Overview
We are going to go through a short little example of the differences in something I would consider a “professional tool” vs a “non-professional” tool. When comparing Bricks and Duda on the surface it may or may not feel like a fair comparison. See, Bricks is built on the WordPress CMS while Duda is its own “CMS”, and I use CMS very loosely here.
What we are comparing
Duda is what I would consider a “no-code” tool. There is no need to understand any HTML, Javascript or CSS to get started, while Bricks is sort of the opposite. You can get away with not knowing any of those 3 in Bricks as well, but an understanding of CSS properties at the least will help you a lot when it comes to designing the page. With Bricks,at least you have the option to really leverage these features as compared to Duda.
Code Output
You may be wondering, “why should I care about what the code looks like?” and maybe it doesn’t matter to you. But good code output not only helps with SEO but with accessibility standards as well. So think about all the people who are accessing your site, you’re going to want to make it work well for them. Now take a look at the code output of the same two designs below and tell me which one looks better and feels more “professional”.
I think the obvious answer is the second image. If just viewing the code like this didn’t give it away, just look at the number of the elements. Sure, the first one was something everyone would be able to do, but so is the second one. I applied no styles to either of these off when I started building. As you can see in the first one, it is very opinionated on how everything should be set up. This is not good when it comes to styling everything.
Maintenance
Take a look at the image below of these 3 cards. Now imagine, you are using these cards on two different pages, and the client comes to you and says they want to make a change. Simple enough, they want to change the border color of the cards from light gray to red. Take a look at how much longer it takes in Duda and how easy something like this is in a professional tool.
Bricks Video
Duda Video
This is obviously just a small example of what the differences are, but it is already apparent how daunting this would be if you used this design on 10+ pages. In Bricks, it would still take 30 seconds to change all of them, and you wouldn’t even have to remember which pages they were on. But with Duda, since you cannot assign classes to them, you are forced to change them individually and remember what pages they were all used on. That creates a bad workflow and frustration when these small changes are made, so imagine the big changes.
We will compare these builders more, but just wanted to get started in the comparisons between builders and why some builders just shouldn’t be used by professionals.