The definitive Shorthand alternative

Designers accustomed to using tools such as Figma and Adobe XD can visually build websites, marketing materials, eBooks, landing pages, and more in Vev that would traditionally require custom coding. Vev’s free-roaming canvas lets you place pre-coded design components anywhere.

You are free to build whatever you want—either as a one-off project or reusable templates—and embed it on your existing CMS. Most importantly, Shorthand's pre-made layouts (e.g., Scrollytelling section) can be replicated in the exact same manner in Vev. You just have greater flexibility, combining the best of both worlds.

If you have dev resources at hand, your creative ceiling becomes limitless. They can create whatever custom React components you want using Vev’s CLI, and designers can reuse these components repeatedly by tweaking visual attributes.

Marketers equipped with basic design skills—especially those accustomed to simple web builders such as Squarespace and Wix—will find Shorthand familiar. Likewise, companies with repetitive content needs (e.g., articles) will find this suitable for their daily use cases.

You might hit a roadblock, however, once your ambitions grow and so do your needs for that wow-factor. You can't drag and drop elements anywhere you want, and you have to adapt your content to suit Shorthand's rigid premade layouts. There is very little your developer team can do to elevate your content as code flexibility is minimal, only providing simple CSS & JavaScript adjustments.

Vev is a highly collaborative platform that enables real-time work and editing, simplifying workflows among designers, developers, and content creators. Its multiplayer functionality allows you to observe colleagues' activities, and you can leave comments pinned to specific elements to provide context-specific feedback.

Vev's permission structure streamlines the feedback loop. Once the design is completed, content creators and marketers can easily make edits within a restricted environment. If you have an external stakeholder, you can use project sharing to invite anyone outside your team and manage their access level.

Concurrent editing is available in Shorthand, but there's no way to see exactly what your colleague is doing in the editor. You can only track the section they are working on, not their specific actions.

Similarly, you can pin a comment only on a section, not a specific element. As of Q1 2024, they acknowledge that performing multiple undo and redo actions concurrently could lead to unexpected results. Finally, the lack of a content-edit only mode and distictic permission levels makes it challenging to collaborate seamlessly.

Vev has flexible hosting options. You can host with us, connect and publish directly to your server, or even embed your content into your existing CMS—making Vev a native part of your site.

Your existing tech stack remains intact, but you have the flexibility to visually build and modify the dynamic "marketing components" of your web pages — from individual blocks to full pages.

Shorthand offers subdomain and custom domain options, but it doesn't support webhooks. Moreover, there isn't an automatic DNS setup support available.

Vev’s embedding provides advanced customization. This includes adapting your Vev page to precisely fit the container you wish to embed it in, or enforcing a full-width display. Most notably, Vev applies shadow DOM technology to encapsulate embedded content, ensuring its independence from external styles and scripts.

After setting up custom subdomain hosting, you can embed its script into your CMS. However, without a technology like Shadow DOM, which Vev uses, the stability of embedded content could be compromised. It's because such content can be affected by external styles and scripts.

With Vev's CLI, your development team can create custom React components that can be reused across your teams. The highlight? Designers can visually customize the styling of your components within the design editor without changing any code. This reusability significantly enhances the scale of your content production.

Only minor changes in CSS and JavaScript are supported.

Our free Starter plan lets you try out Vev, create mock-up projects, and publish unlimited live sites with the Vev watermark. Our initial Enterprise package is priced lower than Shorthand and allows you to publish a greater number of projects without watermarks.

Similarly, Shorthand allows you to try it for free, but the annual pricing for the Enterprise version starts at 27,000 US dollars.