Gutenberg vs Elementor 2023? This choice is often overlooked by those about to create a WordPress site from scratch. They instead think about which theme to use, with the rest depending on which page builder – or not – that theme uses.
Indeed, Gutenberg and Page Builders are two very different tools that are not the same. So, taking a look at their features helps you understand which option is the best to make according to your real needs and not only the theme you would like to use.
Gutenberg vs Elementor: Quick Overview
While you may already know some information about Elementor and Gutenberg, to start our Elementor vs. Gutenberg 2023 comparison article, we first want to give you a quick overview of these two WordPress page builders.
✅ What is Gutenberg?
Obviously, we needed to start this article with Gutenberg. For what reason? Because it is the native page builder of WordPress. Therefore, if you prefer not to use third-party plugins to create your website, you stay 100% native with Gutenberg. This means that you will not have any compatibility problems, for example.
Everything is split into blocks with Gutenberg. There are image, title, paragraph, video, audio, quote, and many other blocks. These blocks provide you with a high degree of versatility to add a wide range of content types to your posts. You also can add columns, dividers, widgets and many other styles of content to your post and/or pages.
One major issue with Gutenberg is that it could potentially conflict with your existing plugins or themes. There is no problem if you want to design a WordPress site entirely from scratch with Gutenberg. The challenge occurs if you choose to integrate Gutenberg with your existing site.
✅ What is Elementor?
Elementor is among WordPress’s most popular page builders, with 5 million downloads. Using Elementor, you can visually create entire websites without knowledge of HTML, CSS or any other programming language.
What makes it special is that Elementor is not a theme but rather a plugin. This means that you still need a WordPress theme installed. But don’t worry: many themes are optimized for Elementor.
You can create a complete website quickly and conveniently with Elementor. For this, you do not need any knowledge of CSS or HTML.
In fact, you can configure everything you can think of using the visual page builder. With its very intuitive interface, Elementor is clearly laid out and thus also very suitable for beginners.
All the setting options are separated semantically (Content, Style & Advanced) and work relatively similarly for each widget (module). In this way, you do not have to learn every module in Elementor. As a result, it is particularly easy to get started with this WordPress page builder.
Gutenberg vs Elementor 2023: Key Differences
Well, there are some significant differences between these two, and in the following, we will look at some of the most important ones.
✅ What they offer
The first one is that Gutenberg is a content editor, which means that you can edit the contents of pages and articles (text, photos, etc.), while Elementor, as a page builder, allows you to edit entire pages.
As an example, you may have to create a different menu or footer for each site page, as happens with landing pages. Furthermore, page builders like Elementor offer the ability to work in a visual editor mode, which lets you see the changes live and makes the design process more straightforward.
But you don’t have such a feature in Gutenberg and won’t be able to see your design changes until you preview it.
✅ Ease of installation
The second significant difference is that you can find Gutenberg by default in any WordPress installation, but Elementor has to be installed separately.
Therefore, you can start using Gutenberg right after the WordPress installation. In contrast, if you’re going to use Elementor, you will first need to install it. Unless it is already included by default with the theme you have decided to install.
✅ Cost and updates
Elementor is a free plugin with a paid-for Pro version (starting from $49), which must be updated separately, just like all plugins and themes. On the other hand, Gutenberg is always free and will be updated automatically with the WordPress core.
✅ Options for WooCommerce
Another big difference between Gutenberg and Elementor is that with the latter, you have much more options to play with the design of a WooCommerce online shop. Many of the famous WooCommerce plugins offer Elementor widgets which could come in handy while creating shop pages.
One good example is the MC Lists plugin, which is among the best WooCommerce marketing plugins. It enables your customers to add products to their wishlists and share them with friends and family, increasing your online shop sales.
With this plugin installed on your online shop, you can add four Wishlist widgets to your Elementor. Ranging from buttons to Wishlist Items and the actual Wishlist itself, you can use them on product pages and templates.
Gutenberg vs Elementor: Features and Options
In this section of our Gutenberg vs Elementor 2023 comparison, we will take a deeper look into the features and options they offer for building WordPress pages; stay tuned!
✅ Elementor Features and Options
You can create outstanding page layouts with Elementor regardless of whether you are not a web designer or know nothing about HTML and CSS!
Furthermore, since Elementor follows a policy of open-source code, i.e., code that is documented and accessible to everyone, several extensions have been developed by other companies.
This means that you have numerous widgets at your disposal and many possibilities for developing pages and content. What particularly impresses us is the live editing feature.
This means that you can change colors, values, and so on and directly see the results on the website and what the whole thing looks like.
This is particularly useful when using your own CSS: 90% of the CSS code is displayed live. This way, you can implement smaller CSS changes without repeatedly refreshing the website.
Let’s take a look at a list of what Elementor (Pro) provides and what you can do with it:
- Create fantastic layouts quickly with a drag & drop interface.
- Design your own blog articles.
- Save sections of layouts as templates and use them on other pages.
- Create landing pages.
- Dynamic content creation
- Create contact or opt-in forms. (Elementor pro)
- Link contact forms to some popular autoresponders. (Elementor pro)
- Customize the look of your theme easily. (Elementor Pro)
- Create and manage Pop-ups. (Elementor Pro)
✅ Gutenberg Features and Options
Gutenberg is a new editor which replaced the previous TinyMCE editor beginning with WordPress 5.0. It is a block editor, not a page builder, which lets you define a page as a set of editable blocks.
The designers then configure the blocks so that editing their content is user-friendly, and the result is a developer-friendly structure. It simply puts an end to the mess that WYSIWYG editors tend to produce.
While Gutenberg may not have as many options and features as Elementor offers, it has enough to help you easily create pages.
The following are some features and options of the Gutenberg block editor:
- Utilize lots of blocks to build content, from the most classic (text, image, video) to advanced options like galleries, lists, buttons, and widgets.
- Use drag and drop editor to create pages, articles, and custom post types (CPTs)
- Set up a basic multi-column layout which can be varied along with the page or article
- Personalize specific options on each block, plus a few parameters on the whole document
- Drag-and-drop to add, remove or reorder blocks
???? The Winner: Elementor
Elementor offers much more features and options to build pages. There are also more add-ons for Elementor on the market than Gutenberg.
Gutenberg vs Elementor: Learning Curve
One important thing when deciding on what page builder to choose for creating a WordPress website is its ease of use. In the following, we will see which of these tools has a better interface and is easier to work with.
✅ Elementor Learning Curve
Elementor is not among the easiest WordPress page builders on the market, and it will take some time to get used to it. For us, it takes about half to experiment with it and get familiar with the menus and features. There are many tutorial videos on YouTube that can help you a lot.
However, after an initial look around, many will find Elementor easy to use, and the tool will feel easy to work with. The editor is very intuitive and contains all the essential elements.
The important thing is that you don’t need any programming or graphic design skills to start using Elementor. You can easily create your website with the help of Elementor. Everything from text, images, or videos to more complex elements like Facebook comments or user reviews can be added to the pages.
✅ Gutenberg Learning Curve
If you do not have any page builders installed on your WordPress website, you will automatically be taken to the Gutenberg interface when you create a new article or page.
This interface looks somewhat overwhelming at first glance if you are only interested in a “basic” editor. However, the interface becomes simple and clean as you get used to it.
Furthermore, you have to admit that although it looks a bit complex for a basic editor, Gutenberg is in fact rather quick to pick up. In general, the user interface can be made more intuitive, but once you start learning it, you soon feel that it is no longer complicated.
The Winner: Elementor
Elementor has a better interface, is more user-friendly, and you can quickly learn to work with it after spending some time.
Gutenberg vs Elementor: Performance
Most importantly, the Gutenberg block editor built into WordPress has no additional effect on page load speed. It works the same way as in a classic editor on the front end.
The static HTML is loaded from the database at the WordPress loading stage and is subsequently displayed by the theme.
Elementor plugin is a standalone software application that will become a kind of overlay on the default block editor in WordPress after being installed and activated.
The plugin has its assets (e.g. CSS, JS files), its operating logic, and its team of developers on whom the quality of the applied solutions depends.
As well as its own business goals, which can make profit maximization more important than, say, the quality of the generated code.
Considering the different performance aspects, such as the DOM tree size or code semantics, Elementor performs much worse than the Gutenberg block editor in all of them. No wonder a site built on the Gutenberg block editor performs twice as well in Core Web Vitals, even with no optimization efforts on your part.
The already good result of the page with the Gutenberg block editor alone can be improved even further by choosing (or coding yourself) a lighter theme.
???? The Winner: Gutenberg
As discussed above, a website built with Gutenberg has much better page load speed and excellent performance overall.
✅ Would it be wise to switch from Elementor to Gutenberg now?
There are obvious benefits to ditching Elementor in favor of Gutenberg. This is particularly true now that Core Web Vitals results will count as a ranking factor in Google.
Gutenberg, on the other hand, is very unlikely to ever have such a rich palette of options for setting styles for each individual block, because it’s not really a page builder.
Instead, it is more of a tool for generating HTML. The developers are committed to maintaining good webmaster practices. The idea is that most of the generated HTML is to inherit style from the global settings, instead of being set individually for each individual block.
For some users who don’t know much about good practices and have already got accustomed to the many options offered by Elementor, this may be hard to handle.
However, Gutenberg is still in the process of developing and expanding its features. It will only reach its full potential in a few years. Nevertheless, you can already use it to create a pretty good, and above all fast, website.
If you want to have a website with better page load speed and performance and don’t need any of the features offered by Elementor, switching from Elementor to Gutenberg is a must.
Gutenberg vs Elementor: SEO Friendliness
For one thing, Elementor can help you create attractive websites and achieve an eye-catching design, including for beginners. Ideally, this great design means your visitors spend more time on your website, resulting in a longer dwell time and a lower bounce rate.
Google values such positive signals with better rankings on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Conversely, Elementor, as with other page builder plugins, inserts unnecessary code into your website, which generally increases loading time and decreases performance.
As performance is also a ranking factor in Google, this may result in lower rankings in the SERPs.
When it comes to the Gutenberg block editor, as we mentioned in the performance section of this Gutenberg vs Elementor 2023 comparison, it has no bad effect on page load times and on SEO. This is because, unlike Elementor, Gutenberg adds no unnecessary codes to your website.
???? The Winner: Gutenberg
Since Google considers core web vitals essential for ranking higher in search results, Gutenberg’s websites could be more SEO friendly.
Gutenberg vs Elementor: Pricing
As you might already know, Elementor can be downloaded for free from the WordPress repository. The free version is quite good and offers many features, which could be enough to build a website.
But if you need additional widgets, a ready-made professional page, and block templates, or if you would like to tamper with the look and feel of WooCommerce, you will need Elementor PRO.
There are several options in the paid version of the page builder. These differ primarily by the number of sites (domains) on which you can use Elementor for a single cost.
On the other hand, Gutenberg is WordPress’s default block editor; therefore, you do not have to pay anything to use it on your website.
???? The Winner: Gutenberg
While the free version of Elementor offers some basic features to build pages, you must pay for Elementor Premium for the ultimate experience. On the other hand, Gutenberg is totally free, letting you utilize all features and options without paying anything.
Gutenberg vs Elementor: Customer Support
As you pay for Elementor Pro, you will receive support if you have any problems with the plugin. Elementor Pro users have the option of a ticket system on the Elementor website to resolve their issues.
On the other hand, since it is a free product, there is no support when using Gutenberg, and in case of any problems, you should only rely on forums and other free platforms.
✅ The Winner: Elementor
On its premium version, Elementor offers good customer support where you can resolve your issues with a ticket system.
Gutenberg vs Elementor: Building Pages
In this section of the Elementor vs. Gutenberg comparison, we will talk about building pages, which is what both of the plugins promise to do easily.
✅ Building a Page with Elementor
An essential aspect of a good page builder is a clean and straightforward interface. You can find both of these features in Elementor.
Indeed, for the building of pages, it uses a side menu from which you can choose the elements to be inserted into the page and drag them to the desired location.
All you have to do to access the features of the Elementor plugin is to create a new article or a new page on your website. By clicking the Edit with Elementor button, you will be directed to a loading screen and, shortly after, to the page builder.
Use the + (Add new section) button to create your page from scratch using the drag and drop commands in the column on the left.
Next, choose the structure of the section based on the number of columns, then select the + symbol inside it to select the element to be inserted.
Then drag the desired element from the left-hand column and drop it in the desired position. As you select an element on your page, you will be given several options, which will be shown in the column on the left.
If you would like to use Elementor’s available templates, select the button representing a folder icon. This will take you to the library of templates. Pick the one you prefer and then customize it to your satisfaction. There you will find not only whole page templates but also individual elements.
Each time you create a new section, a small menu of icons will be displayed whenever you hover your mouse over it:
- the + indicates the insertion of a new section;
- the dots in a row are used to drag the section to another position;
- X deletes the section.
After loading a template, you can still add new elements to the page, once again, using the drag and drop feature.
✅ Building a Page with Gutenberg
As the standard block editor of the WordPress CMS, Gutenberg is getting more popular among users. While the structure of its panel is quite reminiscent of the classic WordPress editor, featuring a top toolbar, a side toolbar, and the content area, the way it works and its features have changed a bit.
With the blocks that we can add to our page, we can create the structure of a website. All you have to do is learn the type of blocks you have and how to insert and customize them, in addition to the basics of the Gutenberg block editor.
The editor contains different Gutenberg blocks: common blocks, formatting blocks, layout blocks, widgets, and embedded blocks. Each of these has numerous blocks and covers different features.
As you will have guessed from their name, the first is the most basic and include paragraphs, subtitles, header, image, cover image, or gallery. On the other hand, the design blocks are intended to structure the content with columns, spacers, and separators.
If you want to insert a new block on your page, you must click on the “add block“ button in the top bar of the editor. It will display the different elements that we can add according to what we are looking for.
Alternatively, we can add it from the content area by clicking on the “+“ icon. In both cases, a drop-down menu will open with the different block options, sorted according to their type.
To remove a block or modify its position in the content area, you can click on the last three dots in the top bar on the right when you select the block.
Like Elementor, Gutenberg also has a list of blocks and patterns, which you can open by clicking the + button on the top bar. You can easily drag and drop them on the editor to design the page.
To save changes you have made, you can use the “Save Draft” button on the top bar. As Gutenberg does not have a live editor, to see the changes you’ve made, you should use the preview button, which gives you the option to see the changes on desktop, tablet, and mobile. The “Publish” button, as its name suggests, publishes the page that you have created.
???? The Winner: Elementor
Because of its easy-to-use interface, you can build pages more easily with Elementor. Moreover, as a live editor, you don’t need to preview the changes you’ve made.
Gutenberg vs Elementor: Gallery Templates
When it comes to visually appealing templates, both have an extensive source of extensions. While Elementor has more built-in elements, Gutenberg adopts a more remarkable set of blocks created by third-party authors.
If you want to create a photo gallery on a WordPress page, Elementor provides more flexible options in its own website builder. Still, Gutenberg is better if you just want to use an individual section like a WordPress table or document library list. And Gutenberg works for pages, posts, and other custom post types, too!
Once you organize WordPress media library with folders, it’s easy to publish the media or document files as a document gallery.
If you wish to use the document gallery on Elementor, it will also generate a shortcode to output the preset templates as well.
???? The Winner: Gutenberg
With Gutenberg, you’ll have plenty of patterns and image/document gallery template options to choose from. Most of them are free and offer greater compatibility with popular WordPress themes.
Bottom Line: Which One Should You Choose between Elementor vs Gutenberg?
As discussed in this Gutenberg vs Elementor 2023 comparison article, both tools offer good features to help you build posts, pages, and websites with no programming knowledge.
Elementor is a dedicated page builder plugin and has more features and options when compared to Gutenberg.
When it comes to designing pages, Elementor is the winner here, but as already mentioned, since it adds some additional code to your website, Elementor can decrease the load time of your pages.
In contrast, the Gutenberg block editor would be your best option if you want to build a website with good page loading times. Although it has fewer features than Elementor at the moment, its developers are adding more of them to Gutenberg with each update.
So, when it comes to the Gutenberg vs Elementor 2023 comparison, which one is the winner, in your opinion? Let us know in the comments section below.
