4 Premium WordPress Page builders + Gutenberg - a comparison

As you have probably heard already, Gutenberg will be the default editor in WordPress 5.0.

Although the current plugin is quite underdeveloped, the final, WordPress integrated version is expected to be fully featured and very powerful.
The inclusion of Gutenberg as a default WordPress editor has raised a lot of questions regarding the future of other page builders such as Divi and Beaver builder as well as its compatibility with these builders. In order to answer these questions, a thorough analysis of the features of the different WordPress page builders needs to be done and compared with what Gutenberg has to offer.
In this article, we’ll have a deep look at a number of popular WordPress page builders and how they compare to Gutenberg and to each other.

Divi Builder

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Divi is a premium page builder for WordPress from ElegantThemes that has over 40 modules which can be used to design your pages.
These modules can be placed on posts or pages using drag and drop feature to build your either on front-end (see exactly what the end-result will be) or back-end of your website (if you are more comfortable working in the admin section).

With Divi, you also have a large choice of pre-made layouts as well as a built in library, with professionally designed layouts at your disposal which you can use to build your pages faster.
You can also build your own custom layouts with different sections, rows and modules to suit your own needs.
This builder is fully translated and supports Right to Left languages. It also boasts a large online community that is quite helpful when learning Divi due to the forum-like discussions that occur there between professional users.
Divi and Gutenberg are quite similar in some aspects. For instance, both can be used to build or edit posts and pages. Also, when building or editing, you can switch easily to the default classic editor and back to either builder.

As compared to Gutenberg, Divi has the following pros and cons:

Pros

• It is customizable with CSS.
• You can build multiple columns and layouts with Divi.
• It allows you to save layouts on its library.
• It provides both a front-end and back-end editor.
• It is expandable with plugins.
• It has a massive online community

Cons

• It has no live back-end builder.
• It stores content in shortcode format.
• It cannot transform blocks.
• It does not provide a document outline for the post or page being designed.
• It is fully premium. It does not have a free version.

Beaver Builder

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Besides Divi, Beaver builder is the other pagebuilder which is one of the most popular - see this article here for a comparison of these two popular products.
One of the main differences between BB and Divi is that the former is very developer friendly. It can be customized and extended through either widgets or using its wide module set, which is very well documented for easier use.
It uses standards such as Schema.org markup and techniques such as code compression to optimize the pages you create for Search Engines. Additionally, Beaver builder also has a huge online community, which is quite helpful if you get stuck while working on your project.

One of the features of this WordPress page builder allows you to save and reuse rows and modules. This is simply done by saving these layouts as global layouts, which can then be applied on all other pages.
When building e-commerce websites, Beaver Builder comes in very handy because it is compatible with WooCommerce. This makes it very easy to design store fronts.
It also supports the WPML translation plugin, making it much easier to design websites (including e-commerce websites) with translation options for the international market.
Beaver builder is quite similar to Gutenberg in a number of ways.
First, they can be used to design mobile friendly websites. As long as you are using a responsive theme, both of these builders will continue to help you build a responsive site.
They also have a live editing feature which basically means what you see when designing is what you get on the live website.

Pros

• It has a free version.
• It works well with almost all themes.
• It can be used to edit pages, posts and custom posts types.
• It has a network-wide control panel that enables you to make changes across multiple sites from one place.
• It is translation ready.

Cons

• It stores content as short codes.
• Its free version is not fully featured.
• It cannot transform blocks.

Themify Builder

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Themify builder is a bit different than the two builders we mentioned above. The difference is that it is quite good for spicing up your designs.
It has custom styling and animation features that are quite impressive. These enable you to customize fonts, background sliders, parallax scrolling and video backgrounds. The animation feature gives you the choice of using bouncing, flashing, pulsing, swinging and zooming in animations among many others.

It has back-end and front-end editors that both support drag and drop. This significantly simplifies the design process, but in particular for those who’d like to create fancy sites without knowing a lot about coding these animations and features. The front-end builder has a live editing feature, which means that what you see is what you get.
Building pages using this builder is further simplified by the availability of multiple, professionally pre-designed layouts that are included in the package. They give you ready to use landing pages as well as ideas to implement on custom layouts.
When compared to Gutenberg, the two builders can build responsive designs, so long as the underlying theme is responsive. They also have undo and redo features that enable you to rectify mistakes easily.

Pros

• It allows easy copy/pasting of rows and modules from one page to the other.
• It has a front-end and back-end editor.
• It can be used on multiple websites.
• It helps you build SEO friendly pages.
• It can be translated to any language.
• It enables pages to be processed faster due to its cache system that reduces server resources.

Cons

• The back end editor does not support live editing.
• It stores content as short codes.
• The free version is quite limited.

Thrive Themes Architect

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This builder is a bit different than the rest because it is mostly aimed at marketers rather than designers or developers.
In fact, this builder gives you a wide variety of professionally designed templates to use. It has over 220 templates, which means that you can create your landing page in a very short time. Of course, the pages in the templates are fully customizable hence, they can be modified to your liking.

It also has the expected a drag and drop feature which makes it very easy to create custom designs, combined with the live editor that shows you the exact layout that will be on the live website as you continue designing.
For outstanding designs, this builder gives you font customization (something which you don’t find in most other builders) and an animation feature that can animate elements, text and add some hover effects to any part of the page.
In comparison with Gutenberg, the two builders support responsive design, meaning that you can build pages that are optimized for different device screens.

Pros

• It has a very intuitive UI.
• It has a wide variety of templates to get you started.
• It has a very nice selection of animations.
• It supports hot keys for fast actions.
• It has a live editor.

Cons

• It has no free version.
• It stores content as short codes.

Conclusion

Now that you’ve seen these popular page builders and probably also experienced Gutenberg, you should be able to make a decision on which of these you like best. One thing you need to understand is that Gutenburg will be free, whilst some of the best features of most of these plugins are paid - so this is something which is always going to be in favour of Gutenberg. Yet for the ultimate flexibility and ease of designing websites, we believe most WordPress page builders offer excellent value. It’s up to you to make a choice to which one of these products you prefer.