If we imagine an epic battle in the WordPress frameworks arena, we definitively can think in Divi vs Elementor. Even if technically Divi and Elementor are not the same, both are recognized by developers all around the world as the two top-notch more powerful frameworks available. Both are tools that you definitively want to have to build your website page.
Ali, Frazier, Tyson, Holyfield, Mayweather, Pacquiao; it was a no brainer when you’ve put money on them to face any other fighter. But when your bet is in a top fight, the decision is not that simple. Like judges in a boxing match, you have to check and analyze round by round to make a final decision. In this case, you have to understand what do you want to do with these tools and what is essential to achieve those goals. This information is what it will help when the moment to decide comes, and you have to put your money into Divi or Elementor page builders WordPress framework.
We are going look at this Elementor and Divi battle in an appropriate way for a WordPress framework comparison. And this is thinking about the different needs that a developer can have considering different goals.
This fight is not a fight that is going to have the same winner for every reader, and even after this article, you’ll have to make a tough decision. Nevertheless, the good news is that we are here to help you. Let’s take a look at some detailed information on this Elementor vs Divi battle, to discover what makes them different, considering that both are top-notch products for WordPress in 2020.
It’s curious that two WordPress products that both works as a visual builder, never were technically the same kind of tool. Elegant Themes created Divi a decade ago as a theme, and its evolution into Divi builder happened without losing the “theme” condition. Elementor is a page builder as well but works as a plugin.
Both Divi and Elementor and their developing companies gained prestige over the years do their outstanding work and contribution to the WordPress developers community. Divi and Elementor are names that now are undoubtedly associated with the drag & drop visual editor page builder technology.
When you are using Elementor or Divi builder to create your page or website, the differences are not as evident as you can think. In the end, you will find yourself in a similar workspace: a drag and drop visual builder with a lot of options and features that save you from a slower or more complex coding process.
So even if they started with different concepts, now it’s quite similar: two real-time website builders replacing coding with visual builder workspace. This coincidence means that the last updates and the future improvements of both products are going in the same direction.
Divi 4.0 is a WordPress Theme by Elegant Themes. It is designed originally as a theme and evolved into a complete workshop with a builder powerful enough to create complex websites for a variety of goals, and accelerate the whole development process.
It is important to know that the Divi framework is the Divi theme and the visual page builder. Of course, both work perfectly together, but they are not theoretically the same, and other themes can be used as well.
Divi has been since years the shinning star product of Elegant Themes, a company that is now one of the major providers for WordPress, with a lot of loyal users and more than 2 million websites around the world made with that technology.
Elementor is a sophisticated WordPress plugin and theme builder and, like Divi, uses a visual drag and drop editor to make more comfortable and faster the work of the website developers.
Elementor framework doesn’t include a theme like Divi, so you need to activate and install a WordPress theme to use it. Any theme can work with it, but some themes designed to get along with these kinds of frameworks are a better choice than just a random one.
Even considering that Elementor is younger than Divi, since its release in 2016, it made a massive impact on users, primarily because of its powerful free version where you can have an excellent taste of how good it can be the experience of using it.
In less than four years, millions of users around the world made Elementor the main asset for website development.
Let’s start this duel checking Elementor vs Divi general features. As we said, both have a market share from 2 to 3 million websites, which gives a little advantage to Elementor, considering that it is on the market less than Divi. But there is a lot about these numbers related to the free version of Elementor: even with some restrictions, you can do a lot there and is probably the main reason why it gets popular so easy.
There are three main categories in Divi that together give you the general structure to build your website. The containers area that we call “Sections,” the divisions that we call “Rows” and the real content that we call “Modules.”
When you are planning the most basic structure of your website, you use sections to divide it. It is the standard division between the header, footer, and body. You have different pages to replicate or not the design you created for your homepage.
You add rows and columns to your website to divide sections into small spaces. This decision depends on how much content you are planning to add and how you picture the general structure of your global page, homepage, or a single page. You can even create “Specialty sections,” that allows you to work with vertical orientation even outside of the standard “sidebar” place.
In the modules, you integrate the specific content that we show and the way we do it. Modules on the website will be text, images, videos, maps, paragraphs, polls, contact forms, and more.
As Divi, Elementor has three different categories to build a website. The container is called “section,” the dividers are called “columns,” and the content is called “widget.”
Sections are the containers for widgets and columns. The difference is that you don’t have to add it to a page because it is by default part of the workspace. You open a blank page, drag and drop a widget to it and create a section with that single widget inside.
In addition to normal, in Elementor, there are “intern sections,” that basically accept elements inside, making it possible to build complex designs.
Columns are the vertical divisions for sections. They work like a container for widgets, including those from the intern section. Adding a new section, we can choose how many columns it will have.
Similar to Divi modules, Elementor widgets represent the content itself. Here you have videos, galleries, buttons, text, images, and so on. To add a widget is as simple as drag & drop one from the sidebar menu to the page or click on widget selection panel with drag and dropping too.
Elementor has more widgets to add than Divi, and both work with third-party companies that offers special features and widgets. The drag & Drop system for a lot of users is more friendly and easy to use.
A page builder is a tool that uses visual drag & drop concept to design easy and quickly a pro website without coding. Divi and Elementor are two of the top-notch page builders in the market, delivering in every new version and update exciting new features.
The workflow with a page builder it’s usually to pick a basic design and then to place elements in the body, header & footer until the design is complete.
These tools are getting more popular because the learning curve is being less challenging every day, and because the results are improving more and more. There is some investigation that points out that for most of the users, after an entire day of using one of these tools, there is a significant improvement in performance.
Professional and experienced developers have something to get from page builders as well. Time is money, and this is something that gets much better whatever Divi or Elementor is your choice.
Both Divi theme and Elementor Pro have several design tools that have enough power to become a challenge even for an expert coder. Of course, this happens just in the beginning, because the main concept is behind the idea that anyone can use them
If beginners can find a tool, advanced developers can combine them with their coding work in order to get precisely what they are looking for.
If you double-click in a Divi element, no matter it is a section, a row, or a module, you will see the control panel. It is possible to access this panel hovering the cursor over an element until you see an action bar.
Here you work with content, design, and advanced tabs in the control panel, where you can modify various settings. In the design tab, you can choose your font, shadows, margins, animation, filters, and more. This is really easy to use even if you are a beginner. Advanced users can add CSS specific code to be in complete control of their work.
It is possible to have different settings considering responsive features. You can choose a font size for laptops, phones, and tablets, to be sure that your website will always look perfect, no matter the size of the screen and the navigator used.
When you click on a widget in Elementor, you can see some differences in the control panel sidebar. Each one of the widgets has its parameters, depending on the specific features.
In Elementor, you also find three tabs in the control panel; video tab, style tab, and advanced tab. The tabs change depending on the settings related to the selected element.
Con la pestaña de estilo puede modificar la configuración de estilo como el color de fondo, bordes, errores tipográficos, sombras y más. La pestaña avanzada incluye margen y códigos, entre otros.
If we compare Elementor vs Divi, we can see how complete and powerful are both as page builder tools. If you are an amateur and a professional, you will have enough elements to create most of the websites they are going to require from you.
Nevertheless, all that freedom can be overwhelming, especially in the beginning. Some times you expect to have something more than a blank page to work on, especially when your perception is not trained enough, and you can, in the end, create a messy design. In this case, layout packs can come handy.
As we said, Divi includes a theme as part of its framework, and Elementor is essentially a plugin. Besides this definition, both offers to its users a significant amount of layouts and designs designed thinking on the most common needs.
While both offer several excellent themes, Divi’s layouts are one level up considering how much you can work over them, and how easy they adapt to make some minor changes and have the appearance of a totally different design.
You can find single pages with one design or a complete package with different pages united by a similar aesthetical and functional concept. If the former is centered on the idea of a single homepage, the latter includes the homepage, blog, video section, contact page, and more.
With the builder, use Divi to save your edited themes to use them again, or you can export them to use it a different WordPress setup. This is some feature that you will love when you work developing, and you have clients with similar activity and requirements.
You can use Elementor templates like blocks or pages. Elementor free version gives access to 40 of those, but if you have the paid license version, you can choose among 150 different layouts.
Blocks are templates with a single section that you can add to a page. There are blocks like contact form, call to action buttons, frequently asked questions FAQ, and more. Page templates have every single part of a page and were made thinking in the big picture.
Elementor included in the last version an option to save a theme, and export them to using later.
The most popular tool of Divi and Elementor is what we know as a theme page builder. With this, you create an entire website from scratch, including all the content and each one of the pages. Header, footer, sidebar, body, and whatever you need through the development process.
Elementor had some history with this feature, but builder Divi included it from its 4.0 version, making it possible to easily create things than before were only possible using code, including theme import and export.
The “global theme” feature makes it possible to create a main template that will change every page of a website or some specific pages. The first thing you do is to choose where you want to add your template; posts, pages, tags, categories, and more. Then, you can build and design.
You can save as global theme headers, footers, or body, and mix it up with other elements. You can start with a template for the body and then create headers, footers, and other elements, or backward.
If you click over the custom body menu, custom header or custom footer, you will see a small menu with some options, and that’s the moment when you can use a premade template or save what you are actually doing.
When we are inside the “theme builder” option on the WordPress page, we realize that we can create some templates for pages, sections, popups, header, footer. All of this works in the same way as it works with pages, but the available elements in the sidebar change considering the specifics of the theme you are creating.
After finishing the process of creating the template, you can choose how and when this template will be visible. This part of the work Divi makes it easier than Elementor, because there you have to mark some checkboxes to include or exclude a template, and here you have to click the “add a condition” button and then look for the down drop menu every time you want to do this again.
It is not that easy to just go and throw and adjective so ambiguous like “better” to compare Divi with Elementor. There are some crucial aspects to consider that we analyzed through this article.
You’ll see in different reviews available on the Internet opinions that point Divi as the tool aimed to pro users, and Elementor Pro as the one that connects better with beginners and people without coding or developing experience. And yes, we have to agree with this. Both page builders share the total framework concept but have slight differences in their designs that attract different users.
Most of the people using WordPress Theme are not page builders but an alternative to put some premade WordPress Page together and create a website just adding content. For them, you can find exciting layouts in both WordPress frameworks and use them as one of those theme.
The power of the Divi builder and Elementor visual builder is not that different. Maybe if we go deep in the comparison, third-party developers and specific options can make us say that you can develop more sophisticated websites with Divi.
But Elementor has some exciting features as well and some of theme that beat Divi parallels. But the most important pro of Elementor is simplicity: to do much with less effort, especially in the beginning.
Easiness is one of the topics when we find some differences between Divi and Elementor. But when we talk about “ease of use,” the first we have to ask ourselves is: easy for who? For a coding developer? For a beginner that is working on its first WordPress website? It’s not possible to write from both perspectives at the same time, so we have to find some middle ground to reach a conclusion that makes sense.
Let’s say we have some experience using WordPress, that we know something about Divi and Elementor and some other themes, plugins, and frameworks. But we are not coder experts, and we are not doing this like, eight hours per day. So we are using the free version of Elementor and Divi, testing both, playing a bit with the features in order to make a final purchase decision.
When you use the Divi theme for the first time, and see all those options available in the visual drag and drop page builder, it’s just amazing. It is impossible not to think, “wow, I really imagine myself doing some crazy stuff with this.” But the thing is, that probably your next thought will be something like “where to start?”. Because yes, you probably will go from amazing to overwhelming feeling. There are so many options around, and so many things to do, and maybe you just want to do one standard website for yourself or a regular client.
Elementor is maybe easier to understand from the beginning, and with a learning curve less challenging. The page builder a bit more “friendly,” and you can quickly find the basics in order to build the roots of your website. This indicator means that with a few hours of use and b testing, you find yourself in total control. This opinion is also supported by the fact that a lot of its page builders start from the free version, so they already have some experience using it when they go to Elementor Pro to build a theme.
User Interface UI is a significant thing when we talk about a page or theme builder. It is the place where we are going to spend most of the time working, so it’s going to have a major impact on our performance. Using WordPress theme or page builder is defined by the features related to this section, and especially if you are doing it in a framework.
Elegant Themes created a User Interface for its Divi Visual Builder that we can define it as minimalistic. It is clean and straightforward, but with all that you need to have the work done. If you are in your first steps of web development., maybe you will not understand all the options you see when you explore, but this feeling is over after you know most of the basic concepts.
You have a very interesting fullscreen experience with popups that replaces the bars where usually the options are. Nevertheless, using this mode will make you go through more clicks in order to do different things in the Divi builder. The good news is that you can change the view of your workspace easily, something that comes handy when you edit long pages.
You will notice that moving elements in the page view go slower when the page is getting larger. This issue can be solved by changing the view, having as a result, and improvement of the general performance.
Elementor pro version and free version have a user interface utterly different from Divi. Elementor is not designed to be clean and minimalistic, but to have a page builder that makes things easier. And that’s it.
Elementor and Divi have here their signature here. Elementor is much easier to learn than Divi and makes you feel “at home” very fast. The concept is the “construction blocks” that you use to build every page divided into sections. Using drag & drop, you can add new elements from the sidebar menu.
Behind Elementor is the idea is accessibility. So Divi is maybe more suitable for people with a designer eye that want to have a cleaner space and Elementor for those who want to be introduced to the developing world without having a career behind them.
Nobody denies how nice it is to look at the visual editor and page builder of these frameworks. But if you compare your experience at the beginning of what you see in YouTube tutorials with what happens when you are developing long pages and using several features of the builder, it’s not that smooth.
It looks like both Elementor page theme builder and Divi theme works well in the first stage of page development, but the builder goes buggy when you have a lot of elements on one page. So the more complex the projects, the more problems you can have with this issue.
What kind of laptop you are using and how many things you are doing at the same time are relevant aspects of how your visual editor works. Nevertheless, the reports around this issue are in both Divi and Elementor reviews, so it is a thing to consider, no matter which one of them you are finally going to use.
For some reason, there is a lot of curiosity to know if Elementor Pro and Divi builder can work together at the same time. The answer is yes, Elementor works with Divi, basically because it is a plugin, and Divi a WordPress Theme. So yes, you can use both on a single website to build one WordPress page.
The question is: how can this be useful for you? Maybe if you are aware of some specific thing that you need at the same time on a website and Elementor Divi combined can come handy, you can try. But if we are honest in this, it is not recommended at all.
We recommend you to not use Divi and Elementor at the same time for building a website unless you have a compelling reason to do it. Both page builders at the same time could be a bit “heavy” for your website, and we think you should analyze their differences and make a choice. Use Divi page builder or Elementor considering your needs and the pros and contras that you find in both.
There are two main aspects of pricing that users are worried about page builders: how much money they have to pay, how many websites are supported by the license, and how much time of license do you have with your purchase.
Divi offers two types of licenses, both for unlimited websites. One is $89 for one year, and the other one is 1-time$249 payment for lifetime updates, support, and access without many website restrictions. It is hard to say something against this business model: 1-time payments are one of the things we miss the most from old times, and Divi offers it for a more than reasonable amount of money.
Elementor Pro version has a more complex pricing system. First of all, all their licenses are for one year. Second, there is no license for unlimited websites, although the expert license gives you 1,000 websites for one year, which is basically an unrestricted use. And the most criticized aspect of Elementor Pro: there is no chance at all to make 1-time payment for a lifetime license.
The facts are undeniable: if we compare the 2 top licenses of Divi & Elementor, the former is way better than the latter. Pricing is, of course, not the only factor to consider to decide what product you are going to purchase, but the difference in this aspect is essential, and score points for Divi.
We don’t think that you can say that Elementor Pro is better than Divi at all. As we said before in this article, it is a question that is hard to answer.
If you want to start to develop your first websites, and especially if you don’t want to put money to it, you should try b testing a page builder like Elementor free version. You’ll have time to understand how this framework works and to really know if for you worth an investment in going into the Pro version.
So let’s say the if the main thing for you to choose one of these page builders is to learn, and experiment with the website deleting world, go for Elementor. Divi builder is an option for developers with some experience, that want to have more freedom and a cleaner workspace.
If we talk about the potential and power, you can do a lot with both of them. It’s a good idea to search on the Internet for websites made with one of these two WordPress Page Builders. You will be able to see some interesting aspects of developing on Divi or Elementor, and decide what suits your own style.
There is something left to say? We have in Divi and Elementor two excellent products that created a revolution for WordPress. You will not regret purchasing them if you analyze before doing it that you are going to use Elementor or Divi and to make real use of your investment.
Divi, it’s a natural choice if you have experience developing, with the big plus that it’s by far the WordPress builder with the best deal for 1-time payment lice with unlimited use. You will have ahead unlimited time using it and experimenting with the page builder until you really feel in control.
It will be better for you to start using the Elementor page builder if you need some introduction to this universe. Maybe pricing is not as good as Divi, but it totally worth it if you enjoyed the free version and want to put your WordPress Page builder skills into the next level.
Elementor vs Divi is a battle that changes a bit in every update and the new version. They are the best page builders you can find in WordPress, so never lose the opportunity to check from time to time the details of what’s new on them. Maybe perception change after some time, not only because of the updates but also because of your own developing experience. With time perhaps you will value things that you didn’t in the beginning, and you will find how useful it can be to make a second and final opinion.
