For Us, Major Disappointments

As in my other reviews, if you are coming in from working with Gutenberg you will likely LOVE Kadence’s Pro Blocks. If you are coming in from Divi or Elementor you may really struggle as we have.

We have encountered strange dead ends like unstylable components like pagination in the Posts Grid Carousel. The mega menu not working with dynamic menus is for me like insanity. Clients change nav items and then they will have to pay us or someone to manually update mega menus because they are manually populated.

Coming in from Divi it feels weird that some Pro blocks combine Kadence and Gutenberg blocks and that Kadence’s font size options like SM, MD, L don’t match Gutenberg’s S, M, L. Again if you come from Gutenberg you might already accept this, but from other builders it feels broken and inconsistent.

Kadence blocks leave a door open for addressing accessibility issues, but they could be so much better especially with typography spacing.

There could be better, clearer relationships with the Customizer.

We frequently experience what feels like bugs with sizing options in blocks. We’ll try to click an option and it won’t activate, or we can’t change measurement units, or we will change something and the value won’t stick. For us it’s a lot of extra manual re-work and tickets to understand what’s happening with that. That time adds up.

And also the relationship with Design Library could be improved. For instance, Kadence has some cool image masking options, but Design Library layouts seems to use old methods like massive border-radius instead which accidentally made images disappear on our layouts until we changed it to the circle mask option.

One of our biggest nightmares and there is no simple, straightforward solution is keeping all content left aligned without jagged indents. Apparently Kadence applies padding pretty arbitrarily to various blocks and can even be impacted on when you add a background color to an area? We sort of found a way to make things more consistent, but it’s a multistep process we then have to save into our own versions of custom patterns. With other builders like Elementor or Divi, stuff just lines up automagically. There is none of this multi-step process for code modules or blocks. Just feels so odd it’s so hard to do basic, consistent alignment.

Sometimes is also feels illogical to us how some style options are in the Advanced tab instead of the Style tab.

Again, Kadence has some powerful, granular options if we don’t run into glitches, but the logic of the whole thing takes us much, much longer than a system like Divi. (No, I am not a Divi affiliate.)

We’ll keep giving Kadence blocks a shot. Try them out for yourself and form your own opinion.