Divi Builder: The Best Page Builder for WordPress Agencies Freelancers

Divi Builder is maybe the best WordPress page builder plugin for agencies. We said so because its license allows you to use it for as many websites as you want. In other words, you can create websites for all your clients with only a single license. Each website can have a unique API key for update needs as well.

If you want to use it for a personal use, you might love the fact that the licensing applied by Elegant Themes (the developer of Divi Builder) also allows you to download two useful WordPress marketing plugins: Bloom and Monarch.

Are there other reasons to use Divi Builder? Read on to learn more.

Divi Builder: The Intro

Divi Builder is a WordPress plugin developed by Elegant Themes. The plugin was initially only available for Divi and Extra, two premium WordPress themes developed by Elegant Themes. In 2015, Elegant Themes announced that its page builder was available as a standalone plugin. Meaning that you can use it on any WordPress theme, not limited to Divi and Extra anymore.

One crucial thing you need to know. Divi and Divi Builder are two different products. Divi (just “Divi”) is a WordPress theme while Divi Builder is a page builder plugin. If you prefer to use Divi Builder on the Divi theme (and Extra theme), you don’t need to install the standalone Divi Builder plugin as it is available as an integral part of those two themes. If you install Divi theme or Extra theme on your WordPress site, Divi Builder is automatically available on your site.

Are there differences between Divi Builder as a standalone plugin and Divi Builder as a built-in feature of Divi theme and Extra theme? Nope. At all.

Divi Builder is released as a premium plugin. Elegant Themes offers two options to get it: with a yearly subscription ($89 per year) and a one-time purchase option ($249). As we said in the opening section, the license applied by Elegant Themes allows you to use its products (including Divi Builder) on unlimited websites, make it a great option for agencies.

Divi Builder: The Features

Visual editor is the main feature offered by page builder plugins. Divi Builder is no exception. With it, you can create a beautiful page without needing to deal with CSS or HTML. Everything is drag and drop. It also comes with a theme builder feature which you can use to create custom templates for the header, footer, and other parts of your site. Here are the features you will get.

— Visual Editor

You will have a visual editor to edit your post or page in a visual way. You just need to add the elements you need and then make the customization accordingly. In Divi Builder, elements fall into 3 types:

• Section: Represented in a blue
• Column: Represented in a green
• Module: Represented in a grey

Clicking the gear icon on each element will open a panel where you can make the customization and styling. To add a new element, you can click the plus button.

If you work on a long page, there is also a handy feature you can make use of — Layers View — to make it easier for you to jump between elements on your page. You can use the feature to jump to a certain section, column, or even module in a single click instead of making a long, deep scroll.

— Theme Builder

Divi Builder was initially a mere page builder plugin. It had no feature to create a custom header template or a custom footer template like it is today until version 4.0 was introduced in 2019. Since version 4.0, you could create custom templates to replace the default templates of your theme thanks to its Theme Builder feature. This is great as you can create a fully customized website without coding. You can create custom templates using its visual editor. The theme parts you can create the custom fields of are:

• Header
• Footer
• Single post template
• Archive pages (category page and tags page)
• Author page
• 404 page
• Search results page

If you use WooCommerce, you can also create custom templates for the single product page, product category page, and other WooCommerce pages.

The Theme Builder feature supports display conditions, allowing you to assign a certain custom template to a specific page(s) or post(s). You can, for instance, create a custom single post template and assign it to posts under a specific category, a specific tag, a specific author, and so on.

— Dynamic Content

The ability to add dynamic content is a crucial enough feature you need to notice when selecting a WordPress page builder. Today, most page builder plugins come with this feature, including Divi Builder. You can add dynamic content — whether the default WordPress dynamic content types such as featured image, post title, post meta, and so on — or custom fields you created with Advanced Custom Fields.

The custom field plugins supported by Divi Builder are:

• Advanced Custom Fields
• Pods
• Toolset

The ability to add dynamic content is especially should be your priority if you plan to use the Theme Builder feature as it will allow you to add the required elements such as post title, post meta, site logo, site title, and so on.

— Premade Layouts

You have two options to create a page using Divi Builder. First, you can create the page from scratch. You can choose this option if you have your own design concept. Second, you can create the page from a premade layout. A premade layout contains predefined elements (sections, columns, and modules).

If you want to create a page from a layout, you can simply import one and then tailor the default content (images, texts, and so on) with your own ones. This is a saver time way to create a page with Divi Builder. Also, it is a great option if you have no idea about the concept of the design you want to create.

Divi Builder provides the layouts in packs. A layout pack is a set of premade layouts designed specifically for a certain website type. A layout pack can consist of 4 to 8 premade layouts. There are over 180 layout packs offered in total (over 1,300 layouts).

— Modules

Modules are the actual design elements you will use to create a page and other design types (templates and posts) in general. Compared to other page builders, say Elementor, the modules offered by Divi Builder tend to fewer (read: Elementor vs Divi). It offers only 39 native modules as follows:

Accordion	Email Optin	Pricing Tables
Audio	Filterable Portfolio	Search
Bar Counters	Gallery	Shop
Blog	Image	Sidebar
Blurb	Login	Slider
Button	Map	Social Media Follow
Call to Action	Menu	Tabs
Circle Counter	Number Counter	Testimonial
Code	Person	Text
Comments	Portfolio	Toggle
Contact Form	Post Navigation	Video
Countdown Timer	Post Slider	Video Slider
Divider	Post Title	Icon

If you need more modules, you can visit Divi Marketplace to discover Divi plugins developed by third-party developers. Some plugins, like Divi Supreme and Divi Essential, offers a set of modules to allow you to add more creative elements to a page.

In addition to the modules above, Divi Builder also offers dedicated modules for WooCommerce. The WooCommerce modules will only show up if you have WooCommerce installed and activated on your WordPress site. Here are the Divi Builder modules for WooCommerce:

Woo Breadcrumbs	Woo Notice	Woo Product Rating
Woo Cart Products	Woo Product Add To Cart	Woo Product Reviews
Woo Cart Totals	Woo Product Description	Woo Product Stock
Woo Checkout Billing	Woo Product Gallery	Woo Product Tabs
Woo Checkout Details	Woo Product Images	Woo Product Title
Woo Checkout Information	Woo Product Information	Woo Product Upsell
Woo Checkout Payment	Woo Product Meta	Woo Products
Woo Checkout Shipping	Woo Product Price	Woo Related Products
Woo Cross Sells

— Third-Party Integration

If you use tools like HubSpot, Mailchimp, MailerLite, or similar tools, you can also integrate your account with your website. Divi Builder supports integration with those third-party tools. You can integrate your account using the Email Optin module. Here is the list of the third-party tools and services you can integrate Divi Builder with:

— Global Elements

The ability to add a global element is another handy feature offered by Divi Builder to streamline your workflow. It is another time-saver feature offered by the page builder.

What is a global element?

Say you want to create a website that consists of 8 pages. On each page, you want to add a button that has exactly the same style (color, behavior, typography, size, and so on). Instead of making the styling on each button on each page — which is very time consuming –, you can create a global button. By creating a global button, you only need to make the styling once. If you make a change to the global button, the change will be applied to all pages it is added to.

Divi Builder allows you to create a global item for all elements (section, column, and module).

— Display Conditions

The Display Conditions of Divi Builder allows you to control the visibility of your content. You can show or hide certain elements on your page by certain parameters such as user login status, user role, web browsers, operating system, date and time, cookie, and so on. You can apply a Display Condition to all Divi Builder elements. Be it section, column, or module. The Display Conditions of Divi Builder supports the following parameters:

• Login Status
• User Role
• Web Browser
• Operating System
• Cookie
• Date and Time
• Page Visit
• Post Visit Product Purchase
• Cart Contents
• Number of Views
• Post Information
• Website Location

You can read this post to learn more about the feature.

— Background Pattern and Mask

Background pattern and background mask started available in Divi 4.15.0. The features allow you to add extra decorations to a background. Be it a section background, column background or module background. Divi offers 20+ background patterns you can choose from. They are available in a vector format so that you can scale them without compromising the quality of the pattern image.

Background mask, just like the name suggests, allows you to add a layer mask to your background. There are 20+ mask shapes to choose from and you can set things like aspect ratio, color, and blend mode when adding a mask to your background.

Both background pattern and background mask can be accessed from Content tab on the settings panel. You can open the Background settings block to access them.

— Advanced Gradient Builder

Elegant Themes introduced a new feature in 4.16. The feature allows you to create a gradient that consists of more than two colors. In version 4.15 and the older versions, you could add only maximum of two colors on a gradient.

Since version 4.16, when creating a multi-color gradient, you can set any stop for the second color, third color, fourth color, and so on. Also, you have your gradient to choose from:

• Linear
• Circular
• Elliptical
• Conial

— Custom CSS

Although Divi Builder already comes with a bunch of styling options to style up elements, some styles can only be achieved via custom CSS.

In Divi Builder, custom CSS can be added to every element. From section, row, column, to module. Unlike, for instance Elementor, you don’t need to add a selector to target a certain element part. All you need is to directly add the CSS properties and values to the CSS editor.

To start adding custom CSS, you can go to the Advanced tab on the settings panel and open the Custom CSS block.

The fields available on the Custom CSS block depends on the element you are editing. Each field here represents the part of the element you can style. For instance, if you are editing the Blurb module, you will get 6 fields.

Divi Builder allows you to add custom CSS to both the normal state and hover state. To add custom CSS to hover state, you can click the cursor icon right above the CSS editor.

Divi CSS editor of Divi comes with the following features:

• Color Picker
• Auto Complete and Suggestions
• Error Reporting
• Multi-Select
• Search, Find and Replace

If you often use custom CSS on your Divi projects, you can save your CSS code snippets to Divi Cloud so that you can access them from any website you build with Divi.

Update: You can now generate CSS code inside the Divi Builder editor using Divi AI, which is great for time efficiency.

Additional Products and Services from Elegant Themes

— Divi Marketplace

Divi Marketplace is an official marketplace introduced by Elegant Themes in 2020. On this platform, Divi creators (developers and designers) can sell their products, while regular Divi users can buy the products they need. On Divi Marketplace, you can get Divi products like:

• Plugins
• Child themes
• Premade layouts

Divi Marketplace is a platform dedicated to Divi community. Elegant Themes promised to not sell their own products on the platform.

— Divi Cloud

You can think of Divi Cloud like Dropbox whereby you can store your files on the cloud and access them from anywhere as long as you have an internet connection. But unlike Dropbox, Divi Cloud is designed specifically to store Divi assets. On Divi Cloud, you can store Divi assets such as layouts (be it page layouts, section layouts, or module layouts), code snippets, theme builder templates, and so on.

Divi Cloud is available as a freemium service. All Elegant Themes members — be it new or old — can store their Divi assets for free for up 50 items. To store more items, you need to pay extra fee.

— Divi Teams

Working with a team? You can try Divi Teams, then. Divi Teams is a cloud-based collaboration tool introduced by Elegant Themes in late 2022. In Divi Teams, you can invite your team members and grant them access to your Divi products.

Some permissions you can grant to your team members are:

• Billing access
• Theme and plugin download
• API key access
• Divi cloud access
• Marketplace item download

Divi Teams is a paid service. You will be charged a $1.5 monthly fee per team member.

— Divi Hosting

Elegant Themes teams up with several hosting providers to provide hosting service designed specifically for Divi. The program is called Divi Hosting. The resources of Divi Hosting are optimized for Divi to make sure your Divi-powered WordPress site run seamlessly.

In Divi Hosting, all plans are pre-installed with Divi. In other words, you don’t need to buy Divi separately. Some hosting providers teaming with Elegant Themes on the Divi Hosting program are:

• Flywheel
• Pressable
• Cloudways
• SiteGround

— Divi VIP

The Elegant Themes support has been excellent. They always try to fix any issue you consult. If your issue can’t be solved via chat, they will grant temporary access to your website to find the issue themselves (without asking for your username and password). You can give the Elegant Themes support team remove access from the Support Center menu within your WordPress dashboard.

If you can’t way to get things fixed, you can try Divi VIP.

Divi VIP is a service from Elegant Themes that offers exclusive treatments to users. Two main exclusive treatments you will get are:

• Faster support. Your queries will be answered within 30 minutes
• 10% off on Divi Marketplace

Divi VIP is a premium service. Once you subscribed, everyone on your team (even your clients) will get the same treatment as you are.

— Divi AI

Following the AI trend in the tech field, Elegant Themes has finally made a decision to develop an AI feature for Divi. The feature was released in August, 2023.

Divi AI is a generative AI feature that has the ability to generate images and text content inside the Divi Builder editor. Also, you can use it to generate CSS snippets inside the builder to achieve certain styles for an element. While Divi AI is integrated with Divi Builder, it requires extra subscription for continuous usage. For the first 100 usage, regardless of the content you generate (text and image, or CSS snippets), you won’t be charged.

You have a full control over the use of Divi AI on your website. If you don’t like generative AI, Elegant Themes offers an option to disable Divi AI from Divi Builder. You can also set who can use Divi AI on your website via Role Editor (Divi -> Role Editor).

The Pricing Options of Divi Builder

Elegant Themes used to offer two pricing options for its products. You can either pay yearly or one-time to be its member and access its products.

Following its service expansion, the company finally decided to change its pricing options. There are now two plans offered by Elegant Themes: Divi and Divi Pro.

Divi is the standard/original plan which allows you to access all of Elegant Themes’ products, while Divi Pro is the plan that allows you to access extra services from Elegant Themes, including Divi Cloud, Divi AI, and Divi VIP.

	Divi. $89/year or $249 lifetime	Divi Pro. $249/year or $365 lifetime
Divi Theme	✅	✅
Extra Theme	✅	✅
Divi Builder Plugin	✅	✅
Bloom Plugin	✅	✅
Monarch Plugin	✅	✅
Divi Cloud	❌	✅
Divi AI	❌	✅
Divi VIP	❌	✅

You still can pay yearly or one-time to become an Elegant Themes member:

The Bottom Line: Divi Builder Review

Overall, Divi Builder is a great page builder plugin. It allows you to create beautiful pages on your WordPress site without dealing with CSS. The ability to create custom templates for header, footer, and so on is another selling point. The biggest downside of Divi Builder probably is its limited modules collection. As a comparison, Elementor offers over 90 modules (called widgets) while Brizy offers 42 modules (called elements). But as long as the offered modules can cover your needs, it is not a serious problem.

The licensing applied by Elegant Themes is the most compelling selling point, especially if you work for a web agency. With a single license, you can use Divi Builder (and other Elegant Themes products) to build as many sites as you want, which is great to cut off the production cost.

Pros:

• Great navigation feature on the visual editor
• Complete enough features
• Not limited to a certain theme
• Compelling licensing, especially for web agencies
• Open ecosystem

Cons:

• Lack of modules
• No built-in flexbox. Need extra effort to create a website with complex layout

FAQs

Are Divi and Divi Builder the Same Thing?

Both Divi and Divi Builder are the products developed by Elegant Themes. Divi is a WordPress theme, while Divi Builder is a page builder for WordPress. Divi Builder is available in two versions: as a standalone plugin and as an integral part of the Divi theme.

If you have Divi theme installed on your WordPress theme, you no longer need to install Divi Builder plugin. You can directly edit a page using Divi Builder without installing the plugin.

Can I Use Divi Builder on Other Themes?

Yes. The Divi Builder plugin is compatible with any WordPress theme. But you are highly suggested to use Divi Builder on the Divi theme.

Can I Use Divi Builder for Free?

Divi Builder is a paid plugin. No free version is available. But Elegant Themes gives you a chance to try Divi Builder before you make a purchase.

What Set Divi Builder Apart from Elementor?

Both Divi Builder and Elementor are great page builders for WordPress. While they allow you to create pages with a no-code approach thanks to the drag-and-drop editor, they offer different editing experience.

Can I Install Divi Builder on My Hosting?

Absolutely. But you need to make sure that your hosting service has the minimum specifications demanded by Divi, the maximum file to upload in particular. For easier setup, you can consider using Divi Hosting.