If you are not able to decide which WordPress builder you should choose between the most popular Elementor and the most controversial Oxygen Builder then stick with me as I am going to share with you my personal experiences of using both of them.
Before anything else, I want to make one thing very clear which is that the comparison in this blog post is neither influenced by any external force nor by any of the companies that paid me for writing this blog post.
Whatever I have written over here is my personal opinion based on the facts and my own experiences of using both tools, therefore you must perform your due diligence before choosing any of the tools between Elementor Pro and Oxygen Builder.
Consider checking our other posts about the comparison of other WordPress Website Builders, including Elementor, Oxygen Builder, Zion Builder, and Bricks Builder.
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 ready-made 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 backend page builders.
Then one day I got 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 built dozens of websites using Elementor Pro and OceanWP pro themes (including personal projects) and I was happy with the overall features and the results.
But one thing that always kept bugging my head was how can I make my websites faster.
Being a Google and HubSpot certified digital marketer I always knew how much website speed matters, and how it can help businesses to attract and convert more leads and sales.
So at that point, I started learning more about website speed optimization, I learned how to optimize images, and how to minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript using tools like Autoptimize, Plugin Organizer, AssetCleanUp Pro, WP-Rocket, and many others.
Also, I tried different web hosting companies including Flywheel, SiteGround, Bluehost, HostGator, and GoDaddy but nothing helped.
In the beginning, optimizing websites used to give me a good speed score of under 4 sec and sometimes 3 sec, but after a few days, it again used to start dropping the speed by getting slow and then slower, up to 7 to 9 sec.
All of my clients were happy with the design and features of the websites I built for them, but most of them were not happy with the website speed and unfortunately, I could do nothing about it to make them happy.
Then I determined that I will learn how to keep websites faster, and I knew there must be something that can help me to do that, but I need to find that, and it was the time when I found Oxygen Builder through a speed comparison video by Louis Reingold on YouTube.
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 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 multivendor e-commerce website are natively integrated with Elementor.
Although you can create various kinds of websites using Oxygen Builder, you need to use custom field 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.
Now I will explain a few of the most important reasons to choose Oxygen over Elementor. It will help you make your decision much easier.
If you are a long-time user of WordPress then you must have heard that the speed of WordPress websites gets slower when you keep adding more plugins to your website, at least everyone would tell you this when your website is slow.
But according to my personal experiences, I know that WordPress themes also play a huge role in making your website slower especially on mobile devices which is a serious matter as Google already changed its indexing policy from a desktop-first to a mobile-first approach.
I remember that whenever someone used to ask me to improve their website speed on mobile devices I used to tell them that they should consider AMP technology because the themes of WordPress are not capable of making your website faster on mobile, and you can’t make a website without using a theme which is a shame.
Then time changed, and I found Oxygen Builder, which is the only builder in the entire WordPress ecosystem that completely disables the use of a theme and cuts off all the unnecessary bloats that a theme generates.
Oxygen not only helps you make your website faster on the desktop view, but it also helps you make your website super fast even on mobile devices if you optimize things properly.
In this case, if you talk about Elementor then I would say that Elementor is faster than most of the other WordPress builders in the market, but it is not faster than Oxygen and I believe it happens because of its unclean HTML codes and DIVCEPTION.
From the very beginning of using WordPress, I always wanted to learn to code but due to workloads and access to easy-to-use website builders like Elementor, I was never able to push myself to learn the skills.
When technology becomes easy, people become lazy, which happened to me as well, I always used to find a plugin to achieve even something very small thing which can be achieved with a very simple snippet of code.
But when I started using Oxygen, I got the assurance that now I will be able to learn to code because during working with Oxygen editor most of the time I need to use the basics of HTML and CSS which keeps me motivated to learn more coding while even working on a client’s project.
Therefore, if you are a person who just doesn’t want to rely on easy-to-use tools to build websites that anyone can do, and if you don’t want to spend the rest of your life chasing new plugins for everything then Oxygen is your best friend as it will push your limits and encourage you to learn to code which will eventually help you in the future.
Imagine you are the only person using a complex tool and there is no one to discuss or ask something about the tool that you’re not familiar with yet. I know you can learn from the documentation and tutorials on the internet, but that alone is not enough for a sense of fulfillment.
Elementor has a large community group on Facebook, but most of the community members are beginners and experts are very limited in quantity. And on the other hand, Oxygen has a fairly small community on Facebook as compared to Elementor but most of them are advanced users and experts in their fields.
The other thing I love about the Oxygen community is that they are very passionate about the product, and they are always ready to help each other in need. The reason behind this, according to my opinion, is that they believe in Oxygen so much.
Also, the Oxygen community is open to discussing any criticism or comparison whereas the Elementor group is famous for closing the threads which criticize or compare their products with others.
I have used many paid plugins, but very few of them provide satisfactory support, and Oxygen is one of them even though they don’t ask for any yearly subscription for extending the product support, you just need to pay once and get lifetime support.
On the other hand, Elementor support is kind of frustrating for me. I never feel like contacting the support team because they reply with a very generic answer which I already knew in the first place and never provided a proper solution to my problem.
But when I contact the Oxygen team for the support they even respond to my emails on Saturday and Sunday though they officially don’t provide support on weekends.
And the best part about them is that most of the time they reply after solving the problem and also explain in the email reply how they have fixed the issue I was facing.
Oxygen has a great pricing model that Elementor can’t even think about considering using, for Oxygen just pay once and use it on an unlimited site, and get updates and support for a lifetime.
Although I personally love products with Lifetime deals, I know that it’s very tough to survive with this kind of pricing model, so I support a subscription-based pricing model because it helps a business stay profitable, pays the bills, and keeps working on its awesome products.
On the other hand, Elementor sells a product on a yearly based subscription which means you need to pay a fee yearly to get updates and support which is absolutely fine for most of us.
But what I personally hate about Elementor is that if you don’t renew your license after it expires, they won’t even let you touch the pro elements within the editor.
This means you will be limited to only using the free modules of Elementor which is totally unfair if you compare that with the other paid tools where you can at least use them after the license expires.
Even though if Oxygen was a subscription-based product I would still use it but thanks to Soflyy (the company behind Oxygen) for keeping the awesome plugin on a lifetime deal for us.
But one thing I know for sure is that eventually, they will introduce a subscription-based pricing model like the most popular custom fields WordPress plugin ACF Pro did, which is totally fine.
Although there are so many differences between both tools, still you can find a few things that are great and similar in both Oxygen and Elementor.
After all the comparisons now I will share with you where both tools are similar and the best at the same time.
One thing is exactly the same in both companies: they both have the same approach toward the public roadmap.
They believe that having a public roadmap in this competitive market can invite other lazy and unethical developers to copy their ideas, so they prefer to keep the roadmap a top secret.
Also, they love to give surprises to their users each time by releasing exclusive new features, which is another reason for not having a roadmap.
Both Elementor and Oxygen have dedicated GitHub pages where people can request new features and based on the most requested features on GitHub Pull they decide what are the next features they should prioritize working on.
Elementor’s GitHub Page: https://github.com/elementor/elementor
Oxygen’s GitHub Page: https://github.com/soflyy/oxygen-bugs-and-features
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 tools have high-quality 3rd party add-ons that will help you drastically speed up your workflow.
If you’re interested in exploring more Oxygen add-ons, then you will find the other post I have written about the ultimate list of oxygen builder add-ons really helpful.
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 to 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 the end-users.
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/Elementor/
Documentation: https://elementor.com/help/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/oxygenbuilder/
Documentation: https://oxygenbuilder.com/documentation/
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.
In this detailed post on a comparison between the most popular WordPress Page Builder Elementor and the most controversial Website Builder Oxygen, I have tried my best to cover every possible aspect of these tools that can help you understand which is the best fit for you.
There is no good or bad WordPress builder, both Elementor and Oxygen have different purposes of using and totally different target audiences.
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 should they 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 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 you ask me which tool between Elementor and Oxygen I would personally choose, then my answer would be:
If I need to build very complex websites 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.
Apart from that for all the other projects with a high budget, I would personally prefer to use the Oxygen Builder because if the client is ready to pay the deserving price for my efforts then I am more than happy to put my hard work and extra hours for building a rock-solid website for him.
I know that I might have missed so many things to mention in this blog post therefore if you find something is missing then you can add that in the comment section below.
If you find this blog post helpful, which I hope you did, then please share this with your community so that they also can take advantage of it.
