WordPress page builders compared : Divi vs Elementor vs Brizy vs Thrive vs Gutenberg
In the early days of WordPress, all you had was a textarea in the WordPress admin in which you could type text. You could make a word bold or italic, give it a color and you could even add an image, but that was about it. The rest of your sites look and feel was controlled entirely by your theme, and if you could only change anything if you knew how to write PHP, HTML and CSS code.
In 2012 / 2013, the first themes with a build-in page builder came out, like Avada and Divi. These WordPress page builders finally allowed normal users to divide a page in multiple rows and columns, and add an image, text, slider and other modules on their pages. When Elementor got launched in 2016, and later that year Divi 3.0 featuring their Visual Builder, it became possible to adjust your pages and posts on the front-end, so you could see the effect of your modifications immediately the way your visitors see them.
On December 6th, 2018, all WordPress users got an early Christmas gift with the new Gutenberg editor, a visual page builder which would then become the default way of editing content in WordPress. But not everyone appreciated that gift; the Classic Editor plugin, which switch off Gutenberg and restores the old WordPress editor, has over 5 million active installations already.
In this article, we’re going to compare a few of the most popular WordPress page builders: Elementor, Divi, Thrive Theme Builder, new kid on the block Brizy and the default WordPress editor, Gutenberg. We are only going to look at the features in the page builder itself, so we’re not going to take third party plugins into account.
| Included in the free version | |
| Included in the premium (paid) version | |
| Not included | |
| D | Divi |
| E | Elementor |
| B | Brizy |
| T | Thrive Architect |
| G | Gutenberg |
| Basics | Divi | Elementor | Brizy | Thrive | Gutenberg |
| Basics | D | E | B | T | G |
| Drag & drop editor | |||||
| Front-end editor (make adjustments live on the front-end of your site) |
| Layout | Divi | Elementor | Brizy | Thrive | Gutenberg |
| Layout | D | E | B | T | G |
| Multiple columns | |||||
| Draggable column width | |||||
| Padding and margin adjustment | |||||
| Draggable padding and margin | |||||
| Max-width, max-height and min-height adjustment |
| Styling | Divi | Elementor | Brizy | Thrive | Gutenberg |
| Styling | D | E | B | T | G |
| Basic styling options (colors, alignment, font size) | |||||
| Advanced styling options (borders, line-height, shadow) | |||||
| Background image and video | |||||
| Shape dividers | |||||
| Animations | |||||
| Filters / blend mode | |||||
| Hover effects | |||||
| Transformation effects | |||||
| Google Fonts integration | |||||
| Custom Fonts |
| Modules | Divi | Elementor | Brizy | Thrive | Gutenberg |
| Modules / Widgets | D | E | B | T | G |
| Slider module | |||||
| Contact form module | |||||
| Newsletter subscribe module (for MailChimp and other providers) | |||||
| Social media buttons (to link to your profiles) | |||||
| Social media share buttons | |||||
| Embed Facebook posts | |||||
| Facebook comments | |||||
| Font Awesome integration (icons) | |||||
| Popup builder | |||||
| A/B testing |
| Theme builder | Divi | Elementor | Brizy | Thrive | Gutenberg |
| Theme builder | D | E | B | T | G |
| Header and footer builder | |||||
| Sticky header (header stays in view when user scrolls) | |||||
| Make your own templates for pages, posts, archive pages, 404 page etcetera | |||||
| Dynamic content (get text, images and other data from the database) | |||||
| WooCommerce page custom design |
| Workflow | Divi | Elementor | Brizy | Thrive | Gutenberg |
| Workflow | D | E | B | T | G |
| Undo and redo your last edit(s) | |||||
| Copy / paste sections, rows and modules / widgets | |||||
| Copy / paste styles on the current page | |||||
| Set a default style for a section, row or module globally (for the entire site) |
| Library | Divi | Elementor | Brizy | Thrive | Gutenberg |
| Library | D | E | B | T | G |
| Library with predesigned layouts | |||||
| Save your own designs in the library to reuse elsewhere on the site | |||||
| Global designs (modifications on a global element are adjusted everywhere on the site) | |||||
| Export saved designs to reuse on another site |
| Responsive design | Divi | Elementor | Brizy | Thrive | Gutenberg |
| Basis | D | E | B | T | G |
| See how your design looks on tablet and mobile | |||||
| Hide elements on desktop, tablet or mobile | |||||
| Adjust certain styles for mobile and template (padding, margin, font size) | |||||
| Show different content on mobile and tablet (different texts, images etcetera) |
| Prices | Divi | Elementor | Brizy | Thrive | Gutenberg |
| Prices | D | E | B | T | G |
| Free version available | |||||
| Premium version for 1 website (price per year) | $ 89 | $ 49 | $ 49 | $ 97 one time |
|
| Premium version for an unlimited number of websites (price per year) | $ 89 | $ 199 | $ 99 | ||
| Lifetime premium licence for an unlimited number of websites | $ 249 | $ 299 | |||
| download | download | download | download |
Divi vs Elementor… or maybe Brizy or Thrive?
When people compare WordPress page builders, they often only search for Elementor vs Divi. However, as you can see in the comparison above, newcomer Brizy is a great alternative as well. Especially if you are looking for a free page builder, Brizy and Elementor are really well matched. Divi does not have a free version, but it is one of the most complete page builders for WordPress.
Thrive Theme Builder is a bit different from the others. Thrive Themes, the company behind Thrive Theme Builder, has a handful of other plugins. One of those is Thrive Optimize, which lets you do some really extensive A/B tests. Thrive Leads is another one, and it offers you a variety of ways to collect e-mail addresses for your newsletter.
Divi also works with plugins for collecting email addresses (at least with popups) and for the social media share buttons, but with Divi, those plugins are included in the price while you have to purchase all those plugins separately at Thrive. You can also get access to all plugins with the Thrive Membership, but that membership costs $ 19.95 per month and includes a licence for 25 of your own websites. For $ 49.00 per month, you can install the Thrive plugins on up to 50 customer websites. Pretty pricey…
Elementor isn’t really unlimited either, but we can call their 1000 websites limit “unlimited”. Divi and Brizy really don’t have any limit at all.
There’s not 1 clear winner, only 1 clear loser: Gutenberg is not a major threat to the other page builders when it comes to features yet. However, because it is the default page builder in WordPress, there are more and more plugins like Qubely available that add extra functionality to Gutenberg.
On the other hand, dozens of plugins are available for Divi and Elementor too that extend the functionality. For example, there is a premium popup builder plugin for Divi, and there are various plugins for Elementor that add even more modules. There are virtually no third party plugins available for Brizy yet, but it’s a very young builder.
Are you curious about a feature that is not yet listed in the comparison above? Feel free to leave a comment below, and I’ll find it out for you!
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This article contains affiliate links. That means I get a compensation when you buy one of the page builders mentioned in this article. The price you pay is still the same so it won’t cost you anything, but it will help me to help you with these kind of free articles.
So if you’re going to buy one of the page builders above, I would really appreciate it if you use one of the links on this page 🙂
Are you going to use the free version of Elementor, Brizy or another free solution, but still want to help me out? Then I would really appreciate it if you would make a small, one time donation via the button on the right 🙂
Is there a reason why Beaver Builder isn’t on this list? It’s probably the leanest out of the bunch
I don’t have much experience with Beaver Builder. I only played around with the demo a bit, and I wasn’t that impressed with it’s possibilities then… maybe I’ll give it another try 😉
Hi Bob, thanks for your great comparison.
Do you know
https://oxygenbuilder.com/
?
Would be interesting what you think about it.
thanks
Hi Marco,
I guess you didn’t find my Oxygen builder review yet 😉
In short, I think it’s a really cool builder with a lot of features, which will check most of the boxes in my comparison (but no undo / redo, can’t believe they haven’t solved that one yet). However, it’s just not as user friendly as the other builders since Oxygen is geared towards developers.
UPDATE: The latest version of Oxygen finally has undo / redo 🙂
Best regards,
Bob
Bob,
Thank you for the page builders’ comparison chart! This information has been very helpful to me because I am deciding which free page builder to use with WordPress.
The information you provide is in a great format and it makes it easy to see who offers what with their free plan.
I take my hat off to you! Bravo!
Thanks for your compliments Natalie 🙂
Best regards,
Bob
Hello, First of all, I read your article and your Information about WordPress page builders is very amzing and so much useful for me. Keep it up And Thank you very much.:)
Thanks James 🙂
Best regards,
Bob
A most comprehensive breakdown of theme templates/builders. I was curious to know your thoughts on this developer’s site that appears to be user friendly for non-developers.
I am looking for more of a theme builder as I don’t want to be locked into the limitations of a template and have issues later on. I really appreciate the dynamic, bold and simplicity of The Gem, but I am unaware of any pitfalls, limitations, hidden costs that could arise with them. I don’t want a monthly bill that increases with every add-on, plugin or widget or application.
Have you done a review of these sites: *link removed*
Thank you, Bob!
Hi Nicole,
I didn’t work with TheGem before, but it seems to have a lot of features. A real theme builder is not one of them though… TheGem offers multiple header and footer layouts, but if you really want to control every part of your theme I wouldn’t recommend it. Divi, Elementor Pro, Brizy Pro and Thrive Theme Builder all do offer real theme building functionality.
Moreover, TheGem uses the WP Bakery page builder, which is not truly front-end like the other builders in this article. It does offer a front-end mode, but that means you click on something, then a popup opens, then you adjust the things you want, save, close, and only then you can see the effect of your adjustments. So if you adjust a color, you’ll first have to save and close the popup. If you don’t like the color, you’ll have to open the popup again, choose a different color, save, close…
With the other builders, you can see the effect of your changes as you make them, so at the moment you’re adjusting a color, you see the text change to that color. The same goes for things like typography, padding, animations etcetera. Trust me, that works so much better! I’ll have to write a review about WP Bakery soon 😉
Your other question was about some other themes. I think I’ve worked with Salient once, and I’ve also worked with Avada. I wrote a review about Avada on my Dutch site (still have to translate that one) and I must say Avada 6.x (with the front-end builder) is quite nice. However, Divi is still my favorite 😉
Best regards,
Bob