If you have just started your journey with WordPress who doesn’t have knowledge about any programming languages and looking for a solid WordPress Website Builder with less barrier to entry then stick with this article as here I am going to review Elementor, the most popular and easy to use tool for building professional websites.
Elementor is the Drag & Drop website builder that makes it easy to build beautiful websites, landing pages, and mobile responsive websites. It allows you to create layouts visually using a live front-end editor, no coding is needed.
It comes with all the features you need to create a beautiful website. Elementor Pro comes with detailed documentation. Also, you can choose from Elementor pre-made page layouts or customize them to create entirely new designs from the scratch.
In this section, you will find all the much-needed bookmarkable official and 3rd party resources for Elementor to make your workflow easier while building websites using it.
First of all, I should tell you something about myself so you can understand how I am eligible to compare these two tools.
Hi, I am Wasim, a Web Strategist, and Web Designer for more than 3 years. I run a WordPress web design business from my home office and build strategic websites for small businesses from all over the world.
When I started my journey I used to build websites using readymade themes from the WordPress directory as well as from the Envato marketplace
But I was not completely satisfied with the results, thus I started testing out different tools such as WP Bakery, Visual Builder, Fusion builder by Avada, and DIVI.
I didn’t like any of these tools as they were too complicated for me to use at that time and most of them were a backend page builder.
Then one day I get to know about the Elementor page builder and started using the free version of Elementor to design websites, being a non-coder it was a great tool for me to design websites as I wanted to.
After that, I decided to purchase the Elementor Pro Expert Licence for $199 which I could use on 1000 sites.
I have built more than 40+ websites using Elementor Pro and OceanWP pro themes (including personal projects) and I was happy with the overall features and the results.
If you wonder when you should choose Elementor over Oxygen, then I am going to give you a few important reasons for that which will make your decision much easier.
If you are a non-technical person who designs and maintains his own site to cut the additional cost of a web designer and webmaster then Elementor is for you because Oxygen is a more advanced tool that is not recommended for absolute beginners.
If you are a freelance web designer who never intended to learn to code and only looking for easy-to-use tools for website building then Elementor is for you because for using Oxygen you need to know at least the basics of HTML and CSS.
Also if you are a person who is coming from Wix or Weebly to WordPress and looking for a similar user interface and experience then go for Elementor as Oxygen has a different user interface, you can think of it as Adobe Photoshop when other WordPress builders are like Canva.
If you are a person who builds different kinds of websites using dedicated ready-to-use themes from a place like ThemeForest and want to design the pages of those themes using a page builder then you should go for Elementor.
On the other hand, Oxygen entirely disables the WordPress theme from loading so there is no way to use a theme with Oxygen in the first place, though you can use the Theme Enabler plugin to activate the theme yet it’s not recommended.
Currently, most of the themes in the market either to create a directory listing website, a social media website, or a multi-vendor e-commerce website are natively integrated with Elementor.
Although you can create various kinds of websites using Oxygen Builder, you need to use custom fields tools like ACF Pro or Toolset or you should have a good hand in coding to achieve what you want.
There are thousands of plugins available in the WordPress ecosystem thus it’s impossible to say that each of the plugins integrates, however, it would be safe to say that Elementor does a pretty good job in this area by integrating with most of the popular plugins out there.
On the other hand, Oxygen works with various WordPress plugins, but I would say “Not Out of The Box”, to make the plugins of your choice work with Oxygen you need to choose them very wisely and sometimes you would require additional coding skills or 3rd party add-ons as well.
Therefore if you want to use any of the popular plugins on your website without any extra effort to make all of them work together with your page builder then Elementor is the way to go for you.
Powerful Third Party Elementor Add-Ons:
The best part of Elementor and Oxygen builder is that they both have powerful third-party add-ons that extend and enhance the functionalities of the main plugins.
If you ask me what these add-ons can do then I would say, adding a new design library to a new set of features and enhancing the default editor experience.
Both the tools have high-quality 3rd party add-ons that will help you drastically speed up your workflow.
Documentation is the very first thing that I find before using any kind of software and tools, and I am glad to say that both Elementor and Oxygen have great and very extensive docs on their websites.
If you are stuck somewhere and don’t know what should you do next then the documentation can bring you out of that situation by teaching you how to use that particular thing to achieve what you exactly want.
Elementor and Oxygen both have active YouTube Channels where they publish awesome and helpful tutorials to make our lives easier as end-users.
Apart from the official documentation and YouTube videos, there are a handful of great blogs and YouTube channels by 3rd party publishers where you can find a bunch of step-by-step tutorial blog posts and videos to learn more about the usage and operation of both Elementor and Oxygen.
Third Party Websites to Learn Elementor:
But I would say that Elementor can make everyone an expert and a developer (Elementor Developer), and one thing we should always keep in mind is that:
“When everyone is an expert, no one is an expert”
– Unknown
If everyone starts building websites then why they should hire an expensive web designer or developer? For that reason being web professionals we should learn to code and improve our skills regularly to keep our jobs safe in the future.
However different people would have a different opinions about these tools which directly reflect their beliefs, and whatever you have read in this article is my personal opinion derived directly from the facts and my experiences of using the tools.
If I need to build a particular type of website such as social media or directory listing sites on a low budget which require a lot of custom features to code then I would prefer Elementor Pro because it would allow me to use ready-to-use themes and plugins that are dedicated to building such websites.
