Elementor vs Divi, Which you should choose to build your online shop?

When it comes to website page builders, many people will think about some of the big names like Elementor and Divi, Site Origin, Gutenberg, and Visual Composer. However, if you’re a big fan of WordPress, you must have already heard about these two huge page builder brands: Elementor vs Divi. Both of them are the most popular WordPress Page Builders which are drag and drop tools enabling users to build and design professional-looking web pages with ease.

In this article, we are presenting a detailed, objective comparison of these two Page Builders to help you decide between Divi vs Elementor, and what you should choose to build your online shop.

Overview: Elementor vs Divi, Which page builder is more popular?

Before making a detail comparison, I would like to clarify you some background about these two page builders.

What is Elementor?

Elementor is a page builder plugin for WordPress. Elementor is the most full-featured free page builder offering a visual drag-and-drop interface. With Elementor, you can access to various useful widgets, a various designed template library, a useful mobile editing toolset, and a visual revision history feature. There is also a Pro version of Elementor offering you advanced features for you to extend your website.

What is Divi?

Divi is a premium WordPress Theme and standalone WordPress plugin that helps users build websites easily using the live drag-and-drop interface with mostly no code experience.

Divi vs Elementor: Which one is more popular?

Both of Elementor and Divi are visual page builder offering friendly interface and drag & drop editing. But you may not know to choose which one to build your website. Let’s see how they are popular in the community. According to a large part of the audiences at WordCamp Europe 2019, most of whom are professional at developing, designing, and building websites. It can be explainable that the majority of them customizing themes by themselves, and not choosing any site builder. However, as you can see in the chart, Elementor stands second in the rank, just behind Visual Composer. While the number of users using Divi just accounts for over half as that of Elementor. Therefore, in terms of popularity, it’s clear that Elementor beats over Divi builder.

In the next part, we will look in detail comparison between Elementor and Divi.

Elementor vs Divi Comparison

1. Interface

Though both Divi and Elementor offer visual front-end drag-and-drop editing which is easy for store owners to customize their shop page without programming knowledge. However, each plugin’s interface uses a different approach.

With Elementor, you’ll do most of your work from a fixed sidebar, while Divi Builder utilizes more floating buttons.

Elementor’s Interface

Elementor divides its interface into two main parts:

• A left sidebar where you can add new elements and edit settings for existing elements, access and apply other functionality. You can hide this sidebar if you ever want a quick fullscreen preview.
• On the right side is a live preview of your page that you can edit with drag and drop.

To add a new design element to your page, you just drag it over from the list in your sidebar:

Elementor supports inline editing for elements with text so you can either type directly on the page or use the text box on the sidebar to edit the text in various elements.

When it comes to site speed, Elementor’s interface wins due to its minified styles, and polished performance on both its front and back ends. Often the folder size of Elementor pages will look a lot smaller than Divi ones, which pays when it comes to hosting prices and smooth operation. 

Divi’s Interface

Unlike Elementor, Divi Builder gives you access to both front-end visual editing and back-end editing. However, in this text, we just focus on the visual editor which is preferred by most people.

Unlike Elementor, the visual editor interface of Divi has no fixed sidebar. Instead, Divi popup builder offers you to access everything with floating buttons that open various customizing options:

To insert a new module, you’ll use a floating popup including various icons:

Like Elementor page builder, you can use inline editing to directly edit text on the page to edit text on your designs, though Elementor’s inline editing is a bit more flexible in the elements that it supports:

Besides, you can use drag and drop to rearrange modules on the page:

But, the biggest drawback of the Divi website page builder’s interface is its slow performance. This is more of a problem for sites with a lot of content and elements. This could end up costing you more in hosting and create an increasingly frustrating web editing experience as your site progresses. 

Conclude: Both Divi page builder and Elementor succeed when it comes to providing easy-to-use layouts. There are plenty of options to remove distracting elements and ways to customize each block individually. Everything is shown in real-time, and used with drag and drop editors, which are incredibly user-friendly. 

If you are wondering “how long does it take to learn Elementor and Divi?”, it’s certain that you may get familiar with them immediately at the first times using because of their ease of use and friendly interface.

Though, Elementor probably has the edge over Divi page builder when it comes to interface quality thanks to its more polished performance and increased speed. 

2. Modules & Sections

To actually build your designs, you’re going to rely on your chosen page builder’s library of modules and elements. In this section, we’ll compare the building blocks that both Divi Builder and Elementor offer.

Below are the total numbers of modules currently available for each page builder:

	Elementor	Divi
Official Elements	58	46
Use WordPress Widgets?	Yes	Yes
3rd-party Addon Elements	Yes	Yes

Here are some modules in the comparison between 2 Page Builders:

Elementor’s sections & elements

Elementor gives you three types of elements to design your page:

• Sections – the largest group which may include columns and widgets inside a section.
• Columns – these help you divide your page vertically. You can resize columns using drag and drop.
• Widgets – these are the actual design elements like text, a button, image, gallery, etc.

In Elementor’s free version, Elementor gives you 28 widgets to build your designs. With Elementor Pro, you get access to 30 new widgets for a total of 58 widgets as below:

You can also extend your page functionalities with additional widgets to Elementor by installing third-party add-ons.

Divi’s sections & modules

Divi Builder similarly gives you three different building blocks, though with some different names:

• Section – the largest container.
• Row – rows fit inside sections and let you use different column layouts to divide your page vertically. You cannot resize these columns with drag and drop, but you can assign custom widths using CSS or choose from Divi Builder’s pre-built column layouts.
• Modules – these are the actual design elements that you’ll use.

There’s no free version of Divi Builder. It has only one version offering 36 modules as below:

Like Elementor, you can also find third-party plugins that add additional modules to Divi page builder.

Conclude: If you own a small shop and just need basic functionalities, Elementor Free can meet your requirements.

In comparison between Elementor Pro and Divi, Elementor has a wider selection of elements and provides a faster way of adding elements to a page since you can just drag and drop them from the sidebar to the preview. The Divi builder, on the other hand, requires you to click several times before getting to the element you want to add.

3. Styling Options

Both Divi and Elementor come with in-depth and advanced styling options that are suitable not only for people who can’t write codes but also for those who are experts in the field of web design.

Elementor’s Styling Options

By default, after installing Elementor, the page builder plugin will automatically apply its styling options to override your theme’s.

But by accessing the plugin’s settings, you can turn this functionality off and use your theme’s global styles instead:

If you’re using Woostify theme, this setting is helpful because it lets you use Woostify’s Customizer settings to set up your global styles, which will save you a lot of time in comparison to manually editing each individual element.

Elementor gives you three different tabs namely Content, Style, and Advanced to control how every section, column, and widget looks and functions:

• Content – lets you specify basic content and alignment settings
• Style – lets you set things like fonts, colors, borders, and more. These customizations vary depending on the type of element that you’re working with.
• Advanced – lets you add custom margins/padding, change Z-indexes, entrance animations, custom CSS identifiers/custom CSS code, and more

With Elementor, you have full control of customizing sections, containing the ability to set layout, widths, and more:

Additionally, you can use Elementor to set up separate styling settings depending on a user’s device, which helps you create better customized responsive and more aesthetic designs.

Divi’s Styling Options:

In comparison with Elementor, Divi Builder similarly provides you with three different tabs to customize your various elements:

• Content – allows you to customize text and basic formatting options.
• Design – allows you to edit alignment, colors, shadows, animation, custom margins/padding, sizing, etc.
• Advanced – lets you add custom CSS or CSS identifiers, as well as change responsive design settings.

Similarly, you can also add advanced styling to rows and sections, including custom gutter widths, equalized column heights, and more:

Like Elementor, you can apply many design settings differently based on the users’ device:

Plus, if you like working with custom CSS, you have plenty of flexibility because Divi Builder makes it easy to add CSS to the main element, as well as before/after the main element:

conclude: Both page builders offer an excellent set of styling tools and options that suit everyone. Even non-coders can easily define their styles by using the sliders and other styling tools that both plugins have.

Advanced users and web designers who want more control can also enjoy using any of these two plugins since both let them add their custom CSS codes for further designing capability.

4. Template Libraries

	Elementor (Pro)	Divi
Number of pre-made layouts	100+ (Free version offers nearly 40 demo templates)	400+

Both Elementor and Divi Builder come with plenty of pre-made template libraries on various topics. This comes in handy for helping you find a template that best suits the purposes and niche of your website. In this section, we’ll compare how each builder’s library works and what you get.

Elementor’s Template Libraries

Since the release of Elementor 2.0, Elementor now offers two different types of templates:

• Pages – these are full-page designs.
• Blocks – these are designs for individual sections of a page. For example, you can find blocks for a “Contact” section.

If you’re using the free version of Elementor, you get access to nearly 40 page templates and a larger number of block templates. You can also save any of your own designs as templates to reuse them later.

And if you want access to more templates, Elementor Pro unlocks the full template library, which gives you access to hundreds of page and block templates:

If you’re using Woostify, you can also get access to a variety of websites demos based on Elementor and Woostify on Woostify Starter Sites.

Divi’s Template Libraries

Elegant Themes recently upgraded the entire Divi Builder template library, both in terms of the number of templates available and how you work with them.

You now get access to 350+ templates from 45+ layout packs:

A “layout pack” is essentially a set of themed templates. For example, you might have 8 different templates that, combined, help you build an entire restaurant website. Divi allows you to edit its central Divi theme with full customizability.

Like Elementor, you can also save your own designs as templates to reuse them later.

Conclude: While both Elementor and Divi page builder plugins offer a vast range of template selection, at this point in time, the Divi builder offers much more in terms of numbers. In addition to that, Divi makes it easier to build a whole site, thanks to its template packs.

5. Theme Building

	Elementor	Divi
Support theme building	Yes	Yes (update in October 2019)

Elementor’s Theme Building

Elementor Pro offers full theme building which allows you to actually use the same Elementor interface to build every single part of your theme – including your header, footer, and template parts.

You can access the Elementor theme builder through the WordPress dashboard and going to Templates > Theme Builder. When you utilize Elementor’s theme building functionality, you first choose where you want to apply your template:

Then, you can build your template using the Elementor interface and a special set of Theme Elements. These theme elements let you bring in dynamic information from your site. For example, you can find elements for Post Title, Author Box, etc.

Once you’re done editing a theme template, you can choose how and when the template will be displayed.

You can choose to include and exclude your Elementor templates using complex conditional rules. Used correctly and creatively, this Elementor rule engine can be an incredibly powerful and useful tool. It gives you flexibility and customizations at a very small level. This is enough to steal the crown in the theme building section.

Divi’s Theme Building

Unlike Elementor, Divi Builder doesn’t support the same customization interface when integrating with WordPress theme right now. It is perfect when used with the Divi WordPress theme. But if you’re using Divi Builder with the Woostify theme, you can still build custom headers and footers with Divi as you desire.

The Divi Builder 4.0 major update, which was released in October 2019, focused on equipping the Divi builder with powerful theme building tools, lets you create templates that you can use to override your website’s header, footer and body’s design, layout and even behavior.

You can access Divi’s theme builder by going to Divi > Theme Builder.

From there, you can create a new template, export a template, or import a template from external sources.

Currently, one of the downsides is that there’s no way to import pre-built theme builder templates from the cloud. You have to download a JSON file from an external source and upload it to import a pre-built template.

With the theme builder, you can define a global template that will override the overall look and feel of your entire website and you can also create targeted templates that can be applied to specific posts, pages and parts of your website.

Conclude: Regarding theme builder comparison of Elementor vs Divi, Elementor may be the winner.

6. Performance: page speed, page size, and request

The performance of a website may be shown in various factors like loading time, page size, UX, UI, Database Queries, etc. In this section, we will compare about page speed, page size, and request between Divi and Elementor.

	Elementor	Divi
Load time	489 ms	463 ms
Page size	530.7 kB	532.7 kB
Requests	28	15

To know how divi and elementor perform, we need to test how each of which run on separating websites. Here, I sourced from Pagely, they created the same website with different page builders such as Elementor, Divi, Siteorigin, beaver builder, and WPBakery page builder.

I just filter the result of Elementor and Divi as follows:

Elementor’s Performance

Divi’s performance

Conclude: From these 2 results above, it’s clear to conclude that the Divi page builder is more optimized in terms of loading time and the number of requests. But regarding page size, Elementor may be the winner.

Choosing which page builder depending on your requirements. If you want better performance, you need to sacrifice functionality. If you want a more powerful page with more functionalities, you have to trade for its performance.

7. Code quality & lock-in

Which page builder has better code quality? It’s true that if you are the beginner, you may ignore this factor when choosing a plugin to build your site. But if you are a developer good at coding, you may definitely focus on this side when selecting a page builder. Because, some shortcode-based page builders (like Divi Builder) can cause “lock-in”, making your content a mess of shortcodes if you deactivate the plugin.

In this section, we’ll look at two things:

• What kind of code does the plugin output?
• What happens if you need to deactivate the plugin?

To make an equal comparison, we got a similar design and layout for each page builder. Then, we’ll see how the code looks like in Elementor and Divi Builder. We also make a test to see what happens if deactivating the plugin.

Elementor page builder code quality and lock-in

This is how Elementor’s code looks like while it’s activated:

And here’s how your layout and code become if you deactivate Elementor:

After disabling Elementor, you will lose all the fancy formatting and icons. But in general, it’s still fine. Elementor doesn’t lock you in. Elementor leaves behind clean code that at least preserves basic formatting like <h2> tags and lists.

Divi page builder code quality and lock-in

Here is how your layout and code look like when activating Divi. As you can see, it looks quite similar to that when using Elementor:

However, if you deactivate Divi Builder, it will look like this:

On the contrary with Elementor, Divi lock you in. So if you deactive Divi on your site, you will face with its lock-in problem. I am sure that you will not want to see your website anymore because of the mess of the shortcode. You will lose almost all of the layout and content in your site.

Conclude: When it comes to code quality and lock-in, Elementor is the clear winner. It offers cleaner code and doesn’t lock you in if you need to turn it off on your site. Whereas, if you disable Divi, you will have to handle with lock-in problem, which may be more suitable for those who are developers..

8. Responsive on Mobile

Nowadays, people spend most of their free time on mobile. That’s why it’s necessary to optimize your website for mobile devices.

There are many things that can go wrong when you switch to view a website on mobile such as columns arranged on the wrong order, headlines getting too big, wrong size padding and margin, etc. Luckily, both Elementor and Divi builder can help you easily adjust mobile layout on your site.

Elementor: Mobile responsiveness

Elementor includes 5 main mobile editing tools, namely Mobile font size, Reverse column width, Padding & margin, Hide & show elements. With these options, you can resize the headline’s size, reorder the columns, set different mobile alignments, change sections, etc. All things are applied to mobile.

Divi: Mobile responsiveness

Like Elementor, Divi also does a great job of optimizing an eCommerce website’s mobile responsive. It has a lot of structural features built-in that adjust to tablets and smartphones easily. In detail, you can set custom mobile responsive settings for all sections, rows, and modules. This gives you a lot of power over your mobile design.

Conclude: Regarding mobile responsive, there is no clear winner. Both Elementor and Divi can help you easily customize your site for mobile devices.

9. Pricing Comparison

After comparing all the main factors of Elementor and Divi page builder, you may need to consider how much Elementor costs and how much Divi costs. The pricing of Divi page builder vs Elementor are shown below:

	Elementor	Divi
Free version?	Yes	No
Price	Start from $49	Start from $89

Elementor Pro Plans- How much does Elementor cost?

Elementor is a drag-and-drop page builder plugin for WordPress. So the question is ” Is Elementor free with WordPress?” The answer is “Yes”. Elementor offers users a free version that lets you access 30 different widgets and its main drag-and-drop page builder. This is a great starting for a newbie of drag-and-drop design.

To extend functionalities, you can take a look at 3 pricing plans of Elementor Pro costing as below:

• 1 site – $49
• 3 sites – $99
• Unlimited sites – $199

There is no lifetime option. Each plan offers one year of support and updates. After that first year, you’ll need to renew if you want to continue receiving support and updates. Active customers get a 25% off to continue support/updates.

If you own a small business, I think a plus license can meet your demand.

If you’re planning to use this on more than one site or building websites for your customers, we believe you should opt for the Expert license, because it offers the most value.

Divi Plans- How much does Divi cost?

Unlike Elementor, Divi Builder doesn’t have a free version available, but they have a demo that you can access so you can try it out yourself before buying. There are two different price plans for Divi:

• $89 – use on unlimited websites with one year of support and updates.
• $249 – use on unlimited websites with lifetime support and updates.

One of the biggest differences between Divi and Elementor is that, with Divi license, you will not only have the Divi Builder, but you will also have access to Elegant Themes’ entire offering which includes the Divi theme, a magazine theme, an email opt-in plugin, and a social media plugin. You can use all of them on unlimited sites.

Recently, Divi has released Divi 4.0 which provides you with a lot of great functionalities which allow you to build custom headers, footers, category pages, product templates, blog post templates, 404 pages, and more.

Conclude: When it comes to a pricing comparison of Elementor vs Divi, the Divi builder may be the winner because of its excellent value. Besides, you have an exclusive Divi Discount Code through which you can avail 10% special discount.

10. Elementor vs Divi, What is better to build an online store?

Elementor vs Divi, which is your choice? Both page builders are designed for WooCommerce compatibility, so they are great website builders for you to create your online shop. To use them, you just need to install the latest version of WooCommerce.

Elementor’s features for building shops

With the support of Elementor, it’s quite easy for you to build a stable and flexible store. You can have full control of all the elements that make up your product page, including customizing the products displayed in the list, the number of columns to color, and typography settings. Plus, you can also customize your product search result pages, so your clients can find the exact product they are looking for.

Elementor Free offers various widgets such as Product Title, Gallery, Images, Price, Rating, Short Description, Breadcrumbs, Data Tabs, Stock, Related Products, Upsells, Add to Cart, Meta, Content, and Additional Information. You can get much more options if you upgrade to Elementor Pro.

Another outstanding widget of Elementor is the menu cart, which lets you easily add the cart button to your header and customize it. These are some steps you can do to deeply customize the shop page with Elementor, giving your customers better shop experiences.

Divi’s features for building shops

Like Elementor, Divi page builder also provides shop owners with great modules to empower their shop pages. These modules sync with your product categories, so you can easily arrange, organize, and adjust your storefront with fast speed. It also comes with a lot of customization options, so you can create visually stunning shop pages to attract visitors.

After installing Divi to your WooCommerce site, you need to create a new page using the Divi builder. Then, you can insert Shop module to start your shop page:

Once you create your shop page, you can customize the layout of the module including the type of products you want to display, the number of columns to display, etc.

The next step is to style your module with a comprehensive set of options for styling your Shop module to appear exactly as you want it.

Conclude: As for the ability to create eCommerce sites comparison of Elementor vs Divi, both of the page builders come with interesting modules that help you easily create shop pages and make them more aesthetic, powerful, attracting more visitors, though, the modules they offer are not all the same. When it comes to building a shop aspect, WooCommerce users may prefer Elementor because of its free deep feature set and ease for using and mastering in comparison with Divi.

Final Thought on Divi vs Elementor Comparison

Divi Builder and Elementor both offer a wide variety of features that can help you build beautiful pages with ease. Both website page builders have focused on ease of use. Also, there are thousands of satisfied users, so there is no clear winner. To conclude, we find out the main differences between Divi and Elementor as below:

Interface: Elementor offers accessibility by offering a sidebar containing tools and options while Divi offers a simple popup builder by displaying as little UI elements as possible.

Default templates: The Divi theme builder offers more as compared to Elementor, but both plugins have an import and export option, allowing you to add dozens of third-party templates from other sources.

Theme building: Both page builder plugins offer powerful theme building features with fine-grained controls letting you build and design your website in any way you want.

Pricing: Elementor provides a free version that still offers a powerful suite of tools and even templates that lets you build beautiful pages. Divi builder in some cases may be costlier than Elementor Pro since it has a lifetime license and unlimited site usage. Elementor, on the other hand, has a maximum price of $199 per year, allowing you to use it for a thousand sites.

There’s one thing that makes Divi builder somehow more standing-out: Divi comes in two forms which are a theme and a plugin. You would use the Divi plugin if you want to use the Divi builder with third party themes like Woostify or Genesis. Otherwise, you’d opt-in to use the Divi theme.

Besides, Divi has built-in A/B split testing although this feature is not used much. But if you’re marketing-focused, you might love the fact that Divi comes with built-in A/B testing to optimize your designs.

By clicking on any module, you can quickly spin up an A/B split test and see how different variants of any module perform. For example, you can test different headlines, buttons, images, and more.

Here we’d like to introduce you Woostify theme which has already offered starter sites built with Elementor and focuses on increasing conversion rate. You can take a look at Elementor addons and these documents to get familiar with the page builder integrated with Woostify. Or you can still use Woostify theme with Divi page builder plugin as I mentioned before.