Thank you for sharing your findings Carols! Anton’s comment above mentions a plugin for removing Divi shortcodes.

With Elementor and Beaver Builder you can avoid the shortcodes issue (check the article). Good luck!

I’m in the process of choosing a page builder for a client’s multilingual site. Your review has been very helpful and I’m leaning towards Elementor at the moment, but I’ve also contacted the other companies to ask some questions.

Below is a response I got from E. Themes, that kind of put me off a bit regarding their use of shortcodes and what happens shall you decide to stop using their plugin:

“Divi uses WordPress shortcodes, and if you no longer have Divi active they will be visible on your website. It is a fundamental flaw in the design and functionality of WordPress shortcodes. Use of shortcodes does not impair the performance or SEO of your website in any way, however we understand how this does make it more difficult if you are switching to another theme.

To address the issue, we made the Divi Builder available as a standalone plugin which can be installed alongside any WordPress theme. This means that, should you ever decide to change themes, you can take the pages/post designs that you created using the Divi Builder with you to your new theme.”

All that talking about a “funfamental flaw” while the other two builders can leave a clean code behind, doesn’t sound right to me. Anyway, that’s my two cents on the subject.

I’ll keep doing my research and see other options.

Cheers!

I’ve been using Beaver Builder Pro for about two years and have created several websites using it. I have found it very difficult to get good results without lots of CSS and purchased modules.

Most of the built-in modules are useless because they lack basic styling options. For example the photo module does not have options for borders, captions above the photo, or rounded corners. You are expected to create a class for these basic options. There is also no centering options for modules.

I don’t mind writing CSS but most times it takes quite awhile to get the selectors right, and I can’t think of any good reason why these basic options are not included. I find myself purchasing add-ons for almost everything: menu, slider, contact form, photo gallery, etc.

By default you cannot edit headers and footers.. oh yeah, you can but it’s not included with the Pro version and BB charges extra for BB Themer. Fortunately there is a free WP add-on (Beaver Builder Header Footer) to edit headers and footers.

A big drawback is that you cannot nest rows and columns. For example, you cannot create a section in your content that has a particular background and then place two rows inside. They may say this can be done but it cannot: to get a right-left border around my fixed-width content area I had to create two rows and use then use CSS to put the border around each row.

One positive is that tech support is very responsive and they know their product.