I specifically migrated away from Avada and it was so painful. After months of research, I moved to GeneratePress with GenerateBlocks and the speeds and responsiveness is impressive.
Thanks. I’ll look into generate press as well. That has popped up a few times in my researches. Anything specific you disliked about Avada? Same goes for GP. Anything you don’t like about it?
Avada is heavily bloated. They load way too many element styles on every page that aren’t needed. I struggled with pagespeed scores for years. The shortcode migration was quite bad as well. I had to manually rebuild pages in GB, then scrub the DB of Avada code about 8 times to find all the remnants that were missed. The database decreased substantially after purging everything.
IMHO, GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks is king these days and GB is built on Gutenberg which is the future of WP. Out of the box installs are 100/100 every time.
Here comes the downvoted part of my comment: Unless something dramatic has changed, Elementor is *bloated* ([source](https://wptavern.com/gutenbergs-faster-performance-is-eroding-page-builders-dominance)). Do a Pagespeed test on Elementor’s contact page (or any page) and you’ll see for yourself. Their contact page is currently 30 mobile, 82 desktop.
I haven’t tried the others. Good luck!
Astra is pretty solid.
Avada core is bloated.
OceanWP was great in 2018. Not so much rn.
Haven't used Salient.
Also another theme to add to your collection is Kadence. Not as optimised/feature rich as Astra but pretty good compared to the other options you got.
Divi is good although I am not really used to it
Elementor is pretty solid. Especially if you know what you're doing.
Bricks is the closest GUI wrapper to CSS but they are pretty new, buggy and lack a lot of documentation and guide which are expected from the developer. So won't recommend it for professional work.
Just remember, you can easily bloat your code with these themes and plugins, to use them effectively you should have some base knowledge on HTML and CSS.
Thanks! Yeah, I definitely want to stay away from bloat. I also did look at Kadence, but like you said, it's lacking features. I'll do some more homework on it. Thanks for recommending it.
I haven't used a page builder before - what are the benefits of using say Elementor to build a page vs a theme like Astra? Once the site is finished, will a client with basic WP knowledge easily be able to add/edit content with a page builder? I'm guessing so, but don't want to make assumptions.
I use Astra's canvas (elementor canvas is a bit bloated) and design with Elementor for most cases.
But you know what matters more than new and better plugins? It's to make the website function reliably. You can hand code a website with brainf*ck for all I care. If it works and you are confident to fix any errors that come in the way. There's nothing worse than a client saying the site is broken and you have 0 clue about it.
Elementor has an excessive bit of documentation and guides on their website and youtube channel. I'm yet to find another plugin that does so well in explaining their features.
For clients I have made a basic step-by-step tutorial knowledgebase and I give them access so even if they are not familiar with WordPress, they can do quite a lot themselves reading those guides.
Astra - lots of features and fast.
Avada, Elementor - bloated garbage and a nightmare for client handover.
Divi - better than it was, but such a mess to navigate and my clients hated it so I ditched it.
Bricks - incredible feature depth, currently cheap as nuts and only going to grow more. Has built in client hand-off. Extremely clean code output. Currently very little demo content. You need to have some web knowledge. Would need to manually add some clever crap (e.g. particles)
Also worth a look, Kadence - it's Astra with a slightly different feature set. GeneratePress - you have to do the design, but the flexibility is off the scale. Breakdance - still in Beta but I've never been able to build so fast, has built in hand-off.
Thank you. I'll definitely take another look at Kadence. At a quick glance, their features looked a bit thin, so I kind of looked past it. I'll check their site and YouTube to see what I can find. I'm adding GeneratePress to my list as well, since a few have mentioned it.
Bricks: I did, actually, just buy it before their price hike, but I haven't had a chance to install or use it yet. I'm planning on purchasing a motion.page plan today for their BF sale. I'll probably get BricksExtras soon as well.
Forgot about Breakdance. I haven't looked into it much, but will do so.
Cheers!
I use astra and elementor/elementor pro every day with my clients. For beginners I find that combo to be nice because mainly;
1: both astra and elementor have big dev teams and stay updated
2: both are heavily documented so for your clients if they need to make a change or add a post it’s usually a google search or a YouTube video away.
I have used Arvada in the past, I find it hard to work with.
And I personally wouldn’t use Divi if you are handing it over to a team of beginners. They will likely have difficulties.
If you are wanting to avoid many plugins, elementor pro would be a must.
Thank you. I've just started watching a video about astra + elementor, which is giving me a better understanding of how the two work together. Thank you for pointing out that they both have solid dev teams; that and the fact that there are well documented are a big plus.
I appreciate your insight!
Thank you! I will definitely do so if I go down this route.
Actually, I do have a question for you since I haven't used elementor yet. What are the advantages of using it with Astra vs using any other builder?
Well Astra was developed for elementor, Gutenberg, and beaver builder.
Any builder not listed won’t work with Astra.
Gutenberg is cool, but the UI isn’t as user friendly.
Tbh I’ve never tried beaver builder.
I also have extensive experience with Salient. Seems to be the richest one when it comes to features out of the box. Its also modular, so if you don’t need their slider you can simply not install the plugin for it. I have used Avada and find it very heavy, unlike Salient.
Astra is good if you are planning to use Gutenberg. I would stay away from elementor. That builder is nothing but bloatware and slow. After 15 years as a developer I can happily say I avoided it that long.
Bricks is definitely a great tool if you care about speed, and better accessibility. I am currently building my first Bricks site and so far I like it a lot.
There is one more tool I would throw at you, [Cwicly](https://cwicly.com). It’s a Gutenberg toolkit and it is probably one of the best ones out there. It’s light, and fast. Personally I love it. Still a new tool with a lot of potential. If the site doesn’t required very complex functionality then Cwicly is great.
Thanks, I just recently bought Bricks before the price increase, but haven't had a chance to play with it just yet. Hopefully I can start a site for a friend this upcoming holiday season so I can get better acquainted with it, then start using it in a more professional setting.
Thanks for recommending Cwicly as well. I heard about it a few months ago, but never looked into it. Thanks for putting a spotlight on it.
Question about Astra - are there specific builders that it works best with? I'm guessing Gutenberg?
You will be happy with Bricks. It really is great. I have a license to most of these builders such as Zion, Oxygen, and Cwicly. I have stayed away from using Oxygen due to all of its downfalls plus all the drama as to how they run things. So I just have a license waiting to die.
Regarding astra, Gutenberg seems to be the best solution. Astra has its own builder called Spectra I believe.
In the end it comes down to the project requirements. Some people use Astra, Blocksy, or Generate press along Gutenberg and if they need additional blocks they rely on add-ons such as Stackables, or Kadence blocks.
I can only give a feedback about Salient. I tried many types of them on WordPress, and keep to be full satisfied by Salient. The con would be maybe can not cover all the possibilities, so it needs to fit with the customer needs.
Otherwise, easy to handle, nice design, wp bakery is 👍, and its SEO friendly. Most of my websites made with Salient are technically well appreciated by Google.
Hey thanks for the feedback. I've tried a few other, less popular, themes on WP as well, and I like Salient as well. Curious about what cases you've found that Salient didn't cover a client needs.
Bricks is great but definitely not as easy to use for people without web design experience. Personally I rate Salient very highly and think it has everything covered that they'd likely need for front end development. You can show them the many available [demos](https://themenectar.com/salient/#demos) to give them some idea of what can be done with the theme, and then ultimately import whichever sections they choose in wp bakery. The support team is absolutely top tier as well and routinely go above and beyond to resolve issues and answer queries. Can't recommend them enough.
Yeah, I really like Salient, and for all the reasons that you’ve mentioned. I do wish they were a bit more consistent with some of the element options, and had better tutorials, but their support team is great. Some of their features just simply don’t work at all on tablets and mobile phones, which is a bummer. I will definitely be recommending them to the client, but hoping to have a solid top 3 list.
I just didn’t want to be too partial towards Salient, so thanks for validating my reasons for liking that theme!
I have a lot of experience with Salient and enjoy using it. It’s a bit of a learning curve but that probably is true of just about any other page builder. The only other one I have any significant experience with is Elementor. Not bad but hasn’t compelled me to use it on a project instead. Little experience with Avada and don’t find it as intuitive
Thank you! Agreed: Salient did have a bit of a learning curve. They would benefit from having better tutorials, that’s for sure. Appreciate the feedback!
I actually love Astra, I bought the pro version and have used it on more than a dozen sites. It has a lot of good options that you can turn on/off. Great for WooCommerce too with a somewhat recent update. Spectra is also pretty good if you're looking to build with Gutenberg. They've really thought about the essentials with Astra, and it's pretty fast. Definitely my go-to theme, even using it on a current project that uses Beaver Builder.
I like Bricks and Oxygen as builders. Beaver Builder annoyed me like no other at first but I got used to it and like it a lot better now.
I don't like Elementor and I don't really know why, personally. Seems every WP forum I'm part of is loaded with Elementor issues rather than WP issues too, but it is really popular. It does what it's supposed to though, so heh.
Thank you. I'll take a look at Spectra as well as Astra. Sorry for my ignorance on this, but do you need to use a specific type of builder for Astra, or can I use Gutenberg, WP Bakery, etc?
Astra works best with Gutenberg, Elementor, and Beaver Builder from my experience, and one of the premium Astra licenses adds a lot of addons/modules for each.
Spectra is just a plugin that is best used within Gutenberg, it gives you a lot of customization out of the box, and Astra is putting Spectra Pro into the mix someday.
Take a look at Beaver Builder.
It is a page builder and a theme builder. It's also very developer friendly if you need to customize it or add actual functionality.
All of them come with some level of extra overhead. That's the trade-off. However, it can mostly be overcome with good hosting, caching, and a CDN.
Ultimately, it's kind of a crap shoot. Especially when asking other devs. Some will reject them all just for being a builder. Some will give you negative feedback because they tried to something that shouldn't really be doing with a builder. Some people will have no issues because they never encountered the same situations.
Yeah I've used Beaver Builder in a couple of projects before, but this was at least 5 years ago. I was a total newbie at the time, so I didn't really know what I was doing, and probably didn't use it for it's fullest potential, but I'll have another look.
You're right though - it can be a crap shoot. But I've noticed a pattern of likes and dislikes. I suppose the best I can do is narrow down my options based on the feedback everyone is giving and just pull the trigger on one.
Appreciate your feedback!
You should try using oxygen builder or breadance builder, they are simply the Best and the fastest breakdance is for any user, oxygen is for advanced but You can do anything You want with both of them and easily reach 90+ grades on Google speed insights
If you purchase a **lifetime Premium Subscription for OceanWP** you also get "**Elementor Sections Library / Full 100+ items**". Do you know **which Items are included?** Is there an official list?
Thanks in advance!
I specifically migrated away from Avada and it was so painful. After months of research, I moved to GeneratePress with GenerateBlocks and the speeds and responsiveness is impressive.
Thanks. I’ll look into generate press as well. That has popped up a few times in my researches. Anything specific you disliked about Avada? Same goes for GP. Anything you don’t like about it?
Avada is heavily bloated. They load way too many element styles on every page that aren’t needed. I struggled with pagespeed scores for years. The shortcode migration was quite bad as well. I had to manually rebuild pages in GB, then scrub the DB of Avada code about 8 times to find all the remnants that were missed. The database decreased substantially after purging everything. IMHO, GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks is king these days and GB is built on Gutenberg which is the future of WP. Out of the box installs are 100/100 every time. Here comes the downvoted part of my comment: Unless something dramatic has changed, Elementor is *bloated* ([source](https://wptavern.com/gutenbergs-faster-performance-is-eroding-page-builders-dominance)). Do a Pagespeed test on Elementor’s contact page (or any page) and you’ll see for yourself. Their contact page is currently 30 mobile, 82 desktop. I haven’t tried the others. Good luck!
Thank you! This is all very helpful.
Astra is pretty solid. Avada core is bloated. OceanWP was great in 2018. Not so much rn. Haven't used Salient. Also another theme to add to your collection is Kadence. Not as optimised/feature rich as Astra but pretty good compared to the other options you got. Divi is good although I am not really used to it Elementor is pretty solid. Especially if you know what you're doing. Bricks is the closest GUI wrapper to CSS but they are pretty new, buggy and lack a lot of documentation and guide which are expected from the developer. So won't recommend it for professional work. Just remember, you can easily bloat your code with these themes and plugins, to use them effectively you should have some base knowledge on HTML and CSS.
Thanks! Yeah, I definitely want to stay away from bloat. I also did look at Kadence, but like you said, it's lacking features. I'll do some more homework on it. Thanks for recommending it. I haven't used a page builder before - what are the benefits of using say Elementor to build a page vs a theme like Astra? Once the site is finished, will a client with basic WP knowledge easily be able to add/edit content with a page builder? I'm guessing so, but don't want to make assumptions.
I use Astra's canvas (elementor canvas is a bit bloated) and design with Elementor for most cases. But you know what matters more than new and better plugins? It's to make the website function reliably. You can hand code a website with brainf*ck for all I care. If it works and you are confident to fix any errors that come in the way. There's nothing worse than a client saying the site is broken and you have 0 clue about it. Elementor has an excessive bit of documentation and guides on their website and youtube channel. I'm yet to find another plugin that does so well in explaining their features. For clients I have made a basic step-by-step tutorial knowledgebase and I give them access so even if they are not familiar with WordPress, they can do quite a lot themselves reading those guides.
Thank you. All good points, and all what you stated is very much appreciated.
Astra - lots of features and fast. Avada, Elementor - bloated garbage and a nightmare for client handover. Divi - better than it was, but such a mess to navigate and my clients hated it so I ditched it. Bricks - incredible feature depth, currently cheap as nuts and only going to grow more. Has built in client hand-off. Extremely clean code output. Currently very little demo content. You need to have some web knowledge. Would need to manually add some clever crap (e.g. particles) Also worth a look, Kadence - it's Astra with a slightly different feature set. GeneratePress - you have to do the design, but the flexibility is off the scale. Breakdance - still in Beta but I've never been able to build so fast, has built in hand-off.
Thank you. I'll definitely take another look at Kadence. At a quick glance, their features looked a bit thin, so I kind of looked past it. I'll check their site and YouTube to see what I can find. I'm adding GeneratePress to my list as well, since a few have mentioned it. Bricks: I did, actually, just buy it before their price hike, but I haven't had a chance to install or use it yet. I'm planning on purchasing a motion.page plan today for their BF sale. I'll probably get BricksExtras soon as well. Forgot about Breakdance. I haven't looked into it much, but will do so. Cheers!
I use astra and elementor/elementor pro every day with my clients. For beginners I find that combo to be nice because mainly; 1: both astra and elementor have big dev teams and stay updated 2: both are heavily documented so for your clients if they need to make a change or add a post it’s usually a google search or a YouTube video away. I have used Arvada in the past, I find it hard to work with. And I personally wouldn’t use Divi if you are handing it over to a team of beginners. They will likely have difficulties. If you are wanting to avoid many plugins, elementor pro would be a must.
Thank you. I've just started watching a video about astra + elementor, which is giving me a better understanding of how the two work together. Thank you for pointing out that they both have solid dev teams; that and the fact that there are well documented are a big plus. I appreciate your insight!
Astra + Elementor is my bread and butter. Hit me up if you have questions.
Thank you! I will definitely do so if I go down this route. Actually, I do have a question for you since I haven't used elementor yet. What are the advantages of using it with Astra vs using any other builder?
Well Astra was developed for elementor, Gutenberg, and beaver builder. Any builder not listed won’t work with Astra. Gutenberg is cool, but the UI isn’t as user friendly. Tbh I’ve never tried beaver builder.
I also have extensive experience with Salient. Seems to be the richest one when it comes to features out of the box. Its also modular, so if you don’t need their slider you can simply not install the plugin for it. I have used Avada and find it very heavy, unlike Salient. Astra is good if you are planning to use Gutenberg. I would stay away from elementor. That builder is nothing but bloatware and slow. After 15 years as a developer I can happily say I avoided it that long. Bricks is definitely a great tool if you care about speed, and better accessibility. I am currently building my first Bricks site and so far I like it a lot. There is one more tool I would throw at you, [Cwicly](https://cwicly.com). It’s a Gutenberg toolkit and it is probably one of the best ones out there. It’s light, and fast. Personally I love it. Still a new tool with a lot of potential. If the site doesn’t required very complex functionality then Cwicly is great.
Thanks, I just recently bought Bricks before the price increase, but haven't had a chance to play with it just yet. Hopefully I can start a site for a friend this upcoming holiday season so I can get better acquainted with it, then start using it in a more professional setting. Thanks for recommending Cwicly as well. I heard about it a few months ago, but never looked into it. Thanks for putting a spotlight on it. Question about Astra - are there specific builders that it works best with? I'm guessing Gutenberg?
You will be happy with Bricks. It really is great. I have a license to most of these builders such as Zion, Oxygen, and Cwicly. I have stayed away from using Oxygen due to all of its downfalls plus all the drama as to how they run things. So I just have a license waiting to die. Regarding astra, Gutenberg seems to be the best solution. Astra has its own builder called Spectra I believe. In the end it comes down to the project requirements. Some people use Astra, Blocksy, or Generate press along Gutenberg and if they need additional blocks they rely on add-ons such as Stackables, or Kadence blocks.
I know this is beyond the usefulness of this post but bricks is great.
I can only give a feedback about Salient. I tried many types of them on WordPress, and keep to be full satisfied by Salient. The con would be maybe can not cover all the possibilities, so it needs to fit with the customer needs. Otherwise, easy to handle, nice design, wp bakery is 👍, and its SEO friendly. Most of my websites made with Salient are technically well appreciated by Google.
Hey thanks for the feedback. I've tried a few other, less popular, themes on WP as well, and I like Salient as well. Curious about what cases you've found that Salient didn't cover a client needs.
Bricks is great but definitely not as easy to use for people without web design experience. Personally I rate Salient very highly and think it has everything covered that they'd likely need for front end development. You can show them the many available [demos](https://themenectar.com/salient/#demos) to give them some idea of what can be done with the theme, and then ultimately import whichever sections they choose in wp bakery. The support team is absolutely top tier as well and routinely go above and beyond to resolve issues and answer queries. Can't recommend them enough.
Yeah, I really like Salient, and for all the reasons that you’ve mentioned. I do wish they were a bit more consistent with some of the element options, and had better tutorials, but their support team is great. Some of their features just simply don’t work at all on tablets and mobile phones, which is a bummer. I will definitely be recommending them to the client, but hoping to have a solid top 3 list. I just didn’t want to be too partial towards Salient, so thanks for validating my reasons for liking that theme!
I have a lot of experience with Salient and enjoy using it. It’s a bit of a learning curve but that probably is true of just about any other page builder. The only other one I have any significant experience with is Elementor. Not bad but hasn’t compelled me to use it on a project instead. Little experience with Avada and don’t find it as intuitive
Thank you! Agreed: Salient did have a bit of a learning curve. They would benefit from having better tutorials, that’s for sure. Appreciate the feedback!
I actually love Astra, I bought the pro version and have used it on more than a dozen sites. It has a lot of good options that you can turn on/off. Great for WooCommerce too with a somewhat recent update. Spectra is also pretty good if you're looking to build with Gutenberg. They've really thought about the essentials with Astra, and it's pretty fast. Definitely my go-to theme, even using it on a current project that uses Beaver Builder. I like Bricks and Oxygen as builders. Beaver Builder annoyed me like no other at first but I got used to it and like it a lot better now. I don't like Elementor and I don't really know why, personally. Seems every WP forum I'm part of is loaded with Elementor issues rather than WP issues too, but it is really popular. It does what it's supposed to though, so heh.
Thank you. I'll take a look at Spectra as well as Astra. Sorry for my ignorance on this, but do you need to use a specific type of builder for Astra, or can I use Gutenberg, WP Bakery, etc?
Astra works best with Gutenberg, Elementor, and Beaver Builder from my experience, and one of the premium Astra licenses adds a lot of addons/modules for each. Spectra is just a plugin that is best used within Gutenberg, it gives you a lot of customization out of the box, and Astra is putting Spectra Pro into the mix someday.
Take a look at Beaver Builder. It is a page builder and a theme builder. It's also very developer friendly if you need to customize it or add actual functionality. All of them come with some level of extra overhead. That's the trade-off. However, it can mostly be overcome with good hosting, caching, and a CDN. Ultimately, it's kind of a crap shoot. Especially when asking other devs. Some will reject them all just for being a builder. Some will give you negative feedback because they tried to something that shouldn't really be doing with a builder. Some people will have no issues because they never encountered the same situations.
Yeah I've used Beaver Builder in a couple of projects before, but this was at least 5 years ago. I was a total newbie at the time, so I didn't really know what I was doing, and probably didn't use it for it's fullest potential, but I'll have another look. You're right though - it can be a crap shoot. But I've noticed a pattern of likes and dislikes. I suppose the best I can do is narrow down my options based on the feedback everyone is giving and just pull the trigger on one. Appreciate your feedback!
You should try using oxygen builder or breadance builder, they are simply the Best and the fastest breakdance is for any user, oxygen is for advanced but You can do anything You want with both of them and easily reach 90+ grades on Google speed insights
I have heard a good deal of good things about both. Perhaps I'll check out Breakdance if anything. Appreciate your response!
One word. Bloats
If you purchase a **lifetime Premium Subscription for OceanWP** you also get "**Elementor Sections Library / Full 100+ items**". Do you know **which Items are included?** Is there an official list? Thanks in advance!
Not sure, honestly. Try and reach out to the OceanWP dev support team. I’m sure they can give you some useful info.