As for the typeface, that is part of the design. Typefaces are a good way of bloating your site, and they should be left most of the time to themes. Many plugins try to add them as a feature, but they end up adding to the size of the page and make websites slow. Forge is semantically correct, and limits itself to adding all the markup. Your theme should be the one providing custom typefaces for the body, heading tags, and so on.

    If you compare it with Live Composer, yes. Forge is more bare-bones. But each addon packs a ton more value than each of the LC ones. We wouldn’t think of adding an entire extension with just a simple video embed, for instance. Instead, we add completely new functionality such as an entire library of layouts for agencies, conditional logic for building intranets, and so on. For the record, we plan on adding integrated AB testing and analytics to the builder.

    Also, that might be part of the reason why live composer had to find a new owner. They are giving away the house, but if they don’t monetize the odel is simply unsustainable.

    We don’t compete on price, but value– we are adding more features to the base plugin soon (animations, bulk editing), and the main attractiveness is the design experience.

    As for the site, not sure why it loaded slowly for you. We recently had an issue with our hosting (suffered a DDoS attack), so there were a couple days with slow load times.

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