Are you trying to choose between Elementor and Divi for your WooCommerce site?
Creating a WooCommerce site is a big project. Many elements contribute to the success of your online store, and the revenue you earn will closely relate to your site's performance. One of the best ways to design your WooCommerce site is by using a page builder plugin. WordPress has visual builders that give you complete control over your site's design and improves the experience for your customers.
In this article, we will compare Elementor and Divi based on their features for WooCommerce. We will explain which one offers the best tools and experience for building WooCommerce stores.
We'll focus on their interface, default styles, pre-made templates, WooCommerce builder customization options, performance, and advanced features. This will give you a good idea of which page builder is likely the best option for your WooCommerce store.
Let's start with an overview first.
Elementor vs Divi Builder: Which Is the Best Page Builder for WooCommerce Sites?
WooCommerce is a popular platform for creating online businesses using WordPress. As an open-source eCommerce plugin, it offers the flexibility and features needed to support a wide range of businesses, from startups to established enterprises.
The two visual site builders we will compare, Divi and Elementor, integrate seamlessly with WooCommerce. They both come with unique features and also have occasional drawbacks when it comes to WooCommerce.
Elementor is well-known for its user-friendly interface, while Divi is popular for its extensive template library. To make our comparison even more interesting, we will also include Breakdance. It's a more modern option in the WordPress site builder space, focusing on global-first styling, a huge collection of built-in elements, accessibility, and performance.
Each of these page builder plugins has a different approach to working with WooCommerce, and we will look at how they compare.
1. Elementor vs Divi: Page Builder Interface
The most important element when it comes to choosing a page builder is that you should be able to use it easily. All three page builders offer intuitive drag-and-drop interfaces that include inline editing. However, they all take a different design approach to enhance the user experience. Let's explore how their interfaces compare in detail.
Elementor User Interface
Elementor is well-known for its intuitive interface that features a fixed sidebar with all the widgets. When you create a new page in the WordPress editor, click the Edit with Elementor button to access the Elementor builder.
The Elementor builder consists of two main areas. There's a web canvas that allows you to add various widgets using the drag and drop feature. There's also a fixed sidebar panel on the left that contains widgets categorized into different sections.
If you prefer to preview the design in fullscreen, you can collapse the sidebar.
To start designing your page, first add a container or choose from the pre-designed templates. Once your page has a container, you can start adding widgets from the sidebar.
Each widget comes with various customization options that appear in the sidebar. They are divided into three tabs: Content, Style, and Advanced, and allow you to make fine design adjustments.
Divi User Interface
Divi Builder offers both frontend and backend editing options. However, it's mostly known for its frontend visual editor.
When you create a new page in Divi Builder, you'll be presented with three options. You can either start from scratch, choose a premade template, or clone an existing page.
Divi's visual editor comes with various floating buttons that open popups for various settings. It uses color coding to differentiate between structure elements on a page.
For example, after you add a section and columns, you'll click on the gray plus icon that opens a popup window with a module list.
Once you add a module to the page, another popup automatically opens with relevant settings to that module. These settings are also divided into Content, Design, and Advanced tabs. Like Elementor, Divi also supports inline editing, allowing you to edit text directly on the page.
Breakdance User Interface
Breakdance offers a modern and user-friendly interface that makes designing pages easy, even for beginners. When you open a new page with Breakdance, you'll see a popup that lets you import a pre-made template from its design library. If you prefer to start from scratch, you can easily close this popup and proceed to design your own layout.
The Breakdance interface is similar to Elementor, which has a fixed sidebar on the left that houses various Elements.
To start designing your page, you can add a section and then choose to add columns, divs, or a grid. This gives you much more flexibility to create complex layouts.
When you click on a specific element on your page, its settings will appear in the sidebar. The settings panel is divided into three tabs which are represented by icons.
Who Wins When It Comes to the Interface?
Breakdance and Elementor both offer an intuitive and beginner-friendly interface that makes it easy for users to design website pages without a steep learning curve. The fixed sidebar gives easy access to design widgets that can be added using a drag-and-drop. Divi's use of icons and floating windows makes it look cluttered and confusing to users.
2. Elementor vs Divi: Default WooCommerce Styles
A key aspect of any website builder is its ability to provide attractive design options out of the box that can be easily customized to fit the brand identity and specific needs of a business later on. Let's compare the default WooCommerce styles and customization options provided by Elementor vs Divi and Breakdance.
Elementor WooCommerce Styles
Elementor Pro offers a variety of WooCommerce widgets to help you design custom product pages, category listings, and more.
However, the default styles are quite basic and not enough to make the design stand out. They often require you to install a theme and do significant additional customization to stand out or match a brand's unique aesthetics. This can bloat your website's code and make it load slower.
Or you can design custom WooCommerce pages using the Theme Builder functionality piece by piece.
Divi Builder WooCommerce Styles
Divi’s default styles are also very simple and heavily influenced by your theme. Similar to Elementor, it also requires that you build things like product layouts piece by piece, with no one-click option to insert the essential product elements typically needed for an eCommerce website.
While it may not provide an out-of-the-box solution for WooCommerce, its extensive library of pre-designed layouts can help you build an attractive WooCommerce site with ease.
Breakdance WooCommerce Styles
Breakdance stands out by offering modern and sophisticated default styles for WooCommerce elements. If you’re building a basic WooCommerce store, you generally won’t have to tweak the design settings for any of Breakdance’s WooCommerce elements because they look great out of the box.
If you don't want to use the default styles, it also includes powerful global styling controls that let you style every aspect of WooCommerce from a central dashboard. This allows you to build a beautiful on-brand WooCommerce website in under 12 minutes.
Who Wins When It Comes to Default WooCommerce Styles?
All three builders offer robust design and customization options for WooCommerce sites, but Breakdance stands out for its superior default styles and an extensive, easy-to-apply global customization capabilities. Elementor Pro and Divi offer great flexibility but may require more individual element adjustments to achieve a cohesive look.
3. Elementor vs Divi: WooCommerce Templates
Default styles are important, but pre-designed templates can make an incredible difference as well. Packed with their own styles and layouts, WooCommerce templates can transform your store drastically with very little effort. Here’s how Elementor, Divi, and Breakdance compare in terms of their WooCommerce templates.
Elementor Pre-designed WooCommerce Templates
Elementor features approximately 10 WooCommerce-focused “Template Kits” by default, giving you a fairly limited selection. While the designs are modern and attractive, customizing an imported theme template kit can be time-consuming due to a lack of global WooCommerce styles, requiring you to customize each element individually. This makes the time savings of using a template somewhat negligible in the end.
Divi Pre-designed WooCommerce Templates
Divi has an absolutely massive library of pre-made layouts. 30 of them are in the “Online Store” category, which means they feature layouts for WooCommerce-specific pages like the shop page and product page. Unfortunately, many of the designs appear dated, making them limited in their usability without heavy design modifications.
Breakdance Pre-designed WooCommerce Templates
Breakdance includes 14 WooCommerce-enabled templates, featuring the designs you’ll need for your shop, product, and WooCommerce archive pages. Each of these templates is modern, fresh, and will give you a fantastic starting point for your online store. Because of Breakdance’s global-first approach, it takes seconds to swap out the colors and styles to match your brand.
Who Wins When It Comes to WooCommerce Templates?
While each builder includes a wide variety of WooCommerce-enabled templates, Breakdance's combination of quantity, quality, and ease of customization puts it in the lead.
4. Elementor vs Divi: WooCommerce Builder Customization Features
The ability to customize an online store to reflect a brand's unique style is essential. To cater to this, all three builders come with WooCommerce Builder features that let you design individual WooCommerce pages using the same powerful front-end page builder.
Here's how Elementor, Divi, and Breakdance stack up in terms of their customization capabilities, particularly focusing on global styles and layout flexibility.
Elementor WooCommerce Customization Options
Elementor comes with a number of WooCommerce widgets that allow you to visually style the essential aspects of your store. Where it lacks, however, is granular layout customization options and custom product loops, neither of which are readily available.
When it comes to overall store design, it provides some basic global styling options for generic website elements, but nothing specific for WooCommerce. In fact, their global form styles don’t apply to WooCommerce forms. This means customizing WooCommerce requires you to individually edit every widget, which can be a time-consuming process.
Divi WooCommerce Customization Options
Divi fares a bit better when it comes to WooCommerce modules and layout flexibility, allowing you to granularly design your checkout pages and some other aspects of your store. However, it misses out on some critical modules, like shop filters and a mini cart.
As for styling your store, however, it’s missing WooCommerce-specific global styles, unfortunately. This means you’re left to style each element one-by-one or register many different custom global presets to help with design changes down the road.
Breakdance WooCommerce Customization Options
Breakdance comes with 34 powerful WooCommerce elements that give you granular layout control and allow you to customize every aspect of your WooCommerce store like your cart and checkout pages. It’s also the only builder in this comparison to include a custom product loop builder, allowing you to design completely bespoke product archives, shop pages, and more.
You can also individually add elements such as product images, descriptions, prices, add-to-cart buttons, and more to your page to create truly custom WooCommerce pages.
When it comes to styles, Breakdance handles WooCommerce in a true global-first fashion. With a huge number of WooCommerce-specific global styles, you can style WooCommerce forms, buttons, images, and more across your entire site in just a few clicks.
Who Wins When It Comes to WooCommerce Customization?
Though all of the compared builders have some level of customization, the global styles and product loop builder in Breakdance set it ahead of the pack.
5. Elementor vs Divi: Website Performance
Website speed is crucial for WooCommerce sites. According to a study, 40% of shoppers don't want to wait more than 3 seconds for a web page to load before abandoning the online store. A fast-loading website not only helps with a better user experience but also improves SEO rankings.
In this section, we'll conduct a few page speed tests to check which builder loads fast. We'll first do a page speed test on a blank WordPress website with WooCommerce and the page builder plugin installed. Then, we'll create a test page and add a few widgets/modules/elements to provide a fair comparison.
Blank Website Speed Performance
We created a new WordPress website on an InstaWP server and installed WooCommerce and each of the page builder plugins. Here are the page speed numbers recorded across all three plugins using the PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom Tools.
Page Builders | Page Size | Requests | Desktop | Mobile |
Elementor | 176.3 KB | 26 | 94 | 87 |
Divi | 188.5 KB | 31 | 95 | 90 |
Breakdance | 133.7 KB | 22 | 97 | 95 |
The site with the Breakdance plugin installed shows excellent performance, with minimal impact on loading times. This shows that Breakdance is designed with performance in mind, which makes it a great choice for WooCommerce sites.
Test Page Speed Performance
We'll now create a similar looking test page on each of the websites by using the following building blocks:
- Heading
- Image (900x900 150 KB)
- Button
- Product Grid
- Text
Here are the page speed numbers recorded for all three plugins using the PageSpeed Insights tool and Pingdom Tools.
Page Builders | Page Size | Requests | Desktop | Mobile |
Elementor | 592.7 KB | 52 | 93 | 84 |
Divi | 559.0 KB | 66 | 94 | 86 |
Breakdance | 366.3 KB | 31 | 96 | 92 |
Breakdance maintains the lead even after adding various elements to the page. This shows its streamlined code and efficient handling of resources. Breakdance allows you to disable the default theme, which improves its performance and results in a faster experience.
Who Wins When It Comes to Speed & Performance?
Breakdance is clearly the fastest page builder that outputs clean and streamlined code for faster page load times. In reality, it helps you cut down on third-party extension bloat by giving you all the features you need in a single plugin.
Divi comes second due to the built-in CSS and JS optimization options present in the plugin. Elementor comes in last as its focus has traditionally been on ease of use and design rather than performance.
6. Advanced Features for WooCommerce
Every store is unique and comes with its own unique requirements. Advanced features give you the ability to fulfill those requirements, even if they’re not possible out of the box. Let’s explore how Elementor and Divi stack up when it comes to the nitty-gritty development work of a WooCommerce project.
Elementor Page Builder: Advanced Features
Elementor supports dynamic content, allowing elements to change based on certain conditions, such as user behavior or product specifications. However, for more advanced conditional logic, such as hiding or displaying elements under specific WooCommerce-related conditions, users often need to rely on third-party add-ons.
It’s also lacking the ability to completely customize your shop page and product archives, leaving you to work within the confines of the provided layouts and styles.
Divi Builder: Advanced Features
Divi also supports dynamic content features, but its capabilities for conditional logic are somewhat limited compared to its competitors. Users looking to implement complex conditional displays might find Divi lacking without integrating additional plugins.
Like Elementor, Divi also neglects to give users the ability to build bespoke product loops, a critical feature when working on higher-end WooCommerce stores.
Breakdance: Advanced Features
Breakdance excels in this area by offering extensive support for dynamic data and built-in conditional logic. This includes conditions based on user actions, such as purchases or cart values, which can be crucial for personalizing shopping experiences and streamlining navigation.
In addition, its Product Loop Builder feature ensures you can create the exact design needed for your shop, even if the out-of-the-box designs don’t meet your needs. Combining this with the Code Block element, which allows you to write custom PHP, HTML, and JS, there are no limits to what you can create with Breakdance.
It also has a Client Mode feature that allows you to control what changes clients can make to the site. This prevents accidental design changes and streamlines the handoff process.
Who Wins When It Comes to Advanced WooCommerce Features?
With Elementor and Divi both missing the ability to create custom product loops, PHP Code Blocks, and WooCommerce conditional logic, Breakdance edges them out for the lead.
7. Elementor vs Divi: Pricing Plans
When choosing a page builder for your WooCommerce site, pricing is also an important factor to consider. Each plugin offers various plans to accommodate various budgets. Let's look at which one offers the best value for money.
Elementor Pricing Plans
The core version of Elementor is free and comes with basic widgets and templates. It also offers paid plans that start at $59/year for a single website. However, this base premium version does not include WooCommerce features and is intended for creating personal websites.
The Advanced plan with WooCommerce features starts at $99/year for three websites. There's also an Agency plan which costs $399/year and allows you to install the plugin on up to 1,000 sites.
Divi Builder Pricing Plans
Divi offers simplified pricing plans with two options and lets you choose between a yearly subscription or a one-time payment for lifetime access.
The yearly subscription costs $89/year and allows you to use it on unlimited websites. There's also a Divi Pro plan that costs $277/year and gives you access to additional services.
The lifetime pricing of the same plans costs $249 and $365 respectively, but the Divi Pro Lifetime plan still requires you to pay yearly for some of the add-on services
Breakdance Pricing Plans
Breakdance Builder offers a straightforward pricing structure with two main options. You can download the plugin for free which provides a basic set of tools and features, suitable for building a simple website. It allows users to test out the builder's capabilities before deciding to upgrade to the Pro version.
The Pro version costs $99/year for a single site license, or $199/year for unlimited websites. The Pro version unlocks all of Breakdance's advanced features, including a fully featured WooCommerce Builder, access to all design elements, form builder, dynamic data, and more. The Pro plan is ideal for users who need full design capabilities and advanced customization options for their WordPress websites.
There's also a separate plan for agencies and resellers that costs $799/year.
Who Offers the Best Value for Money When Building a WooCommerce Site?
Breakdance offers the most value. The benefit you get with it compared to Divi vs Elementor is that it minimizes the need for third-party plugins, reducing your additional costs. The extensive native features mean that Breakdance often works out as the most affordable option for designing WooCommerce sites.
Divi also offers affordable plans for the core plugin if you're looking just from the pricing perspective. But do note that you'll most likely spend more in the future if you want to add advanced features to your store.
Which is the Best WooCommerce Page Builder?
Choosing the best WooCommerce page builder depends on many factors. We compared various factors to make it easy for you to choose the best builder for your requirements.
Breakdance stands out as the top choice for building WooCommerce sites. Its combination of modern design, user-friendly interface, and powerful features makes it an ideal solution for both beginners and experienced developers.
It stands out in several key areas. You get beautiful default styles for WooCommerce elements, allowing you to create visually appealing online stores without extensive customization. Its global-first approach to styling also ensures that you can maintain brand consistency across your entire site in just a few clicks.
While Elementor and Divi both have their strengths, they require more individual adjustments and may not provide the same level of efficiency or ease of use as Breakdance. Elementor is praised for its intuitive interface, but its reliance on third-party add-ons for advanced features can be a drawback. Divi offers a vast library of templates but may feel dated and requires considerable design modifications.