Excellent tool, but with a potential stinger.

Odd way I found out about Brizy was having to deal with the one thing that keeps me from giving it a top rating.

The good? It’s a _nice_ tool. Good interface, allows for creating some really nice designs quickly and easily. It’s well thought out.

One bit of wisdom I’ve learned is that if you really want people to love your service, though, and the pro version IS a service, is that you make it easy for people to leave. It has to do with building trust by allowing your users to feel quite in control. Should they need to leave, it should be painless. It makes it easier to have better, fonder memories of what you’ve done from them and come back.

In terms of account management, Brizy does a good job of this. It’s directly in how the tool is implemented. Uninstalling Brizy as a plug-in leaves some ugly, UGLY residue in any page or post that it was used to make or even touched. That means you might need to go over your site and edit everything you’ve created since install, and by hand. That’s tedious work, there’s no explanation to any novice as to why this occurs. (Experienced devs can make inferences on what’s going on easily, but unless you’re truly comfortable and feeling cavalier writing regex style update queries against the WP database or custom PHP scripts to walk the records and make those edits, there’s no way to automate the removal of the Brizy code.) It’s probably left there as a way to make it easy to restore Brizy-fied pages to Brizy-form if you reinstall quick. But it’s a messy breakup.

That’s a major drawback, in my eye.

It gets as much as four stars overcoming that drawback on the strength of the rest of the tool, but I had to rescue a friend’s site from that problem once already. It was very few pages, but it was a really thorny edit. I hated that, and in good conscience couldn’t recommend to my friend that she pay a subscription fee for a shoestring business website. So I carefully extracted all the debris and we figured a design that worked without use of Brizy. It _was_ indirect evidence of how much easier it is to use a tool like this to make the kind of design we wanted.

So, my advice is this: Brizy is excellent but should be viewed as a commitment. Once you commit to using it on a site, there’s a high cost to remove it, and the more you add using it, the deeper the cost of breaking away from it. Understand that when deciding on it, plan appropriately, and you’ll probably be happy with your decision. Impulsively adopt it and impulsively leave later on, you’ll probably regret that.