In this review I’m comparing Greenshift and Cwicly. A lot of people have asked about them and from a high level there are a lot of similarities. They each have:
- A large number of blocks
- They appeal to power users who want a lot of control and advanced features
- They both work with dynamic data
- They are both optimized for performance
- Each one has its own theme
- They both work in the Full Site Editor
Even though they look similar, as we go through the review, at every point of comparison you will see how different they are. By the end you should have a good sense of which one would work best with your goals and workflow.
Video Version
Comparison Points
See the video for the full walk-through. Here are some comparison points that are shown:
- It is faster to start building a site with Greenshift as it has more default style options. With Cwicly you need to set up global styles and build all templates manually.
- Cwicly has a steeper learning curve, but is more like a page builder.
- Cwicly has very strong support for dynamic data functionality, though just for ACF. Greenshift is not as thorough, but it works with ACF, Meta Box, JetEngine, Pods, and Toolset.
- Cwicly seems more coherent and complete. Greenshift feels a bit more ad hoc.
- Greenshift’s extensive animation options is one of its strengths.
- The Greenshift theme is newer and leverages recent features of block themes, like multiple color palettes, global styles, and integrating settings from theme.json.
- The Greenshift plugin works well with any theme, including classic themes.
- The Cwicly theme is a blank theme, mostly just a reset.
- In theory you can use Cwicly with any theme, but you need a block theme to the Themer feature and there might be issues using Cwicly blocks with a classic theme.
- Greenshift has many “content” blocks such as product comparison, pros and cons, score, and offers.
- Greenshift settings are more per block based.
- Cwicly has “builder” blocks for constructing your own content blocks.
- Cwicly block settings are standardized across blocks.
