Mixing Bricks and WP Bakery Insanity!
A while back I posted about a site I inherited that was built with WP Bakery and used a handful of extensions that had known security issues with no updates in the recent past or on the horizon. Seemed like WP Bakery was a dead platform....I wanted to move them to Bricks, it was a simple design, but they didn't want a full rebuild. One of the plugins with issues was the one used to make the universal header and footer. I wondered if I could just use Bricks for header/footer and leave WP Bakery pages intact. Short answer - Yes.
No need to tell me this is a bad idea, I know it's a bad idea, I explained why this was a bad idea to the project manager and the client, but I'm just the developer, what do I know? This site was one of a few in their portfolio, it rarely gets updated, and they just wanted it to work and not have those known security issues as a possible exploit.
It works. It was a little glitchy at first but it ended up being pretty straight forward. I rebuilt the header and footer in Bricks, and rebuilt (in bricks) some of the pages that relied on the other dead WP Bakery plugins that had known issues. The rest of the pages are pretty straight forward, the plan is to switch them to bricks when the client calls for updates, and eventually the whole site will be built with Bricks.
I suspect the reason it works so well is that WP Bakery is essentially just shortcodes, and was never meant to be a site templating engine. WP Bakery is actually kind of nice. Editing is fast and it feels lightweight. They recently had a major release, but I didn't spend enough time in it to notice what, if anything, had improved.
So yes, you can mix Bricks with WP Bakery, you should not do it, but you can if you need to.