Builderall Review Update For 2018 - How Does Builderall Compare Now?

By Teri Helms

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Builderallbonus full review, 2017 - 
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Builderall is an impressive, comprehensive collection of online tools that are extremely valuable to online marketers, but it also has a ton of apps that can be used to promote local, offline businesses too.  

When I first learned about this HTML5 sitebuilder, it seemed like it might be too good to be true, so it was time for a Builderall review.  There have been some similar applications available on the market. While it's fun to go into a dashboard of one of these "everything but the kitchen sink" programs and have a large selection of apps to use, there are a couple of downsides that almost all of them have: 

1. With so much to choose from, it can be overwhelming

2. It can be time consuming to learn how to use all of the apps

3. Only one or two of the apps really work, and the rest just waste time. They seem to have been thrown into the mix so that the developers could promote the product based on about how many tools are contained in the toolbox.

If you've been in the internet marketing game for any length of time at all, you will have seen at least one product launch that was all hype but no substance. After the buzz dies down, the developers move on to the next big thing and stop making improvements or even fix existing problems.

Builderall is not like that.  After operating in Brazil for several years, Builderall has now turned its focus to the United States, and is working hard on building a solid market for the product in the U.S. There is also talk that they are planning to offer the platform in a Spanish language version to serve the millions of Spanish-speaking people in the U.S. and Latin and South America.

The developers have had a number of years to do a Builderall review and work out any bugs and add applications that offer value to their customers.  Customer input is always welcome and Builderall pays attention to what the customers want. Live chat support is available for users, as well as a Facebook group for community interaction.  Many other products I've seen have producers who STRONGLY discourage users from asking other group members about problems they are having with the program. Builderall, on the other hand, does not seek to prevent people from discussing issues with each other. Obviously, there are guidelines for interaction (kindergarten rules - treat each other nicely and respectfully) but by having the opportunity to connect and discuss problems, the group members tend to be able to help each other troubleshoot issues before they have to contact support. 

That's not to say that this platform is perfect - there is no such thing.  But I can honestly say that after working with Wordpress for a number of years now, it is easy for me to see by comparison how much attention has gone into this system, and give an honest Builderall review.

At the core of this system is a drag and drop HTML5 sitebuilder that has some very beautiful templates available to all users. Whether designing for an online-based business, a local small business or even a large organization, there is a template for nearly every type of site that might be needed in an organization. Even if there isn't one that will exactly fit your needs, the ones that are there can be customized and then easily duplicated to use again for another similar site, and new ones are being added all the time. 

The Builderall Drag And Drop HTML5 Sitebuilder can take some time to get used to if Wordpress has been your preferred platform, as it has for me. But Wordpress has some disadvantages that Builderall does not seem to have. For example, I have lost a lot of time and money trying to keep hackers at bay with Wordpress. There are some inherent weaknesses in the Wordpress platform, and hackers know exactly what they are and how to exploit them.  Wordpress is pretty secure if it is regularly updated and a good safety protocol is in place, such as premium security plugins and proper installation. Unfortunately, many, many Wordpress users don't update as frequently as they should, and it leaves the door wide open to bots or hackers ready to take advantage of the latest uncovered weakness.  Because Wordpress utilizes different themes and plugins developed by different developers and companies, weaknesses are often not discovered until someone's website is hacked and taken down.  In many cases, this does not lead to a big loss if the site is being overseen by a savvy webmaster who monitors all sites and makes regular, frequent backups. But many Wordpress users do not have access to a webmaster.  One of the largest strengths of Wordpress, its ease of use, is also one of its weaknesses - it attracts users who aren't prepared to deal with serious website issues when they arrive. A plugin that is stable in one situation and in combination with one theme may conflict with a different theme. Many times I have installed the latest, greatest plugin, only to be met with a "white screen of death." Fortunately, that situation is more of an annoyance than a danger, and is usually easy to fix. But it is still something I don't miss since I have changed from using Wordpress to the Builderall platform. 

Builderall's HTML5 Sitebuilder platform is a drag and drop way of creating visually appealing sites. Unfortunately, that comes at the expense of responsiveness.  In order to create a site that looks good and functions well on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices, each site must be configured separately for each type of device. Although that may sound like three times the effort, I've found that in reality it doesn't take more than a few minutes of additional work to customize each version. There is a function in the program that allows the user to modify the site for desktop and then see how it looks in each of the other two plaforms.  While a few of the available templates that look good on a desktop are a mess when viewed on mobile or tablet view, most of the templates are ready to go right away without changing much.  If you check a template in all three views before you decide to use it, you can save yourself a lot of aggravation. Even if your first choice of template doesn't work on all three views, there are so many to choose from that it won't take long to pick another one that will require very little effort to customise. Once you get your site so it's looking just the way you want on all devices, there is a mechanism to save each one individually so they are more independent of the others. This way, the mobile site is truly cutomized for mobile devices and when checked on the Google mobile friendly test tool (found here), it will pass with flying colors. 

Builderall also has a responsive blog builder function that is based on a container system (like Divi), but that has a few minor issues. One of these issues is the URL appends the number of the post at the end of each entry - not the best for SEO purposes. A new responsive blog builder option is in the works, but I find the drag and drop builder fun and easy to use and it has suited my purposes well to this point, so I honestly haven't spent a lot of time with the responsive blog builder.

Builderall Is Much More Than Just A Website Builder

A website builder is just one of the many components of the Builderall system, and if you use each part to its fullest advantage, it can stand to save you a lot of money and time over using another company to provide the same service or product. For example, one of the biggest advantages of Builderall is the Mailing Boss email automation (autoresponder) system.  It is often said in the internet world "the money is in the list", and if you do the math, you'll find out that's a true statement. If you have a responsive email list, you know that a carefully chosen promotion can bring a certain amount of money to your pocket just by sending an email. Even brick and mortar businesses will often find that building an email list can bring them thousands of dollars in additional revenue each year by giving them a mechanism to promote offers that will benefit their exising customers.  A good sale or promotion can often become a great promotion by sending an email to the customer list.  Customers who might not know about a great sale your business is having can learn about it by checking email. If you need to generate a little revenue for an unexpected business expense, having a list of reliable customers you can email can end up making all the difference if you can come up with a good spur-of-the-moment offer.

The problem is, standalone autoresponder services can be expensive, particularly for someone just starting a business online.  After paying for hosting, premium Wordpress themes and plugins, courses to learn how to use them, and paid advertising, the added cost of an autoresponder can seem out of reach.

Although there are free autoresponders available, they have disadvantages - such as injecting their ad into your message, which can look unprofessional for a new business.  Other free systems don't not allow you to set up an automatic response to someone who joins your list. This can be bad if you want to offer something to encourage someone to join your mailing list, and that person doesn't receive what you've offered until you manually send it.  Special lead magnet offers such as a book or course tend to lose their luster when they aren't delivered immediately after a perfon requests it. Often the requester will forget that he even requested it if too much time has passed. This can put you at risk of receiving undeserved spam complaints. 

The basic Mailing Boss package comes with the capacity for a 10,000 subscriber email list, with an unlimited sending capacity, and is expandable incrementally to up to hundreds of thousands of subscribers at a modest additional cost. This gives small businesses the ability to grow slowly and inexpensively.  

I have dealt with most of the major autoresponders, and I have found Mailing Boss to be far easier to configure, and the rate of delivery has so far been comparable to some of the other big companies. There are a number of email templates available if you want to send emails that are more artistic than simple text on a white screen.

Builderall Review - What I Like

• Really easy to set up email and access it - no cpanel
• Easy to add header scripts for analytics and retargeting pixels
• Design Studio - Good for creating mock-ups that can be used in promotions
• Lots of tutorial videos
• Easy to link site to domain - just set it up in the domain registrar and point it to servers, connect in a few clicks.
• Very easy to create subdomains - just start a new site, save it, connect it to the main domain, when you publish it, create the full url: subdomain.domain.com  (or whatever)
• Unlimited subdomains 
• Easy to add lines to create boundaries when placing elements on site
• Builderall is continually updating and improving the platform
• Mailing Boss is probably easiest email autoresponder platform I have ever used, and 10,000 subscribers included in basic plan makes it a bargain compared to other autoresponders
• A number of Facebook apps included in platform
• Browser notification capability included
• Heat map/Click map capability included
• Animated video studio included
• App builder included - can created unlimited mobile apps, but you do have to pay a reasonable extra fee to have them published in iTunes or Google Play
• Unlimited websites included in standard plan 
• 10 gb of hosting storage and unlimited bandwidth in standard plan
• SEO Onpage Report Tool makes it easy to see what changes need to be made to pages for high search engine ranking
• Free SSL included on all sites
• Floating videos app included
• Tutorial videos are short and to the point
• Easy implementation of social media: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Google+, Pinterest
• Easy to add image galleries with different configurations
• Animated counter allows an interesting way to report numbers/stats
• Number of different types of popups can be added - exit pops, exit intent, time, opt-ins, templates, create your own
• Create paid or free restricted pages
• Paypal and Shopify integration with more payment types coming
• Open Table integration
• Easy to create a sales funnel
• Create free or paid membership sites/pages
• Iframing sites is EASY
• Once you have a personal template perfected, you can clone it with one click and easily edit the next site, and over and over again

Builderall Review - Improvements I'd Like To See

• Presentation creator not the best (but if you have Powerpoint or Libre Office, you don't need it)
• Animated video creator could use some refinement, but the kinetic video maker is good
• The drag and drop website builder does have a learning curve for people used to using Wordpress, but once you're used to it, and the templates are better than most WP templates I've used
• No access to CPanel, but I haven't missed that
• No link cloakers available, but one may be in the works
• Drag and drop sitebuilder requires separate customization to three platforms (desktop, tablet, mobile)
• Responsive blog builder has a few issues that may impact SEO, but I can't honestly say whether or not it does because I have focused more on the Site Builder
• Better as a website platform than blogging platform, but adding a blog to a subdomain is easy to do, and adding new posts gets easier the more you do it
• Might be challenging for new users, but probably not more than Wordpress
• Sites build on the platform are not transferable to other platforms, so probably won't work well for site flippers

Who Should Use Builderall?

Builderall is a good choice for anyone who makes a living online and can take advantage of all of the tools included in the platform. Internet marketers may find it very interesting because it's so easy to build the optimal site, and then clone it for additional sites.  This makes it very useful for people who want to develop a collection of small niche sites dedicated to promoting a single item - like a Clickbank product or higher ticket item on Amazon.  This would likely require sending paid traffic to the site(s), but since microniche sites tend to not rank well anyway, if this is your business model you're probably already doing that.

Update: sites built on the Builderall platform can rank well in search engines, as long as they observe basic SEO principles. I have knowledge of several of these sites that have attained page 1 ranking in Bing and Google for keywords that are relatively competive.  On my own sites, use of the built-in SEO checker tool has been extremely helpful to allow me to see where improvements could be made. Once they were, the sites started to climb in rankings with no additional work done on them.

Because of unlimited subdomain availability and how easy it is to create them, local marketers may find it worthwhile to focus on a niche, and then build a master site that can be cloned and then customized for each community in a local area. For example: someone who promotes plumbers in the New York City area may form subdomains for each borough. So bestplumber.com can become longisland.bestplumber.com, statinisland.bestplumber.com, manhattan.bestplumber.com, etc. 

The Builderall sites are very nice and professional looking, which makes them a good choice for smaller brick and mortar businesses. Although the price of the platform makes it slightly more expensive than just having a simple Wix site, for example, the cost difference really is almost negligible, especially when considering all of the other marketing tools that you don't have to buy separately.  A good marketing strategy for smaller businesses should include social media and email marketing. Since you don't have to use separate services for these features, it really does make for a good package deal for both online and offline small businesses.  I have seen many of the tools sold invidually for the price of the entire Builderall suite.  

Builderall was introduced into the USA in April 2017, after 8 very successful years in Brazil.  I was one of the first buyers of that launch, and after a couple of months of playing around with it, I wrote the review that you see below.

As my one-year Builderall anniversary approaches, I decided it was time to update my review. Many things have changed about Builderall, and as the platform has matured and many of the kinks have been ironed out. BA has experienced explosive growth, not only in the United States, but internationally, as well.  The Facebook Builderall Users' group now has tens of thousands of members sharing their experiences with the platform, and helping each other out.  

What's the bottom line for me?  After using Builderall for a full year, would I recommend it?  The answer is not a simple "yes or no".  Full, updated 2018 review here...​​​​​​​