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I’ve used Elementor, Divi, Gutenburg, Visual Composer when it was a dumpster fire, Beaver, and more. I’ve been in the market for a new builder for more dev heavy clients and would like to know your favorites AND a link to a site you built with it that you think best showcases it’s function/performance/design. There’s a lot a talk but I want to see some in action! Professionally made templates these builders tout on their websites are great, but what can an average human expect to accomplish?
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Oxygen
Bricks
If you are looking for dev friendly visual page builder, the 2 above are great options and can do pretty much anything you throw at them.
Unfortunately not sharing any websites because I don’t want to dox myself / company
The thing is that you can build the same exact site using any builder. There might be some minor differences here and there, but the issue is going to be which one will have the cleanest code. In such case, Bricks is probably the best builder for the job.
There’s an extended list of sites made with it here: https://themesinfo.com/bricks-best-wordpress-template-cf89 but again, you can build these sites with the builders you’ve listed.
Here’s an example of different builders used to build the same site: https://wpbuildersfightclub.org/ Keep in mind that it’s kind of outdated now, since these builders had lots of updates by now.
Ive used avada, envato themes with visual composer, X Theme, Divi, Elementor, Kadence, Genesis, Beaver, then Stackable, Gutentor, etc.
Design wise, I still settle for Elementor and Divi as my go to design and website customizer. They have everything you need to create modern and beautiful website. Page speed wise, you can manage it if you know what to tweak. I also love how AI integration for both Divi and Elementor have evolved making things easier especially when doing design prototyping.
Block editors, I do like stackable coz it has sort of elementor style designing but still not there. Page speed is nice but customizing and getting your site to look really modern requires a lot of plugins to make it look as much as what you can produce with the two builders above and it still slows the site. You can still manage if you know what to tweak but I’d still go eith Divi and Elementor.
Visual Composer sucks since it started together with slider revolution. I used to love beaver but eventually they stopped improving the UI and a lot of features just didn’t get updated. Kadence Blocks are alright but it feels like visual composer using gutenberg. Genesis is like going back to wordpress 2.0 just premade templates with very limited customizations. X Theme had cornerstone editor and it was quite nice back then but went to become like visual composer soon enough. Avada with Fusion Builder then replaced with Visual Builder (visual composer wannabe) just sucked but back in 2013-2015 it was the best theme competing with x theme.
Yeah Divi and Elementor still wins me and a little with Stackable and Gutentor.
Flyntwp.com
Ive been looking at Bricks and Breakdance, but ended up with breakdance. At the time they had more going for it than bricks, and they had a nice feature that allows a customer view so that if you don’t want your client to be messing around with things you can lock it down. Just like bricks you can create custom loops and queries for anything. BD does have a few more things out the box that makes designing the sight easier, like the design kits and free themes which you can copy sections that you like.
Here’s a sight I built with BD:
https://script-rocket.com
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Ive almost exclusively built themes from scratch but i decided to go with a full block theme for this new project, specifically Spectra + spectra one.
Everything is smooth so far, only there’s not as many block options out of the box but those can be easily extended
Take a look at bricks builder. They have a nice showcase section on their website.
Kadence Blocks works perfectly for all my websites and client websites.
I now exclusively use GeneratePress + Generateblocks (and at times leaning on Kadence Blocks).
I switched to this base using the block editor to get away from all bloated old school page builders and it’s been such a superb move for myself for my workflow, performance and output.
A couple of example websites I’ve put together:
– https://harveyaesthetics.co.uk/
– https://weddings-norfolk.com/
Bricks builder is the most developer friendly option I’ve found. This guy breaks it down pretty well. Also worth looking into the AutomaticCSS framework that works with bricks and some other tools.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zWp-ms0qLvg&t=3s
I use Divi almost 100% of the time, across hundreds of sites. Once you adapt to its flaws and create a custom boilerplate, stripped down “version” with your own child theme it becomes great, can look like anything on the front end if you have design + code + general WordPress knowledge.
I like that I can visually design on the fly within it as if it was Figma or sketch, then add my own code for misc interactions, animations, combine with acf for dynamics and it’s all easy enough for any client to edit on their own.
Elementor has quite the reputation. Don’t know if you can go wrong with them
I build custom or rebuild sites from ba dead start with the Beaver Builder “ecosystem,” the main plugin and theme plus the Themer and PowerPack extensions. I’ll use either a custom design from a graphic designer or, when rebuilding, I’ll use the current site as a design spec.
At least so far I’ve never not been able to build whatever I want. I rarely need to add much custom CSS and I doubt I’ve written 500 lines of code since adopting BB nine years ago.
The sites generally load quickly and perform well on SiteGround-class basic shared hosting.
That includes e-commerce, membership, events, summer camps and after school registrations, multi-lingual, digital-download, and combinations of the above.
The real advantage is that since BB is easy to train an and hard to screw up I can turn my sites over to non-tech owners and staff and even without I going support they generally still look good and run well years later.
Not sure I should post URLs but I keep trying other tools(Divi, ACF “builder,” Elementor, and especially-aggravatingly Glutenberg) and get frustrated by how unreliable or difficult to operate they are in the hands of owners and their staff.
With well-crafted, competent authoring tools WordPress absolutely can be *both* as easy to learn and use as Wix *and* as powerful and flexible as Drupal. I wish more people, especially the Gutenbois, could see that you can have both.
Bricks
Astra + Beaverbuilder and sometimes Elementor. Even though depending on the initial set up it can be a “resource hog”. Beaverbuild is efficient and if uninstalled doesn’t leave a mess behind.
YooTheme is solid.
https://quality-hc.com
https://thompsonfamilyplumbing.com
https://cordellcordell.com (Built by array digital)
We build custom as well as with site builders. We switched to Bricks for the latter after using or trying most of the lot and are quite happy with the choice. I think if you’re a pro dev you’ll enjoy it more than most of the others.
Kevin Geary has a video which covers strengths and weaknesses of some of them. It may be helpful to you.
https://youtu.be/G5PfWBFk6pc?si=qvUBWLyEh2OjtYpE
I can’t show you a site as we are under NDAs, but one site is very complex. We’re about 700 hours into it at this point and have a way to go. I can tell you that we would not have attempted to build it in any of the other builders. This may or may not be helpful to you-it depends on what you build and the clients you serve.
I’m no pro and have really only built 2 full sites. This one is my actual business so I’ve put a lot of love into it. Switched from Divi to Bricks and can absolutely say that Divi doesn’t hold a candle to Bricks https://divanbleu.com/
I just started building an internal portal for my company too and hiding content from specific users or non-logged in users is super easy. I’ll be making a paid course site with Bricks and feel confident in it.
Now try breakdance, bricksbuilder, brizy
Visual Composer
Elementor can be great if you use their lightweight hello theme with Crocoblock for functionality and craft the website yourself rather than installing bloated themes. I’ve heard Breakdance is pretty good but I already pay for Elementor Pro licenses, might consider it when they come up for renewal.