I seriously don’t understand the hype for this plugin. The functionalities are so minimal and the horizontal scrolling breaks the table formatting which the author does not bother to fix and pushes users to buy the premium plans in order to get responsive tables. Everything else needs to be done using CSS like the most basic background coloring and border lines. What’s worse is that the CSS that is implemented in this plugin is unconventional. If you spend time learning to write CSS for this plugin, you are wasting your time because the naming convention cannot be transferred anywhere else. You still need to learn conventional CSS naming conventions in order to use your CSS codes elsewhere, including other Table plugins. This is especially time consuming for me as a non-programmer with no coding knowledge.
For example to target the first column of your table, conventional CSS is written as:
.yourtable td:first-child {Your styling}
But for TablePress, you need to write CSS like this:
.tablepress.yourtable .column-1 {Your styling}
For non-programmers, It may look like it’s simplifying your CSS naming convention but it is very confusing when you want to use conventional CSS from forums like stackoverflow to do something that is not in the TablePress documentation, which is very sparse. The documentation is so sparse that you might as well read articles written by 3rd parties on Tablepress. At least the 3rd party websites teach you most of the basic CSS functions for Tablepress to let you have a basic grasp of how the naming conventions work in Tablepress.
Responsiveness is the most important aspect in today’s software design. Yet, horizontal scrolling is broken. I’m fine with locking vertical stacking responsiveness behind premium plans but the basic horizontal scrolling is not working and I need to use custom HTML and CSS just to make it work. If I need to use so much CSS to style and add functions to my tables, I might as well just use custom HTML block to create the table or the table block that came with my WordPress theme and style it myself. Why the need for TablePress?
Horizontal Scrolling is only one aspect that is lacking. There are so many other missing functionalities that it boggles my mind that reviewers and users review this plugin favorably.
Let’s just compare TablePress and WP Table Builder **FREE** Version:
**TablePress Settings:**
1) Custom CSS
2) Admin Menu Entry
**WP Table Builder Settings:**
1) Allowed User Roles
2) Custom CSS
3) Lazy Load Images
4) Version Control (Install the version you want)
5) Table Fixer (Your tables might get corrupted by your browser addons. If you have any table with unexpected behaviour (cell edit disabled, etc) use this tool.)
​
**List of Table Configurations that TablePress are ABSENT but available on WP Table Builder:**
1) Insert Buttons, List, Star Rating, Custom HTML, Shortcode
2) Background Colors for Headers and Even/Odd Rows
3) Table Management (Padding, Table Alignment, Table Container Max Width, Table Container Min Auto Width)
4) Table Border (Border Width/Color, Inner Border Width/Color, Inner Header Border)
5) Horizontal Scrolling that does not break the table formatting (TablePress horizontal scrolling breaks table formatting.)
6) Table Tags
7) Table Role
8) Disable Table Styles
**List of Table Configurations that TablePress has but WP Table Builder is missing:**
1) Search/Filtering
2) Pagination
3) Custom JS
Just look at the differences in functionalities between the 2 plugins in the FREE version! Furthermore, WP Table Builder is much cheaper with $49/year plan to include vertical stacking responsiveness, search, pagination and more. Whereas TablePress requires $79/year just to have those functions given for free in WP Table Builder. Not to mention that WP Table Builder has a lifetime plan.
In fact, not only WP Table Builder has better functionalities than TablePress. Even Ninja Table is much better. It gives as many functions as WP Table Builder for free so making it another plugin that trumps TablePress soundly. The premium plan is also very competitively priced at $55/year, which is again much cheaper than TablePress.
I am not affiliated with WP Table Builder nor Ninja Table. I’m just confounded by the lack of functionalities of TablePress yet have so many users and got such good reviews online. The purpose of plugins is to make it easy for us non-programmers to set up a decent looking website and also to make life easier for web developers who want to save time from coding everything from scratch. Instead, when using TablePress, we need to style and make responsive tables from scratch. So, I really fail to see how this plugin is getting all the glowing reviews.
Maybe this plugin was developed much earlier than the others so it had a head-start in getting users. But obviously in 2023, it has lagged behind competitors and by putting functionalities that other plugins are giving for free behind premium plans at a much higher price, it really does not deserve the amount of praise and mentions.
My final advice for non-programmer users:
**STAY AWAY** from this plugin! Other table plugins have much more functionalities like the ones I mentioned above and they make your life much easier without having to fiddle with unconventional CSS implemented by this plugin.