Overpromised and underdelivered

I am an experienced developer and I’m used to writing everything myself. I am only using page builders when there is a need for non technical people to add or update content. I am working on a project with a few non technical people and thought Beaver Builder will be a good fit to enable the non technical people to work on the marketing / general pages, leaving the dev to work on the heavier stuff. Frankly I hate Elementor and was impressed by BB’s marketing. Sounded like a breath of fresh air so I thought I’ll give it a try. Bought the Premium version after a few hours of playing with the free version, and now a few months later we decided to remove it and go back to writing everything from scratch.

Why?
– The UI is very convoluted and doesn’t make sense
– Basic and pretty trivial editing options are just missing
– Why can’t you apply custom CSS to each element? Only on a page or module level. With many editing options missing we found ourselves overriding a lot of things so at least make it easier
– Every change in the editor takes a few seconds to reflect while everything freezes, makes it really impossible to work with

Take a look at the review by room34 (can’t add links here – it is titled “Please just learn to code instead”)
I’m signing on every word. Is it unclear who is this product for. End users will need to have a dev jump in at some point because they messed something up or can’t achieve something trivial that is impossible without custom code anyway. Maybe for agencies or creatives with some technical knowledge that can add some CSS / JS overrides if they need to (which they will). If that’s the case there are better alternatives out there.

Bottom line is – I thought Elementor was bed – I was wrong. Elementor is as good as a page builder can be considering the inherent flaws and limitations of visual page builders.