Elementor vs Bricks Builder — Which One Should You Use?

I get asked this question at least once a week. And my answer is always: it depends on the project — but here's how I think about it.

Elementor: Mature, Stable, Familiar

Elementor has been around since 2016. It has an enormous ecosystem of third-party add-ons, a massive user community, and most WordPress developers know how to work with it. For client handoffs where the client wants to edit content themselves, Elementor's interface is more approachable.

The downside: it generates bloated markup, loads unnecessary CSS and JS, and is meaningfully slower than Bricks on the same hardware.

Bricks: Fast, Flexible, Developer-Friendly

Bricks Builder is newer (2021) and takes a completely different approach. It outputs clean, semantic HTML with no unnecessary wrappers. Sites built with Bricks are consistently faster than their Elementor equivalents, often by 15–30 PageSpeed points on the same server.

The tradeoff: steeper learning curve, smaller ecosystem, and it's not the right choice for clients who will be editing their own content frequently.

My Recommendation

For performance-critical projects — eCommerce, high-traffic blogs, sites where speed is a priority — I use Bricks. For client-managed sites where the owner will be updating pages regularly, I use Elementor. The best tool is the one that serves the project's actual requirements.