Ever since the introduction of page builders in WordPress, development has taken new horizons. Earlier building a customized WordPress page was a hard job but page builders have made developer’s life easier with their drag and drop interface. You can develop beautiful pages with page builder with full control. The icing on the cake is that you don’t need to have knowledge of programming. No need for HTML or CSS.
Choosing a page builder for your website can be a tricky job. You need to be fully aware of what you want to build and which page builder can suit your requirements best. You have the luxury of choosing two or more builders at a time and you can always switch to another page builder. But this switch can get messy. To avoid this mess, you should try to choose the best one in the first place. There are a number of page builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder, Site Origin, Divi Builder, and etc. available for your usage. In this article, we are going to discuss two of the leading page builder on the WordPress repository.
Elementor Page Builder
Released on June 2016, Elementor became popular in the WordPress community faster than even its creators would have thought. Experts have stated that;
“The main reason for its popularity is its free version with all the rich features”.
Elementor has 53 Widgets to help the developer build a beautiful yet responsive page. 24 of these widgets are available in the Pro version. We will try to discuss Elementor page builder on the basis of the following points:
Usability
Elementor is one of the easiest page builders to use. Once you activate the plugin, you start to see the “Edit With Elementor” button on the edit page.
Elementor provides a split-screen interface. You can drag a widget from one and drop in the other with live preview to view immediate effects. You can enjoy inline editing and change everything about the widget, from colors to fonts, margins, paddings, and other style options while having a great live preview.
Elementor lets you globally define fonts styles and set default colors. There is also a color palette option providing you the opportunity to select your color on the go with much ease.
Elementor provides you the luxury of different screen size optimizations. You can develop your tablet and mobile interface according to your requirements with complete control over customization.
One of the selling points of Elementor is its ability to roll back changes. Elementor keeps track of your changes in form revisions. You can test around different design and once you are sure that the first one was good for you, you can always choose that one from revisions. There are some third-party plugins available to extend the functionality of Elemetor with their addons.
Pre-designed Templates
If you are feeling lazy or don’t have the experience of designing, no need to worry! Elementor comes with a number of pre-designed templates. These templates can be a full page as well as a block. Some of them are available in the free version and some of them are only available in the pro version.
What you need to do is to select a block or page template according to your need and import it into your website. Just edit its content and you are good to go. All of these templates are completely mobile and tablet-optimized. You can find page templates from different genres in the library, let it be for a marketing agency or a coffee shop. You will have a great set of options to choose from.
By using Elementor’s pre-designed templates, we can speed up our development process. As they are already mobile and tablet ready, it saves a lot of time for the developers.
Reusable Elements
If you want to use the same section, you built on a particular page in some other pages too. Elementor gives you this great option to reuse it. Save your section as a template and use it on the other pages too. This lets you make changes to your sections quickly as you don’t have to repeat the drill on every page. Just make changes to your saved template and these will apply to all the sections on the website’s every page.
Elementor Integrations
You have the option to choose which post types you want to edit with Elementor. Just navigate to Elementor > Settings and select your post types.
Elementor comes with the option of integrations of many third-party applications like reCAPTCHA, donReach, Facebook SDK, MailChimp, Drip, ActiveCompaign, GetResponse, ConvertKit, MailerLite, and TypeKit Web Fonts by Adobe.
You just need to add their respective activation keys and use relative widgets from Elementor to get the desired results. This smooth process of these main third-party integrations has reduced a great burden off the shoulders of developers.
Code Quality
Elementor comes with great code quality. All the sections and divs and properly defined. CSS is also very well handled. If you want to make changes, understanding of the code a not that difficult for a developer with knowledge of code techniques.
Performance
Website performance is a point that is considered by all the developers when they are choosing a plugin, a theme or a page builder. Elementor has emphasized a lot on performance and has improved quite a bit in recent past. But still, Elementor can be improved when it comes to the performance.
In our test, a website designed with Elementor took 1.47 seconds to load. The time taken can be justified but the request sent count for Elementor is 48, which is way too high as compared to other page builders.
Support
In web development, no matter how much experience you have, there may come a point when you are stuck with an issue and there is no other way than to contact the support of the services provider. And if the support system of that particular product is not much helpfull, that can make users consider the other competitors of the product. Unfortunately, Elementor does not have a great support system at the moment. Many users are found complaining at different platforms about support.
Although, there are multiple platforms like official documentation, social media, and help desk available. But help desks are not willing to go a step more to help the customer.
Pricing
Elementor comes with two versions, Free and Premium. The free version has a number of widgets which can be enough for your website if it is a minimal one. For advanced functionalities, the pro version is available.
In the Pro version, you get to choose from three different packages. If you want Elementor for one website you can get it for $49/year, $99/year for the license of three websites and if you are an agency you can spend $179/year for 1,000 websites.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Live preview editor
- Templates and blocks library
- User-friendly
- Theme Builder
- Different screen size personalization
- Powerful popup builder
- Justifies its price
Cons:
- Third-party integrations can cause issues
- Support does not resolve custom issues
- No white-label version
Popularity
Elementor is among the top page builders when it comes to popularity. Which is mainly due to its freemium attribute. Elementor achieved the 10,000 active installations benchmark, after only three months of its introduction. At the moment, Elementor has 2+ million active installations. These numbers speak for the page builder’s popularity among the developers.
User Reviews
Elementor users rate the page builder very highly, with over 3000 5-stars ratings.
Along with a rating of 2+ million, active installations are total proof of its popularity and user satisfaction.
Beaver Builder
Beaver Builder was first introduced in April 2014. Beaver Builder offers its users a free version as well as a premium version. In this page builder, you have the luxury of a very easy to use interface. Like Elementor, Beaver Builder also lets you make changes to your website with a live preview. Beaver Builder gives you the opportunity to select a module from a wide range of options. It has modules in a free version.
We will try to discuss Beaver page builder on the basis of the following points:
Usability
Beaver Builder can prove to be one of the easiest page builders to use. You just need to edit with Builder and you will see a full-width screen.
You can choose to change the layout setting from the upper left corner. Here you can Publish a layout, Duplicate a layout, Preview Layout, Responsive Editing, and Revisions. If you want to add custom CSS or javascript you can also achieve this by short key CTRL + Y.
If you want to use a module on your page, click on the plus icon at the top right corner of the page. A drop down with all the available modules will appear. Drag your desired module and drop it onto the page.
Once added the module, click on edit and settings popup will appear. You can style it here according to your theme. You can apply changes in style like color, background-color, font settings, spacing, and text-shadow. In the Advanced tab, you can change the margin, padding, visibility, and other advanced options. Like Elementor, Beaver Builder also lets you do the mobile and tablet customization with a live preview.
Pre-Designed templates
If you are looking to develop your website by using the page builder’s already designed templates, then Beaver Builder can be a good option for you. You can choose templates as per your requirements. You can find templates for content pages as well as landing page templates.
Reusable Modules
If you want to use the same section, you built on a page on some other pages too. Beaver gives you this great option to reuse it. Save your section as a template and use it on the other pages too. This lets you make changes to your sections quickly as you don’t have to repeat the drill on every page. Just make changes to your saved template and these will apply to all the sections on the website’s every page. Beaver also lets you save sections, rows, and columns.
Code Quality
Like Elementor, Beaver Builder also provides developers great code quality. All the sections and divs and properly defined. CSS is also very well handled. If you want to make changes, understanding of the code a not that difficult for a developer with knowledge of code techniques.
Performance
When it comes to performance, Beaver Builder has a reputation of its own. In our test, we compared it with Elementor. Same page size, same hosting server, and with other same factors Beaver Builder’s website took 1.32 seconds to load. Which is better than that of Elementor’s. But the most impressive part was that the number of requests was 30, which is much less than Elementor’s 48. Making it a faster and performance efficient page builder.
Support
There is no denial of the importance of a good support system as we discussed earlier in this article. However, Beaver Builder has a great support system. The support staff is quick and responsive. There support team is more than willing to help their customers. Which makes a developer’s life a lot easier.
Pricing
Opposite to Elementor where pricing is based on the number of websites, Beaver builder creators have created plans based on features. There are three plans available at the moment. One being the Standard version, others are Pro version and Agency version. All of these costs $99, $199, and $399 respectively.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Fast live preview editor
- Templates and blocks library
- User-friendly
- Beaver Theme in Pro version
- Different screen size personalization
- Good choice for Agencies
- White Label in Pro version
- The Lite version has very few modules and functionalities
Cons:
- Theme Builder is available only in Pro Version
- Form building can be an issue
- It can prove to be expansive compared to other page builders
Popularity
Beaver Builder is one of the most popular page builder available on the WordPress repository. Beaver Builder has 500,000 + active installations at the moment. It is a famous and personal favorite for a number of developers.
User Reviews
Beaver Builder has only a few reviews on its WordPress page. This means that most of the users from 500,000+ active installations are very much satisfied with the page builder. It has 4.8 stars rating at the moment.
Final Words
Selecting a page builder can be a difficult task to do. In this article, we have discussed two of the most used and highly rated page builders i.e. Elementor and Beaver Page Builder. We have discussed these two on the basis of their functionalities, pricing, and ratings by users. If you are a freelancer you should go for Elementor Pro, which has a wide range of elements. But if you are an agency you should select Beaver Builder Pro version.
This article compares two giants of the WordPress design world. Elementor and Beaver Builder!Click To TweetWP inCare is a WordPress development and maintenance agency providing our valued customers top-notch WordPress services. If you want us to develop a website using either Elementor or Beaver Builder, contact us today. We will be more than happy to serve you!
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