On my site, I switched from Thrive Architect to Elementor Pro in November 2018.

Since then, I’ve never looked back and Elementor has been my most favorite plugin on WordPress.

But like any other plugins, Elementor also has got its own advantages and disadvantages.

Type	WordPress page builder
Starting price	$49/year for 1 site
Features	WYSIWYG editor Popup builder Responsive editor Developer friendly
Competitors	Divi Builder Beaver builder
Addons available	Crocoblock Ultimate Addons for Elementor Essential Addons for Elementor

So, in this blog post I will discuss the features and benefits Elementor has got to offer you, and also compare other popular page builder plugins with Elementor.

At the end of this review on Elementor, hopefully, you’ll have the clarity of whether Elementor is right for you at this time or not.

Elementor Review – Is it right for you?

Elementor free vs pro

Elementor is a freemium plugin. They have their pretty generous free version of their plugin in WordPress and as well as their pro version that you can optionally upgrade to.

The free version of their page builder comes with a limited number of elements, customization options, undo-redo, and pretty much all the basic functionalities.

However, their pro version adds much more features like:

• 85+ more pro widgets spanning across design, marketing, theme building, dynamic content, WooCommerce, etc
• Global widget feature
• 300+ pro templates & blocks for the quicker page building experience
• Popup builder for supercharging lead generation
• Theme builder for complete design and customization freedom on your site
• Integrations with many email marketing software and also Zapier
• Dynamic content with ACF and PODs integrations
• Much more

If you want a complete comparison of free vs pro, please refer to this page.

Elementor installation

In order to install Elementor Pro, you need to have both the free version of Elementor and also pro plugin installed on your site.

Once you have these plugins active, you need to head over the “license” and pop in the license key.

You can see Elementor adds two menu items, “Elementor” and “Templates”.

The Elementor menu has options for you to:

• Edit settings (like you can see in the screenshot) – Enabling or disabling post types, and also some global settings related to style, integrations, etc.
• Upload custom fonts: You can upload custom fonts to your page builder in any format like WOFF, WOFF2, TTF, SVG or EOT File
• Upload custom icons (alongside the default FontAwesome icons)
• Role manager: This allows you to set Elementor’s permissions to different user roles on your site. The two permissions Elementor provides are:
  • Access to editor
  • Access to edit content only
• Tools: Here you have options to regenerate CSS, sync library, safe mode, debug bar, replace URL, version control, and also maintenance mode for your site.
• System info: Under system info, you can view all the details regarding your server, WordPress environment, theme, list of active plugins, log, and much more.
• Getting started: With a link to their documentation and videos
• Get help: It is linked to their support page
• License

Under Templates, you have Saved Templates, Popups, Theme Builder, etc. I’ll come back to these later in this blog post.

Elementor page builder

Elementor page builder will be enabled on all WordPress posts and pages by default.

If you want to enable the Elementor page builder on any of your own custom post types, you can make use of their settings section as I’ve shown above.

In the post/page edit screen, you can see the button “Edit with Elementor”.

Page builder interface

Once the page builder is loaded, you can see the webpage with page builder loaded. The page building experience is very swift with Elementor.

It’s faster than any of the WordPress page builder plugins that I’ve encountered.

All the elements offered by Elementor are present in the sidebar. Although the sidebar is collapsible, by default the sidebar is open.

Whenever you want to start building your page, you need to click on the plus button and select the layout for the section.

Alternatively, you can also click on the “Templates” button to import any of the pre-built templates from the Elementor library.

When you see the button of the page builder, you have:

• Settings: Where you can modify the title of the page, featured image, layout, and also status.
• Navigator: Navigator allows you to see the hierarchy of your page, and allows you to reorder the blocks and rename the blocks for a better understanding of the page structure.
• History: Here you can view the actions you did on the page and redo or undo them. You also have a revisions section where all your revisions are saved.
• Responsive mode: Here you can toggle between the desktop, tablet or mobile mode of page building.
• Preview: Allows you to preview the page on a separate tab
• Update: Here you can publish, update, or save the page as a template

Under Elementor page builder settings, you have options to

• Set default colors for your page builder. You can add your brand colors to your palettes.
• Under default fonts, you can set the default font family and weight for different headings and texts on your page
• Under global settings, you can get default generic fonts, content width, widget space, etc.
• Under preferences, you have the option to toggle automatic/light/dark mode and also toggle the visibility of the editing handles, etc.
• Finder allows you to activate spotlight search-like functionality for Elementor

Templates

With Elementor you have access to dozens of professionally built templates for landing pages, sections, and also popups (which you’ll discover later on).

There are literally hundreds of sections that Elementor comes across various categories as you can see.

Once you select any templates, you can make the necessary changes to the templates and save them under “My Templates” for further use.

If you want to save any section for future use, you can right-click and select “Save as template”.

Elements

There are at least 70+ elements coming with Elementor.

For each and every element, you have:

• Content: Here you can select the templates of the element, text, add a link, alignment, icon, size, and others.
• Style: Here you can change the color of the text, background, hover effects, etc.
• Advanced: In here you can modify the margin, padding, z-index, motion effects, background, custom CSS, etc.

Again depending upon the element in question, the options provided by Elementor differ.

Dynamic content

Elementor also comes with dynamic content functionalities.

These are some of the elements that allow you to pull the dynamic post-related elements to the frontend.

Along with this, for almost all the major elements, the dynamic content functionality is available.

You can pull the data of any post-specific fields or custom fields (in case you are using ACF or PODS), to the frontend.

One such elegant implementation can be found in review posts on our site.

The data we provide in the custom fields (created by ACF), will be pulled to the frontend by Elementor.

Mobile responsiveness

With mobile-first web design practices on the rise, Elementor offers great responsive editing features.

Here you need to select “Mobile”, and the Elementor page builder turns into mobile editor.

Here the changes you make to margin, padding or any other options which have a mobile icon next to them, will only be applicable to mobile devices.

Also when it comes to elements, you can toggle the visibility of the elements on various devices like desktop, tablet, and mobile.

You can refer to this official Elementor’s video on all the mobile editing capabilities in this video:

Theme builder

Elementor’s theme builder helps you a lot to build websites with ultimate design and customization freedom.

It allows you to tweak the aspects of your website that can’t be done with the help of themes.

With the theme builder, you can easily customize website headers, footers, archive pages, single post pages and other areas of your site with the power of drag and drop functionality.

Building web templates with the theme builder involves:

1. Template Type: You need to select the type of template you need to create. It can be header, footer, single post page or archive page.
2. Dynamic data: You need to build your templates by making use of dynamic content elements I’ve explained before. By making use of these elements, the data will be populated automatically
3. Conditions: Here you need to set the conditions for where your templates should be displayed on

Now the header I created will be applied across the site, except the blog page (for which I have a separate header). Everytime you need to make changes to the header across the site, you just need to edit the template.

You can also create a “single” template for applying to posts and pages on your site.

The template that you select and customize will be applied across every blog post. You can also consider having category-specific templates for your blog posts by creating multiple templates and playing with the conditions.

Like this you can create:

1. Archive pages (categories, tags, etc)
2. Headers
3. Footer
4. Section
5. Popup
6. Single
7. Page

Elementor Popups

Recently, I’ve created a dedicated video on Elementor popups – do watch it below.

Here you need to select one among dozens of templates.

There are different types of templates like popups, slide-ins, notification bars, etc.

Once the popup loads, as you can see you can modify the popup settings, by clicking on the gear button at the bottom of the sidebar.

Some notable features available for the popup are:

1. Width and height
2. Show close button after (secs)
3. Prevent closing on overlay
4. Prevent closing on ESC key
5. Disable page scrolling
6. Avoid multiple popups
7. Etc.

You also have options to modify the styles of the popup overlay color and also the close button.

One important element for every popup is “form”.

Once a person clicks on the form, there are many actions which you can let Elementor perform.

You can have multiple “Actions after submit” for a form.

In the above example of my webinar optin, you can see I have multiple actions like redirect (for tracking conversions), webhook (for adding people to the webinar), MailerLite (my autoresponder).

You can trigger popups on your site when certain conditions and rules are met.

Here you’ll be setting the conditions where your popups need to be triggered. It can be certain posts, pages, categories, tags, entire site (excluding some category posts), etc.

Here you need to set – what triggers the popup? On scroll to element, onclick and on-inactivity are quite unique ones.

In advanced rules, you have settings to avoid showing popups to the cold audience, same user, referral rules for pop-ups, option to hide popups for logged in users, etc.

By making use of these settings, you can target the popups to the right audience who may find your popups useful and may convert well.

Here’s an example of how I use popups for promoting affiliate offers.

Above I’ve created a Black Friday bar that’ll be triggered during Black Friday, with a countdown and also will pull the product name and affiliate URLs from advanced custom fields of those posts.

Sounds too good huh?

One final question I like to answer when it comes to Elementor popups is – How to trigger Elementor popups on the button or link clicks?

The below screenshot will answer your query 🙂

Here, you can see I have my settings so that when people click on the “big green button”, a webinar popup will be triggered.

Some time-saving genius features of Elementor

Global Widget

This has been the most time-saving feature for me.

With Elementor’s Global widget, you can save some widgets as global widgets. Whenever you edit these global widgets, all other places where these global widgets are used also get modified.

For example in the above example, I have a global countdown timer for my weekly webinar.

I’ve used this timer in multiple places.

Rather than changing the date and time at all places, I can set it as a global widget.

You can consider adding your countdown timers, testimonials, about me box, as global widgets for saving a great deal of frustration.

Elementor Navigator

This is a really great feature in the page builder interface, that really helps me in being organized when building long sales copies.

Here you’ll get a fair overview of all the sections present on the page. You can rename the section names, toggle them to see what’s inside them, rearrange the sections so that it makes logical flow.

Reordering the sections using Navigator comes really handy as the page becomes more complex.

Elementor Finder

This is a great feature that comes in with Elementor to find and edit the pages super-fast.

Whenever you are logged into WordPress, you just need to click on CMD+E or CTRL+E on your keyboard. It’ll open up the spotlight-like search box.

This saves you tons of time searching for the right page to edit manually and launching an Elementor page builder. If you know the power of spotlight search on Mac, you know what I mean.

Copying and pasting the styles

With Elementor, you can copy any element and paste only the style of that element to another element.

(have those toggles on for mute, autoplay, and also inline play on)

As you can see, the copy-pasting of the styles also works across different pages.

It saves a lot of time when maintaining the consistency of design in the landing pages.

Keyboard shortcuts

When you are in the Elementor Page Builder, you can just click on CMD + ? or CTRL + ? to display the hotkeys available.

Once you remember to make use of these shortcuts in your page building workflow, you’ll be far quicker.

How does Elementor compare to other page builders?

Elementor vs Divi

Divi is more popular among large business and corporate sites. The learning curve of Divi is quite higher than the Elementor, which is easy to learn.

Elementor excels when it comes to refined customization and also the speed of implementation of the features.

With Divi, you’ll be forced to make use of their own theme. On the other hand, with Elementor you can make use of many themes like Astra, GeneratePress, OceanWP or Hestia.

Elegant Themes feels like a gated ecosystem. In this regard, You can call Divi as Apple (without being costly!) and Elementor as Android for page builders as the pace at which Elementor is evolving is astounding.

When it comes to pricing, Divi comes with a lifetime plan, but still, I would go with Elementor happily paying yearly fees.

Elementor vs Beaver Builder

Beaver Builder is especially known for its usage on client sites. All of their plans come with unlimited site usage and whitelabel functionality. On the other hand, you need to pay $199/year for getting 1,000 site license with Elementor.

Also, you need to also note that Beaver Builder sells some of the features as separate addons (for example Beaver Themer) which Elementor offers right inside the core package as a theme builder.

If you’re interested in implementing Whitelabel functionality to Elementor, you can make use of this plugin.

Elementor vs Thrive Themes

Thrive Themes develop marketing-friendly WordPress products. They have products like Thrive Architect, Thrive Leads, Thrive Ultimatum, Thrive Quiz Builder, etc.

When all these products integrate with each other, you can build complete advanced marketing funnel with Thrive Themes.

On the other hand, Elementor is a design and performance-centric page builder plugin that also comes with advanced popups feature which is far better than Thrive Architect’s lightbox feature.

Elementor vs Brizy

Brizy is one of the newest page building plugins in the market right now. It has really great features like:

• Brizy cloud
• Global styling (that allows you to change colors and fonts easily)
• Pop-ups
• 500+ block designs

It can be called both a competitor of page builder plugins and also cloud-based page builders like Leadpages.

However, comparing Brizy to Elementor is quite not possible. Because Elementor is an old plugin and has gone through countless iterations to make it the best page builder for WordPress.

Developer friendliness (3rd party addons)

Elementor, unlike many other page builder plugins, encourages 3rd party developers to create elements and integrations with Elementor.

They have their developer documentation to get started. There are dozens of free and premium plugins for Elementor.

Some great plugins that add much more power to Elementor are Crocoblock (their whole business model is on Elementor), UAE (from Astra theme developers), Essential Addons for Elementor, etc.

There are also various free plugins in WordPress repo to add new elements, functionalities, and tweak Elementor options. If you want to have a look at some of the third party addons for Elementor you can refer to my previous post on best Elementor addons.

Pricing

Elementor is a freemium plugin.

They have three premium plans. The only difference between these plans is pricing and website usage.

I’m currently on their plus plan so I can make use of their page builder on three of my sites.

If you’re into web design and client work, you can get the expert plan.

Compared to competitors like Divi (which comes at $249 lifetime), Elementor is not cheap. But considering the features and flexibility, you may need to rethink.

Pros and cons

Verdict

Elementor has been my all-time WordPress plugin. I currently use it on all my sites.

When you compare Elementor to its competitors, I certainly agree that it is priced on a bit higher side, but I think it’s worth every penny. Once you get accustomed to the features, benefits and also design flexibility Elementor has got to offer, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

Elementor prevents you from using multiple plugins on your sites, like social share plugins, lead generation plugins, notification bar plugins, contact form plugin, and much more.

If you have doubts about my review on Elementor, do let me know below in the comments section.