GutenKit: A Feature Rich Gutenberg Block Collection

I recently did an in-depth review of the GutenKit plugin. In this post I’m summarizing the main points. Please check the video or the full walk-through.

There is a new Gutenberg plugin called GutenKit. It’s from WPMet. They’re a company who has made a number of popular plugins. And just this past May they released a beta of the Pro version of GutenKit. Since its release the Pro version has gotten a lot of updates and new features have continually been added. However, it is still new so you might run into some issues.

Video Version

What I do in the video is a general overview of the features that come with GutenKit. And then I go into the Site Editor and try to make templates, a single and archived template for a Custom Post Type using the GutenKit blocks.

GutenKit on WordPress.org

Let’s check in the WordPress.org plugin directory. Just showing you here are a couple of other plugins made by WPMet. Metform is one. It’s got 400,000 active installs. ElementsKit is another one. It has over a million active installs. Both of those plugins are for Elementor. Then here is the GutenKit page. And you can see it’s got 7,000+ active installs. Okay, so kind of on the newish side. It’s got 10 5-star reviews. And there are no support requests in the last two months.

The GutenKit Website

This is the GutenKit website. If we look at the features, we can see it has a query loop builder and we’ll be looking at that. Then it has GlassMorphism, Copy/Paste Style, Mega Menu Builder, Dynamic Content, which we’ll be using is in Beta, Parallax Effects, One Page Scroll, Motion Effect, Custom Breakpoints, among others.

This is a large block collection, 90 blocks in total. Obviously, we’re only going to be using a few of them. But what we see here is that I think the GutenKit team has taken the large number of features from their popular Elementor plugin and brought that kind of engineering knowledge that they had for developing the features for Elementor over to Gutenberg. So this is a large plugin collection that has lots of stylistic variations and creative types of blocks. One thing I’ll point out is notice this upcoming tag. So Advanced Search, Comparison Table, Hotspot, Image Morphing, Motion Text, Particles, and Table of Contents are upcoming features. And actually, during the process of making this video, several features have moved from upcoming to being released. So this is something they’re working on very actively.

There’s a large template library, which we’ll take a look at a little bit inside of a demo site.

There are some help resources, but the documentation isn’t super extensive. Then if we look at pricing, we’ll see that they have yearly and lifetime prices for 1, 5, and unlimited sites.

GutenKit On AppSumo

Currently GutenKit is up on AppSumo. I would check AppSumo to see if GutenKit is still available. The lifetime packages are a bit cheaper on AppSumo.

Results of Testing

Here are my main take-aways:

• The GutenKit block collection is very extensive. It has a ton of blocks, has a lot of templates. I think what’s happening is that the team is bringing the features over from the Elementor side to the Gutenberg side. It makes a lot of business sense that they would do that.
• Obviously, the team, the WP Met team, knows how to create useful plugins and make users happy because they have ElementorKit, which is a million plus active installs. I’ve noticed that the team has been active on social media, so they really want to get this launched and have another successful product.
• GutenKit is being actively developed. During the making of the video there were several updates where new features were released. I did find a couple of bugs when I was trying to make the video. I reported those, and a couple of days later they were fixed. I applaud the team that they responded really quickly to the problem report and got it fixed right away.
• In my testing creating the single template for a Custom Post Type went pretty smoothly. However, for the archive template, I had some problems with the layout. The GutenKit Query Builder block doesn’t allow divs or columns inside it’s loop item template, which limits the layout options.
• Also, the plugin could deepen support for dynamic data. For example, I think there is a star rating block that doesn’t support dynamic data. You know, and I showed with the button block, you can’t choose dynamic data for the button text.
• Their blocks are more sophisticated than in many other block collections, both because they have a lot of blocks, the blocks have creative style animation options, they have a lot of blocks with different features, and also out of the box they’re starting out with a query builder, the nav block with the mega menu. So I think this block collection shows some sophistication.
• I like the fact that they start out with support for the site editor. There are a number of block collections that have no support for dynamic data, or they don’t work in the site editor, so I like the direction it’s going. I think they’re doing a lot of things right. I think it still needs a little more refinement. I’d be totally satisfied if a container block worked in the query template, and I was able to get the layout I wanted.

So that’s my look at GutenKit. I hope you found it useful.