Marketers often use site builders (or page builders) to rapidly create landing pages and entire websites. The main thing that sets marketers apart from average people building websites is that they are results oriented: the designs they implement have concrete desired outcomes.
Today, we’ll look at which of the three popular page builders has the best suite of tools and features to assist marketers in their goals.
Elementor, Divi Builder, and Breakdance are our three candidates. Each has its own advantages, with Elementor and Divi Builder being the older of the three. Let’s dig in and find out which one is the best option for marketers.
What Marketers Should Look for in a Website Builder
The main marketing-focused factors we’ll be looking at today are:
- Ability to create landing pages quickly and easily.
- Forms and lead generation - including critical marketing integrations.
- Pop-ups and CTAs.
- Performance & SEO.
- Analytics & tracking.
These key features and tools are critical for anyone building a results-oriented website. It’s also important to note that marketers often are not designers or developers, so the builder they choose must provide everything they need to fill those gaps.
Elementor vs Divi vs Breakdance: Landing Pages
Landing pages are usually single-purpose pages aimed at funneling visitors toward a specific outcome. This could be a newsletter sign-up, a purchase, or any number of other actions.
Being able to quickly and easily create bespoke landing pages is very important for active marketers. When running ad campaigns, it’s not uncommon for ads to have their own specific landing pages. It’s also common for landing pages to be created for each specific use case a product or service might have.
Let’s take a look at which is the best landing page builder among Elementor vs Divi and Breakdance.
Elementor
When it comes to creating landing pages specifically, Elementor performs as expected. By using the “Elementor Canvas” template for pages where you want a unique header or footer, you can design everything for that specific page and avoid the complexity of overriding global templates or changing their conditions.
Elementor does feature a number of “template kits” - pre-made website designs that can be imported and help you build your site more quickly. Unfortunately, you cannot currently import a single page or template from the template kit, making it logistically complicated to use these designs for specific pages on an already-designed site.
Divi
For the creation of landing pages, Divi is sufficient. It does allow you to use the “Blank Page” template to build out individual landing pages separately of the site-wide header and footer. It also requires more work to establish attractive styles due to module designs being quite basic by default.
When it comes to pre-made designs, Divi’s library has a large selection. Some of the designs, however, appear to be less modern than others, meaning you’ll have to curate for quality. Divi Builder does allow you to import designs from their library on a page-by-page basis, making it convenient for building bespoke landing pages.
Breakdance
Breakdance excels at creating landing pages, allowing you to give each page a bespoke design via the “No Header / Footer” template available in the WordPress editor when using Breakdance. This, accompanied with its optional global styling, means your landing pages will be on-brand by default with the ability to deviate as needed.
As for pre-made designs, Breakdance focuses on quality over quantity. With a number of beautiful, professionally designed templates geared toward e-commerce and marketing pages, you’ll be able to stand up new landing pages in no time. You can also import the designs section-by-section, page-by-page, or install all of the templates and pages from a design set to expedite a full site build.
Which Builder Aces Landing Page Creation?
All three builders—Elementor, Divi, and Breakdance—offer robust tools for creating landing pages. Breakdance’s ability to import design sets piecemeal, combined with its global styling to ensure your new landing pages don’t require excessive design tweaks, makes it a true landing page powerhouse for marketers.
Elementor vs Divi vs Breakdance: Forms And Lead Generation
Email marketing is a powerful tool in any marketer’s arsenal, and the key to growing your list is well optimized lead capture forms.
Having a site builder or page builder that takes care of forms for you can eliminate costs and additional setup, making it easier and cheaper to bring new marketing sites online.
Let’s take a look at Elementor vs Divi and Breakdance and see which one has the best built-in form capabilities.
Elementor
Elementor’s form widget includes many of the features you will need to capture leads.
With the Pro version, users can access advanced form features like multi-step forms and integrations with popular marketing platforms.
Notably, Elementor forms lack conditional field display logic. This can be added via third-party add-ons or custom code. It also only lets you send up to two custom emails after a form is submitted, a severe limitation for some use-cases.
Divi
Divi’s form module also covers the basic features you’d expect. It’s capable of capturing information such as names, addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers.
Divi’s form module also features a fairly robust conditional logic system, allowing you to create forms that adapt to the user’s needs. This can lead to a better experience for users filling out the form.
Unfortunately, the Divi form module is lacking features like multi-step form capabilities and file upload fields. These limitations can be a deal breaker depending on the types of forms you need to implement.
Breakdance
Breakdance’s Form Builder element is a striking departure from the form functionality included with most builders. Instead of offering only the basics, the Form Builder in Breakdance competes with even third-party premium form plugins.
It features conditional form field display logic, multi-step form capabilities, recaptcha/honeypot fields, file upload fields, and many more field types.
The Breakdance Form Builder element also features the ability to send unlimited unique emails on form submission, and it integrates with popular marketing platforms such as ConvertKit, Drip, MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, GetResponse and many more.
Which Builder Masters Forms And Lead Generation?
All three builders (Elementor, Divi, and Breakdance) offer the basic form functionality you’ll need to capture emails.
If you plan to go beyond the basics, however, you’ll need a more robust feature set. That’s where Breakdance shines. By offering features similar to those included in premium third-party form plugins, Breakdance gives you all the power you need to build advanced forms and more effectively convert visitors.
Elementor vs Divi vs Breakdance: Popups And CTAs
Popups and calls to action (CTAs) are critical tools for engaging visitors, capturing leads, and driving conversions.
A website builder with strong popup and CTA features can significantly enhance your marketing efforts.
Let’s compare how Elementor, Divi, and Breakdance handle popups and CTAs.
Elementor
Elementor Pro features a very capable built-in popup builder. It allows you to create customizable popups with a wide range of triggers: on-click, scroll, exit intent, and time delay to name a few.
The Elementor popup builder also has display conditions (similar to template display conditions) and advanced rules, allowing you to restrict how many times a popup is shown as well as a few other options.
CTAs can be created within popups or on posts and pages using the normal button element. The design of the CTA will be determined by the styles you’ve set for buttons in the site settings, or you can design each individual CTA button uniquely.
As for CTAs reused across your entire site, you can use “global sections” or “global widgets” to ensure you can update them once from a central location without having to edit each one individually. This is particularly helpful if your CTA features some information that is likely to change in the future.
Divi
Unfortunately, Divi does not include a native popup builder. This means that for popup functionality, you’ll need to rely on third-party plugins or Divi add-ons.
Divi does, however, have the ability to create global library items, which can contain CTA designs to be re-used across your site and provides a central location to edit them all at once. This will save you a lot of time if you intend to change your CTA later.
Breakdance
Breakdance features an incredibly powerful popup builder, enabling you to create any type of popup you need: discount popups, email capture popups, lead capture popups, welcome popups, exit intent popups, time sensitive popups, notification popups, and much more.
The popup builder also has extensive targeting options, allowing you to decide exactly where a popup should be shown: by page, post, archive, taxonomy, date & time, and more.
There are also many triggers available, ensuring the popup shows at exactly the right time to increase conversion rates. You can set your popup to appear on click, on page load, on page scroll, on page scroll up, on user inactivity, and on exit intent.
Additionally, you can limit the frequency of the popup, or ensure Breakdance only shows one popup at a time.
When it comes to CTAs, Breakdance’s Global Blocks enable the creation of universal CTAs for easy re-use across your entire site. After creating a CTA as a Global Block with your value proposition and button, re-use it in multiple locations. When you change the Global Block, it changes in all locations without the need to edit each one individually. This can be incredibly helpful for CTAs that mention things that change, like pricing or discounts.
Additionally, Breakdance’s focus on global styles means your CTA buttons will be consistent everywhere they’re used, with no need to manage individual styles for each button.
Which Builder Has The Best Popup & CTA Features?
It’s clear that Divi is behind the pack when it comes to marketing-focused features.
Elementor, however, brings a lot of value with its robust popup builder and global sections/widgets.
Breakdance includes a powerful popup builder, globally styled buttons for CTAs, and Global Blocks for composing globally synchronized CTAs and CTA sections. This combination may place it slightly ahead of Elementor when it comes to popups and CTAs, but we’ll call this one a tie.
Elementor vs Divi vs Breakdance: Performance And SEO
Performance and SEO are closely tied together, and are often a hot topic when it comes to site builders and page builders.
From a performance standpoint, marketers need a builder that adds very little overhead. The slower your site loads, the worse it will convert. By choosing a builder that makes your site performant by default, you’ll get better results from your marketing efforts.
And if you plan to do SEO, clean markup (the HTML the builder outputs) plays a huge part in ensuring your content can be crawled and indexed efficiently. It can also help with content interpretation and better SERP display.
Let’s compare how Elementor, Divi, and Breakdance perform in terms of performance and SEO.
Elementor
Elementor’s focus has traditionally been on ease of use and design rather than performance. This means that its robust feature-set belies a heavier overhead than some other builders, which could negatively impact the speed of your site.
In our tests, Elementor loads 587 kb by default on a blank page. This will grow as you continue to design the page, leading to a much larger final page size than in performance-focused builders like Breakdance.
Markup (impactful for SEO) is another area where Breakdance performs poorly. For instance, the number of HTML tags inserted for a single heading clocks in at 3. Instead of just a heading tag, Elementor injects unnecessary markup to wrap the heading. When adding a heading to a section, the number of tags climbs to 5 in total.
Elementor does integrate with popular SEO plugins, giving you the ability to assess your content from an SEO perspective from within the WordPress environment.
Divi
Divi, being an older builder, also has a bit more overhead than you see in more modern contenders. The blank page size measured with Divi came in at 570 kb, which will grow as your design becomes more complex.
With site speed being so important, especially for visitors with slow internet, the extra overhead of this blank page size can have a marked impact on your site’s ability to convert traffic into customers or leads.
Divi is the worst offender when it comes to needlessly complex markup, which can impact the SEO performance of your site. A standalone heading comes in at 3 HTML tags, but a heading in a section balloons to 6. This additional markup can make it harder for search engine crawlers to make sense of your content.
Integrations are easy to come by, with Divi Builder boasting compatibility with most popular SEO plugins. This will give you the metrics and scores you need to ensure your content meets your SEO goals.
Breakdance
Breakdance has a huge edge in the performance and SEO arena. This is largely because the Breakdance team focused heavily on performance during development, including choosing a modern and fast architecture on which to build it. Other builders are using the same frameworks and libraries they were using nearly ten years ago.
For example, a blank page in Breakdance only loads 42 kb, approximately 500 kb less than blank pages from both Divi Builder and Elementor. This lower initial overhead means that though your site will grow in size as you build it out, your end product will be much smaller and load faster.
Breakdance also features a number of bloat eliminator settings, allowing you to turn off default junk loaded by WordPress and achieve even better performance.
Breakdance’s markup (HTML output) is nearly as clean as hand-coding. One standalone heading results in one HTML tag - the heading tag used for the heading. Nesting that heading in a section results in 3 tags, due to the section wrapper, inner container, and the heading. The cleanliness of the markup will ensure that your site is SEO-friendly out of the box.
Additionally, Breakdance integrates with popular SEO plugins such as RankMath, Yoast and SEOPress, allowing you to easily check content scores and make adjustments on the fly.
Which Builder Is The Most Performance And SEO Friendly?
Breakdance stands out as the most performance and SEO-friendly builder. Its modern architecture, built-in optimization features, and clean HTML output ensure fast load times and a solid foundation for SEO.
Elementor offers good SEO integration and responsive design but requires careful management to maintain optimal performance. Divi, while powerful and highly customizable, can be resource-intensive, potentially affecting performance if not optimized properly.
Overall, Breakdance provides the best combination of performance and SEO features, making it an excellent choice for marketers looking to build fast, SEO-friendly websites. Elementor is a close second, offering robust SEO tools and good performance with proper optimization. Divi, while capable, may require more effort to achieve the same level of performance and SEO readiness.
The Final Verdict: Which Is Better Between Elementor Vs Divi Vs Breakdance For Marketers?
Marketers need a few key things out of their site builder and page builder tools. While both Divi Builder and Elementor deliver some of these things, Breakdance delivers the complete package.
Breakdance allows marketers to rapidly create and design landing pages, capture leads with premium-grade native forms, create beautiful intelligent popups & CTAs to convert visitors, and do it all while maintaining stellar performance and SEO.
Whether you’re deeply entrenched in the Elementor and Divi Builder ecosystems, or just starting out, Breakdance is the best choice for the modern marketer who needs to build conversion-focused sites and pages quickly.