WordPress is the most popular platform for blogging. Thanks to the wide-range of plugins and themes it offers.
In the recent years, the visual page builder plugins for WordPress are all in rage.
In fact, almost all the serious WordPress blog owners use WYSIWYG page builder plugins.
If you don’t know what WYSIWYG is, it stands for “What You See Is What You Get” and with
| Rank | Product | Number of elements | Starting price |
| 1 | Elementor (Best pick) | 80+ | $49/year (for 1 site) |
| 2 | Divi Builder (Best for money) | 46+ | $89/year |
| 3 | Thrive Architect (Best for marketers) | 37+ | $67/year |
Best Visual WordPress Page Builders
There are many WYSIWYG page builder plugins, but among them very few are reliable to depend on.
In this section of the review, let me list a few of them and review them completely, compare them with their competitors and help you make the right decision.
#1. Elementor – Best page builder for web designers
Elementor is by far the most popular page builder for WordPress. It is a freemium tool, that comes with limited features in the free version and the pro version comes with more advanced features.
Who’s it for? The team behind Elementor have put a lot of emphasis on functionality and design customization options offered by the plugin. It’s perfect for web designers and agencies.
Once you install the plugin on your WordPress site, you’ll be able to see “Edit with Elementor” button when you are creating/editing any post or a page.
On clicking this button, it’ll load up the frontend page builder interface, where you can witness the visual building experience.
Here in the left hand-side (default), you can find all the elements that Elementor offers you.
You can drag these elements into the canvas area and start building your page visually.
In the above example, I’ve selected a blank canvas.
Once you drag in any element, you can select it and alter the content, style and other advanced aspects of those elements as shown in the screenshot. The customization options offered by Elementor are endless.
The interface of Elementor is very straightforward, seems familiar, and is easily understandable right off the bat. You can clearly see that there’s a lot of thinking and refinements down on UI and UX part, which is sometimes overlooked by other page builders.
This is all about some of the basic working mechanism of Elementor or any other page builder.
Here are some features offered by their page builder.
- 80+ elements
- Shape dividers – Lets you add cool SVG graphics to your page with zero coding
- Revision manager – For reverting back to a previous version of the page
- History section – Undo functionality reloaded
- Navigator – Truly a time-saver while building pages
- Elementor Finder – Spotlight search (USP)
- Display conditions for templates (USP)
- Responsive mode for mobile/tablet page building (Crazy versatility)
- Safe mode (USP)
- Maintenance mode (USP)
- Gutenberg module (USP)
Let’s now get into all the features that it offers.
Here are some of the features offered by Elementor Pro vs the free version:
- 50+ Advanced Widgets along with the 30 free basic blocks (Highest of all)
- Elementor theme builder
- Dynamic content
- Integration with ACF and PODS plugins (USP)
- Design oriented popup builder
- Visual form builder
- WooCommerce Builder + Over 15 Shop Widgets
- Dynamic Content & Custom Fields Capabilities
- 300+ Pro Templates (Highest of all)
- Global Widget
- Role manager
- Live custom CSS (for developers)
- Much, much and more
Although the free version of Elementor is generous enough, Elementor Pro truly unlocks a whole new dimension of features as you can see in the above list.
Elementor’s greatest strength is rolling out new features super-quick by keeping latest design trends in mind.
If you want to get a glimpse of what’s possible with Elementor, just take a look at my site. I’ve used Elementor Pro and Astra Pro theme on my site – BloggingX. You can see the boldness in the design and how neatly I have the category pages setup with custom backgrounds and colors.
Elementor integrates with major online tools, autoresponders, etc. It also integrates with various WordPress plugins, font/icon sites (like Google fonts, Adobe fonts, Font Awesome) and also social networking sites. You can see all the integrations in this page.
When it comes to pricing, the Elementor is very competitively priced compared to the features it offers.
If you are planning to use Elementor on only one or upto three sites, you may want to go with either Personal or Business plan.
They don’t offer lifetime deals as the plugin needs to be maintained and new features need to be added.
It makes some sense to pay you the yearly price seeing at their impressive changelog and potentially bug-free enhancements. At the end of the year, you get 25% renewal discount which is quite impressive.
Bottomline: It is hands down the best page builder plugin you can get when it comes to versatility, and customization options.
There are also various developers who develop addons for Elementor like Crocoblock, Ultimate Addons for Elementor, dozens of others that truly extend its functionalities. It’s like “Android” for page builders – it’s that versatile.
There are also various developers who develop addons for Elementor like Crocoblock, Ultimate Addons for Elementor, dozens of others that truly extend its functionalities. It’s like “Android” for page builders – it’s that versatile.
#2. Divi Builder – Best cheap Elementor alternative
Divi is one of the most popular WordPress page builders out there, in fact it is one of the oldest ones. But, they were quite late to the WYSIWYG game.
In their page builder, there are two modes:
- Backend editor
- Frontend editor
The backend builder is also called classic builder, and is their legacy mode for building pages. Honestly, it’s not that good and now WYSIWYG. They still have it in place so as to not disappoint the classic fans.
Most of the times, you’ll building the pages using the frontend editor.
With Divi 3.0, the things have been advanced a lot when compared to what you know about Divi years ago.
The classic editor is still there, but there’s an option to switch to front end editor as well.
Above is the screenshot how frontend editor looks like. When compared to all the page builders I mentioned in this post, Divi has the most attractive UI/UX.
Your page building experience will be filled with eye-candies.
The builder layout in Divi is essentially an overlay and it lives outside of your page and
The best part about the interface is that there’s no sidebars that you need to hide to take a look at the page fully. By default, the entire page will be visible and modules/customization options only popup when editing.
Just like in Elementor, you’ll be editing the content inline.
In case of Elementor or Thrive Architect, you’ll be building pages using their builder page.
But with Divi, you have the ability to also build the page right within your WordPress post/page editor screen as you can see in the screenshots.
Here are some of the features offered by Divi builder.
- 46+ content modules with support for third-party modules
- Unlimited undos and redos
- Global items (like global widget in Elementor) – But more advanced with selective sync
- Split testing – For conversion rate optimization (USP)
- Copy module style – Super-quick page building (USP)
- Divi role editor – Restrict Divi functionality or even element access based on WordPress user roles
- Lock element – To avoid making unnecessary changes to a finished module
- Shape dividers – For making advanced shapes on your page
- Divi layouts with advanced sync
- Dynamic content
- Divi theme builder
- Much more
When compared to Elementor, there’s a bit steep learning curve with Divi – as it does not have a quite straightforward layout.
You don’t need to play with custom CSS and media queries to make the Divi layouts mobile responsive, there’s a separate mobile visual editor like that of Elementor.
Divi’s email optin module integrates with various email marketing softwares. Almost all the major email marketing providers are covered.
When it comes to pricing, Elegant themes offer to all their plugins and themes with their plans. You can either choose to pay them yearly or lifetime deal.
I would recommend you go with a lifetime deal, as you can save a lot of money in the long run which is something that is not present in Elementor.
Another thing to note here is that Elegant themes offer you to use their plugins and themes and unlimited sites with GPL license contrary to Elementor making it the best value for money – especially for agencies.
Concern (especially for agencies): One of the major concerns with Divi that is often overlooked is the plugin lock-in problem. It means if you deactivate Divi in the future, it’ll leave behind a big mess of shortcodes. On the other hand, it’s not the case with Elementor, Thrive Architect and others.
Bottomline: I would say that Divi has plenty of design features to make it comparable to Elementor. The native split testing functionality offered by Divi Builder is unmatchable. It is our next best pick after Elementor page builder.
#3. Thrive Architect – Best page builder for marketers
I can’t simply compare Thrive Architect with Elementor or Divi Builder as it’s catered to a whole different audience/need.
Thrive Architect was initially Thrive Content Builder later they gave it a complete revamp from the ground up to call it Thrive Architect. I’ve been using their plugin on my niche sites – even it was Thrive Content Builder. And, I can say that Thrive Architect is better than the old Thrive Content Builder in every aspect.
For digital marketers, the features like lightboxes, popups with analytics, A/B testing, integrations with other marketing plugins matters a lot. That’s where Thrive Architect comes into play.
Who’s it for? If you are a digital marketer, who wants to implement some of the most advanced marketing strategies in your landing pages like advanced scarcity marketing, advanced lead generation, online courses, and much more – you may want to consider Thrive Themes membership or Thrive Architect.
You just need to launch the Thrive Architect builder page on the edit page/post page.
It’ll launch the WYSIWYG editor.
Here on the right-hand side of the screen, you can see all the elements that Thrive Architect has got to offer you.
On the left-hand side, you can alter the style and content of the selected element.
At the bottom of the page, you get the option to toggle between the desktop, tablet and mobile page building modes along with the preview button.
Here are some of the features offered by Thrive Architect.
- 37+ elements for page building (I really hope that they encourage 3rd-party developers to develop marketing modules for them)
- Typefocus animation
- Refined customization options
- 270+ conversion-optimized landing page templates (main selling point)
- Revision manager
- Undo and redo buttons
- Edit source code (USP) – very handy
- Page events for conversion optimization (USP)
- Thrive Lightboxes for list building
- Templates and symbols
Here’s the kicker.
Thrive Architect as it’s a product from Thrive Themes, it integrates great with other Thrive products like:
- Thrive Optimize ( A/B testing plugin for WordPress)
- Thrive Leads (Best lead generation plugin for WordPress – Better than OptinMonster)
- Thrive Ultimatum (Scarcity marketing plugin for WordPress)
- Thrive Quiz Builder (WordPress quiz building plugin for lead generation integrates with Thrive Architect and Thrive Leads)
- Thrive Theme Builder (Unlocks endless possibilities to visually edit the sidebars, widgets, menus, footers, and all theme elements)
Thrive Architect adds in more elements to its page builder when these plugins are installed and opens a whole new level of possibilities in your marketing campaigns.
It integrates with these plugins, and adds in functionality to do the A/B split testing, build lead generation forms, links and multi-state popups using the power of WYSIWYG page builder, build highly customizable countdown timers with advanced lockdown features, and also build interactive quizzes for lead generation, and many more.
If you need access only to Thrive Architect without any of the plugins to integrate it with, you can get it for $67 or $97 according to usage.
However, as discussed in this blog post if you want it to be a complete marketing suite you may want to get Thrive Membership with all their plugins.
Please note that at the end of the year you only need to renew the license if you want support – updates will be for lifetime even if you don’t renew it!
So at $228 you get lifetime updates to all their plugins!
Bottomline: It’s the best WYSIWYG page builder for digital marketers for whom conversions matter, and are not looking for some features that Elementor offers that are only hardcore web designers need. Again, I would like to emphasize that Thrive Architect’s power will only be unveiled to the full-extent once you start using it with other plugins Thrive Themes team offers.
Wrapping up
These are the only WYSIWYG visual builder plugins for WordPress I would recommend.
When it comes to number of features and design flexibility, I recommend you Elementor or alternatively Divi. However, Divi costs you a little less and comes with GPL license for usage on unlimited sites and also lifetime deal option.
If you are an advanced digital marketer for whom tight integration with other marketing plugins is essential, then go for Thrive Architect. It also comes with 270+ conversion optimized templates that’re alone worth the price.
At the end you can’t go wrong with any one of these.
