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 Architect, 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.

Divi vs Elementor… or maybe Brizy or Thrive Architect?

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 Architect is a bit different from the others. Thrive Themes, the company behind Thrive Architect, 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 newsletter subscriptions (with popups at least) and for implementing social share buttons, but with Divi, those plugins are included with the price.
With Thrive Architect, you’ll have to buy those plugins separately. At the moment, Thrive doesn’t have a theme builder yet, but it is in development – but also as a separate plugin.
Thrive also offers a membership that costs $ 19,95 per month for all plugins, but that’s for a 25 sites maximum so that’s not unlimited.

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 available that add extra functionality to Gutenberg.

On the other hand, dozens of plugins are available for Divi and Elementor 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!