Is Elementor the Most Powerful Page Builder? Here’s our Elementor Review

Elementor is the most popular WordPress page builder, and this Elementor review is going to show you why that is the case.

In this post, we’ll be doing a deeper dive into Elementor’s features, use cases, pros and cons, alternatives, and more.

All to help you grow a deep understanding of the platform to see if it’s a good fit for you.

Let’s begin.

Elementor is a WordPress plugin with a drag-and-drop interface used to build custom WordPress sites. As an Elementor user, you’ll be able to create WordPress pages that have unique eye-catching designs within 30 minutes of installing the plugin.

And while Elementor is far from the only WordPress page builder, it’s definitely one of the best builder plugins available.

Even the free Elementor plugin has enough features and integrations to create a full WordPress site.

In fact, according to PR Newswire, more than 5 million WordPress sites were created using Elementor. So, if you’re determined on creating a WordPress site, Elementor might be a good option.

Let’s examine their pros and cons to see if they’d remain a good fit.

The Theme Builder is an Elementor Pro feature that gives you a bird’s eye view of all the pages of your website. This allows you to see what types of pages are missing and make sure all the existing parts have the same style or pattern.

You can also save templates for all the pages you design to create an entire WordPress theme that you can edit and utilize quickly.

To access their theme builder, navigate to Elementor’s settings when editing any page and choose “Theme Builder”.

You can also access the feature from your WordPress dashboard under Templates > Theme Builder.

One neat thing about the Theme Builder feature is that you can choose where to publish certain elements. For example, you can select your footer to be published on the entire site or on all the pages that exclude the checkout page.

This can be handy if you’re running an ecommerce store and looking for conversions.

That being said, you don’t actually need this feature to build an entire WordPress theme. With some tweaking, this can also be done on Elementor’s Free version.

Through the same function, Elementor lets you easily breeze through different actions and add-ons like turning on test mode or adding a custom post type to your page.

WordPress users can access the Finder function by either pressing CMD + E or CTRL + E.

As a neat detail, you can also move the Finder pop-up around if it’s covering something important.

These containers basically hold the widgets of content you’ll be adding.

For example, you can drag and drop a form widget to one of the plus sections to have it occupy that space.

There’s no need to worry about it having the appropriate size as this is all responsive — we’ll discuss this more in detail later.

To create new containers, simply click the plus icon (+) on top or below an existing section, and then choose your preferred layout for the container.

You can create a whole webpage by adding new containers and widgets from the Widget Panel to said containers until you reach desired results.

You can edit all headings and paragraphs on the page itself.

Controlling fonts, size, buttons, colors, and more advanced details are all done from the Widget Panel.

For example, you can edit the fields and styling from the Widget Panel when having the form widget selected:

You can also save the final form widget for you to use in other places or other projects.

Customization is the name of the game and this Elementor interface allows you to control all visual aspects of your design in a frontend environment.

This means that what you see when building a WordPress webpage on your site is what you get when it’s live or published.

Well, that’s the case most of the time.

Sometimes, Elementor’s interface bugs out and has issues loading certain widgets properly, or straight up crashes — although admittedly, the latter is more rare.

Some users also find that custom CSS Elementor widgets only being available on Elementor Pro is a bit dishonest to the “customize everything” promise Elementor has made.

With Elementor Pro, you also get Theme Element widgets which unlock the features of the previously mentioned Theme Builder feature.

If you want to build an entire theme, this is actually important to you, especially because Elementor Pro also unlocks WooCommerce Widgets.

These will allow you to run online stores on WordPress using Elementor, without many third-party integrations.

The Global Widget setting (available on Elementor Pro) lets you create widgets on multiple pages of your WordPress site, and once you update one of them, they all get updated.

There is also a single post template widget which is essentially a template premade by you that has the layout of posts and articles that you use.

This will help you build your blog posts quicker.

So between global widgets, ecommerce functionality, and everything between them that’s not available on Elementor’s Free version, you should consider the upgrade to Elementor Pro if you’re serious about this platform.

Your goal when using builder plugins is to get things up and running in no time without sacrificing quality — you don’t want to end up with basic landing pages, for example.

And this is where Elementor’s templates come in.

You can easily insert full-page templates, import your own templates, save the current ones as templates, or even look for certain blocks of a page.

Blocks are sections on your page, like FAQs, contact forms, and About Us sections, for example.

Of course, some templates are free and some are only available with Elementor Pro.

You can still use the Free version of Elementor to create full-page templates — which is nice, but don’t expect much from the free templates, because while some of them are decent, a lot of them are super basic.

So if your only option is the Elementor Free version, get ready to get crafty and try other solutions, like integrating other third-party WordPress plugins.

But that comes with its own set of troubles, like page load speeds, which we will explain a bit later.

And don’t forget that you can always preview changes before publishing to make sure everything is looking exactly like you want.

Elementor's responsive design controls should be used regularly to ensure the quality of the content you’re putting out.

After all, the last thing you want is someone to visit your website and find sections overlapping or worse, not even there.

The Elementor pop-up builder is a fully modernized way for you to build pop-ups in an easy and constructive manner.

To use Elementor's pop-up builder, head to yourWordPress dashboard >Templates > Add New > Pop-up.

From there, you have all sorts of tricks and tweaks that you can use, like:

You can leave the default settings on and add the pop-up to certain places, like buttons or CTAs, from the dynamic settings for those buttons.

There are pop-up templates, so you don’t have to build everything from the ground up every time — this would save you both time and effort.

The pop-up builder also allows you to highly control your pop-ups.

For example, you can display pop-ups on certain devices, have different ways to close pop-ups, display them as site notifications, and more.

Also, you can use practically any widget in your pop-up and it should work fine, create multi-language pop-ups if you have a multi-language website, and as a convenient detail, pop-ups are GDPR compliant.

Finding all these pop-up features in other page builders is almost nonexistent — you really want to go after the best WordPress page builders if you want to produce similar pop-up results.

In fact, the Elementor pop-up builder isn’t available with the free Elementor Core plugin, and you have to sign up for Elementor Pro if you want to use it.

The Elementor team is always pushing their platform to be the best WordPress page builder, and one of the features they came up with to achieve that is website kits.

Website kits take Elementor templates and expand on them massively.

Not only do they contain more page templates, but also come with a whole website structure for your WordPress site.

You can think of them as a bundle of page templates, pop-ups, product management plugins, and all the elements needed to create your full website.

Elementor offers both free and premium kits and, as expected, the premium ones require a subscription with Elementor Pro.

To use website kits, go to WordPress Panel > Templates > Kit library.

After selecting a website kit that’s suitable for you, start customizing it to make it your own and fit your branding.

One note that’s worth mentioning is if you already have data and pages on your website, importing a website kit would erase all of that data and you won’t be able to retrieve it — unless you had a backup in place.

The way we see it, there are 2 types of integrations with Elementor that you can use:

Before we jump into pricing, we want to make clear that the prices discussed below are for the Elementor plugin.

That’s because Elementor offers a “Cloud Website” service for $99/year but that’s not the focus of our Elementor review today.

Systeme.io isn’t just a page builder, it’s an all-in-one solution for building, launching, and scaling online businesses effortlessly.

But what does that mean to someone who’s looking for an Elementor alternative?

Great question — using systeme.io, you can completely build a custom website with:

Here are our plans:

Now we’re back to WordPress territory.

The Elegant Themes team made Divi to be a multipurpose theme plugin that doubles as a page builder within WordPress.

Similar to Elementor’s interface, Divi has a ton of customization with a drag-and-drop builder.

All the templates you have in Dive are responsive and what’s neat is that you can easily create custom templates that you can later use on multiple pages.

A handy feature of Divi is Wireframe mode, which gets you a structured overview of your pages — this falls into the same category of visual page builders that the Theme Builder in Elementor is in.

Of course, all of this is under the WordPress environment, so your integration list is endless — and so too the amount of money you can pay for them.

Pricing is simple with Divi, you have 2 plans:

The Beaver Builder is another Elementor competitor that’s very popular.

It’s similar to Divi because it provides you with both a Beaver theme and a Beaver plugin, that you can use with WordPress themes, to build websites.

The Beaver Builder allows you to build pages with features familiar to Elementor, like:

The platform has 3 plans: