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I’m coming back to WordPress development after several years, and I’m looking for the *best* option to make it easy for my clients to use and update the site, but still give me great tools and flexibility to craft a very custom theme and code my own functionality and components. I’ve never enjoyed fighting with Divi or Elementor and happy to pay for a premium option. What’s out there in 2023?
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ACF + your own theme
Oxygen + gutenberg integration
bricks
breakdance
Be sure to give Beaver Builder a try. We have a live demo and a “no questions asked” 30-day money-back guarantee.
We’ve been keeping our heads down and slowly adding features and improving performance over the last several years. We take great pride in our support system and reliability when it comes to updates and new features.
We have extensive docs and several free courses to help get set up and going. We’re also big believers in open source and the WordPress community.
Happy to answer any specific questions too! 🙂
Gutenberg is easily the best answer. It comes with WordPress and has a strong API for extending the core blocks, or creating your own custom blocks.
All of the points against Gutenberg compared to Elementor / Oxygen are completely moot since you will be tailor-fitting the theme as a developer. Gutenberg is the best with that approach.
For news sites tagdiv builder, for others elementor.
Elementor
I support and maintain a LOT of sites, built in Beaver, Elementor, Divi, Gutenberg. Elementor is hands down the easiest to teach to clients, and they are the happiest in it – especially under 30. It works well for a variety of sites, and plays very nice with Gutenberg. Content teams (bloggers and writers) like Gutenberg, mostly because they like the ease of copy and paste. Most of their pages are pretty bland, tbh.
Besides disliking Divi, I am still pretty agnostic as a dev on the others. They all have their perks and quirks.
When I am building my own sites, I prefer Gutenberg and Elementor for variety of design ideas.
a blank starter theme, HTML, CSS, Js, PHP for styling and functionality.
Visual builders slow down your projects, both in the development phase, and the design phase.
You can’t design and implement at the same time, pick one.
Either design your project in Figma/Sketch, or develop it. Trying to do both with a visual builder always lengthens time to completion while giving mediocre results.
Just about the only thing a visual builder is good for is developing extremely simple sites quickly, in which case you should just use a static site generator like Hugo, or Squarespace/Wix.
If you absolutely, MUST use a visual builder, use Webflow not WordPress. Webflow is the “Wordpress” of the 2020’s. All of the visual building you get with WordPress, none of the bugs and headaches.
Bricks – without question. If you get Bricksforge as well it has everything. It’s got built in ‘edit only’ for clients, can do all the header/footer/templating. It’s light and quick and currently has a lifetime option. The team also seem like good people.
Breakdance is also excellent. They are pretty much neck and neck – but with different strengths.
I use both, and GeneratePress (templating/theme – no builder) also. The only question for me is – are they building on old/PHP wordpress – and new FSE will eventually overtake them. But I can’t answer that – and the same problem is true of almost all visual builders from the garbage elementor and divi, to the good kadence and astra – and many others.