By Bogdan Rancea
I still remember the days when building a website meant either hiring an ultra-expensive developer, or learning how to code everything yourself. Now anyone can design an incredible website with no coding knowledge what-so-ever with a handy page builder.
Elementor and WPBakery are two of the most popular options around if you’re using the popular WordPress CMS for your website. They both take the hassle out of site design, with pre-built templates, widgets and blocks you can drag and drop into place.
But which is best?
I put the two builders head-to-head to answer that question.
The Quick Verdict: Pros and Cons
TL;DR: I personally think Elementor is the better option overall. It’s a lot more user-friendly, more affordable and it’s slightly better for SEO because it prioritizes clean code (more on that later). However, WPBakery is a more versatile option if you want to dive into code, and experiment with both front-end and back-end editors.
Elementor Pros and Cons
Pros
- Excellent generative AI tools
- Lightning-fast cloud hosting available
- Easy-to-use and intuitive interface
- Cleaner code (to protect your SEO)
- Lots of great templates, widgets, and elements
Cons
- Limitations on back-end coding
- Occasional glitches
WPBakery Pros and Cons
Pros
- Front and back-end page building tools
- Excellent selection of templates, widgets, and elements
- Handy extras, like a “skin builder”
- Generative AI toolkit (WPBakery AI)
- API extensibility
- Professional online support
Cons
- Steeper learning curve
- Can be more expensive
- Clean code issues
Elementor vs WPBakery: Feature Comparison
On a broad level, Elementor and WPBakery are very similar. They both offer access to intuitive page building tools for WordPress, with hundreds of templates, elements, and widgets to choose from. They even both have their own generative AI tools baked in.
But the experience you get with both platforms is very different. Let’s take a closer look.
Interface, Ease of Use, and AI Features
I’ll start with the thing that matters most to me when I’m choosing a website design tool: simplicity.
From a user experience perspective, both WPBakery and Elementor are pretty straightforward. They certainly make it easier to design a great WordPress website.
Both tools offer drag-and-drop tools, so you can customize your site without code. However, Elementor is a little more intuitive, allowing you to drag individual elements directly into pages, whereas WPBakery makes you select items from a menu.
Elementor was clearly designed with beginners in mind. There are added features like an easy undo and redo functionality, and everything is managed on the “front end”. That basically means you can see exactly what you’re doing to your pages as you work.
The only thing I don’t like is that Elementor can make your screen feel a little cluttered, particularly when you’re editing text and images.
WPBakery is an intuitive tool, but it’s intended for people with a bit more design experience. You can design in the frontend, or use the back-end design to experiment with code. Obviously, the latter option requires more technical knowledge, but it does mean you have more freedom to make granular changes to how your website looks and behaves.
To put it simply, if you want a straightforward experience, stick with Elementor, if you’re looking for more flexibility and customization options, WPBakery is the better choice.
Templates, Elements, and Widgets
Templates, widgets, and elements are at the heart of both Elementor and WPBakery’s toolkit, ensuring you can design virtually anything, without having to start from scratch.
When it comes to templates, both options are pretty similar. You get over 100 website and page templates on both platforms, which you can modify and enhance with widgets and customizable elements.
Elementor also offers “website kits”, which are great if you want to access all of the components you need for a great website at once, without having to built step-by-step.
Both platforms also offer a huge library of elements and widgets, covering everything you’d expect, from animated headings and buttons, to fonts, columns, and tables. WPBakery gives you up to 50 widgets to choose from, as well as the option to expand with add-ons and extra components. For instance, you can add Google Maps, or video players to your site.
Elementor gives you 40 widgets on the free plan, and over 100 additional elements on its paid plan. Again, you can add extra components into the mix too, like Google Maps and Images. One thing I do like about WPBakery, however, is that it comes with an advanced grid builder, which is great for organizing your content, elements, and widgets, without too much coding.
Performance and Scalability
Performance should always be a key consideration when choosing a page builder. Remember, site speed isn’t just crucial to user experience, it affects your SEO potential too. Ultimately, both Elementor and WPBakery promise that their pages will load incredibly quickly.
An analysis from WPRocket, however, suggests that the total loading time for Elementor pages is just slightly faster than those on WPBakery (3.4 seconds compared to 3.6). One interesting thing to note is that Elementor does offer its own WordPress secure managed hosting packages, which are designed to ensure your website can handle any peak in traffic, no matter the time of year.
WPBakery offers a hosting service through IndyStack, which also delivers some performance-enhancing features, such as LiteSpeed caching.
From a scalability perspective, both solutions can handle websites of virtually any size, and they’re both compatible with a wide range of WordPress themes, plugins, and applications. They both work with most of the top WordPress templates, WooCommerce, and various other tools, so you shouldn’t have any issues with plugins conflicting.
SEO Functionality and AI Extras
Since both WPBakery and Elementor help to ensure your site loads quickly, and they both integrate with tools like Yoast, I think they’ll both serve the SEO needs of most companies. The biggest difference between these two tools, is the impact they’ll have on your site if you remove the plugin.
If you deactivate WPBakery on your WordPress site, it leaves behind a lot of messy broken short codes, which can seriously harm your SEO and traffic. You’ll also need to spend a lot of time fixing everything, which leaves you feeling a little “locked in” once you start using the app.
Elementor, on the other hand, maintains the integrity of page code even when the plugin is deactivated. This means that if you decide to stop using Elementor for any reason, your pages will still work – they just won’t have all the same features and designs.
From an AI perspective, both tools now have their own generative AI capabilities. With Elementor, you can rapidly generate content, images and code, just by clicking on an icon and sending a prompt to an AI bot.
WPBakery has a similar solution in the form of the WPBakery AI, which allows you to create code and content effortlessly.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an option for image creation, which places WPBakery just behind Elementor in this respect.
Pricing
Notably, while Elementor does offer hosting and other services, I’m going to focus only on the pricing for the website builder here.
Elementor does have a free plan, but you won’t find it on the company’s website. It’s only available via the WordPress plugin directory, and gives you a stripped-down version of the overall experience. For instance, you get fewer widgets and templates, no WooCommerce integration, no customer support, and no pop-up and form builders.
There are four premium plans, starting at $4.29 per month for the Essential plan, and ranging to $33.25 per month for the “Agency” plan.
The higher your pricing plan, the more features you’ll get, such as additional widgets, custom code and CSS options, floating buttons, WooCommerce access, and dynamic fields.
WPBakery doesn’t have a free plan, but its pricing structure is a little easier to understand. There are three options available, starting at $69 for a Regular plan, $256 for a 5-Site plan, and $499 for a 10-site plan. These are all lifetime one-off purchases, and you get access to the full feature selection on all of them. The only difference is the number of websites supported.
While the subscription plans for WPBakery are “lifetime” plans, you only get 1 year of access to the template library, WPBakery AI, and support services at a time. That basically means you’ll need to renew your plan every year.
Customer Support and Service
Finally, let’s take a look at customer support. Both WPBakery and Elementor seem to take customer support seriously – provided you’re a paying user. As I mentioned above, you won’t get any support (other than access to self-help resources), if you’re using Elementor’s free plan.
You can contact Elementor via email, or social media, use its help center, examine its blog and Academy pages for guidance, or connect with its online community.
WPBakery offers support via a knowledgebase, online community, and email. There’s also advanced support available on some plans, which basically just means you get responses to questions a little faster.
I would have liked to see more live chat and phone options available from both companies. However, from what I can tell from reviews, most customers are happy with the level of service they get from both Elementor, and WPBakery, so there’s not much to worry about here.
Elementor vs WPBakery: The Verdict
Overall, WPBakery and Elementor are both popular page builders for a good reason. Elementor is definitely the more straightforward option in my opinion, and it might be better for beginners, thanks to its free plan. I also love that you can do more with AI on Elementor, like generating images.
WPBakery gives you a lot more freedom when it comes to customizing the backend of your website, without the need to upgrade to a specific plan. However, there’s a steeper learning curve with this plugin, and I don’t like the fact that disabling the app will leave messy code behind.
Ultimately, the choice if which one to go with will depend on your level of experience with website design, and your priorities.
For me, though, Elementor wins overall.
