The appeal of WordPress is simplicity. The debate on Gutenberg and Page builders is much more than functionalities. It’s more about ease of use.
In the world of page builders, Gutenberg emerged as a complete paradigm shift for the users. The battle goes on whether the page builders will be replaced by Gutenberg and lose their influence? Or is Gutenberg alienating most of the current user base because of its workflow?
In this blog, we are going to compare WordPress page builder plugins with Gutenberg to help you select an ideal choice that suits your WordPress website requirement.
Live visual editing
If you want to figure out how things would appear without saving the page – through an actual live preview of a page as you edit it – then here is a big turn up you will find in the differences.
Page builder offers the level of visual editing that Gutenberg doesn’t. A page builder lets you design the entire page in a WYSIWYG interface. You can save the preview time by making direct changes in the layout and style of the web page.
Styles and themes compatibility
Page builders provide more style options in comparison to Gutenberg editor. Elementor and Divi Builders are among the perfect examples for it.
For a button, Page builder offers a lot of customizations like color, border radius, animations, filters etc. But Guntenberg will only have few choices in its bag like shape, background color, and text color.
Gutenberg relies on WordPress for themes and styles. With custom CSS, you can customize your blocks but the overall look of the page will be the same as your theme. On the other hand, Page builder lets you override themes and styles. Thus help in creating a unique experience for standalone landing pages.
Responsive design controls
Gutenberg does not have a responsive design control. But plugin like Kadence blocks adds custom blocks to extend Gutenberg’s editing capabilities. You will be able to better control columns for different screen sizes and will be responsive according to your theme.
But you can’t change how that responsive design will work in Gutenberg.
Whereas page builders provide responsive design control for each element. Therefore, if you want to have full control on the design, you must prefer page builders as an ideal option.
Layout functionality
You can’t customize margins and paddings for individual blocks in WordPress’ new default editor. It gives some basic options for alignment such as left, right, and centre. On the other hand, a page builder gives you the option to edit every single entity on the screen like margins and paddings.
Gutenberg has some third party extensions to let you use drag and drop options to adjust different layouts for different devices. One of the most popular extensions is Kadence blocks. It adds detailed layouts in a web page. But Gutenberg’s default column block is limited and cannot be compared to page builders.
It’s for this reason, you will always require a page builder to get full layout control.
Scope
Gutenberg comes with limited actions. Ease of use is the main goal of Gutenberg. It is intended to be used by writers, bloggers, and businesses.
Whereas, Page builders work well for people who rely on customizations for their development needs.
Page builders are commonly used by eCommerce stores, WordPress agencies, aspiring designers, small businesses, among others.
Takeaways
- Gutenberg is for people who put reliability and ease-of-use over a buffet of customizations.
- You can prefer Page builder when you have specific vision for site’s design. You can create unique designs according to your needs and preferences.
- You can use Page builders when you want to add some specific features that are not present in Block editor. Some of these features include media carousels and subscription forms.
- People who are used to the freedom of customizations in page builders will find the simplicity of gutenberg quite limiting.
Currently, Gutenberg is not powerful enough to replace highly flexible page builder plugins. It’s just a modern version of the classic editor. But there’s a good news Gutenberg enthusiasts…
Integrating page builder plugins within Gutenberg has the potential to bring out the best of both worlds. Maybe WordPress is heading that way only with custom fields integration.
As a result, you’ll be able to use different modules as separate blocks in Gutenberg editor itself. It would help you to create rich and more flexible web experience. At the same time a future with a win-win situation for all.