If you’re a web developer looking for a Webflow alternative for WordPress then I am going to review Oxygen Builder which is the most advanced Website Builder for WordPress that opens up limitless possibilities to build almost any kind of complex website which can’t be built using any other WordPress Builders at this moment.
The best part about this tool is that it allows you to follow the best web design and development practices to build websites following the layout first approach by offering elements like sections, columns, and div to create any complex layout that can hardly be found on major WordPress Builders nowadays.
Before anything else, I want to make one thing very clear which is that this review article is neither influenced by any external force nor anyone paid me for writing this blog article.
Whatever I have written over here is my personal opinion based on the facts and my own experiences of using the tool, therefore you must perform your due diligence before choosing Oxygen Builder.
Also consider checking our other post about the Best WordPress Website Builders that contains products like 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 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.
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 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 (The Founder) on YouTube.
Oxygen Builder is the most powerful WordPress builder to build almost any kind of WordPress website. It is a dedicated website builder for the developers who hates using page builders, even if you’re not a developer then using Oxygen would help you learn HTML & CSS along the way.
The best part about Oxygen is that it produces clean codes and helps you make lightweight websites that perform faster for real-world users. Also if you love Webflow then using Oxygen Builder will give you a similar experience of Webflow even inside WordPress.
Explore the useful resources for Oxygen Builder in order to know more as well as find necessary details about this powerful tool.
Now I will explain a few 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 really a serious matter as Google already changed its indexing policy from desktop-first to 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 disable 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 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.https://www.youtube.com/embed/KDGwVfj1jr4
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 codes.
But when I started using Oxygen, I get 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 of 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 the sense of fulfillment.
Elementor has a large community group on Facebook but most of the community members are beginners and experts are very less 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 a 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 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, pay the bills and keep working on their 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.
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.
Here are a few Oxygen Builder Addons:
If you’re interested to explore 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 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 Oxygen Builder:
In this in-depth evaluation about Oxygen Builder, the most powerful WordPress Site Builder I have tried my best to cover every possible aspect of this tool that can help you understand why it is the best fit for you.
For the 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 article therefore if you find something is missing then you can add that in the comment section below.
Also if you found this article helpful which I hope you did then please share this with your circle and community of other WordPress professionals so that they also discover and take advantage of this powerful WordPress Builder.
