Top Rated uSkinned Site Builder Alternatives
We’ve used uSkinned Site Builder on nearly 200 projects, and it’s become the integral part of our approach building websites on Umbraco. Its comprehensive set of pre-built components, combined with our own custom-built block components, offer a great balance between robust out-of-the-box features and tailored customisation.
Basing all our recent Umbraco sites on uSkinned enables customers with marketing capabilities to handle content updates that require minor layout changes independently, without needing our involvement. With a little training they are normally able to create new basic page layouts. This marks a significant shift from the traditional Umbraco approach, where we created rigid bespoke components tailored to each site. While these were easy to use, they offered our customers limited flexibility for layout changes. By combining uSkinned starter kits with bespoke block components, we’ve addressed this limitation, providing customers far greater scope to create diverse and dynamic layouts but also providing easy to use custom components for areas of the site that require regular updating or are managed by end users with more limited technical ability.
The hybrid approach of combining uSkinned with our custom block components has enabled us to deliver both flexibility and control to our clients. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
There’s very little to dislike about uSkinned, it's become our go-to starter kit for almost every project. We appreciate its extensive features set, which provides a solid foundation, along with the flexibility to add advanced functionality through our own bespoke block components. Early on we experienced some challenges with upgrading the pre-SiteBuilder sites, as these required a rebuild. However since the introduction of Site Builder in 2021, this issue has been resolved, making it easy to roll all our sites onto new versions of Umbraco when required to meet LTS requirements. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
35 out of 36 Total Reviews for uSkinned Site Builder
Overall Review Sentiment for uSkinned Site Builder
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It offers a variety of controls, and an easy to use framework, which gives guided instruction for back office users.
The Visual Designer provides a great experience, giving back-office users great creative freedom with a live preview.
I have used uSkinned access Umbraco Version 7,8 and 13 for multiple clients, and most of them have been very happy with the results.
Yes, easy to integrate & implement with Umbraco. And their block controls are a joy to work with.
Version 13 has shown noticeable improvements in SEO performance, including great scores on PageSpeed Insights.
the support team also responds in a timely manner and is always ready to help.
It’s the first choice for Umbraco as a ready-to-go startup kit, and a user-friendly framework for quickly getting started with site-building. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
While the blog engine is good, it seems to lack some basic features, especially with Umbraco 8.
We haven't had the opportunity to explore the blog functionality with Umbraco 13 yet.
For developers aiming to fully customize the design, it can be somewhat challenging due to the limited documentation available.
Additionally, if you've worked on a customization during the uSkinned version upgrade, that can also present some difficulties.
Additionally, after the upgrade, it’s been challenging to determine which namespaces or libraries are compatible and which ones aren't. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
I’ve been trying out the uSkinned Site Builder for the past week, and I have to say, I’m really impressed!
The back office is really user-friendly and packed with options to customize your site. As an editor, you get so much control over everything—choosing title images, deciding how they’re displayed, picking colors, fonts, and more. It really puts a lot of power in your hands and makes building a site quick and easy.
What’s also great is that it’s built on Umbraco, which I’ve been using for a few years now. Umbraco is already a great CMS, but uSkinned takes it to another level by making the whole process even simpler. It takes a lot of the complexity out of a developer’s hands and gives you amazing tools to work with right out of the box.
For my trial I used the "Charity" theme and was really impressed by the high Lighthouse score it achieved right out of the box. It’s a testament to a well-architected and thoughtfully designed frontend build.
After using the trial, I’m really happy with what it offers. It’s so good that I’ve decided to buy a license. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
There’s a bit of a learning curve when it comes to figuring out how the block list settings combinations work. That said, after spending some time playing around with the tools, I started to get the hang of it and understood how to use and customize the settings effectively.
One thing I’d love to see in the future is a visual builder for the blocks on individual pages. They already have a fantastic visual website builder for the overall site, so it would be amazing if they extended that functionality to the blocks themselves. It would make it so much easier to preview and visualize changes before publishing them. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Our web design team started using the Uskinned site builder plugin about two years ago and it is now our preferred implementation for all Umbraco sites we build. Uskinned provided a better solution to many of our most critical CMS ‘must-haves” including:
- A visual editor with advanced layout options
- Individual module settings and options for variations
- XML sitemaps and robots.txt
- Built in site search
- Global design and navigation settings
- Reusable pods & components
- A better blog post editing experience
- The Uskinned support team has always been responsive to our questions and the licensing makes sense for our digital marketing agency to offer their solution to our clients. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
We have encountered a few drawbacks with uSkinned. One notable issue is the lack of functionality to import old blog posts, which has made content migration much more difficult. Additionally, the blog feature is limited to categories only, with no option for tags, restricticting our ability to organize content.
We've also faced CSS generation issues in load-balanced environments based on Umbraco's documentation regarding the separation of frontend and back-office app services. And also difficulty working with POSTs on RenderControllers.
Lastly, the inability to view previous support ticket history makes it difficult to track ongoing issues or refer to past resolutions. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The uSkinned Site Builder is a fantastically comprehensive tool for rapidly building any Umbraco website. I have used the package professionally for nearly a decade, across scores of site builds, and have never found it wanting.
The range of out-of-the box features is impressively large and increases with every new iteration of the system, and usually does the trick on its own for most requirements. The product has continuously evolved alongside Umbraco itself over the years and has added huge amounts of new functionality in that time. However, the ease of customization means that the developer is never boxed in by any perceived limitations of the package out of the box.
The level of customer support is top notch, with plentiful documentation and timely responses to help requests. This gives a decent level of comfort to anyone approaching the system for the first time.
In short, I can't recommend the product enough to fellow Umbraco developers - it is outstanding. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
There might have been a point in the product's past where sites built with the tool might have had a somewhat cookie-cutter, "uSkinned"-look about them (especially when using a theme) but this has changed much for the better over the years as it has become ever easier to build unique front-ends over the skeleton Site Builder theme itself. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
When we first threw ourselves into uSkinned Site Builder, we were almost overwhelmed by all the many design and setting options. But after using the system for quite a few solutions and websites, design and setup now take no time.
However, one of the best things about working with uSkinned Site Builder is probably their support. Their response times are incredibly fast and they have even answered questions that did not directly concern uSkinned Site Builder, but more general areas in Umbraco. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
We have occasionally had some problems with the installation of Umbraco together with uSkinned Site Builder, but most often it has been due to errors on our part. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Points for recommendation:
- features and themes let us have a responsive and user friendly website ready in record time
- high usability in back office for our users with little prior experience
- fast and helpful customer support
- upgraded og maintened code, we've used uSkinned for multiple sites over many years Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Points to be aware of:
- some coding software and skills required for implementation
- possible Umbraco version issues
- high level of customization possible, keep clear lines for overall design Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
uSkinned is a powerful library of pre-made UI components and settings that helps you easily get your Umbraco website off the ground. Marketing teams that we work with love it for its easy-to-use experience, many customization options, drag-and-drop page builder, and scalable functionality. It is very easy to learn for novice users and can even be customized in incredible ways with a seasoned builder.
uSkinned integrates with a number of out-of-the-box integrations including many for marketing/analytics, ecommerce, booking/scheduling, and more. This allows you to quickly connect your account to uSkinned to deploy faster with the technologies you already use.
The uSkinned team is incredibly responsive and have built the product over many years / iterations of Umbraco. They continue to release new features and to enhance their product with every new release of Umbraco. It's really a very easy tool to use, and is a great option for sites of all sizes.
If you're looking for an easiliy installed add-on to Umbraco to get up and running quickly and to give your editors / content managers more control over the website, uSkinned is a great option. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
While uSkinned is a powerful tool, remember to keep in mind that it has a TON of options for each component. It needs internal governance to keep pages consistent and unified.
It can also be difficult to upgrade if you decide to make a lot of optimizations to the out-of-the-box installation. If you plan on doing a lot of custom implementations, uSkinned likely is not the best option for you. However, if you're in the market for an easy-to-install theming engine with a ton of out-of-the-box features and everything you need to make an incredible website, uSkinned is a great option for you. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
uSkinned comes out of the box with loads of great premade components that you can drag and drop pretty much anywhere on your site. Just about anything content you would want to add to a page is available as an option, and for the more advanced components, uSkinned allows you to extend the functionality with custom components.
Each component in uSkinned comes with a suite of settings and options that are consistent aross the site. Do you want to hide an element? There's an option for that. Need to center a component or remove some padding? uSkinned's got you covered.
uSkinned also has the ability to add custom CSS and Javascript on top of the clean designs, and with the ability to add custom classes to any element, it's really easy to ensure that the website perfectly fits the customer's brand.
The settings and features are sensibly organised in such a way that makes the barrier to entry for editors very low. Our customers love the flexibility of being able to change the look and feel of their website instantly and play around with different features
Once uSkinned has been installed, it's super easy for multiple members of the team to hop in and build the site at the same time.
A few times we've contacted support at uSkinned and they've always replied promptly with detailed responses to help us out. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
While it's easy to extend uSkinned with custom components and featured, the documentation for some advanced features could be more detailed.
As a "nice-to-have", it would be great if there was a playlist of videos about how to use the site builder that we could direct customers to. We've used some of the help pages on the website but having additional training material would be really useful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
uSkinned powers our web solutions on GameChampions.com
The software provided by Paul and his team is A-tier and I recommend this solution as a Wordpress alternative for anybody looking to start a site without any developer experience. You will find the an extremely intuitive interface with almost everything included out of the box without having to install any plugins. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Some limitations exist if you want to host a site with large amount of traffic. They do not offer to host the site for you and you will need to host it yourself which can get more complicated. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
