This is a story about the intense competition among the WordPress PageBuilders for the past 3 years has added substantial PageStyling and ThemeBuilding capabilities to all the top tools. Consider the following table of the top WordPress PageBuilders:
| Tool | Free+Pro Cost site/year | WP Plugin Rating | Active Sites | |
| Beaver Builder | Yes , $99US unlimited/yr | 4.98 | 500,000+ | |
| Divi Builder | No, $89US/year 1 website +Monarch, | NA | 1,200,000 | |
| Elementor | Yes, $49US 1 website/year | 4.98 | 3,000,000 | |
| Thrive Architect | No, $67US 1 website/year | NA | NA | |
| Visual Composer | Yes, $59US 1 website/year | NA | 400,000+ | |
| SiteOrigin PageBuilder | Yes, $29US 1 website/year | 4.85 | 1,000,000+ | |
| Themify Builder | Yes, $89US/yr Master Club | 5.00 | 100,000+ | |
| Gutenberg | Yes + many 3rd party addons | 1.97 | 200,000+ |
First, there is a remarkably close pricing among the tools with each offering some extras like unlimited usage or free themes and plugins. Only two PageBuilders, Divi and Thrive Architect, do not offer a free, starter version of their tools. However, as we shall see in this review, the PageBuilders are very competitive in the features they are introducing and offer. This summer has seen a substantial set of new features from all 7 PageBuilders.
Innovation among the PageBuilders
What is driving the rapid innovation among the PageBuilders? Well, the competition among the 7 PageBuilders itself is intense as each attempts to secure a market winning advantage. But the eighth PageBuilder in yellow in the table, Gutenberg, is also acting as a stimulus. Despite Gutenberg’s very low rating among users at 1.97, Automattic has set a goal of making Gutenberg the default frontend tool for WordPress. So that surely has lit the fires of innovation among the top PageBuilders.
And so all of the PageBuilder have developed a substantial set of PageStyling and ThemeBuilding features which Gutenberg has been hard pressed to match. But the biggest beneficiaries have been WordPress Developers who have “No Codong Require”, drag and drop Page layout tools that also deliver superlative page styling features and time saving Template + ThemeBuilding capabilities.
However, let us consider some of the overall features of the topend PageBuilders. First , all of the PageBuilders deliver coding free implementations – no need to know or utilize HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, SQL This is a boon for many developers because SQL, PHP, and Javascript all have 3 notable downsides:
1)they can be fragile and error prone; 2)subject to subtle hacking vulnerabilities;and 3)can be tedious to debug and optimize.
HTML and CSS are less burdensome but new programmatic trends in both HTML [conditional Ifs] and CSS [SCSS, LESS, and internal calculations]add a new layer of complexity to these web tools.
Second, all PageBuilders deliver mobile responsive page designs that run well and look good on desktop, tablet and mobile devices. This is very important as web browsing converts to mobile devices [52% of all web browsing done worldwide is on mobile phones]. Even more important, some of the latest Pagestyler features being added to some PageBuilders further enhances mobile data display.