JoomShaper

What JoomShaper's page builder is

JoomShaper is a Joomla product vendor, and this entry covers its page builder, SP Page Builder, now at version 6. The company's documentation page describes JoomShaper as "a leading Joomla product suite with templates, page builder, and eCommerce & other extension", with 316+ products and 13.8M+ downloads. SP Page Builder is the part for people who want to design pages visually instead of editing template files. It is a component that runs inside a Joomla site rather than a hosted service, so you need an existing Joomla installation to use it, and the reader it fits best is a Joomla site owner, freelancer or agency. The company's pages do not state where it is based.

What you build and how

The product page calls SP Page Builder 6 "an extremely powerful and fully visual drag & drop tool" for building Joomla sites. A customer review on the homepage describes it as a component that lets you "build pages, and modules and customise all using an intuitive, drag-and-drop building system". So the editor works on both pages and modules, so the same tool covers both.

The site's navigation shows the feature areas. Under the page builder you find Features, Dynamic Content, Popup Builder, Interactions, Layout Bundles and Pre-made Blocks, and under Resources there is documentation, forums and live chat. The page builder is separate from the EasyStore extension, which has its own entry in the menu. A banner on the documentation page says EasyStore "is live, now with multi-currency selling". That is a store extension for Joomla rather than a part of the page builder, and the pages give no further detail about it.

Layouts and blocks. The site says layout bundles "accelerate your website development" with a plethora of designed layouts, and it lists pre-made blocks as a separate section. For someone starting a site, that means beginning from a finished layout and editing it, not from a blank canvas. A reviewer who builds sites for clients says the builder helps their team "develop websites and respond faster to the marketing demands of our clients".

Popup Builder. The Popup Builder page says you can "design, personalize, and launch high-converting popups in minutes" with no coding required, and that the work is done visually inside SP Page Builder, described there as lightweight and feature-rich.

Dynamic content and interactions. These 2 features are named in the page builder menu, but the pages give no description of what data sources or events they support, so this entry does not describe them further.

Templates and customization. Alongside the page builder, JoomShaper sells templates, including the Helix framework family. One customer review says one of the company's flagships can be used for free, and another praises the Helix3 template designs. The FAQ says all of the newer templates display well on mobile devices and that a growing number are specifically designed to be mobile responsive. Templates, modules and components also have built-in settings pages for basic changes without code.

Publishing and hosting. The pages describe SP Page Builder as a component for Joomla and say nothing about hosting, code export or a separate self-hosting option.

What the pages publish

Pricing is sold as membership rather than as a per-month plan. The FAQ says templates are only available as part of the membership: "I think you will find that $59 is an incredible deal, even if you only intend to use a single theme", and it also mentions an option at $99. The pricing page's own FAQ says $99 is the figure to compare to a single template. Because the FAQ and the pricing page disagree on the headline number, check the pricing page before budgeting. The plan names are Personal, Business and Developer. A Personal plan lets you use any template on one domain for life, Business covers 3 domains for life, and Developer allows unlimited domains.

The terms that matter most to a buyer:

• The company says you are free to use its templates or modules to build websites for your clients.
• Subscriptions do not auto-renew; each payment is a one-off payment.
• After a subscription expires you can keep using the products you downloaded and the free features, but the Pro license key becomes invalid.
• You can upgrade a plan at any time from the dashboard, but downgrading is not possible.
• Payments are accepted by PayPal, MasterCard, Visa and American Express, and the company says it does not store payment or card information on its server.
• Product documentation is public. Support tickets are available to customers after buying a membership, and support runs for the whole membership period.

Customer reviews on the homepage and product page mention support that is "fantastic", a customer using the products since 2015, and another who built 40+ websites over about 5 years. These are customers' words, not the company's claims. Other reviewers describe using it to create web pages for doctors and medical associations, praise the documentation as complete and up to date, call the source code clean, and say the products have a good price and performance ratio. One reviewer says the company produces components, plugins and templates for both WordPress and Joomla, so the catalog is wider than Joomla alone, although this entry covers only the Joomla page builder. Account tasks are handled in a dashboard: after logging in you see the name of your pricing plan, and clicking it takes you to the page where you can download an invoice, with a separate page for editing your profile and billing details. The documentation page covers Templates, SP Page Builder, EasyStore, Extensions and the Helix Framework, and the company offers forums and live chat for questions.

Who it suits and who it does not

SP Page Builder suits a freelancer or small agency that already builds on Joomla and wants a visual layer for pages and popups, with a license model that lets them use templates on client sites. A founder with no CMS yet should look elsewhere first, because choosing this means choosing Joomla. Subscription terms deserve a read because the Pro key stops working at expiry, and the pricing figures on the FAQ and pricing pages do not match. It also does not give an operations team an app builder, a database layer or workflow automation; it is a page design tool, and a good one for that job according to the customers quoted on its own site.