Oxygen Builder vs Bricks: Which to choose for what projects

[Music] what's up guys patrick from wp builder helper here and today's video we are going to be testing out oxygen and bricks builder so for those of you who are uh unaware or maybe you just don't know brix is a new builder i've talked about it a good bit on this channel and oxygen is another very popular builder that's um been around for some time and both of them are kind of touting each other you've also got uh zion and a couple of other ones like live canvas they're kind of touting each other as the the basically the developers builder and a lot of people have some very very strong feelings towards each of these um obviously bricks is the new uh builder on the block and oxygen's been more established and they've been you know coming out with updates pretty regularly and stuff like that so i just wanted to jump in today and kind of talk about what i thought was some things that separate both of these and why you might pick one over the other for certain projects and everything like that um you know right off the bat i'm going to say you know you're trying to compare two builders like this and a bunch of people have said how can you compare two builders or how can you do that you kind of can and you can because each builder's got different objectives for the type of audience that they're reaching for instance bricks is brand new and it unfortunately does not have all of the uh same things that oxygen has and so it puts it at a disadvantage right off the start however it does have a decent license for right now although some people would argue that oxygen's pricing points at this point is uh is a little bit better only because you get lifetime there's nothing you get you get all of this stuff that you you normally do not get and so to some people that's that's a lot better because that's only you know 229 one-time payment and bricks is 149 and it gives you a thousand you know websites which i guess as somebody pointed out before technically if you're not making money off of a thousand websites then you're doing something wrong but there are a lot of people who like to build these type of deals for their own specialty projects i know that i'm one of those people i usually don't build for clients anymore unless it's somebody that you know i particularly want to work with something that i find interesting or whatever so i'm not doing that type of thing but you know either way i definitely think oxygen has a leg up because they've got unlimited and also i like the way you know oxygen is one of the few that has done this i don't know what you would call it like if you just want the builder it's 129 one-time fee if you wanted woocommerce it's 169 if you wanted the gutenberg block builder i love the way they broke this out where you know if you want everything it's like it's 229 one-time fee that's pretty cool i like the way that they add more functionality into it as it keeps going up that's always been one of my favorite things about oxygen their pricing i think is very fair and i've always enjoyed their pricing these guys are brand new but i still like their pricing also because for the most part this is a hundred dollars cheaper than most other things and they're saying they give you access to all this and the woocommerce builder is coming so if you're comparing this to oxygen then technically you know you're going to get woocommerce for a cheaper price than what you would get for this but you've got to wait for it to come out so that's the other thing that's that's kind of um that's interesting about bricks i'm going to get into the details of each of them and we'll take and we'll look at it so let's start off with oxygen so i haven't looked at oxygen in a while but if you're not aware oxygen disables the theme which is interesting and it's something that it kind of shares almost with bricks because bricks in some ways disables the theme too but it doesn't do it the same way oxygen does it it's not it's not the same it's not the same thing at all the brix uses its own builder similar to divi which in some ways it's kind of the same thing you're disabling the theme because you're having to use the bricks theme in order to get the functionality of everything that's going on so bricks is not a plug-in it's a theme so you install bricks from this area which is a little bit different than most people would expect because most people install things from you know this area rather than rather than here which confuses some people but that's that's just the way that they do it which is fine i mean either way oxygen is you know it uses a template library that i really like this is something that bricks has yet to really add to their uh builder they do have templates that are in there but they've yet to add full building templates so just for right now if you're wondering you know um you're not going to find full build templates they do have full pages but not like oxygen not like this where you come in here and it's got like everything in it so for instance if we were to take a look at uh let's say this sas demo you would get all of this like you get the features the pricing the about page all of this it's almost like i think elementor and divi also do this too but it's almost like an all-in-one like just throw this on a website boom it's yours and as a matter of fact let's go and install it uh it says sas2 will be installed and we'll just delete our current style sheets we have to type in delete [Music] confirm and install and in a second you will see after we've confirmed it it's going to start creating uh this sas 2 install which is something that i've always liked about oxygen because it kind of uh i didn't set the the page correctly let's see we should have two home pages so yes one of these are old and i think it's this one so let's trash this one let's go into tools real quick or into settings and i think it is in reading i believe yes static home page and we'll set it to home and save the changes so now you can see we've got the prototyping here and it's got all of the same stuff that you'd come to expect from oxygen all the little hovers all the style sheets all the fonts everything is already included in this so it makes it a little bit easier for you to go back and kind of customize this this is where oxygen and bricks start to differ quite a bit because bricks you kind of have to piecemeal right now granted i'm sure that they're you know they're they've just released everything so i'm sure in the future we're going to see something like this i would expect that it would happen but for right now you're going to have to piecemeal everything together which isn't necessarily a bad thing because you can learn how it's building another thing that you're going to find with oxygen is the builder loads pretty slowly i have some hopes that in the next version of oxygen in version 4.0 that they're going to take and rewrite all of this um i think that this is going to be rebuilt using a better framework and that's probably going to you know make things just much much better in the long run you're also going to notice right off the bat that oxygen just has way more in terms of like in terms of your styles there's basically almost nothing anything that you click on in oxygen you can basically edit in some way shape or form whether that's animations whether that's icons whether that's the image the uh the text or anything like that that's something that's still primarily missing from bricks and something that they just haven't gotten to yet because they are so brand new there's times where you'll click on something and when you go to click on it you'll notice very quickly oh i don't have the ability like there's there's headers where you can't go in with the header and if you choose typography you can't choose certain decorations on certain headers they don't have all of these in here oxygen has a lot of that which makes it more desirable in terms of somebody who's more used to a full development standpoint that doesn't mean that they're not going to have it like i've said so many times in this video that just means that they just haven't hit it yet so that's that's something that differs a little bit between these two and i should note that for anybody who's been using bricks the the guy behind it uh thomas has been very very open and vocal and he's been doing a really good job with the road map and everything and listening to everybody's concerns about you know how how um how thick the code is and you know how it performs and everything like that so that's really a good sign oxygen does a little bit of the same thing but for the most part they kind of just come out with what they think they should come out with which is fine i mean there's definitely some feedback from the community and they do listen to the community but if you're looking for a builder which listens to the community a little more i would say brix does that better than almost any other builder um brizzy kind of listens to the community a good bit too but i think that they follow their own kind of guidelines for when they're going to implement something and so they're not always listening to the community like the same way that bricks is bricks is actually coming out i think because the community's so small and they're basically saying hey if you want something you make sure that it's on this like you know you vote for it on this roadmap which is this idea board and roadmap which you can see there's voted for ideas and things that are on here to specifically customize and they tell you what's planned what's next and what's in progress i really like the way they do this i wish oxygen would implement something like this for the most part all we get with oxygen is if you're someone who's brand new for the most part you get this kind of stuff where they go in and they kind of tell you overviews of what's coming or what they've done or what tweaks they have or anything like that which is which is neat i don't mind this i think that this is fine that this is good the way they do um you know what the way they talk about a lot of this stuff and the way that they go about what they're doing in the change logs i don't mind this it would just be neat to see what they had coming up and i think that this is really cool how he implemented like a idea board where people can put ideas and then people can vote on them and then obviously you've got your change log and everything i think that's one thing that really separates bricks from other builders but anyway back to oxygen so oxygen is a very established builder and that's one thing that has going for it that bricks just cannot compete with right now at this very time uh oxygen is just it has way more features it has way more in terms of what it can do with what you can do with it there's a lot in here that you can just drop especially since they started adding these dynamic elements such as uh flip boxes or anything like that once they started adding these it makes it a lot easier to take and customize this and most of this is very basic stuff it's just stuff that basically oxygen wanted to create for the sheer purpose of trying to bring everybody up to speed with certain elements and showing them how they could do it because i think there were a lot of people who were confused so if we drop in a section here and we pick something like one of these elements i'll quickly show you you can see like so for instance a review box you can see when we drop this element in here that really all this is is an image some text some more text some icons and some rich text down here this is all the review box is but the cool thing is is that they've done it for you so the idea behind it is if you wanted to take and you wanted to go in here and kind of change this up you could if you wanted to set in you know columns in here or something like that you could go in and do that it's nice that they've kind of put this sort of thing together now on the opposite end of the spectrum if we go and we actually look at bricks as a whole brix does have the ability somewhere in here i should just jump in i tell you what let me jump into bricks real quick and i will show you what i'm talking about hold on so i thought i was going to actually open bricks but actually after looking at this i do have bricks open i realized very quickly that you can create your own elements but you have to do it with their child theme which you can download from the account includes a simple custom element for demonstration purposes and you can create your own elements for bricks it follows a pattern similar how to create a wordpress widget and it basically allows you to go in and create these elements so one of the beauties of bricks is in some ways while oxygen has this type of stuff where you can take and you can go in and you can do that you now have the ability to kind of create your own elements in bricks and that's something that's unique to bricks there are some other builders that may allow developers to specifically kind of come in and do this but bricks is one of the first ones i know that if you want to custom build uh some elements maybe there's something that's missing or you want to copy some code he's kind of walking you through how to go through and build these functions and you can load and register your element and do all of this and once you do that that's it your element is inside of your your brix file and that's unique in its own right because with these blank element classes and everything that's something that oxygen doesn't allow you to do right now they're charging you for these even though these are basic elements and they do save on time brx allows you to create your own oxygen charges you form granted oxygens are meant to speed up time and all of that it's definitely a plus when you see this type of thing uh happening and when they've got the ability to take and do it it just gives you more capabilities overall with what you can do with the builder so moving on from here let's keep talking about the differences between these two um a lot of people have been arguing specifically about oxygen's header i've known that i've seen that a couple of times bricks had an issue right off the back when it first came out um let me go to the home page where bricks actually did things with a as a matter of fact let me go to the builder itself so this is an old version of bricks but i will show you what i'm talking about here so bricks divides everything up into sections in containers and that's something that uh it it's it's rather a pain in the butt because a lot of people don't like the layout in the structure of this now the good thing is this is being fixed in the latest version of bricks because rather than having a section and then a row and then a column and then you know your elements inside they are going to have containers and the container class will allow you to put whatever in it that you want it's going to come with flexbox and a lot of other things that you know people have been looking for when this happens it's going to get a lot more competitive with oxygen in oxygen in terms of the layout factor only because um you know they're taking away that whole entire section it was bloated a little bit more than it should have been when it first came out and they've kind of adjusted for that and once again i mean i like that fact that they they knew it was a problem and they're immediately jumping on it and they're trying to fix it so that's one thing i definitely like about the fact that bricks is doing this is that they've noticed very quickly hey we need to you know get rid of this bloated structure panel and get with something more simple that is maybe just a straight container and then i could throw one container in here i could center it with using flex and just have maybe a container and just a you know another can a div that's in here that i could put this centered in there or just have these elements divided straight into the middle that's another thing you can do it just cleans up the code a lot more makes it look a lot better but needless to say it's it's getting worked on you know that's something that they're definitely trying to improve uh oxygen on the other hand if we go back to the oxygen uh page you'll notice that they've just updated features and one of the features they've updated is having css grid and they're also giving you you know they're talking about what you can do with css grid and creating impossible layouts in terms of both of these builders i really give both of them a hand and i'm really really happy with both of them because they're allowing more custom layouts than you could find with elementor divi and some of the other builders that are out there and i'm very impressed with this i think that they both win at this game um you know they're both a step ahead of the curve that some others are just not there yet where you don't have this in other builders you don't have css grid you don't have flexbox in all the builders and that's a big deal and i'm i'm really really happy with both of them when it comes down to the whole layout scenario because for me especially when the newest version of bricks comes out you're going to be able to create impossible layouts like this where you could not normally do that in some of the other builders that are out on the market like i've said specifically uh you know elementor you can do some cool stuff with but i don't think it's as flexible as this you don't have css grid and you don't have you know some of those things so you know on that place they both fare pretty even i feel like i i especially think that with the way thomas is developing it we're going to see more stuff come out for bricks that's going to make it a lot better in the future but uh another big difference between oxygen and bricks that a lot of different people have pointed out has been that oxygen is very very code heavy meaning if you want to do something uh you're going to for the most part be looking at some kind of coding so for instance this is a custom class that they built into this and while it's not hard to do the custom class because oxygen has everything laid out here in terms of effects transition and all of that you still have to understand the difference between classes ids and how all that happens some people have uh mocked bricks a little bit by saying that it's more of wysiwyg it's more of a drag-and-drop interface where you literally just go in here and you drag and drop and there you go there's your heading and so uh you know oxygen has that same thing you could still drop a heading in here and you could do all that but when you're looking at the lengths and the way you know this does link so for instance let's look at something let me look at a button if i have a button that's in here uh let me see if i have one so i think that this is technically speaking i think it's a button yes it is it's a button so the difference between bricks and oxygen in terms of the button interface and everything is that while oxygen expects you to understand classes and ids and all that brix really doesn't brix has hover styles and so with the hover styles you can change how something looks by just clicking the hover style and then on hover that will uh do whatever that is so for instance if we wanted to add let's say uh let's see if we wanted to add a border around here and we wanted to give this a width of 1 and we wanted to change the color to red then technically speaking let me see if i even did that right because i might not have done that right border label border radius style style you want solid um and then that's linked and then you do that and now i think you need a radius for it then you click off of hover and on hover this should on the front end i believe it should turn red but oh apparently i just selected this so you can see it kind of turns red it should have selected the whole thing but i didn't but you can see this turns red so for instance if you want to do hover styles you can do it that way with oxygen knowing ids in classes is a little bit more um important especially understanding how the class function works because you are dealing with style sheets oxygen is more like coding from scratch it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to code from scratch i want to i want to remind everybody that because a lot of people get it wrong they say oh well i can't i can't design an oxygen because i can't code well you don't necessarily need to i think people get frustrated because they're wondering how to create some of these effects but most of what you can do in oxygen you can find within this panel it's just understanding how these panels work together that sometimes confuses people but in the most part you can take and you can you you're not going to have to code now there are some codes that they do with their specialty buttons so for instance the review box the dashboard tabs the dynamic slide you know all of these things they do have some coding in here so for instance if we were going to go pick this and let's add in a what was i playing with earlier it might be in the basic section nope i was actually play oh hover scrolling image so if we add in a hover scroll image so forget the fact that this is in the front because it's separated by negative margin if we look at this div and we actually look at the structure pane you'll see that in this div specifically which is in probably the reviews section which section is this so main hero features it's review so it's in here here's the hover scrolling so you'll see that they've added some code to it and when you go in here and you look at the code you can see there's a little bit of php which it's just it's a blank essentially and then there's some coding in here and it's just basically css that's all it really is it's just css that makes this scroll down and there's some other things that they're doing with the image itself that they have so they've got some background effects in here and stuff like that that they're doing so i'm pretty sure that's the background so that's just this but you know and obviously they have an icon above it and it's got its own effect that it does whenever it transitions off of the page or whatever so this is pretty cool but i mean you could do the same exact thing in bricks with css that's all this really is it's just a faster way to do it because they've created it for you like i said before if you wanted to create this in bricks you could definitely do it you would just do it using this element itself and create your own element you know create your own element and then boom there you go you've got your own element that you can bring in wherever you want to so you know it's does it require coding yes and no if you want to achieve certain effects like this then yeah you're going to have to get some coding involved it's good for you to know at least basic css for oxygen but for the most part oxygen people make it out to be something that it's not because for the most part you do not need to know coding for oxygen it's a pretty straightforward process and it works really easy and once you get inside of it you're going to run into problems but trust in yourself you will learn what you need to do and you can ignore everything else that's going on in in you know in oxygen for the most part and just get through and you can build a website like this fairly easily i don't think that there's anything that you need to do inside of you know your website to do anything crazy so you know where does this all come down to where where does everything fit i mean do you prefer oxygen do you prefer bricks this has been the biggest fight of all since this came out is whether oxygen or bricks is the better builder and to be real honest with you it's one of the choices that i don't think you can make right off the bat without first playing with it yourself number one and understanding that brix is a brand new builder and oxygen is a more established builder and it's got a lot more of the things that you would probably be looking for as a builder so with that said i don't think that either one of them is outclassed i don't think either one of them is a bad buy and i don't think either one of them would uh would hurt you in any way purchasing them i like both of them i think they both have their uses i think i'm going to be interested to see what happens when oxygen 4 comes out at the same time i'm going to be interested to see what happens when bricks 2.0 comes out because both of them will hit milestones that are uh achieving certain things and really the question that is going to boil down in everybody's mind is how long will it take bricks to hit these milestones like bricks has a great running start from the very beginning with everything that it has but it still doesn't have the woocommerce builder it doesn't have a lot of the stuff that oxygen already has established and so it's almost not fair to compare them and for the most part people are right about that you can't compare something that's brand new and then say okay well i expect it to be flawless from the very beginning you just can't but brix has a very very good start ahead of it and oxygen just keeps getting better over time about the only complaint that i've seen on the oxygen form is really it's really been about the composite elements and really it's just that people were frustrated in having to pay for them because there's a monthly fee for them if you're not willing to pay for the uh the license the um the yearly license is 29 but for the most part these just speed up the workflow that's all they're there for i mean you could do the same thing like i said bricks and create these yourself they're just there to speed up the workflow and so at the end of the day you don't need to use these and i mean it's nice to have but you don't necessarily need to use them an important note is that oxygen did give all of these to anybody who's had a yearly license i mean a lifetime license and i think that that's really cool oxygen has done a good job of making sure that they incorporate uh their their old-time users who have supported them from the beginning and i think that that is a really really strong stance and i've been really really happy with the way that they've done that because oxygen could have came out and said you know what we're going to make these pre-built elements and if you want them you're just going to have to buy them and i'm sure most people would have probably purchased them if they needed them um i don't think anybody would have said oh no i don't want them or whatever the case is i think they would have probably purchased them it's just one of those things that it's a nice to have when oxygen goes through and just adds them to people who have this lifetime deal so i hope this video didn't disappoint you i know that we didn't go over every little thing that separates these two uh together um you know once again it's one of those questions where you have to sit down and you have to think of it for yourself if you are using somebody who is maybe let's say brand new or you have a client that is just wanting a basic website i think that brx is fine for that i've built some basic bricks stuff and i like it um i don't have any issues with it and it is fast it is very fast to build with it is not a hard builder to grasp and learn and do anything with same being said oxygen once you get rolling in it and you start playing with it the people who are really good with it know for a fact that you can build whatever you want to with oxygen and there's really no limitation as long as you're willing to learn so that's being the key between them if you're somebody who's maybe a little bit shy on learning something you could start with bricks i think bricks would be a fine addition to anybody's library it's really fast it works really well i've been really happy with it um but if you're somebody who wants to be more of a developer and tinker in the back end then i think oxygen is still probably the primary pick for you up until uh brick starts coming out with some more features that hits all of their elements that you know we're not seeing just yet with some of their elements and you know that's just my personal take you don't have to take and listen to me obviously you can do your own thing but when we when we're going over here and we're looking at what uh what kind of things i would like to see in bricks i'd like to see more options especially for the already existing headlines and stuff like that and that'll make it a lot more competitive with oxygen some of the other builders so i hope you guys have enjoyed this i'll take and i'll post links down below for anything you want to see if you want to see the sliced up build with uh bricks i'm going to take and post that up uh down below also and i will see you guys next time [Music] you

Channel: wpbuilderhelper

Views: 3,326

Keywords: Bricks, Oxygen, gutenberg, page builder, wordpress

Id: ijObV6WT4iw

Length: 32min 28sec (1948 seconds)

Published: Mon May 10 2021