# Understand standard vs custom components

[BetaThis feature is new and we're actively working on it.](/beta-experimental-features/#beta-features)

Components help you reuse content and structure across your Design Studio messages so you can build faster.

In Design Studio, you can use our out-of-the-box [**Standard Components**](#standard-components) and create your own [**Custom Components**](#custom-components).

## Standard components[](#standard-components)

Standard components are pre-built blocks that help you build beautiful, engaging messages as quickly as possible. They are the backbone of Design Studio messages — headings, paragraphs, buttons, sections, and more. You’ll see a list of available [standard components](/journeys/standard-components/) in the insert menu of the visual editor. Once you’ve dragged a component onto the canvas, you can style it by adjusting the component’s properties.

Our standard components are:

*   **Accessible**: use our accessibility checker to ensure you’re following best practices.
*   **Responsive**: they scale down automatically to fit smaller viewports, but you can also change this for some standard components like columns.
*   Able to **inherit your styles**: for instance, if you nest multiple paragraph components within a box component, the paragraphs would inherit the text styles of the box.
*   **Lightweight**: to reduce code bloat.
*   **Flexible**: you can modify standard properties or add your own under Advanced in the Properties menu.

We created our standard components following the [Email Markup Consortium compliant standards](https://emailmarkup.org/en/docs/compliant-standards/) to help you make flexible, lightweight code. We maintain and update these components to ensure they’re compatible with the latest email client quirks and bugs.

## Custom components[](#custom-components)

[Custom components](/journeys/create-custom-component/) are pieces of messages you can save and reuse—like headers and footers. Creating a custom component saves you time so you don’t have to re-create parts of messages, and helps you maintain consistency across messages.

Custom components help you:

*   **Build efficiently**: create a reusable block *once* then easily find it to reuse across future messages.
*   **Cascade changes from one source of truth**: update your component file so changes cascade to all messages using it.
*   **Streamline team collaboration**: Developers can create reusable code in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, and marketers can drag them into the visual editor with no coding required.
*   **Create reusable, interactive features**: Interactive messages are time consuming to make, but with custom components you can make an interactive feature (like a survey) once, and reuse it as many times as you see fit.