I'll be honest with you: for most of my career, I avoided page builders entirely. I built custom themes in PHP, wrote my own CSS, and handed clients a WordPress dashboard with a handful of carefully scoped custom fields. That approach gave me complete control — and completely limited my throughput.
At GTMA, the multi-family marketing agency where I manage the Web Department, we serve dozens of real estate clients who all need websites that look premium, load fast, and can be updated by non-developers. Custom themes for every project just doesn't scale. So I've spent real time with both Elementor and Bricks Builder — and I have genuine opinions.
Elementor: The Industry Standard (For a Reason)
Elementor is the page builder that most WordPress developers love to criticize and most clients love to use. After shipping a dozen Elementor sites at GTMA, I've found that both reactions have merit.
What Elementor gets right
The widget library is genuinely massive, and the third-party addon ecosystem (Essential Addons, Crocoblock, Dynamic.ooo) fills in whatever gaps remain. For real estate sites, the dynamic content features — especially when paired with custom post types and Meta Box or ACF — let us build listing directories that would've taken weeks of custom PHP to replicate.
Elementor's learning curve is also gentle enough that trained clients can update their own pages without breaking the layout. That's not nothing. Client autonomy reduces our support load.
Elementor's visual editor is still the most intuitive one in the WordPress space. Clients who've never used a page builder can figure out the basics in an afternoon.
Where Elementor frustrates developers
The code output is still a mess. Every element generates nested div.elementor-section wrappers that inflate the DOM, hurt performance, and make debugging painful. The inline CSS Elementor injects is hard to override cleanly without resorting to !important hacks.
Elementor Pro's recent pricing changes and the move toward an AI-heavy feature set have also been… not for me. I don't need a page builder that suggests AI-generated layouts. I need one that produces clean HTML.
Bricks: The Developer's Page Builder
Bricks Builder launched in 2021 and immediately attracted the crowd of developers who wanted Elementor's visual workflow without Elementor's output quality. I started using it on client projects in 2023 and now it's my default choice for new GTMA builds when the client's team has any developer involvement.
What Bricks does differently
Bricks generates semantic HTML by default. You're working with actual section, article, and div elements — not Elementor's layer cake of wrapper divs. The CSS output is scoped and clean. And critically, Bricks renders on the frontend using PHP templates, not a JavaScript-heavy approach that tanks performance.
The query loop feature in Bricks is also genuinely excellent. Building dynamic listing pages, team directories, or property grids with custom WP_Query arguments is intuitive — and the output is far more performant than the equivalent Elementor setup.
"Bricks finally made me okay with not hand-coding every theme. The output is clean enough that I don't feel like I'm leaving craft on the table."
Bricks' real weaknesses
The learning curve is steeper. Clients who are used to Elementor's drag-and-drop simplicity struggle with Bricks' more structure-aware approach. You're thinking in sections and containers, not just dragging widgets wherever they feel right.
The third-party addon ecosystem is also much smaller. What Elementor has in abundance — pre-built templates, specialized widgets, CRM integrations — Bricks is still catching up on. For some projects, that gap matters.
Side-by-Side Comparison
| Feature | Elementor Pro | Bricks |
|---|---|---|
| Code output quality | Messy, div-heavy | Semantic HTML |
| Performance | Heavy (requires optimization) | Lightweight by default |
| Client-friendliness | Excellent | Good (steeper curve) |
| Dynamic data | Excellent (large ecosystem) | Excellent (native query loops) |
| Addon ecosystem | Massive | Growing |
| Pricing (lifetime) | Yearly subscription | One-time license |
| Developer experience | Adequate | Purpose-built for devs |
The Honest Verdict
For client-facing sites where non-developers will maintain the content, Elementor Pro remains the safer choice. The onboarding is smoother, the addon ecosystem covers more edge cases, and your clients have a better shot at staying out of your inbox.
For projects where developer quality matters and you'll own the ongoing work, Bricks is worth the investment. The code is cleaner, the performance is better out of the box, and the lifetime license pricing makes the economics easier to justify.
At GTMA, we use both. New developer-led builds get Bricks. Client-managed sites with complex content teams stay on Elementor until there's a compelling reason to migrate. There's no universal right answer — just tradeoffs worth understanding before you commit.