Which is better: Elementor or Divi?
It’s probably a matter of faith between WordPress web designers. And honestly, there’s no one right blanket answer to this. However, you’re here because you want an answer (or you just like reading our GREYD blog).
That’s why I wrote this article for you. You’ll learn more about Divi and Elementor, and more importantly, why both tools are not the real deal for professional web designers.
The two tools don’t have much in common. So it’s hard to say whether Elementor is easier to use than Divi.
While the Elementor WordPress page builder initially started out as a plugin for WordPress, Divi has always been a WordPress theme. However, they both fall into the category of WordPress page builders.
There is one fundamental difference between Elementor and Divi:
Elementor is aimed more at WordPress with little to no experience in web design, who want to build a website by themselves. Divi, on the other hand, is used by professional web designers to build websites for their clients.
To help you see the differences between Divi and Elementor in detail, we’ll briefly go over them one by one.
Elementor started out in 2016. Their mission was to make it easier to build WordPress websites. Since it’s been used over 5 million times it’s no surprise that Elementor is often considered the best page builder.
Elementor is a free plugin in its basic version. Once installed, you can easily go to your WordPress backend and build your pages just the way you need them.
Elementor is a so-called “What You See Is What You Get” editor (WYSIWYG editor). As the name suggests, Elementor delivers the design exactly as you see it during your building process.
The WYSIWYG feature is probably the reason Elementor is so popular with web design beginners. In the past, websites were of course built using code only. During your coding stage, you weren’t able to see what your code would look like in the end.
Not very user-friendly, right?
The WYSIWYG factor is one of Elementor’s biggest advantages. And, of course, people like that there’s a free version available that lets you build basic websites.
But nothing is perfect, right?
Elementor has a huge drawback: Final websites are pretty slow. Elementor has some great features, but they bloat the code a lot. This leads to longer load times.
This is a no-go in terms of user experience and in this case Elementor is actually bad for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Also, Elementor isn’t suited for web designers who build client websites regularly. They just don’t have all the features needed for a professional website – not even with the pro version. But we’ll get to that later.
When it comes to tricky topics GDPR-compliant contact forms, you’d need additional plugins specifically for that.
Elementor also doesn’t allow for forms with interdependent fields. And, to see your form entries, you’d need another additional, like Mailchimp.
Elementor’s focus is clearly building pages that are beautiful. But, because it lacks many features, it isn’t necessarily suitable to build professional business websites.
Just by looking at its feature page, you might get the impression that Elementor can do almost anything. However, if you take a closer look, most features only work on a superficial level. Design clearly comes before function.
There’s a way to use Elementor in combination with Gutenberg, but you’d have to switch back and forth between editors. This hardly counts as an integration. Elementor offers its own plugin that lets you insert Elementor blocks into Gutenberg.