CSS3 Animations Slider Plugin Review: Lush Slider vs OneByOne Slider

Please note, the Lush Slider for WordPress is no longer being offered.

A couple of my customers have been looking for more excitement and movement on their site than what a simple slider can provide, so I have used a couple different sliders to give them what they wanted. I couldn’t find any free alternatives that really did what I wanted, so I turned to these two paid* plugins. I wanted to compare these two for you because the documentation is not great on either one and I found it hard to decide which one to use. Both sliders accomplish the same result – lots of movement using the new CSS3 animations.

Lush Slider

Pros

• This slider is much more comprehensive and has many more options, which can be either a plus or a negative depending on your point of view.
  Super simple to add to any page or post with special button included in visual editor. Also comes with widget so it can be added easily to any wigetized area.
• Sample sliders are built in so you can quickly set up a new slider by adapting the sample.
• You can work on one slide at at time.
• You can insert not only an image or text, but also add links to text or images, or insert a block.
• After you have inserted each item, it can be easily dragged and dropped to where you want it, however, if you are looking for very precise lines, you will need to be very careful and use the grid option with a grid size of 2. However, there is still an exact pixel positioning, which is the only thing available with the OneByOne slider.
• RESPONSIVE!
• Plugin author was very responsive when I had questions.
• Each individual section can be customized different incoming and outgoing animations, custom CSS, and alignment. Plus, there are pre-set classes to use if you want something quick. See the image below for a demonstration.

Cons

• So many options might be overwhelming to some people. I felt like it took a long time to set up, but I guess that’s just because there are so many options, plus it’s a much more complicated slider than one with just images.

OneByOne Slider

Pros

• Slider is very simple and easy to use. Not too much to go through to get your first slider up and running.
• Shortcode or php code to go into template file makes adding slider very easy.
• Adding text is fairly simple and color picker makes changing color and background easy.
• Also, to give fair credit to OneByOne, there might be some features that I was unaware of. I tried contacting the developer to get some information on how these things worked, but there was no response and no documentation that I could find.

Cons

• I didn’t like how when you add sliders, they all just go further and further down the screen. There is no way to collapse each individual slide so you can concentrate on the one you are working on. I was able to use the “hide” button to hide the text or images for an individual slide, but every time I saved to check my work, all the text and images were displayed again and I found myself clicking “hide” over and over again.
• And speaking of checking my work, there is a “preview” section at the bottom, but I found it to not be very accurate. I felt I had to check things on the screen to verify placement.
• There was an option to “Enable mouse drag”, which would have been great, had it worked. Maybe I was doing something wrong, but I couldn’t figure out how to use that feature.
• There also seemed to be no way to reorder the slides, which means you’d better know what order you want them in when you set them up, because it is a lot of work to set up each slide. There was also no way to add a new line of text in the middle, although you could delete any line of text. And as far as I could tell, the images had to all come first and the text had to come last. When I wanted my image to appear after my text, I could find no way to make that happen. There also seemed to be no other way to “delete” an image besides actually deleting the link in the bar. Although I didn’t think that was intuitive, it did seem to work.
• The worst part of it was it’s lack of responsiveness. That was one of the main issues that I was concerned about when purchasing this slider. I checked the demo slider on my phone, and it was responsive, so I went ahead and purchased, but when I checked my browser in different sizes after setting up my own slider, I was very disappointed that it did not seem to be responsive at all, despite having checked the “responsive” setting. Maybe if I ad used images instead of text it would have worked better, but there was no disclosure of this. In fact, had I known that it would not be responsive, I would not have bought this plugin.
• And, this isn’t a terrible thing, but I would have liked a way to control the speed of the individual sections that were sliding in. The default was much too fast for my liking. I did however appreciate the ability to set each section with a different animation and having the animations listed to the right was very helpful.
• Most importantly, the author is not responding to my requests for support.

Here is an example of the slider in use:

OVERVIEW

If you are looking for a great slider, I recommend the Lush Slider. The OneByOne slider I would not buy and will probably try to get my money back for.

*Please note: I always judge paid plugins a little more harshly than free plugins because I feel we should be thanking the authors of the free plugins just for putting them out there. If I’m paying for a plugin, I expect much more.