If you’re looking for a powerful yet affordable WordPress Facet Builder to create an advanced group of filters for your blog, taxonomies, custom post, or ecommerce to let the website users filter down the content they are looking for then read this article here am going to share my thoughts about Piotnet Grid which lets you create all kinds of complex grids and facets for your website with no code.
The best part is that Piotnet Grid works with all your favorite website builders including Oxygen Builder, Elementor, and many more.
Also, it is well integrated with Woocommerce which means you can easily create advanced filters like Amazon.com for your online store and allow your customers to search, filter, and sort the products based on various parameters pre-defined by you.
If that is not enough then let me tell you that you can also make it work with the most popular WordPress Custom Field plugins like ACF and Meta Box as it has deep integrations with many of those plugins.
Note: Our SyncWin Deals, Blog, and other important archive pages are completely built using the power of facets and grids by Piotnet Grid and I am planning to produce a step-by-step tutorial about how to use Piotnet Grid on your WordPress website so if you’re interested please let us know in the comment section.
Piotnet Grid is one of the Best Faceted Search, Filter, & Grid Builder plugins for WordPress. It offers an advanced no-code visual builder to create every component including Cards, Grids, Facets, & Templates from scratch without writing any code. It is compatible with Blog, Taxonomies, Custom Posts, & Products plus it has official integrations with third-party tools like Google Maps, Woocommerce, Meta Box, ACF, LearnDash, WPML, Oxygen, and Bricks Builder.
This is the third product from the Piotnet team and in my opinion, this is the best of all other products from their portfolio.
Piotnet is a web development company led by my good friend Lương Hữu Phước also known as Louis Hufer which belongs to Gama Tai An Joint Stock Company from Vietnam.
The very first product by Piotnet Group is Piotnet Addons For Elementor which is a dedicated addon for Elementor as the name suggests to enhance its functionality by offering additional powerful widgets.
The second product is Piotnet Forms which is one of the very advanced yet lightweight WordPress Form Builders and I wrote an in-depth review of Piotnet Forms as well.
Let’s check out the main features of Piotnet Grid to get an idea about what you can build using the power of this no-code WordPress tool.
In this section, I am going to discuss the features that I think are the best in Piotnet Grid based on my personal usage and testing of the product.
Piotnet Grid offers different components that you can put together to build a working facet and grid for your website and the existing templates feature allows you to mix and match your facets and grids to create a ready-to-use template that can be used as an archive page on your website.
In this way, you can set up a variable set of templates using the different combinations of facets and grids for different archives and use them whenever you need to showcase various post types with different layouts.
Piotnet Grid offers a shortcode for all the necessary components which allows you to embed the facets and grids built with Piotnet Grid on any of the pages you want.
It means even if your theme or page builder doesn’t have a native integration with Piotnet Grid still you can use the shortcodes to embed the facets and grids made with Piotnet Grid.
If you’re not sure how to get started working with Piotnet Grid then no worries because it offers a few beautifully crafted readymade demo templates that you can import and tweak as per your requirement and then use on your website as your own.
It will help you to reverse engineer and learn how to create your own custom templates as each demo template has all the necessary components ready that you require to build a working facet and grid for any post type on the website.
Piotnet Grid has a dedicated import and export feature that allows you to export any existing component that you or someone else created for other projects and import them into your WordPress site in order to use them as your own.
The best usage of this feature can be you can create multiple ready-to-use templates for your future projects, in this way you don’t have to create new components each time from scratch as you can easily import your premade templates and use them on your new projects.
Piotnet Grid has an inbuilt analytics system that helps you to understand the usage of your search box and filters by front-end website users.
It offers multiple data points including “top filter option values, top filter option value combinations, and top search terms with no result” covering from 1 day up to 1 year.
Piotnet Grid offers deep integration with Google Maps to set up filterable facets for maps on your website which can be really useful for certain brick-and-mortar business types with multiple freshies and various locations.
You can leverage this feature to show markers on a map based on latitude and longitude coordinates. It offers options like filtering the content when panning the map and also provides a geolocation facet, which lets you search and filter locations of Google Maps on your website.
For this you need to integrate Piotnet Grid with Google Maps API and the best part about this feature is that it is also compatible with ACF, MetaBox, Pods, Toolsets, JetEngine, etcetera.
Piotnet Grid is a type of tool that doesn’t need native integration with all the plugins in the WordPress ecosystem, if it works properly with the themes, page builders, custom post type, and custom fields plugins that would be more than enough.
In this section, I have shared the third-party tools that are officially integrated with Piotnet Grid:
Although there is no mention of integration with all the WordPress themes and page builders still Piotnet Grid works with most of the popular themes and builders as far as I know.
In this section, we are going to explore the pricing structure of Piotnet Grid so you can decide which plan is best for your use case.
By the time I am writing this article, Piotnet Grid has four different pricing plans available on their official website of which three of them are yearly recurring plans and the last one is a lifetime deal plan.
In case you’re ready to purchase Piotnet Grid then consider using our affiliate link in order to encourage us to write more helpful articles like this.
Note: We have good news for you! We managed to negotiate and bring an exclusive offer for our readers and community members so that you can get an additional flat 10% Discount by using the coupon code which you can grab from the Piotnet Showcase Page on our website.
In this section, I am going to discuss the good things about Piotnet Grid based on my personal usage and testing of this WordPress plugin.
I love how Piotnet Grid works with powerful WordPress Builders like Oxygen and Bricks Builder.
The facets made with Piotnet Grid work well with the repeater, easy post, and product list of Oxygen Builder as well as it has the dedicated widgets for Oxygen to showcase the facets, grids, and templates built purely inside Piotnet Grid Editor without any hassle or manual work.
Piotnet Grid also offers a deep integration with Bricks Builder which means you can either use the dedicated widgets built for Bricks to showcase the pre-made grid and facets inside the Bricks Editor. Alternatively, you can build just the facet inside the Piotnet Grid Editor and then assign it to the grids or lists made using the Query Loop feature of Bricks Builder.
Whereas for the builder like Elementor although it offers dedicated widgets to embed the facets, grids, and templates of Piotnet Grid still the facets only work with the grids created using the Piotnet Grid.
And for the other WordPress Builders, there are no dedicated widgets available but you can still use the shortcodes to embed the facets and grids of Piotnet Grid into any of the builders.
Initially, when Piotnet Grid was launched, the backend user interface of this tool used to look like a half-baked ripped-off version of Elementor which offered nothing but a very bad and unsatisfactory user experience same as the initial version of Piotnet Forms which was lately revamped and fixed with the latest version.
However, just like the Piotnet Forms, the Piotnet team also has completely revamped and fixed the user interface and user experience of Piotnet Grid with the latest version to make it more user-friendly and easy to use with an eye candy user interface that automatically provides a great user experience in my opinion.
The changes they made in terms of UI/UX:
If you’re familiar with the user interface of popular visual page builders, especially Elementor then you know how easy it is to design a page using the page builder editor interface.
So the good news is the Piotnet Grid editor interface is heavily inspired by the page builders which means it’s really easy to use and build powerful facets and grids for your archive pages.
Piotnet Grid is really affordable as compared to the popular alternative tools like FacetWP and WP Grid Builder as these tools are expensive.
Even though it’s less expensive than the FaceWP and WP Grid Builder yet you can easily build advanced facets and grids for your website projects similar if not the same as what you can build with those pricey alternatives.
Piotnet Grid is a very lightweight plugin just like Piotnet Forms which is another product by this same company.
It is built with a well-written code that doesn’t bloat your WordPress website and keeps your site lightweight which means it doesn’t add unnecessary load to your site.
Search and filter options made with Piotnet Grid are blazing fast and snappier which means it provides immediate results even in less than a second of making a search or filtering something.
Having faster search and filter options allows website users to search a particular page or filter through the pages quicker than ever.
Piotnet Grid offers an advanced editor window that allows you to edit your card, grid, or facet components however you want without any limitations or touching any code.
There are a lot of visual customization options available that let you control and customize everything on a granular level, also you can style any components of Piotnet Grid to match your brand using its advanced no-code style editor.
In this section, I am going to discuss the bad things about Piotnet Grid based on my personal opinion, usage, and testing of this product.
The license management system of Piotnet Grid is really outdated in my opinion, the same as their other popular product Piotnet Forms.
I don’t like how they let us manage our websites to activate the license of Piotnet Grid. In order to activate a license, you need to log into your Piotnet Grid account from inside your WordPress website.
In my opinion, they should offer a simple interface to add a license key just like other software products offer instead of every time log in to the Piotnet Grid account using the credentials.
I have been using Piotnet Grid since it was first launched and as I can remember the duplicate feature was added after some time which never properly worked for me, unfortunately.
Whenever I try to duplicate a card, grid, or facet it never properly retains the inside components as it is from the original components.
I am not sure if this is just me or if other users also face this issue but I can assure you that this duplicate feature doesn’t properly work for me on any of my websites where I am using Piotnet Grid.
I don’t think this could be a big issue for you but as far as I found a few features don’t work for me and even the support team couldn’t fix the issue for me.
In my case, we created a SyncWin Deals archive page where we have used an advanced facet to filter through the deals where I want to hide all the expired deals from the grid as well as from all the taxonomy filters except the expired deals taxonomy filter but it’s hiding the expired deals from everywhere and even it’s not letting me show the expired deals taxonomy under the deal status filter.
The structure panel is very basic with limited functionalities and they should take inspiration from page builders like Oxygen Builder to make it feature-rich so that we can easily find and customize any items from the component layers at a granular level directly from the structure panel.
In this section, I will share my suggestions based on my personal usage and testing of Piotnet Grid which could help improve the product if the developers take my advice into consideration.
The official website of Piotnet Grid has very limited information about the product therefore I would highly suggest the developers add more information about products like a dedicated features page containing detailed information about each feature, use cases, testimonials as well as tutorials.
It’s really irritating to log into different websites in order to access Piotnet Grid, Piotnet Forms, and other products by the Piotnet company so I would highly suggest the developers merge all the products into one single website for easy access and smooth license management.
Also, it would be great if individual product-specific affiliate programs could be consolidated into one single affiliate program for easy access, management, and payment.
The archive template feature is a great way to create archive pages using Piotnet Grid without any need for a page builder but one thing that will hold back people from using this feature is its default URL structure.
Therefore having a custom URL structure for the archive templates would be great so that people can add their own custom terms to the URL which will make this feature brandable and more useable for real-world users.
I know asking this might be too much for this product but I would love to see a CSS class management system for Piotnet Grid just like Oxgen Builder offers where we can create a custom class with dedicated settings once and use it for different components over and over again to apply the same styling.
If it’s not possible then somehow possible to use the existing CSS class system of website builders like Oxygen Builder, Zion Builder, and Bricks Builder directly into Piotnet Grid will be just fine as there are great products like OxyMade and Automatic CSS with powerful CSS frameworks available which we can use to style the piotnet Grid components as well.
In this article, I have reviewed one of the most affordable WordPress Facet & Grid Builders known as Piotnet Grid. I am an active user of this product as well as another product called Piotnet Forms which is also developed by the same team.
I tried my best to evaluate Piotnet Grid from all aspects including the product introduction, useful resources, main features, best features, integrations, pricing structure, pros, cons, and our suggestions without being biased.
If you were looking for an honest review of Piotnet Grid and you found my review helpful then consider sharing it with your circle of co-workers and colleagues who might also find it valuable.
Also if you have anything to ask or say about this topic related to Piotnet Grid then feel free to express your valuable thoughts in the comment section in a constructive manner.
Last but not least, consider checking our dedicated showcase page of Piotnet Grid in case you’re looking for more hidden information or an ongoing deal or available discount offer as we always keep this page updated with the latest information.
