Elementor vs. Bricks Builder: Which WordPress Page Builder Should You Use in 2026?

I built my first few client websites on Elementor. OceanWP or Astra as the theme, Elementor Pro on top, and maybe a couple of addons to fill the gaps. That was the standard setup at the time, and it worked well enough.

Then I found Oxygen Builder (Classic). Lightweight, developer-friendly, no theme dependency. I moved everything there and stayed for a while.

Then the Oxygen team launched Breakdance as a separate product instead of rewriting Oxygen, and I lost faith fast. That is when I switched to Bricks Builder, and I have been using it ever since, for client projects, personal sites, and my own Bricks Builder template kits that I build and sell.

So when I say I have opinions on this comparison, I mean it. I have used both on real projects. I recently migrated inboundmedic.com from Elementor to Bricks. I know what each builder feels like when a client calls you at 9 PM because something broke.

This is that honest comparison.

Quick Verdict

The short answer: If you are building performance-focused, custom websites and you are comfortable with HTML and CSS concepts, start with Bricks. If you are a non-technical user, a marketing freelancer, or someone who depends on a huge template library to move fast, Elementor still does its job well.

What Are These Builders, & Who Are They Actually For?

Elementor launched in 2016 and essentially defined what a WordPress visual builder should look like. It runs as a plugin on top of your existing theme and currently powers over 10 million active WordPress websites. It was built around accessibility, meaning anyone with no coding background could pick it up and build something decent. That has always been its core strength.

Bricks Builder came out in 2021 with a different goal entirely. It runs as a theme, not a plugin, which means it owns the full WordPress rendering layer. No theme-plugin compatibility overhead. No redundant wrappers. It was designed for developers and agencies who want clean code output and proper design system workflows.

These two tools solve the same surface-level problem, but their foundations are completely different.

Core Architecture: Where the Real Difference Starts

This is where the comparison gets technical, and the technical part actually matters.

Elementor runs as a plugin layered on top of your theme. To maintain layout consistency across thousands of different themes, it wraps every element in additional container div elements.

The WordPress community has called this “divception,” referring to how deeply nested the markup becomes. For a simple hero section with a heading, subheading, and two buttons, benchmarks show Elementor generates 21–84 DOM nodes. Bricks produces 9-32 for the exact same structure.

Bricks controls the full rendering stack because it is the theme. It outputs semantic HTML5 that reads like hand-written code. No compatibility wrappers, no forced nesting. This matters directly to Core Web Vitals, which Google uses as a ranking signal.

The script load difference is even larger. Elementor’s baseline CSS/JS load is approximately 245KB before you place a single element on the page. Bricks loads around 15KB. Elementor pre-loads icon libraries, animation scripts, and dialog handlers upfront so every widget is ready on demand. Bricks uses smart asset loading and only enqueues what the page actually uses.

Performance: The Actual Numbers

Source: Bricks Builder performance documentation

The mobile score gap is what clients actually feel. A PageSpeed score of 60-75 on mobile is the range where bounce rates start climbing. An 85–99 range is where you want to be if site speed is part of your value proposition. After migrating inboundmedic.com from Elementor to Bricks, the difference in load performance was immediately visible in Google Search Console.

CSS Workflow: Class-Based vs ID-Based

Elementor uses an ID-based styling system. Set the padding on a button, and it generates a CSS rule targeting that element’s unique ID. This is intuitive for beginners. On a site with 30 pages and dozens of components, you end up with thousands of disconnected ID-specific CSS rules. Changing a brand color across the full site becomes a manual find-and-replace operation.

Bricks uses a class-based approach, which follows the same DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle that professional front-end developers use. You create a class like .btn-primary, apply it to every primary button on the site, and when the client wants to update the color, you change the class definition once, and every instance updates.

This is also where Automatic CSS becomes such a natural pairing with Bricks. I use it on all my builds and in my template kits. ACSS gives you a pre-built system of fluid spacing, responsive typography scaling, and utility classes that handle a huge portion of the manual styling work. Elementor has global colors and global fonts, but the gap between those and a full CSS utility framework is real.

For a full breakdown of framework options, I have a dedicated post on the best Bricks Builder CSS frameworks.

Key Features: Side-By-Side

One real frustration I want to call out honestly: when you clone a page in Bricks, it picks up the singular page template by default. The client sees the template layout instead of the custom design they built. To fix it, you go into the template conditions, find that template, and manually exclude the specific page. Elementor and Oxygen handle this automatically the moment you open a page in the editor. It is a small workflow issue, but my clients notice it every time, and it should be automatic.

WooCommerce & E-Commerce Builds

Both builders give you full visual control over WooCommerce: product archives, single product pages, cart, and checkout. But they approach it from different angles.

Elementor leans into marketing-first features. Urgency timers, stock meters, and purchase summary widgets. If your client’s priority is a fast-to-deploy, conversion-focused store and they do not want to write any code, Elementor’s WooCommerce builder is fast and effective.

Bricks gives you more structural control. The query loop builder can filter products by taxonomies, meta fields, or custom PHP arrays. Variation swatches and attribute filtering are native, which saves you the extra plugin weight.

The modular checkout elements in Bricks (still in progress) let you build multi-step checkouts visually without reaching for FunnelKit or a similar third-party tool.

For a step-by-step walkthrough, I have a full guide on how to set up WooCommerce structures with Bricks Builder.

Pricing: What You Actually Pay

Elementor Pro

Bricks Builder

The lifetime license is what makes the numbers interesting for agencies. I bought Bricks at launch for around 100 bucks for the highest tier. Made that back within the first few months. Even at the current $599 price point, a single mid-range client project covers the investment completely.

Run the math on a 5-year horizon for an agency on Elementor’s Agency plan at $399/year. Add performance plugins, form builder addons, and popup tools that Bricks includes natively, and the total cost gap becomes significant. Bricks wins on total cost for any serious multi-site agency, full stop.

Developer Experience

Elementor is built around abstraction. It protects non-technical users well, which is one of its real strengths. For developers who want direct code access, that same abstraction becomes friction.

Bricks is explicitly developer-first. You can run custom PHP directly inside the editor through the native Code element (with appropriate permissions set). The query loop builder can be extended using the bricks/query/run filter to pull data from external APIs, custom JSON feeds, or database tables. This makes Bricks usable in more complex, data-driven project architectures.

The Bricks Builder addons ecosystem is smaller than Elementor’s but far more focused. Tools like Swiss Knife Bricks and Bricksfusion cover the workflow gaps that serious Bricks developers run into.

Elementor’s addon ecosystem is enormous. Hundreds of extensions exist for every conceivable use case. The risk is dependency conflicts, where three addons fight each other after a core Elementor update, and you spend a morning debugging a client site.

Security: Being Honest About Both

Elementor’s scale makes it a larger target. Between 2023 and early 2025, it had several disclosed vulnerabilities, including CVE-2023-48777 (affecting versions 3.3.0 through 3.18.0), CVE-2024-8494 (information exposure via shortcodes), and CVE-2025-3076 (stored XSS in Pro 3.29.0). To their credit, the team patches quickly and runs a formal bug bounty program on Bugcrowd.

Bricks has had its own serious issue. In early 2024, CVE-2024-25600 was disclosed: a critical Remote Code Execution vulnerability with a CVSS score of 9.8 out of 10. Patched in version 1.9.7. Because Bricks is the theme and owns the full rendering layer, a vulnerability in it potentially provides deeper system access than a plugin-based exploit.

Neither builder is inherently safer than the other. Keep everything updated. Run a solid WordPress security plugin. Do not skip patch notes.

Gutenberg & FSE: Real Threat or Just Noise?

Honestly, it is not a threat to either builder for serious professional development work right now.

Gutenberg is excellent for content creation and blogging. I use it for exactly that purpose, and it keeps getting better. For complex, custom website builds with advanced layouts, dynamic data, and full design system control, it is not yet in the same conversation as Bricks or Elementor.

If you want professional-grade Gutenberg-based builds, tools like Greenshift, GenerateBlocks, and Spectra have closed a lot of the gap. I have a full breakdown of those options in the best WordPress Gutenberg builders.

But for anything beyond standard content sites, I still use non-Gutenberg builders.

WordPress 7.0 is pushing Full Site Editing further forward. Long-term, core Gutenberg may get closer to third-party builders. But “long-term” in WordPress development cycles means years, not months. It should not be a deciding factor in your builder choice for 2026 projects.

Real Migration Experience: Elementor to Bricks

I have migrated multiple sites over the years. First from Elementor to Oxygen, then from Oxygen to Bricks. The most recent one was inboundmedic.com, a medical marketing agency site, migrated from Elementor to Bricks.

The outcome: the client is genuinely satisfied. He can copy and paste sections between pages easily, customize content without calling me, and the site loads faster across the board. Bricks handled the complexity of that site without needing a stack of third-party plugins to fill functionality gaps.

The one thing that still bothers both of us: cloning a page in Bricks assigns the singular page template automatically, and the client sees that template layout instead of the custom design.

I have to go into the template conditions manually and exclude that specific page. Elementor and Oxygen both handle this out of the box; the custom design shows the moment you open the page. Bricks needs to fix this.

That is the kind of detail that gets left out of most comparisons because the writer has not actually used the builder on a live client project.

If you want a fuller picture of where Bricks still has room to improve, I wrote about it directly here: my concerns about the Bricks Builder ecosystem.

Who Should Use Which Builder?

If you are already on Elementor and it is working, there is no urgent reason to switch. But if you are starting a new project and performance, code quality, or long-term agency economics matter to you, Bricks is the better foundation to build on.

FAQs About Elementor vs Bricks Builder

What is the main technical difference between Bricks Builder and Elementor? Bricks runs as a WordPress theme and controls the full rendering process, producing lean semantic HTML with minimal script overhead. Elementor runs as a plugin on top of your theme, which requires compatibility wrappers and generates heavier DOM trees and larger baseline script loads.

Can beginners use Bricks Builder? Yes, but it has a steeper learning curve than Elementor. If you understand basic HTML and CSS concepts, you will adapt to Bricks reasonably fast. If you have no coding background at all, Elementor’s abstracted interface will be easier to start with. Bricks has solid learning resources documented in the Bricks Builder learning hubs and a detailed Bricks Builder FAQs post if you want to dig deeper.

Is the Bricks Builder $599 lifetime license worth buying? Yes. A single mid-range client project covers the cost. For agencies building multiple sites per year, the savings over Elementor’s recurring Agency plan become clear within 2 years. I bought it at launch for around $100 and made that back fast. The math still holds at $599.

Does Bricks Builder work with WooCommerce? Yes, with 30+ native WooCommerce elements, including product grids, variation swatches, and modular checkout support. For a full setup guide, read how to set up WooCommerce structures with Bricks Builder.

Will Gutenberg replace Bricks Builder or Elementor? Not for professional custom builds in the near term. Gutenberg is excellent for blogging and content-heavy sites. For complex website development with advanced layouts and design systems, third-party builders like Bricks are still significantly more capable. Gutenberg-based builders like Greenshift and GenerateBlocks are worth watching, but the gap remains wide.

Should I migrate my existing Elementor site to Bricks? If performance and code quality matter to your project goals, the answer is yes. The migration is not one-click, you rebuild the site in Bricks, but the output quality and long-term maintainability justify the effort. Read both reviews in full before deciding: Bricks Builder review and Elementor review.

Does Bricks Builder have as many addons as Elementor? No. Elementor’s addon market is far larger, which is one of its genuine advantages. Bricks has a smaller but growing ecosystem, and most functionality that Elementor requires addons for, Bricks covers natively. See the full list: best Bricks Builder addons.

Is Elementor free? Elementor has a free version available at WordPress.org that covers basic page building. Most professional features, including the WooCommerce builder, pop-up builder, and theme builder, require Elementor Pro.

Conclusion

Bricks Builder and Elementor are both capable tools. Choosing the wrong one for your workflow is what creates problems, not the tools themselves.

If you are a beginner, a non-technical user, or someone who builds simple business sites and values a fast start, Elementor is the right choice. Its template library, wider addon ecosystem, and lower learning curve are real advantages for that use case.

If you are a developer or agency building performance-focused, custom websites where clean code, class-based styling, and long-term scalability matter, Bricks is the better foundation.

The $599 lifetime license for Bricks pays for itself fast. The code quality gap is real and measurable. The developer experience, once you get past the initial learning curve, is genuinely better for complex builds.

I have used both. I recommend both to different people. And I will keep being honest about the friction points in Bricks, like the template condition issue, because that is the only way this comparison is actually useful to you.

The best WordPress website builders comparison gives you a broader view of the full market if you want to evaluate more options before deciding.

If you are ready to start building with Bricks Builder, grab the license at bricksbuilder.io/pricing/. One project pays for it. The Ultimate lifetime plan is worth it for anyone building more than a couple of sites per year.

Running a WordPress or Bricks project and need expert help? SyncWin’s WordPress and Bricks support services are built for exactly this. We handle everything from full builds to ongoing support.