React Bricks vs Builder.io
Introduction
React Bricks and Builder.io are both Headless CMSs with visual editing capabilities, making it easy for marketers to create and manage content without needing to write code.
Both platforms have an extensive set of features that allows for advanced customizations, such as custom content blocks and custom fields. Additionally, they both offer integrations with external content sources, like other headless CMSs or e-commerce platforms, providing a powerful and intuitive tool for content creation and management.
Despite their similarities, React Bricks and Builder.io differ in several ways. Let’s take a look.
Content Management Vision
strives to empower marketing content editors to create independently, without the need for developer assistance.
On the other hand, React Bricks aims to provide editors with autonomy while ensuring the consistency of the corporate identity. To achieve this, designers and developers need to create the content blocks that form the corporate design system as React components. This unified design system ensures a consistent preservation of the corporate image.
Visual editing interface
With Builder.io, you edit texts using sidebar text input fields, and you can preview the changes in real time on the page, meaning you can make sure everything is just right before you publish it.
React Bricks takes this concept one step further by allowing you to directly edit the page content inline, just as if you were using a word processor like Word or Pages. This is more intuitive for content editors, as it eliminates the need to switch between the page and the sidebar, allowing them to make changes quickly and efficiently.
Hosting and Deployment
Both Builder.io and React Bricks provide the opportunity to host the frontend website wherever you want, giving you the flexibility to choose the best platform for your needs. However, Builder.io adds a tracking pixel to your frontend website.
As far as we know, Builder.io does not offer an option to self-host the backend APIs. React Bricks offers self-hosting as an add-on for Enterprise plans. This feature allows you to have full control over your API infrastructure and server location, and gives you the ability to customize it according to your specific needs.
Pricing model
Builder.io pricing model is based on page views. This is accomplished by inserting a tracking pixel into each page to track the number of visits, which may not be suitable or ideal for enterprise customers.
React bricks, on the other hand, does not track your page views; its pricing model is based on the number of pages, authors, support level and the features required. For enterprise customers, plans are tailored to their specific needs.
Collaboration
Builder.io and React Bricks use different strategies to manage the collaboration of several editors working on the same website.
Builder.io offers real-time collaboration, allowing multiple users to work on the same page simultaneously.
React Bricks employs a lock system to prevent conflicts when multiple users edit the same page at the same time.
This feature shows who is online and viewing a page. It uses a lock system to stop two users from editing the same content at the same time, thereby preventing a "last save wins" situation. When an editor starts editing a page, they gain write control, which prevents other users from editing. The lock is released when the page is saved, allowing other editors to make changes. If required, the lock can also be manually released.
This lock mechanism is often preferred by enterprise customers as it helps accurately track content creation responsibilities.
Digital Asset Manager
A Digital Asset Manager (DAM) is a fundamental part of a modern CMS. It allows editors to organize, search and reuse assets or upload new images and files.
While Builder.io has a basic media gallery to manage images, React Bricks has an enterprise-grade Digital Asset Manager (DAM).
With React Bricks DAM editors can:
- Search assets by keywords
- Organize images and files in Folders
- Filter images by used or unused
- For each image, view and modify data like title, description, SEO friendly name, source, copyright
- For each image, see the original source (full width, not cropped or rotated) and all the references in Pages
- Before using an image, apply crop, rotation, flip.
- Manage the trash bin
SEO Optimization
allows you to set a title and description for each page. To further enhance SEO, developers need to create custom fields.
On the other hand, React Bricks includes an advanced SEO module. This tool guides editors toward best-practice optimization, encompassing Open Graph, Twitter Cards, and Schema.org semantic data.
Within the SEO module, content editors can set:
- Meta data such as slug, title, description, and keywords
- Open Graph data and images, with automatic resizing and guided cropping to maintain the correct aspect ratio
- Twitter Cards data and images, with automatic resizing and guided cropping to maintain the correct aspect ratio
- Complete support for schema.org semantic data, encompassing 14 schemas, from Article and Event to Product, How To, ...and even Recipe!
Enterprise features
React Bricks offers enterprise-grade features to meet the needs of our enterprise customers, which include:
- Scheduled publishing
- Advanced DAM and SEO modules
- Collaboration
- Versioning
- Approval workflows
- Single Sign-on (SSO)
- External data integration
- Scheduled backup on external S3
- Possibility to self-host the APIs if required
- Fine content locking at the block level
- Multiple content environments
- Multiple web hooks
- Priority support
- Access to Customer Success and Professional Services
Conclusion
Depending on the specific requirements of the user, the decision between React Bricks and Builder.io can be a difficult one.
In our opinion, Builder.io may be better suited for those without coding experience, or those not using React. React Bricks, on the other hand, may be better for corporate and enterprise users who need more flexibility and control.
We recommend trying both Builder.io and React Bricks with a demo project to understand the developer and content editor experiences before making your final decision.