The WordPress page builder Elementor currently has more than 4 millioner users, that’s a lot. Having a large amount of users doesn’t necessarily mean it’s great quality, most if it’s users comes from WordPress.org where it’s ranking high on all lists due to the popularity. When most people look at the top list they’ll assume it’s the best since it has the most users, even though they haven’t tested the alternatives. The reality of Elementors quality is very different though, there’s a huge amount of downsides to the plugin.
Here’s a few downsides of Elementor:
- It’s very expensive compared to its competitors.
- There is no lifetime option, you are forced to pay every year.
- Slow Customer Support.
- You cannot remove Elementor without losing all of your content & styling.
Divi – The Best Paid Alternative
Divi is developed by Elegant Themes. It’s our favourite paid alternative to Elementor. It comes as a theme and plugin, so you can choose whether or not you want to use a theme by a different developing company. Divi is the most bought page builder in the world, you can create any sort of design with it, it comes with more than 140 different designs you can use as a starting point.
Why we recommend Divi as the best paid alternative
- It has more features & is a higher quality product.
- Amazing customer & fast support.
- Cheaper & more flexible pricing.
- Great user community on Facebook & forums.
- Divi is more lightweight than Elementor.
Beaver Builder – The Best Free/Paid Alternative
Beaver Builder is a freemium product, which means there’s both a free and premium version. It does pretty much the same as Elementor & comes with the same modules and shortcodes, it’s just cheaper. You can get Beaver Builder Premium & use it on unlimited sites forever for $99 – Elementor costs $49 every year for 1 website. There’s a ton of big brands that use Beaver Builder, such as WP Engine.
Why we recommend Beaver Builder as the best free/paid alternative
- Cheaper pricing.
- It’s pretty identical to Elementor.
- One-time fee.
- Great customer service.
- Faster loading time than Elementor
Spectra
Spectra Website Builder offers a compelling alternative to Elementor, presenting both free and paid options to cater to a wide range of users. Its user-friendly visual page-building capabilities make website creation a breeze, whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned professional. Spectra stands out with its rich feature set, customizable blocks, and seamless integration with Spectra One and various WordPress themes, providing users with the tools to craft visually striking websites without delving into complex coding. Whether you seek a free solution or advanced functionalities, Spectra’s got you covered, solidifying its position as a top-notch Elementor alternative.
Why we recommend Spectra as the best free/paid alternative
- Professionally designed pre-built starter templates
- Ready-to-use block patterns
- Fully responsive
- Lightning fast editor
- Modern react framework
- Organized block settings
Gutenberg – The Best Free Alternative
Gutenberg is the WordPress 5.0+ editor, it comes with built-in blocks together with lots of plugins that adds new blocks to your editor. You can use them to create columns, buttons and many other layouts. The best part is that it’s absolutely free and will stay that way. All you have to do is upgrade to WordPress 5.0+ and disabled “Classic Editor” if you have that plugin enabled. Lots of great themes are based on it, so you don’t need to use any plugins – that can make your website load much faster as well. We recommend that you read our list of the best free Gutenberg compatible WordPress themes.
Why we recommend Gutenberg as the best free alternative
- It’s free!
- It’s the only free high quality page builder that is actively developed.
- There are a bunch of plugins and extensions for the editor.
- It loads no external JS, it’s the most light-weight solution available.
Elementor Alternative for WordPress
People have lots of different reasons to look for an alternative to Elementor. Elementor is a great plugin, it has 4 million users and that’s no joke – it’s one of the most used plugin the world. When a product becomes that popular, a big price increase usually comes with. Sadly it doesn’t guarantee great quality, it does usually result in less bugs though.
If you’re reading this article then you have most likely been testing Elementor Free, or simply looked at their pricing and decided to look for an alternative. We totally understand that, paying yearly for any products sucks. We hope that you managed to find a great alternative above.
We always recommend that you try building your website without a page builder, since they’ll slow your loading time and most likely end up costing you money at some point. On SuperbThemes.com we code everything yourself and avoid using plugins as much as possible. Of course not everybody knows how to code, and then a page builder is an awesome alternative, it’s a lot cheaper than hiring a developer as well.
Free Elementor Page Builder Alternatives
Elementor is very expensive, as we have already been mentioning throughout this article. You’re in a startup or have a personal blog then it doesn’t make any sense to pay $59 yearly for a plugin, that’s way too expensive. WordPress comes with some awesome out-of-box features such as the Gutenberg editor we mention in the start of the article.
We always recommend that you take a look at the built-in features of WordPress before you install heavy plugins. Elementor comes with a lot of Javascript and CSS, that’s not optimal if you’re trying to have a lightweight website.
There’s a lot of themes and plugins which are coded purely for the new WordPress 5.0 editor Gutenberg. For example our ecommerce theme Gutenshop and our blog theme Writers Blogily. You can download both of them for free and give them a test drive.
Best Elementor Pro Alternatives
If you have been looking through review of page builders and which ones there is to choose between, then you’ve probably noticed Divi by Elegant Themes. It’s the most bought WordPress page builder in the world. Elementor has the most users overall because they have a free version, but if you look at premium versions only then Divi has the most users. It’s one of the first WordPress plugins that isn’t part of any advertisement platform such as WordPress.org, WordPress.com or Envato – it’s very impressive.
Another alternative is Beaver Builder, we recommend that page builder plugin as a free/premium alternative. Some might call it a discount version of Elementor, even though it does have the same features more or less, the company that develops it doesn’t have the same capital as Elementor. It mostly shows on the website & interface design. Their pricing models are very different though, Beaver Builder is much cheaper than Elementor.
We sincerely hope that Elementor pro will have a lifetime plan at some point, yearly subscriptions are simply too expensive in the long run.
List of alternatives to Elementor WordPress Plugin
You can find the list of alternatives to Elementor at the top of the article. Truth said, there are a lot of page builders, but most of them aren’t worth using. There are a lot of page builder plugins we haven’t added to our list, that’s because we don’t believe they compare to our top 3. That doesn’t mean that they are useless or not worth trying, it’s simply our opinion. In a year or two the Gutenberg editor will be so powerful that page builder plugins most likely won’t be needed. If you’ve been following the progress on WordPress then you’ve seen that lots of functionality are being removed from themes and plugins and added directly into the WordPress CMS, that’s awesome!
It also means that page builders plugins have increasingly been adding lock-ins to their plugins so they’re hard to switch away from. Basically most of them are making sure that their users stay, even when they become redundant. That’s kinda sad but it’s how the tech business works. There’s a bunch of lists with alternatives to Elementor you can find all over the web, if you feel like we’re missing some key page builders on our list then please let us know which ones in the comments, we are always open to add more if we find them worthy.
Lightweight alternatives to WordPress Elementor Plugin
Finding a lightweight page builder is incredibly hard. Most of them use a lot of code libraries and Javascript, that’ll always slow down your site a lot. Currently there is no great lightweight page builder, even though all of them may claim that they’re fast & lightweight, then it’s not always true – Anybody can claim their products are that, there is no guarantee for it to be true. If page speed is truly important for you, then we recommend that you choose a theme with a nice layout and stick to that.
Especially if you rely on SEO & organic traffic from Google and other search engines. If that’s your cause then we do in no way recommend that you use any heavy plugins or themes. Your best option is to find a lightweight theme and keep the plugin count minimal. There’s a bunch of awesome plugins you should be looking at if you’re an affiliate though, since bounce rate & page speed are the most important factors.
Elementor Competitors Conclusion
In this article we’ve been looking through the options you have when it comes to finding an alternative/competitor to Elementor. It’s important that you look through the features of each one and choose the one you think will work best in the long run. Chances are you won’t ever be switching because it’s so difficult to add all content again in a new page builder, so choose wisely!
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