Soliloquy Review From a Developer Account

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links. Purchasing a product through one of these links generates a commission for us at no additional expense to you.

Think you’ll get Soliloquy?

Before you do, take a complete behind-the-scenes look at Soliloquy from my Developer account.

Below you’ll find over 2,000 words of analysis and 39 screenshots covering Soliloquy’s every feature.

What is Soliloquy?

Soliloquy is a responsive slider plugin. Add beautiful image sliders to any post or page that will look great on all devices from iPhones to widescreen monitors.

Soliloquy Review

Soliloquy includes numerous features for building sliders and 14 add-ons that add even more flexibility to the plugin.

Soliloquy Pricing

I always like knowing the price of a product first.

Here’s the current pricing for Soliloquy including the full feature breakdown.

Soliloquy pricing table

Now that the pricing for Soliloquy is clear let’s move onto the features.

Creating responsive sliders with Soliloquy

Depending on what plan you choose, you’ll get access to the Soliloquy slider plugin and up to 14 additional add-ons.

I’ll start with the Soliloquy slider itself, and then cover each of the 14 add-ons below.

Slider menu

Installing Soliloquy adds a new top-level menu item to your dashboard.

Screenshot of the slider menu in Soliloquy

This is the main page where your sliders will be listed. Clicking the Add New button takes you to a page similar to the normal post editor.

Add a new slider

When creating a new slider, you’ll see a page just like this.

Add new slider page in Soliloquy

First, you can give the slider a title to identify it. Then you’ll choose to use a Native or External slider and add your images.

Native VS External Sliders

You will mostly use Native sliders to create sliders from images in your media library. You can upload new images, or select existing images from your site for these sliders.

External sliders get their images from outside the WordPress media library. The only time you’ll use an External slider is with the following three add-ons:

  • WooCommerce
  • Instagram
  • Featured Content

Editing sliders

Once you add images, they’ll show up below in the Slider section.

Editing a Soliloquy slider

Soliloquy provides a ton of options for customizing your slider. I won’t go over them one-by-one but instead provide screenshots of them all here.

Click an image below for a larger version, and click the “View full size” link at the bottom for the full-size version.

A few features that stand out include the option to enable/disable the arrows and navigation (dots), turn on/off automatic looping through slides, and control the speed and style of slide transitions.

Displaying Sliders

You can use shortcodes to display Soliloquy sliders anywhere on your site.

Check out this quick tutorial on shortcodes if you’ve never used them.

When viewing a slider admin page, there is a box on the right-side with a shortcode and the PHP code (for developers) you can use to embed the slider.

Soliloquy embed options

The editor also has a button for quickly adding a slider to any post/page. You can use it to quickly select one of your sliders and add its shortcode to the page.

Adding a shortcode for a Soliloquy slider

And here’s how that slider looks embedded in a page with the Shift theme.

Slider added with Soliloquy

Additional settings

You may have noticed the Settings menu link in the dashboard under “Soliloquy.” There are not many global options, but here’s a quick look at that page.

Soliloquy's global settings page

So that’s the core functionality of Soliloquy.

It’s a well-designed slider plugin with plenty of customization options. The sliders it creates are both attractive and completely responsive.

Now let’s cover the add-ons and the extra functionality they add to Soliloquy.

Click here to get Soliloquy and use coupon code SAVE20 to get 20% off your order.

Soliloquy Add-ons

Instead of adding every feature into the main plugin, Soliloquy has 14 add-ons.

You can pick and choose which add-ons you want to use, so your site doesn’t get cluttered. The add-ons are packaged as individual plugins.

CSS add-on

Available in all packages.

If you’re not familiar with CSS, it’s used to style websites. The CSS add-on adds a textarea to the Miscellaneous settings for each slider.

Custom CSS add-on

If you wanted to edit all the sliders, you’d still want to put your CSS into a child theme. However, this is a handy way to add some CSS to tweak individual sliders.

Slider Themes add-on

Available in Multi ($49), Developer ($99), and Master packages ($249).

You don’t have to know CSS to change the style of Soliloquy sliders. You can also use the Slider Themes add-on.

When installed, this add-on includes a new Slider Theme drop-down selector in the slider configuration settings.

Slider Themes addon

There are currently five different themes available. I’ve taken screenshots of each and added a gallery below.

Click an image below for a larger version, and click the “View full size” link at the bottom for the full-size version.

As you can see, they’re all fairly similar, but they do provide different styles and move the navigation elements around. Each theme is still fully responsive.

Image Protection addon

Available in Multi ($49), Developer ($99), and Master packages ($249).

The Image Protection add-on is quite simple. It prevents visitors from right-clicking the images in your sliders and saving them. This makes it harder for people to steal your images.

The plugin adds one simple checkbox to the miscellaneous settings to enable image protection on any slider.

Image Protection addon

Image protection is turned on by default on all sliders.

Schedule Slides add-on

Available in Multi ($49), Developer ($99), and Master packages ($249).

The Schedule Sliders add-on provides two levels of scheduling. First, you can schedule any slider to appear/disappear at any given time on any date.

Schedule sliders

By scheduling a slider, you can add a shortcode to a page, and it won’t show until the scheduled time.

This add-on adds a new Schedule settings panel for scheduling sliders.

Schedule Slides addon

Clicking the start or end date options will display a calendar for picking a date.

Date picker for sliders

Schedule slides

You can also show/hide individual slides within a slider at any given date or time. The slide scheduling options are available when editing any slide.

Scheduling options for individual slider

The Ignore options are particularly neat because you can use them to display different slides throughout the day or different slides based on the season/holiday.

Instagram add-on

Available in Multi ($49), Developer ($99), and Master packages ($249).

The Instagram add-on lets you connect Soliloquy with an Instagram account and import your latest images into a slider.

When you install the add-on, there will be a new settings page where you can authenticate your account.

Instagram authentication settings

To create an Instagram slider, you’ll use the External Slider option instead of a Native slider. If you have the Instagram add-on installed, you’ll see the Instagram slider type available, and some new settings will appear once you select it.

Soliloquy Instagram settings

You can configure the number of images to show from your feed, their resolution, and whether you want to display the captions.

Pinterest add-on

Available in Multi ($49), Developer ($99), and Master packages ($249).

The Pinterest add-on is not for creating sliders with Pinterest images, but rather for adding the Pin It button to your slides.

Installing the Pinterest add-on adds a new settings panel to the slider page.

Soliloquy Pinterest add-on settings

You can enable the Pinterest share button for any slider and choose the position and color of the button.

Carousel add-on

Available in Developer ($99) and Master packages ($249).

A regular slider will show one slide at a time. A carousel shows multiple images at once, like this:

Example of a carousel slider

It provides a unique way for visitors to browse a collection of images. Clicking one of the arrows moves the slider one image over.

Soliloquy provides a complete set of controls for customizing the carousel display.

Settings for a Soliloquy carousel slider

Rather than being a separate type of slider, the carousel display can be activated for any slider.

Lightbox add-on

Available in Developer ($99) and Master packages ($249).

A lightbox is a popup that shows a larger version of an image when you click on it. Here is an example of a lightbox from Soliloquy shown after clicking a slide.

Soliloquy lightbox

The lightbox add-on includes an exceptional level of customization. Here are the settings available for slider lightboxes.

Lightbox setting screenshot

There is also an option to enable the lightbox on mobile devices conditionally.

Setting for enabling lightboxes on mobile

The lightbox can be enabled for any type slider in Soliloquy.

Featured Content add-on

Available in Developer ($99) and Master packages ($249).

The Featured Content add-on is for creating sliders from your posts. The images will come from the posts’ Featured Images and the post title, and/or excerpt can be displayed.

Featured Content sliders source the images from your posts, rather than the media library, so the External Slider type is used. The settings are extensive and provide all the controls you need for selecting and ordering the posts.

Settings available in the Featured Content add-on

And here is an example of how a Featured Content slider looks.

Featured Content slider

WooCommerce add-on

Available in Developer ($99) and Master packages ($249).

The WooCommerce add-on is a lot like the Featured Content add-on. It builds a slider from a category of products in your store, and you have control over the content and order of each slide.

Here is the settings panel added by the WooCommerce add-on which is very similar to the Featured Content settings.

WooCommerce add-on settings

PDF Slider add-on

Available in Developer ($99) and Master packages ($249).

The PDF Slider add-on allows you to upload PDFs to use in the slider. Soliloquy takes the PDF and converts each page into a JPEG image and adds it to your slider.

The add-on adds a new “Insert PDF” option for uploading PDF media.

Page for uploading PDFs with Soliloquy

It can take a few minutes for the conversion to take place, but you can do other work on your site while you’re waiting. The JPEG images created from the PDF are treated just like regular images. They can be edited the same way in the slider menu and are displayed on the site like normal images.

The JPEG images created from the PDF are treated just like regular images. They can be edited the same way in the slider menu and are displayed on the site like normal images.

Dynamic Sliders add-on

Available in Developer ($99) and Master packages ($249).

The Dynamic add-on lets you create sliders on the fly.

Normally, you’d have to use the slider menu to create a new slider from a set of images. With dynamic sliders, you can skip that part entirely. Instead, you simply create a shortcode to output a slider, like this:

[soliloquy_dynamic id="custom-1" images="600,601,602"]

That would output a slider with three images with the IDs 600, 601, and 602.

This feature is especially useful for developers who may need to create many sliders for a site. In which case, the same dynamic slider can be created with a Soliloquy PHP “template tag” like this:

soliloquy_dynamic( array( 'id' => 'custom-1', 'images' => '601,602,603' ) );

The template tag is just a function that takes an array of parameters and outputs a slider. There is extensive documentation on this add-on for customizing sliders via the dynamic code including all the parameters.

Default values for dynamic sliders can also be set via a special defaults slider added by the plugin.

Default settings for dynamic sliders

Thumbnail Navigation add-on

Available in Developer ($99) and Master packages ($249).

We’ve already seen thumbnail navigation in the lightbox, but this add-on adds it to the} regular slider display. Here’s an example of the thumbnail navigation in use.

Example of thumbnail navigation

Visitors can click any thumbnail image to navigate the slider. There are also arrow buttons (optional) for navigating the thumbnails.

Thumbnails can be activated for any slider and include the following settings.

Thumbnail navigation settings panel

Thumbnail navigation can be enabled conditionally on mobile devices.

Option to enable thumbnails on mobile

And, you can specify a specific thumbnail image for any slider.

Custom thumbnail image option

This is useful for art direction. Maybe the most interesting element of an image is on the left side, so the default center crop fits poorly. You can create a custom thumbnail image that is cropped more effectively and use that instead.

Defaults add-on

Available in Developer ($99) and Master packages ($249).

Lastly, we have the defaults add-on which will save you a lot of time if you create many sliders with Soliloquy.

The plugin does exactly what you’d expect: it provides a default slider you configure, and all new sliders adopt the same settings.

Defaults add-on screenshot

If you’re creating a lot of sliders, especially if you’re using a handful of the add-ons, this will save you from repeatedly choosing the same settings.

Soliloquy WordPress plugin reviewed

Soliloquy is intuitive to use, creates beautiful and responsive sliders, and includes an extraordinary amount of features and customizability.

It’s one of the best-designed and most complete plugins I’ve ever used.

Bottom Line

For basic slider needs, Meta Slider is probably the best option, but if you need more advanced functionality, you can’t beat Soliloquy.

You can click here to get Soliloquy and use coupon code SAVE20 to get 20% off your order.

If you have any questions about this review or Soliloquy, post a comment below, and I’ll get back to you ASAP.

You should know I am an affiliate of Soliloquy. That means I get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you sign up. I hope you find my review useful regardless of your decision on Soliloquy.

Ben Sibley
Ben Sibley
This article was written by Ben Sibley. He is a WordPress theme designer & developer, and founder of Compete Themes.