Best Gutenberg Block Plugins – An Experience-Based Review
Whether you are a professional WordPress developer, or just making your first steps in this area, you have most likely seen Gutenberg blocks editor. It provides WordPress users with a bunch of blocks to create pages, build, and customize a website. However, sometimes you may need more features to expand the functionality of your website. Using plugins that provide extra blocks is exactly what you need to solve this problem. In this article, we are going to compare two of the best Gutenberg block plugins for building fully-fledged and multipurpose websites: CoBlocks and ZeGuten. Both plugins represent a collection of blocks with various functionality and a dozen of customizing options. Let’s compare these two plugins and highlight the main differences between them, making sure we understand the benefits they can bring to the table.
Check The Two Best Gutenberg Block Plugins
ZeGuten is as well the plugin for making content with the help of the diversity of blocks on-board. It is compatible with the latest WordPress versions, and also with such browsers as Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Edge. ZeGuten has a Section block, which can be a parent element or any other block, from animated boxes to pricing tables. Moreover, the plugin is regularly updated by the team of professional developers who strive to fix errors and prevent those that have not yet arisen. Each month ZeGuten team releases at least one new powerful block. It is completely hassle-free and SEO-optimized on a high level.
CoBlocks is a package of various blocks, which are aimed to build content for the pages in the WordPress Gutenberg block editor area. The plugin is compatible with WordPress 5+ versions and updates regularly. CoBlocks provides the row and column building approach for the better page building experience. The best Gutenberg block plugin has to be lightweight, and so is CoBlock. It gives users the ability to quickly figure out how the working process performs.
Arrange Content in Layouts
There is a huge variety of plugins for Gutenberg, good or bed, which promises a wide range of functional opportunities. However, to earn the title of the best Gutenberg block plugin, one of the key features any add-on should have is a diversity of layouts. Let’s take a look at the layouts functionality of our two plugins.
The CoBlocks plugin provides you with the ability to add one of the 4 column layouts and choose which row block layout to showcase. With a responsive grid system, you can regulate its size by dragging the vertical separator.
ZeGuten Section block contains columns as well, which number you can vary from 1 to 6. Inside the columns, other elements are put. This allows the developer to never worry about the page layout or spacing options – everything is already organized neatly.
CoBlocks has a few variations of the Gallery block: a carousel, collage, masonry, offset and stacked. The Carousel block is a separate ZeGuten element, which works as an animated slider and can contain any content you can only imagine.
Best Gutenberg Block Plugins – The Post Block Settings
Talking about the Post block layouts, the CoBlocks plugin has two of them: a simple one and a carousel. Unlike CoBlocks, ZeGuten provides 5 posts layouts: classic listing, modern grid, unusual chess, innovative masonry, and dynamic carousel. That is what makes it one of the best Gutenberg block plugins for building any kind of blog.
ZeGuten has a bunch of options for customizing your posts. Let’s look through the most stunning
- query posts by ID;
- set the offset;
- order posts date or title;
- set descending or ascending order;
- showcase posts of a certain category.
Among these settings, you can also select the number of items and columns, display post date or divider, showcase category, tag, excerpt author, and comments.
What About the Typography
The typography properties is a very important rule while talking about the best Gutenberg block plugins. The same content may look a thousand times more attractive with the proper fonts and spacing. Let’s start with the common settings, which are on-board for both plugins. You are completely able to pick the font you are interested in, set font-weight, text-transform, and font size. You can also set the line height and letter spacing value.
The CoBlocks plugin additionally gives you the ability to enable no top spacing and no bottom spacing.
As for ZeGuten, here you can set the font subset and style and the text decoration. One of the additional features of ZeGuten typography is the ability to set a tag for your text element: div, span, paragraph, or one of the 6 heading kinds.
Responsiveness Settings Compared
What makes a good website? Apart from the unique content and amusing interface, it is the ability to be equally useful on any device. The best Gutenberg block plugins ensure your content looks great on any device or screen size. The CoBlocks plugin is a great solution to use responsive margin and padding settings.
However, if you need some more options, take a look at ZeGuten features. Set gaps, margins, and paddings in pixels or percents for desktop, tablet and mobile phone. Vary font and icon size, the number of columns and items to showcase on various devices.
Customization Without any Effort
The best Gutenberg block plugins must be true kings of the customizing options, and they really are! Each of the WordPress blocks within the CoBlocks plugin has a powerful customization experience. It proposes a bunch of custom controls for changing background and text color. However, the plugin is more technically oriented.
As for ZeGuten plugin, its styling options are almost limitless. You can set a color, gradient, image, or video background in a few clicks. Furthermore, you are also able to add a custom shape over an image or create an image overlay.
In addition, you can apply gradient for the Progress bar block and set the opacity for any color background. The settings to style up buttons are amazingly multiple and unique. To cut a long story short, each element of any ZeGuten block can be modified to suit the design of your website.
Best Gutenberg Block Plugins – The Matter of Price
ZeGuten is a paid block plugin, however, because of its widest range of tools and features, we can totally forgive this. It combines multiple styling options as well as a bunch of technical features. It consists of 14 blocks now
- Section block, which appears as the main structural element;
- Countdown timer, Circle progress, Icon list, Pricing table, and Progress bar to showcase infographics and business offers;
- Animated box, Blurbs, Banners, Carousel to make your website engaging and animated;
- other multifunctional blocks: Advanced map, Image comparison, Posts, and Headings.
CoBlocks is a free plugin, which is more oriented on the number of blocks. The plugin contains 27 blocks, which functionality, however, doesn’t have so much to do with customizing. Among its blocks are
- 5 gallery blocks;
- 2 post blocks;
- 3 blocks for social links;
- 4 blocks for content building;
- other relevant blocks: Accordion block, Alert block, Author Profile block, Buttons block, Events block, Features block, Food & Drinks block, Form block, Gif block, GitHub Gist block, Hero block, Icon block, Logos & Badges block, Map block, Media Card block, Pricing Table block, Services block.
CoBlocks is free, and already has a great variety of blocks, however, the average of tabs with options for each block is three. Although ZeGuten has fewer blocks, it has from 4 to 10 tabs with a great diversity of properties. That is why CoBlocks is a great solution for those who are new to WordPress, while ZeGuten provides a solid approach for building a website.
What of Plugin Updates and Support
It should be noted that ZeGuten is updated as regularly as possible by the Gutenix team of professional developers. Yes, ZeGuten is fairly new, as it came out in February 2020, while CoBlocks was around for a while. However, each month ZeGuten team releases at least one new block, so the functional possibilities are growing more and more, and soon the plugin will have as many blocks as CoBlocks, yet provide more precise customization options for creating unique styles.
In addition, Zeguten plugin has a dedicated and experienced support team and a Facebook chat, where you can write any questions. The response rate is fairly high. CoBlocks has basic free support, and the plugin author answers the questions and gives basic help if there’s a need.
Best Gutenberg Block Plugins – Can We Use Both Together?
Each of these plugins is worth attention. Despite their differences, we can only imagine what you’d be able to build having both of them at your disposal. By the way, you can totally use both on one website if you need it. You can take some blocks from CoBlocks and use ZeGuten blocks for other purposes when you need more extensive customization. However, it’s totally up to you which plugin you’d choose to work with Gutenberg. What we can tell for sure, is that both of them improve the experience of working with Gutenberg and make it so easier to create and style all kinds of content.