Divi Builder Review
By Sean Ondes | Last updated: March 15, 2020
Divi Builder from Elegant Themes is a noticeably well built page builder. It has an impressive collection of powerful, well thought out page building features and customization options. On top of all that, the recent release of Divi Builder 4.0 adds full theme building! All this and recent performance improvements are sure to keep Divi Builder in the running with other page builders.
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Divi Builder Review at a glance
Pros
- Beautiful, well thought out, and unique user interface
- Tons of element styling options
- Full theme building capability with version 4.0 release
- Undo, redo, and revisions
- Find and replace styles
- Multi-select and bulk editing of page elements
Cons
- Recent problems (Summer 2019) delivering timely and relevant customer support
- Shortcode lock in. If you decide to remove Divi Builder, you’ll have a huge mess to clean up
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Divi Builder compared to other page builders
Usability
Divi Builder gives a great first impression. More than that Divi Builder’s UI is seriously pretty.
There are a lot of options to get used to with Divi so it will probably take some time to figure out where everything is. The UI is color coded based on the type of page element. When you hover over a page layout, the colors give you a quick visual cue so you can select the row, column, or module that you want.
Divi Builder Features
Divi Builder brings puts a ton of page building and customization features at your fingertips.
Divi Theme Builder
This is the big one for Divi! They’re a bit late to the theme builder game but the 4.0 release of Divi Builder should catch them up.
Divi Theme Builder extends their page builder’s core functionality to all areas of your WordPress site. You can now build custom templates for any page and post, custom headers and footers, WooCommerce product pages and so on.
Live drag and drop page building
With Divi Builder, you’ll see all the features that have become expected in a top tier page builder:
- Live drag and drop editing
- Inline text editing
- Responsive page building
- Global settings
- 50+ page elements
Beyond all these great features, you’ll also a few that are less common in a page builder and a couple that are truly innovative such as:
- Full featured code editing with syntax highlighting
- Multi-select bulk element editing
- Find and replace styles
- Color manager
- Copy/Paste and Undo/Redo
- Role editor
- Right click options menu
- Divi Quick actions
Layouts and Templates
Divi Builder Wins the Layout Battle
Divi Builder includes 125+ layout packs. A layout pack is a collection of layouts that are essentially an already designed website ready for you to use. This turns out to be (according to Elegant Themes) about 939 total layouts.
All of the layouts are definitely professional looking. Many have very attractive and even artistic design. Others are pretty simple or even slightly plain. With over 125 layout packs there’s bound to be some better than others.
Theme Compatibility
Divi Builder, like other top rated page builders, is built to work with pretty much any modern, well built WordPress theme.
Installation and Removal
Divi Builder installs in the same way as any WordPress plugin. If you’re familiar with WordPress, you won’t have any problems.
Removing Divi Builder is another matter. Divi Builder is shortcode based. After reading my other reviews you know how I feel about shortcode based page builders in general. I fully acknowledge that rewriting an entire piece of software as robust as Divi Builder would be an enormous effort. That said, any page builder in 2019+ based on shortcodes just looks like legacy software.
I really don’t like saying this about Divi Builder since there are so many great aspects to it. Anyone reading this can feel free to reach out and change my mind!
Customer Support and Documentation
Divi might have some growing pains
Overall, Divi Builder consistently gets very good ratings from customers. However, in 2018 and 2019, there’s been a rash of one and two star reviews of Divi Builder on Trust Pilot. All of them mention customer support problems as the main reason for their low rating.
https://www.elegantthemes.com/documentation/divi/
Cost
Elegant Themes sells Divi Builder as part of a single package that includes the Divi and Extra themes and Monarch and Bloom plugins. Extra extends Divi Builder to edit your WordPress homepage and categories. Monarch is a powerful social sharing plugin with dozens of options. Bloom is an email and lead generation plugin that lets you create popups and inline email opt-in forms. Along with these powerful plugins, the package also includes 125+ Divi layout packs.
The package is $89 for a yearly subscription and $249 for lifetime access.
Both plans include product updates, premium support, and a money-back guarantee.
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About Me
Sean Ondes
My name is Sean. I've been building websites for more than 15 years. For the last 8 years, I've been working almost exclusively with WordPress and Shopify.
I've read all the blog posts that review the "Best WordPress Page Builders" or the "Top 5 WordPress Page Builders". They can be helpful but after I finished all that reading, I still didn't know which one to choose.
The only thing left to do was try them all. I've spent my own money and hundreds of hours testing every WordPress page builder that I can get my hands on. I'm putting all this together because I personally have needed a resource exactly like this for a long time!
I' don't favor any single page builder over another. I'm not really even promoting WordPress. This guide is for people who have already decided that WordPress is the right fit for them and need the flexibility of using a page builder.