Elementor vs Gutenberg: What are the Differences and Similarities

When WordPress was first released it had a default editor called TinyMCE which was available up until WordPress 5. As the editor was too simple, the team behind WordPress ditched it and introduced a new editor called Gutenberg.

Though it had received a series of backlashes since then, it has all the potential to be a great page builder in the days to come. The best part is that it comes completely free of cost and offers many premium features. However, it lacks some important features that make it difficult to create complex layouts.

On the other hand, Elementor is a powerful page builder plugin that allows users to easily design any website layout no matter how complex it is. It comes with tons of features, but it is very complicated to learn for first-time users.

In today’s article, we will be showing you how these superheroes battle with each other and which one dominates whom compared to their features. Now, let’s begin the game “Elementor vs Gutenberg”.

A Quick Introduction

Since you are a WordPress user, you may already be familiar with both Elementor and Gutenberg. However, I’m going to demonstrate a quick intro to Elementor vs Gutenberg to clarify your confusion.

What is Elementor?

Elementor is a drag & drop based page builder for WordPress that allows users to design a website without writing a single line of code. Elementor is equipped with many built-in content layouts and widgets. You can also create a complete WordPress theme with Elementor Pro.

Elementor provides a lot of features such as drag & drop, visual editor, multi-page templates, etc. Elementor helps you to make your website look professional and unique. To use Elementor, you must first have a WordPress website in place. Then, you can start creating a new website or edit an existing one. Elementor works well with most of the themes available online. However, if you want to customize your theme all by yourself, you may have to start using the tool for a few days to find it under your belt.

Currently, Elementor has more than 5 million users with a satisfactory rating of 4.7 out of 5 which is good enough to call it a great product.

What is Gutenberg?

Gutenberg, developed by the same folks behind WordPress is a text-based block editor for a WordPress website. It’s very powerful and easy to use. You can design a beautiful content layout with this page builder. It was first introduced by Matt Mullenweg in 2017 at WordCamp Europe.

It’s a great tool for creating a clean and organized website. Gutenberg is an open-source project and it works as a block editor. With this tool, you need to add different blocks for different elements such as headings, paragraphs, quotes, lists, images, galleries, buttons, etc. These blocks contain their own layouts that are customizable and can be saved for later reusable purposes.

These features make working with Gutenberg more fun than work. It’s similar to building a LEGO set. Just put together the blocks in a specific order and create your webpage! You can even use different third-party Gutenberg blocks for more customization options.

As of now, Gutenberg has more than 300 thousand users with a rating of only 2.1 out of 5.

Elementor vs Gutenberg Page Builder: What all the fuss is about?

We recommend you at least take a look at the free version of Elementor and Gutenberg before diving into the post. This way you will be able to quickly get the correct message from this post.

Why Gutenberg has become the talk of the town?

As we already mentioned, Gutenberg is an open-source project that allows users to easily create web pages. It includes many different blocks that allow users to add content to their website. Now, let’s take a look at some reasons why it is so much hyped up:

• It’s completely free.
• It’s well-organized and has simple layouts.
• Track the revisions just like the TinyMCE classic editor.
• Helps to take a closer look at page metadata such as featured images, attributes, excerpts, tags, categories, and discussions.
• Gutenberg works smoothly on mobile devices
• Create a multi-column layout.
• Use the drag-&-drop editor to create any pages or posts.
• Drag and Drop Editor allows you to create posts, pages, or customize content.
• Get different blocks for different purposes like images, texts, tables, quotes, video buttons, and many more.
• Customize every block individually without affecting others
• Add, rearrange, and deleted the blocks whenever and wherever you want.
• A quick overview of your content from the top left menu like the number of words, characters, heading, and most importantly document outline.
• Get a bird’s eye view from the top left menu of your content.
• Works comparatively faster than other editors
• Third-party page builder options to extend its functionalities even more just like Elementor.

Apart from these features, in WordCamp Europe 2020, Matt Mullenweg shared some additional features from the Gutenberg Roadmap.

Why do people go crazy for Elementor?

Even if Elementor is late to the party, it surged into massive popularity mainly due to its dynamic, intuitive, and cognitive user interface. other factors include but are not limited to the followings:

• It has both free and pro versions.
• It’s compatible with almost all WordPress themes.
• It’s a large pool of users.
• No coding knowledge is required to create any visuals.
• With the drag-&-drop editor, feel free to create any complex dynamic design.
• Rich library of readymade templates
• Add multiple columns and complex layouts efficiently
• Access 30+ readymade elements (elements are similar to the Gutenberg blocks)
• Control over margin, padding, spacing, etc
• More styles for the sections and widgets
• Design your website’s header, footer, and other pages with more flexibility.
• Construct unique and exclusive header, and footer designs faster.
• Highly scalable with integrated elements like maps, slides, image, forums, accordion tabs, pricing listings, and so forth.
• Seamless integration with e-commerce plugins like WooCommerce, or other multi-vendor marketplace solutions. 
• Add any CSS properties to design the page according to the one you dreamt in your sleep.

Elementor vs Gutenberg: Key Differences

Although they are page builders by nature, they have some key differences:

1. Backend vs frontend editing

Elementor gives you a real-time preview of every change you make on your website. As the Elementor user creates the changes on the frontend unlike Gutenberg, it’s comparatively easier to check the layout.

Though Gutenberg is mainly a backend editor, it doesn’t give you a live preview of your design when you’re editing a post. Unfortunately, you will have to click the ‘Preview’ button to check the design over and over again. Expert people can track changes easily, but mass people can’t track changes easily. That’s why it’s an essential feature for webmasters like us.

2. Advanced formatting

Elementor and Gutenberg both offer advanced formatting options. But, the formatting styles aren’t the same on both of them. Elementor gives you access to every single formatting option while Gutenberg lets you customize texts, images, lists, and other elements. Gutenberg also allows you to add custom CSS to the selected element, but Elementor doesn’t allow any such thing.

3. Page loading speed

Page loading speed is a significant ranking factor of Google. Unfortunately, Elementor is slower than Gutenberg in terms of page loading speed. In fact, Gutenberg’s main USP is its blazingly fast loading speed.

When the Elementor-built page loads it also loads other customization features’ codes the page is not using at all. Consequently, the page loads much slower. On the contrary, Gutenberg-built pages load much faster due to the fact that they have fewer codes running in the background.

4. Responsiveness

More than 52% of people use mobile devices to access the internet. If they can’t find what they want, they’ll leave your website. Your WordPress theme may not be responsive enough to adapt to different screen sizes. With Elementor, you can customize how the contents will be displayed on different devices. You’ll also be able to add additional styling to different elements.

On the other hand, Gutenberg sometimes lacks the ability to show content properly by maintaining mobile responsiveness. Plus, it is highly controlled by the theme you use.

Gutenberg vs Elementor: Prominent Similarities

Now, let’s have a look at the aspects they share in common: 

1. Drag & drop editing experience

Both of the plugins come with a drag-&-drop feature. In the case of Gutenberg, you drag and drop the blocks whereas, in Elementor, you drag and drop the widgets on the page. Most importantly, you can create as many columns as you need for responsive design.

But, in our opinion, In terms of row and column editing, Elementor provides a better user interface and better control.

2. Live editing experience

WYSIWYG Live editing is great because you can see what you’re doing right away. It is much better than hitting the preview button again and again because you don’t need to click the preview button as many times.

In either of the cases, you will get the WYSIWIG live editor panel. However, the live editor of Gutenberg is not that better compared to that one of Elementor considering the fact that you will have to face the hassle to hit the ‘Preview’ button over and over again.

But Elementor is the exact opposite of this. It shows you the changes you’ve made instantly on its WYSIWIG live editor. This makes it easier to save time and energy.

3. Scalability with addons

The two of them are the quintessential instances of scalability. You will find dozens of great third-party addons for them. For instance, Elementor has great addons like Directorist (Directory website builder add-on), Essential Addons, Happy Addons, ElementsKit, ShopEngine, MetForm, etc.

Similarly, Gutenberg is also scalable with many third-party add-ons like Directorist (Directory website builder add-on), Ultimate blocks, Spectra (Formerly, Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg), Stackable, and many more.

4. Revision history

You should always be careful when making changes to your website. It’s quite common that you may lose your elements or blocks in the blink of an eye. To avoid such mistakes, both of them come up with the use of a revision history section. This will help you to undo your mistakes.

Elementor vs Gutenberg: Which One Should You Use?

Elementor has a staggering 5M+ user base compared to the 300K+ users of Gutenberg. In fact, Elementor has got more active installations than any other WordPress plugins out there. What’s more interesting is that you will get a large Facebook community of 100k+ members. In the community, you will be able to post your problem and get help within around 30 minutes on average.

According to a research, the number of video viewers worldwide is 3.1 billion users.

Statista

As 3.1 billion users from worldwide watch videos online, Elementor has capitalized on this opportunity to a great extent with their online video resources. Not only they upload the videos on their official YouTube channel but also enriched their documentation and other tutorials with many video resources. However, Gutenberg definitely has fewer video resources than Elementor.

Another important point is when the theme developers build their themes, first, they make sure that the theme is completely compatible with Elementor.

Last but not least, developers are still focused on Elementor as it is already a proven and matured product. But we know that Gutenberg will start taking over the market in the long run as it is pushed by the inventor of WordPress himself. However, there is no chance of Gutenberg taking over Elementor anytime soon.

Now, it poses the obvious question, “Which one should you go for?”. We are not giving any biased opinions here. You can use Elmentor to design complex designs for your website while you can use Gutenberg to write your dynamic blog post pages.

Wrapping Up

We can conclude that you can’t actually ditch anyone of them as they both shine from their own perspective. Hopefully, this article will help you get a quick and clear idea of which one to choose for which purposes. Still can’t decide what to do? Don’t forget to drop your question in the comment section so that we can help you out.

If you are already using both of them, feel free to share your thoughts and experience with them in the comment section below. If you liked the post, don’t forget to subscribe to our blog so that we can notify you once any post is published. Finally, you can also follow wpWax on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn for more exciting news, offers, and product updates.