Gutenberg vs Elementor

We are comparing Elementor vs Gutenberg here. Gutenberg is the default page builder in WordPress and Elementor is the second best-selling page builder for WordPress. Can these 2 page builders be compared or is the difference between the two just too big?

The Elementor Page Builder

Elementor is now pretty much one of the best-known page builders for WordPress. The page builder continues to improve, just like their own website, which is getting better and better. In this Elementor Review, we’re going to take a look at why Elementor is loved by such a large audience. The addition of their own theme called Hello Elementor certainly plays a part in their success.

Elementor Page Builder Review

The elementor pagebuilder works very fast and is very easy to understand for every layman. This does not mean that professionals do not like to work with it, on the contrary. This website was put together by me with Elementor and everything runs smoothly. Below you can see how you can build a page in the blink of an eye using drag & drop.

Elementor Review 90 widgets

Elementor has about 90 widgets which you can see here, a very high number for a page builder. Another word for widgets is elements, which immediately explains the name of the page builder. There are a lot of companies that offer extra widgets for Elementor like for example one of the best: Astra’s Ultimate Elementor. Below check out the basic widgets (the pro widgets appear on hover).

Elementor's Navigator

The Navigator appears floating when you right-click a widget and select “Navigator”. You now see a list with all widgets and sections neatly under each other and you can jump anywhere quickly. Everyone will use the Navigator in their own way. I mainly use it to drag widgets or sections to another position. Without the Navigator, this is sometimes a very difficult task.

Elementor Conversion & Leads

Leads and conversion are of course very important for every website today. In the example below you can see that Elementor has very nice designs for forms, landing pages and the like. You can read more about Elementor’s conversion here.

Elementor Review Woocommerce

In the widgets chapter you already saw a whole block with extra widgets for Woocommerce. Every self-respecting theme or page builder these days is well prepared for the collaboration with the most popular plugin for E-commerce called Woocommerce and that goes for Elementor as well. Read more about everything Elementor has to offer for the construction of shops here.

elementor pagebuilder review woocommerce

Elementor's Theme Builder

In this Elementor Review we are not going to forget the ThemeBuilder, of course. The Themebuilder has been added with one of the latest upgrades and gives total control over the headers, footers and other global items on your website. The adjustments you make here are carried out on your entire website in one go. Read more about the Theme Builder here.

Elementor's Pop-Ups

The absolute best program for popups for me is Poptins, but we can see here that Elementor already has popups integrated which makes it practically unnecessary to spend any more money on it. Pop-ups, if used properly and not annoying, are certainly a great way to increase sales in affiliate marketing or generate more leads for businesses.

Elementor Pricing

Elementor has very reasonable prices regardless of whether it is for 1 website or many websites in the case of a professional design agency. If you purchase Elementor, buying a theme is basically unnecessary, which makes the page builder even more attractive.

Elementor Review Conclusion

It is with great pleasure that I have written this Elementor Review. It’s always nice to write about a good product that sells itself. Elementor is simply one of the best page builders out there. Tastes differ, so one has it at 1 and the other at 3, but we cannot deny that this is a top product. Elementor is an absolute killer.

Let’s continue this Elementor vs Gutenberg comparison with the Gutenberg editor.

The Gutenberg Editor reminds me of the times when Joomla was even better and more popular than WordPress. Joomla 1.5 was a great CMS but somehow Joomla itself decided to kill everything with changes to their CMS. At one point they even released Joomla 2.5. It was not possible to upgrade from previous versions. This caused anyone who had a Joomla website to rebuild it. Many people, myself included, thought it was better to switch to WordPress at that point. Let’s continue this Gutenberg Review.

Gutenberg Editor Ratings

In my opinion, integrating the Gutenberg Editor into WordPress has also been a very big mistake. We now have an editor in it that most people don’t do anything with. You would say that the old WordPress editor was good enough and if you want something better, you install the DiviBuilder or the Elementor page builder. Well, that is still the case today because there are just few people who like to work with Gutenberg, what can be read from its rating.

An average rating of 2.1 out of 5 is of course incredibly bad. Well-rated themes and plugins on WordPress.org have averages above 4.5/5. Shockingly, so many people are commenting that it’s the biggest mess they’ve ever seen. The WP Classic Editor has a 4.9/5 rating as can be seen below.

WYSIWIG front-end pagebuilder

In principle, Gutenberg is a WYSIWYG frontend page builder, but in reality it is not impressive at all. The most striking thing about the Gutenberg editor for me is that if you paste a piece of text in it that also contains titles, the editor itself neatly divides it into separate blocks. Which in itself should be fast-acting and handy, but in practice people always want it slightly different than Gutenberg does and it takes a lot of time to get it “right” again.

Backend Editor

Frontend Editor

Using special plug-ins

There are a number of special plugins that make the Gutenberg editor a kind of page builder that works a bit better than with the original. One of the best of these is Kadence Blocks, pictured below. The question is why don’t we immediately install Elementor if we don’t want anything to do with the original Gutenberg Editor.

Advice: Don't use Gutenberg

My advice from this Gutenberg Review is not to use the editor. When I build a website, I want everything to work perfectly and to have total control over everything. I therefore strongly advise against building websites with Gutenberg because later you are stuck with it. It is better to work with a good page builder from the start. I think the free version of Elementor is the most suitable for this, but I also like to work with the DiviBuilder, Thrive and ZionBuilder. What Elementor has that the other page builders don’t is the ability to extend it with a sea of plugins available for it. Many premium themes also already have tuned versions of Elementor in them.

Use the Classic WP Editor

Instead of acting as a Gutenberg guinea pig do the following. If you were used to working with the Classic WP Editor, you can just make Gutenberg disappear with one of the plugins for it, the best being Disable Gutenberg. Then simply install the Classic WordPress Editor and you will have the old familiar situation back.

Gutenberg Review Conclusion

Apart from the fact that the editor doesn’t work well and is practically still in beta after years, the editor has nothing to offer of course. A handful of widgets just isn’t enough these days to write decently attractive pages. Just ignore Gutenberg and work with a good page builder is what I do myself.