If you run a WordPress website, you probably often use popular free and premium drag-and-drop page builders that most of the time come in the pack with modern premium WordPress themes. WPBakery page builder (formerly Visual Composer) is one of them.
Of course, you’ve noticed that in October 2017 the well-known Visual Composer has changed its name and transformed into WPBakery page builder. However, some confusion was caused by Visual Composer website builder released after the WPBakery one, so website owners were a bit perplexed when choosing the right product.
In this post we will give you an insight on what is the reason for renaming Visual Composer page builder into WPBakery page builder and what is the real reason of confusion among the users of Visual Composer website builder.
What was the reason for Visual Composer page builder to be renamed?
When WPBakery developers decided to introduce their Visual Composer website builder, their Visual Composer page builder had been already available as an exclusive product on Envato with a lifetime license.
The lifetime license is provided with all the products sold at Envato but the developers of Visual Composer website builder had to move away from the lifetime license model, so they understood they had to sell their new product outside the Envato platform.
The reason for moving away from the lifetime license was that a bunch of new features available in the new product required higher development costs which could only be supported by the annual license model. Another reason for selling the new website builder outside Envato was that the developers wanted to be closer to their users and wanted to start providing them with better support.
The regulations of Envato suppose that there shouldn’t be another product called Visual Composer sold outside their platform. So Visual Composer page builder (which is available on Envato with lifetime license) was renamed into WPBakery page builder, and a new product (which will be available with a yearly license model) was called Visual Composer website builder.
As a result Visual Composer page builder is now called WPBakery page builder and it shouldn’t be confused with Visual Composer website builder which is a completely different product.
What’s the difference?
WPBakery page builder is suitable only for the content part of the site, while Visual Composer website builder allows to build a complete website including headers and footers. Visual Composer website builder doesn’t use any WordPress shortcodes like WPbakery page builder does. It was created from scratch with React.js which helps achieve better performance.
Another key difference is that Visual Composer website builder comes with a cloud-based Hub, so you can choose which elements you download not to bloat your website with unwanted assets.
So now we hope there won’t be any confusion between these two products. Have a great day!
