Choosing the right page builder is key to creating an efficient and high-performing WordPress site. Divi and Beaver Builder are two leading options often compared for their ease of use, features, and speed. The builder you choose will affect not only the design process but also site performance and user experience.
Divi is popular for its robust visual editor and extensive design options, making it ideal for users seeking creative control without coding. In contrast, Beaver Builder stands out for its lightweight design and simple drag-and-drop interface, appealing to those who prioritize speed and ease of use.
When comparing these two, users typically weigh the importance of feature richness versus performance. Selecting the right tool is essential for streamlining site creation and ensuring long-term success.
Overview of Divi and Beaver Builder
Divi Builder Overview
Divi Builder, initially launched as part of the Divi theme, has evolved into a standalone page builder known for its powerful design capabilities. It's widely recognized for offering a highly visual, drag-and-drop interface that allows users to customize their websites in real time.
Among its advantages, Divi excels in providing flexibility with its vast range of design tools and layouts, making it a go-to for users who want complete creative control.
Its template library is another strong point, allowing users to start with pre-designed layouts and customize them to suit their needs.
However, Divi does come with a few drawbacks. Its feature-rich nature can sometimes lead to performance issues, with slower page load times compared to other builders. Additionally, the abundance of design options and settings can present a steeper learning curve for beginners, making it less appealing to those seeking a quick and simple setup.
Beaver Builder Overview
Beaver Builder is known for its clean code and performance-optimized framework, making it a favorite among developers, agencies, and users who prioritize simplicity and speed. Unlike some other page builders, Beaver Builder focuses on creating fast, lightweight websites that load quickly and perform well, even as they grow in complexity.
One of its main advantages is its intuitive drag-and-drop interface, which allows users to design pages effortlessly without sacrificing performance.
Beaver Builder is also lightweight, ensuring that websites remain fast and optimized. This, combined with its straightforward design approach, makes it an excellent option for those who want an efficient page builder without overwhelming features.
However, Beaver Builder’s smaller template library is a notable disadvantage compared to Divi. While it offers enough layouts for most users, those looking for extensive design options might find it somewhat limiting. Still, its focus on performance and ease of use often outweighs this for users who value speed and simplicity.
Divi vs Beaver Builder: Which Is a Better WordPress Page Builder?
When deciding between Divi and Beaver Builder, it’s important to consider your specific needs, as both builders offer distinct advantages.
In the following comparison, we’ll break down key aspects such as ease of use, design capabilities, performance, and pricing to help you determine which builder aligns best with your goals.
Divi vs Beaver Builder: User Interface and Ease of Use
Divi Interface and Ease of Use
Divi offers a highly visual interface with floating controls and inline editing, allowing users to see real-time changes as they design. Its drag-and-drop functionality and extensive customization options make it powerful for experienced users.
However, with so many design features and settings, the interface can feel overwhelming for beginners who may struggle to navigate its depth right away.
Beaver Builder Interface and Ease of Use
Beaver Builder, in contrast, features a more straightforward sidebar-based interface that focuses on simplicity. The drag-and-drop design is intuitive, and users can easily add, edit, and rearrange elements without being overwhelmed by too many options.
The cleaner layout, with fewer distractions, makes it an ideal choice for beginners or those seeking a faster, more efficient workflow.
Which Builder Is Easier for Beginners
For beginners, Beaver Builder’s simplicity and ease of use provide a smoother learning curve. Divi, while more feature-rich, can be intimidating for those just starting out due to its advanced controls. Users looking for a fast, minimalistic setup will find Beaver Builder easier to work with, while those seeking more design flexibility may prefer Divi once they’re familiar with its interface.
Divi vs Beaver Builder: Customization and Design Features
Divi Customization
Divi is known for its extensive customization options, making it a powerful tool for users who want complete control over their website’s design. It offers global settings, allowing users to apply consistent styles across the entire site with ease.
Divi’s extensive template library is packed with pre-designed layouts that cater to a wide range of industries and use cases, giving users a great starting point for any project.
Beyond templates, Divi shines with its advanced visual effects, including animations, hover effects, and gradient overlays, which help create dynamic, eye-catching designs.
It also allows users to add custom CSS for more granular control over elements, making it flexible for both beginners and advanced users.
Additionally, Divi’s responsive design settings enable users to fine-tune how their site appears on different devices, ensuring a seamless experience across desktops, tablets, and mobile phones.
Beaver Builder Customization
Beaver Builder, while not as feature-packed as Divi in terms of visual effects, focuses on delivering clean, performance-optimized designs with more direct control over layout structure and theme integration.
Its template library is smaller but still offers a good foundation for creating professional websites. Instead of overwhelming users with a massive number of features, Beaver Builder prioritizes ease of use and simplicity, which results in more lightweight, fast-loading websites.
One of Beaver Builder’s key strengths is its compatibility with WordPress themes. It integrates smoothly with almost any theme, giving developers the flexibility to create highly customized designs while maintaining the underlying performance benefits.
Although it lacks some of Divi’s flashier design features, Beaver Builder’s customization strength lies in its clean code, developer-friendly environment, and the ability to add custom modules and layouts through third-party plugins or custom coding.
Which Builder Offers Better Customization Features
When it comes to sheer design flexibility, Divi stands out with its focus on creative control, offering a broader range of design tools and templates.
However, Beaver Builder’s approach is more focused on performance and integration, making it better suited for developers or users seeking efficient, highly-optimized designs.
Divi offers more out-of-the-box customization, while Beaver Builder’s strength lies in its clean and developer-friendly setup.
Divi vs Beaver Builder: Performance and Speed
Divi’s Performance
Divi is often recognized for being resource-heavy, particularly when working with more complex or large-scale designs.
Its extensive customization options, visual effects, and modules can slow down site performance, especially on shared hosting environments or when handling numerous high-resolution elements.
This can lead to slower page load times, which not only impacts the user experience but also affects SEO rankings.
We ran a test to accurately measure the performance of Divi Builder. We ran the test on InstaWP test sites and created a test page with the following modules:
- Heading
- Text
- Button
- Image
- Feature section with three Image Boxes.
This test allowed us to understand the performance of the builder in a practical scenario.
Let’s take a look at the results we got:
| Scenario | Page Size | Requests | Desktop | Mobile |
| Test Page | 999.9 KB | 20 | 93 | 89 |
For the test page with the modules, the size of the page was recorded at 576.4 KB with 23 HTTP requests. PageSpeed Insights scores for the test page were 93 for desktop and 89 for mobile.
While the results are not downright horrible, Divi doesn’t really perform great in terms of website speed. The results are average at best.
To improve Divi’s performance, several optimization strategies can be employed. Caching is a key technique to enhance speed by storing static versions of pages, reducing the processing load on the server with each visitor.
Additionally, minimizing and compressing files, such as CSS, JavaScript, and HTML, can significantly reduce page size, allowing faster loading times. Compressing images before uploading them also helps prevent large media files from dragging down site performance.
Limiting the number of plugins on a Divi site can further enhance performance, as each additional plugin adds weight to the site’s overall load.
Beaver Builder’s Performance
Beaver Builder is renowned for its superior performance due to its lightweight and clean code structure, which results in faster load times and a more responsive website.
Unlike Divi, which can become resource-heavy with its vast range of design features, Beaver Builder maintains a more streamlined framework, reducing the strain on servers and minimizing page size.
This makes Beaver Builder ideal for users focused on optimizing SEO and ensuring quick load times, as fewer requests and smaller page sizes contribute to an overall faster, more efficient website.
We ran a performance test for Beaver Builder as well. We ran the test with similar modules installed.
Here are the results:
| Scenario | Page Size | Requests | Desktop | Mobile |
| Test Page | 652.0 KB | 19 | 97 | 95 |
In the Pingdom test, the page size was 652 KB with 19 HTTP requests. The PageSpeed Insights scores were 86 for desktop and 97 for mobile.
Which Builder Has Better Performance
When comparing performance, Beaver Builder stands out due to its lean, performance-driven architecture. Its lightweight framework ensures faster load times, fewer server requests, and smaller page sizes, making it highly efficient for users who prioritize speed and SEO.
In contrast, Divi’s extensive range of features, including advanced visual effects and customization options, can make it resource-heavy, potentially slowing down a site.
While Divi offers more creative freedom, Beaver Builder’s focus on clean code and performance gives it an edge in speed and efficiency.
Divi vs Beaver Builder: Extensibility and Add-ons
Divi Add-ons
Divi boasts a large marketplace offering a wide range of third-party add-ons that enhance functionality.
Popular options include Divi Supreme Pro, Divi Plus, and Divi Switch, which add features like advanced modules, custom headers, and improved design tools. However, the use of multiple add-ons can sometimes affect site performance, so careful management is needed.
Beaver Builder Add-ons
Beaver Builder takes a more focused approach, with high-quality add-ons like Beaver Themer, PowerPack for Beaver Builder, and Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder.
These tools offer additional design elements and theme-building capabilities while maintaining performance and avoiding the bloat often associated with larger marketplaces.
Which Builder Has Better Support for Add-Ons
Divi offers greater extensibility with a wider range of third-party options, allowing for significant customization, but the trade-off can be slower performance.
Beaver Builder's more minimalistic ecosystem features fewer but highly optimized add-ons, ensuring a cleaner, faster experience for users who prefer efficiency over extensive feature sets.
Divi vs Beaver Builder: Pricing Plans
Divi Pricing
Divi has two types of pricing, yearly and lifetime. For both types of pricing, Divi has two subscriptions named Divi and Divi Pro. The Divi plan costs $89/year and the Divi Pro plan costs $277/year.
Features like Divi AI, Divi Cloud, Divi VIP, and Divi Teams are only available in the pro version.
As for the lifetime deals, the basic subscription costs $249. The pro version costs $297, but you need to pay $212 each following year to keep the pro service.
Beaver Builder Pricing
Beaver Builder provides three pricing tiers: the Starter plan at $89 per year, the Professional plan at $299 per year (which includes multisite support), and the Agency plan at $546 per year, adding white-labeling features.
Which Builder Offers More Value
Divi’s lifetime plan offers exceptional long-term value for users who need extensive features and ongoing access, particularly for agencies or developers working on multiple sites.
Beaver Builder, with its lower entry-level price and strong performance focus, provides better value for users prioritizing performance at a lower price point or those who need more control over individual site builds.
Divi vs Beaver Builder: SEO and Marketing Features
Divi’s SEO Capabilities
Divi offers built-in SEO settings, along with seamless compatibility with popular SEO plugins like Yoast and Rankmath. These tools allow users to optimize titles, meta descriptions, and other key SEO factors directly within the builder.
However, Divi’s performance issues, such as slower load times due to resource-heavy designs, can negatively affect SEO rankings if not optimized. Users will need to implement performance enhancements like caching and minification to ensure their sites maintain good SEO performance.
Beaver Builder’s SEO Capabilities
Beaver Builder’s clean code and lightweight architecture naturally lend themselves to better SEO performance. Fast load times and optimized page structures help boost search engine rankings, as speed is a critical factor in SEO.
While Beaver Builder doesn’t offer as many built-in SEO tools as Divi, its performance-driven design makes it a great choice for users focused on achieving strong results in search rankings, especially for performance-based SEO strategies.
Which Builder Is Better for SEO and Marketing
Beaver Builder excels in SEO due to its speed and lightweight framework, making it ideal for users focused on performance-based SEO and fast-loading pages, both critical for higher search engine rankings.
Divi, while feature-rich with built-in SEO tools and marketing flexibility, requires careful optimization to avoid performance issues that can hinder SEO success. For marketing efforts that require more design flexibility, Divi offers more tools, but for pure SEO optimization, Beaver Builder is a stronger choice.
Divi vs Beaver Builder: Who Is It For
Divi Is Best Suited For
Divi is ideal for users who seek extensive design control and creative flexibility. Its vast array of design tools and templates makes it perfect for agencies, designers, and users who want to craft visually intricate sites.
However, users must be willing to manage potential performance trade-offs, particularly with more complex designs, and be comfortable navigating a steeper learning curve.
Beaver Builder Is Best Suited For
Beaver Builder is perfect for users who prioritize simplicity, performance, and clean code. It’s highly appealing to developers, agencies, and users focused on building fast, lightweight websites.
Its straightforward interface and strong integration with WordPress themes make it ideal for those who want to create efficient, SEO-friendly sites without sacrificing speed or ease of use.
Which Is a Better WordPress Page Builder Between Divi and Beaver Builder
Divi and Beaver Builder cater to different types of users based on their needs. Divi offers extensive design flexibility with its visual editor, making it ideal for users who want full creative control, despite potential performance trade-offs. On the other hand, Beaver Builder focuses on performance and simplicity, perfect for those who prioritize speed and clean, developer-friendly design.
For those seeking robust design options, Divi is the better choice. If performance and ease of use are more important, Beaver Builder is the way to go. It’s recommended to try both tools to see which aligns best with your goals and workflow.