I’ve already gone through and reviewed the blocks from various collections — Default+Jetpack, Advanced Gutenberg, Atomic Blocks, Kadence, QodeBlocks, Ultimate Addons and Stackable. Stackable was the clear winner for me, and I kept a handful from Kadence + Ultimate Addons + Advanced Gutenberg, plus the defaults. I ditched all of the Atomic Blocks and Qodeblocks — there were just better options available or I didn’t need the blocks they had to offer.

I’m going to do a quick test of 13 blocks from Otter to see if any are worth keeping. One of their “big” offerings is built-in animation like bouncing or fades, none of which I have much use/need for…some great transitions, just not for anything I’m doing. And I’m a little disturbed it adds animations to EVERY block, not just the Otter ones.

1. About Author — A simple bio block that pulls data from WordPress admin about the author of the current post. Since I’m the only author on the site, that would be ME, and it would be highly repetitive in posts.
2. Advanced Heading — Nothing fancy, just the animation options.
3. Button Group — Up to five options, basic styling, heavy on the animations but otherwise yawn. And I already have such a block.
4. Font Awesome Icons — There is a very large list of icons, but of what use the block is, I have no real guess. Most of those icons could be simply pasted into the text. Oh, wait, now I see it. They do a whole bunch of other “grouped” blocks that use that as the replacement for services or products. Meh.
5. Google Map — Same problem as other plugins, if I can’t get the Maps API key to work, this doesn’t work at all.
6. Plugin Card — This is a fairly unique need — to post a profile of a specific plugin you want to talk about?
7. Posts — Same as other blocks by other collections, to show a series of recent posts on the site, and something I have no need for at all.
8. Pricing — This is a pretty basic pricing box, with a title, price, some features and a button. Nothing exciting.
9. Section — Apparently this is the strong point of the plugin, and particularly good for pages, as pseudo-page design, but it is highly misnamed. It’s basically a columns-and-grid tool with relatively basic options, although the width controls for each of the columns is pretty granular.
10. Service — The same as the pricing block, with minor styling tweaks. Meh.
11. Sharing Icons — I can insert Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Reddit. Nothing exciting about any of it, and I already have tools to do that. It could be interesting for a fast load page combined with animation, but I’m not really feeling it.
12. Slider — I got so excited using this, because when I clicked on the media library, it showed me a link to NextGen galleries, and I thought for a moment it was going to let me pull from them. It didn’t. And that is the only source I would want/need, so no dice.
13. Testimonials — A basic block that doesn’t look much different from the pricing box. You have an image, a name, title, and description. All of which I can do a hundred different ways without this block.

And just like that, another block collection bites the dust.