Bricks is the builder people rave about most in the specialist forums. Clean code, fast pages, no ballast — the arguments are well known and they are largely true.
Even so, I explicitly advise some of my clients against it. Not because Bricks is bad, but because the question of which builder is technically better is the wrong question for most websites.
I have already placed the two side by side in the three-way comparison with Breakdance. Here I go deeper into this one pairing — because it is the one that comes up for debate most often in practice.
The short answer
Bricks, if you or your agency build websites regularly, understand HTML and CSS, and want the site to be as technically lean as possible.
Elementor, if you maintain your own website, do not come from a technical background, and want to be able to get help if it comes to that.
The real difference: who was this built for?
This is not a marketing question but an observation from the work itself.
Elementor was designed for people who have a website and want to edit it themselves. Everything is labelled, everything is clickable, and you can hardly break anything that cannot be undone. The price for that is a certain good-naturedness in the code it generates.
Bricks was designed for people who build websites. It assumes you know what a container is, what display: flex does and why a class is better than an inline setting. Anyone who brings that along works noticeably faster and more cleanly with it. Anyone who does not sits in front of a tool that constantly demands decisions they have no basis for making.
That is the entire comparison in two paragraphs. Everything else is detail.
Elementor and Bricks at a glance
| Elementor | Bricks | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | page builder (plugin) | theme with a built-in builder |
| Free version | yes, extensive | no |
| Licence | annual subscription, tiered | annual and lifetime licence |
| Target group | website owners | website builders |
| Learning curve | gentle | noticeably steeper |
| Generated code | functional, more nesting | very lean |
| Class-based working | limited | from the ground up |
| Custom code in the editor | limited | explicitly provided for |
| German-language material | a great deal | little |
| Available specialists | very many | few |
| Additional plugins needed | often | rarely |
Where Bricks scores
The code it outputs. Bricks produces leaner HTML with less nesting than Elementor. That is measurable, it is not marketing. On pages with many elements it makes a difference to the size of the delivered document.
Classes instead of individual settings. In Bricks you style via reusable classes, much like in a CSS framework. Change the class and every element carrying it changes. In Elementor you largely work element by element. On one page that does not matter. On sixty pages it is the difference between an hour and a day.
The lifetime licence. Bricks sells a one-off licence for an unlimited number of websites. For someone building sites continuously, that adds up to a considerable sum over five years.
The query functions. Dynamic content, nested queries, connections to ACF and similar field systems — all of that is stronger in Bricks out of the box and takes more work in Elementor.
Where Elementor scores
You will find help. This is the argument most underestimated in specialist discussions and most needed in reality. For Elementor there are German-language tutorials, videos, forums and people nearby who have mastered it. For Bricks there is hardly any of that. If in two years you need someone to take over your site, with Elementor the search is a matter of days and with Bricks a matter of weeks — at a different hourly rate.
You can test it for free. Elementor has a serious free version. Bricks does not. You can see beforehand whether the way it works suits you.
You need no technical background. Someone who has never worked with CSS gets to a decent page in Elementor in one evening. In Bricks the same person takes considerably longer and makes decisions along the way whose consequences they cannot judge.
The ecosystem. Templates, extensions, integrations — for Elementor there is something ready-made for practically every use case. That is at the same time its weakness (see below), but if you have to get to a result quickly it is a strength.
Elementor Pro: Theme Builder, forms and popups — the building blocks Bricks brings along out of the box — sit in Elementor's Pro licence. Without them the comparison is skewed. View Elementor Pro
Where Elementor genuinely falls short
So that this does not turn into an advertisement, the other side as plainly as it is:
Elementor tempts you into collecting additional plugins. A widget pack here, a slider there, a forms extension on top — and at some point five plugins are running that all hook into the same editor. That is the most common cause of Elementor sites that are slow and break on updates. Bricks needs additional software far less often.
And Elementor ties you more tightly to individual elements. Anyone who later wants to redesign a site consistently does more clicking in Elementor than in Bricks.
How to get the first point under control is described in Optimising Elementor performance.
On performance
Bricks delivers leaner code for the same construction. That is true and it can be measured.
It is nevertheless rarely the reason a website is slow. In the sites I get handed for optimisation it is almost always uncompressed images, hosting without an object cache, missing caching, or a dozen third-party scripts. The builder comes a long way down that list.
Put differently: switching to Bricks might gain you a few tenths of a second. A properly configured cache and compressed images gain you whole seconds. Do the second one first — see WordPress Page Speed 2026.
Switching from Elementor to Bricks
There is no working automatic route. Both store their layouts in their own formats, and a converter would have to reproduce the design logic of both systems.
Switching means rebuilding the pages. Text, images and posts stay — the layout does not.
For a website with five pages that is a weekend. For one with sixty pages it is a project with a budget. Before you start that, you should have a better justification than "Bricks is technically cleaner". Because it is — but that is not a business argument.
My recommendation by situation
Bricks, if you build websites professionally, if you understand HTML and CSS, if you set up several projects a year, and if a reusable class structure means something to you.
Elementor, if you run your own website, if you do not come from a technical background, if you will need someone to help you at some point, and if you want to try before you pay.
Stay where you are, if your existing Elementor site works and your customers are happy. A builder switch is a rebuild with no visible benefit for your visitors. The money is almost always more effective spent on better copy and better images.
Frequently asked questions
Is Bricks harder to learn?
Yes, considerably. Not because it is made worse, but because it assumes prior knowledge that Elementor takes off your hands.
Can I run both side by side?
Bricks is a theme, Elementor a plugin — technically a mixed setup would work, but in practice you take on two layout systems and double the maintenance. Do not do it.
What about Bricks and accessibility?
Bricks gives you more control over the HTML structure, which helps accessibility — but only if you actually use that control. A carelessly built Bricks layout is no better than a carelessly built Elementor layout.
Is Bricks worth it for a single website?
Rarely. The strengths of Bricks unfold across several projects. With one site you pay the learning curve and get little back.
If you are honest with yourself
Most of the requests to switch that reach me do not come from a real problem with Elementor. They come from somebody having read in a forum that Bricks is better.
Sometimes that is true for the person concerned. Often the actual problem is an overloaded site, poor hosting, or a layout that was never properly thought through — and a new builder does not take that away.
Further comparisons: overview of page builder comparisons, Bricks vs. Elementor vs. Breakdance and Elementor vs. Divi. If you would like to talk the decision through against your own specific project: Elementor training.
Tags