Whether you are an advanced developer or a beginner, a powerful theme builder can make all the difference in creating a professional and customizable WordPress site.
Many of our partner brands have designed their entire websites with SeedProd, so we’ve heard from them that it’s hands down the best theme builder option. We’ve also tested the tool ourselves when writing guides about building landing pages, custom themes, and more.
That said, every web design project is unique, and there are a few other WordPress theme builders that are also worth considering.
So, we tested other popular builders on the market, using them to design visually appealing themes. When researching, we focused on key factors like customization options, premade templates, user-friendliness, and more.
In this article, we will discuss everything we learned from testing the best options out there. We’ll list the top WordPress theme builders to help you choose the right one for your needs.
Overview of the Best WordPress Theme Builders
Don’t have time to read? Here’s a quick look at the best WordPress theme builders.
| # | Theme Builders | Best For | Pricing |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🥇 | SeedProd | All-in-one theme builder solution | $39.50/yr + Free |
| 🥈 | Thrive Theme Builder | Creating WordPress blogs + growing email lists | $299/yr |
| 🥉 | Divi | Building a small business site | $89/yr |
| 4 | Beaver Builder | Developers who need advanced customization features | $99/yr |
| 5 | Brizy | Building and syncing multiple WordPress sites | $59/yr |
| 6 | Elementor | Creating online store themes | $49/yr + Free |
Why Use a Theme Builder in WordPress?
If you have a WordPress website, then using a theme builder gives you more creative freedom over your design. It allows you to create a website design that perfectly matches your niche and brand.
Most builders come with premade templates to create a header, home page, footer, blog page, and contact us page with just a few clicks.
For example, if you run a furniture store, then you can easily use a theme builder’s premade template to launch your business website in a few minutes.
Using these tools is also super cost-effective and saves you a lot of time. This is because you won’t have to spend hours coding your theme.
Plus, these tools are often beginner-friendly and come with a drag-and-drop builder, letting you create responsive and unique themes for your website.
Note: You may confuse a theme builder with page builders, but they are quite different. A theme builder lets you customize your whole website, including headers, footers, and different pages.
By contrast, a page builder only lets you customize and create a single page at a time. For details, you can see our glossary article for what a page builder is.
How We Test and Review WordPress Theme Builders
To give you the best recommendations, we tested some well-known theme builders on real websites. We paid special attention to the following criteria:
- Ease of use: We have included beginner-friendly theme builders that do not require coding knowledge to operate smoothly.
- Customization Options: We tested the range of customization features available, such as theme color customization options, typography settings, layout adjustments, and the ability to add custom CSS.
- Premade Templates: We evaluated the variety and quality of premade templates that each theme builder offers.
- Performance and Speed: After creating a theme, we tested how fast the website loads with each theme builder.
- Mobile Responsiveness: We ensured that websites created using the theme builders are fully responsive across all devices, including desktops, tablets, and mobile phones.
- SEO Features: We looked at each tool’s SEO capabilities, including built-in options for optimizing titles, meta descriptions, and alt text for images.
- Support and Documentation: We checked the support options available, including documentation, FAQs, live chat support, email support, and community forums.
- Reliability: We have only included tools we tested ourselves on real websites.
Why Trust WPBeginner?
At WPBeginner, our team of experts has over 16+ years of experience in WordPress design, online marketing, and more.
When it comes to theme builders and page builders, we have used all the most popular options when creating how-to articles for our readers and building websites for our clients. Several of our partner brands, including Duplicator and WPForms, have also used SeedProd to build their entire site, so we have a lot of insider experience with the tool.
Over the years, we’ve also made a big effort to offer lots of advice about SeedProd, Divi, Elementor, and Beaver Builder since many of our readers frequently ask about them. So, we have a lot of highly specific knowledge and expertise with all these tools. Since we regularly update articles and write about new topics, our theme builder expertise continues to grow every day.
If we don’t regularly use a tool, we thoroughly test and extensively review it before adding it to our list of recommendations. That way, we can bring our readers the most accurate and up-to-date information possible. For more details, see our editorial process.
Having said that, here is our list of the best WordPress theme builders.
1. SeedProd
SeedProd is the overall best WordPress theme builder on the market. It comes with hundreds of premade templates, an easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder, and 90+ pro blocks. Plus, it gives you advanced eCommerce blocks and offers email integrations. In our opinion, that makes it the best all-in-one solution on this list.
When testing the tool, we found it super easy to create attractive landing pages for our demo sites. Several of our partner brands, including Duplicator, WPForms, and Charitable, have also used SeedProd to build their entire websites. They’ve all reported highly positive experiences. To learn more, see our SeedProd review.
The nice thing about SeedProd is that it allows you to launch a unique theme for any niche, like a fashion blog, using its premade designs. We appreciate that you can then easily edit the home page, header, footer, sidebar, and more. Since it doubles as a page builder, you can also use it to modify single posts and pages.
SeedProd also offers advanced blocks for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads, making it a great choice if you have an online store.
Other than that, SeedProd can integrate with popular email marketing services like Constant Contact or Brevo to help you build an email list or generate leads.
We also love that the plugin lets you add animations, custom scripts, controls access, and even lets you do domain mapping, making it the ultimate choice.
For more details, you can see our tutorial on how to create a custom theme in WordPress.
Pros of SeedProd:
- Over the years, we have used SeedProd to easily design single landing pages. For more information, you can see our tutorial on how to create a landing page in WordPress.
- Its layout navigation feature can easily rearrange sections, rows, columns, and blocks.
- We were impressed upon finding that SeedProd has over 20 color schemes, font combinations, shape dividers, smart sections, and bloat-free code to decrease your website load time.
- With SeedProd, you can add dynamic content to your website.
- It allows you to create a maintenance, coming soon, or login page for your website easily.
- During our testing, we came across SeedProd’s powerful AI Website Builder that instantly generates content like images, headlines, descriptions, and body text for your website.
- It has a free version.
Cons of SeedProd:
- To unlock some of its advanced features, you will have to buy the premium plan.
Why we recommend SeedProd: In our opinion, SeedProd is the best all-in-one theme builder solution on the market. It comes with 300+ templates specifically designed for unique niches, an easy-to-use interface, and third-party tool integrations.
SeedProd is also a great option if you have an online store due to its integrations with WooCommerce and EDD and advanced blocks created specifically for these plugins.
2. Thrive Theme Builder
Thrive Theme Builder is a popular drag-and-drop plugin that allows you to create custom and fully mobile-responsive themes for your website without having to learn any code. It also offers many tools to help you boost conversions, so it’s an excellent choice if you want to grow your email list.
During our testing, we found the plugin to be super beginner-friendly. The interface is intuitive and easy to navigate, making it a great option for those who are new to website building. For more details, see the Thrive Theme Builder section of our Thrive Themes Suite review.
The Thrive Theme Builder is part of the Thrive Suite, which offers additional tools for lead generation, comment management, a/b testing, and much more. This makes it ideal for optimizing multiple aspects of your website or online business.
We also like that the Thrive Builder comes with a library of prebuilt templates that you can use to easily build custom pages, headers, and footers for your theme.
Plus, the tool offers 100+ design elements, including icons, fonts, fancy dividers, page blocks, content elements, conversion tools, and global color management.
Pros of Thrive Theme Builder:
- Thrive Theme Builder can integrate with third-party tools like WooCommerce, Zapier, email marketing services, webinar platforms, and more.
- We really like that it can easily connect with other Thrive Suite plugins like Thrive Leads, Thrive Architect, Thrive Optimize, and Thrive Automator.
- During our research, we discovered that the builder also offers conversion-focused features like opt-in forms, lead magnets, and social media share buttons.
Cons of Thrive Theme Builder:
- Thrive Theme Builder does not have a free version.
- We noticed that it has a limited number of premade templates compared to other tools.
Why we recommend Thrive Theme Builder: If you have a WordPress blog and want to build your email list, then we recommend using the Thrive Theme Builder. The plugin offers a number of conversion-focused tools that can help you capture your users’ email addresses.
3. Divi Theme Builder
Divi is one of the most popular WordPress themes on the market. Due to its powerful feature set and a large catalog of templates, it is a great option if you need to build a website for your small business.
We’ve been testing its features regularly for years since our readers ask about it often. For more information, check out our full Divi review.
One of the best things about Divi is that its theme builder comes with over 800+ site templates that you can use to customize your website according to your niche.
For evaluation, we made a custom theme using the builder and were really impressed with how mobile-responsive the design turned out.
We also like that the builder offers a highly intuitive drag-and-drop interface, making it super beginner-friendly.
The built-in WooCommerce integration also makes it seamless to set up an online store, with all the necessary features right at our fingertips. It even offers built-in SEO features that can help your website rank higher and get more traffic.
Pros of Divi:
- Divi offers a huge range of customizable elements, including text modules, image modules, modules for displaying social media feeds, pricing tables, and more.
- We like that it lets you nest different layouts within other templates to create layered designs.
- It supports dynamic content and allows you to create conditional templates for your theme.
Cons of Divi:
- During our investigation, we found that Divi does not allow you to directly add custom CSS code for theme customization.
- When reading reviews, we discovered that it has caused performance issues for some websites. This is because Divi is a heavier theme builder compared to some other plugins.
Why we recommend Divi Theme Builder: Overall, Divi is a great theme builder if you have a small business site. The tool has more than 800+ premade templates for different niches, and you can use it to launch your business site easily. Plus, Divi is super affordable, making it a cost-effective solution.
4. Beaver Builder
Beaver Builder is a well-known page builder plugin that allows you to customize landing pages for your website. You can install the plugin’s Themer addon and use the same visual drag-and-drop editor to customize entire themes. That said, it offers some highly advanced customization options, making it a good choice for developers and agencies.
Like with Divi, we have been regularly testing and researching Beaver Builder for years due to reader requests, and we’ve had positive experiences with it. For more information, see our complete Beaver Builder review.
Over the years, we’ve used Beaver Builder to create custom headers, footers, blog pages, and even archive and home pages with complete flexibility.
As we mentioned, the tool is really developer-friendly, offering a high level of customization that makes it easy to create one-of-a-kind designs. During testing, we were also impressed by its plugin’s field connectors, which allow you to add dynamic data to the site.
Although Beaver Builder can be a great option for developers and agencies, it’s also important to note that its drag-and-drop editor makes it simple enough for beginners, too. So, if it has some features you’re interested in but you lack any technical skills, it could still be a good choice for you.
Pros of Beaver Builder:
- It comes with custom WooCommerce layouts like WooCommerce Shop, Checkout, Cart, and My Account pages.
- Beaver Builder offers dynamic content support.
- It offers a lot of themes and templates and has 30+ design modules.
- There is a free page builder version of the tool available.
Cons of Beaver Builder:
- It has no free theme builder, and its paid plans can be expensive for some users.
- It has a bit of a learning curve and can be difficult to use for beginners.
Why we recommend Beaver Builder: If you want to create a theme with advanced customizations, then Beaver Builder is an excellent choice. Developers love it since it provides a lot of flexibility.
5. Brizy
Brizy is a great website builder that offers a drag-and-drop interface, front-end editing, and a library of premade templates to help you build a custom theme without using any code. It also allows you to sync content across multiple sites, so it can be ideal if you manage more than one WordPress website.
It lets you create responsive designs, integrates with email marketing services, and offers many customizable options, including text and image modules.
Plus, we like Brizy’s display conditions feature, which lets you control where and when certain elements of your website appear. This can be useful if you want to hide certain content from users who are not logged in or display different content based on the user’s location.
Pros of Brizy:
- Brizy has 36+ elements, offers a free plan, comes with a mega menu feature for your navigation menu, and even lets you view your theme editing history.
- During testing, we found that the tool allows you to easily sync content between multiple WordPress sites.
- It comes with a ‘Global Blocks’ feature that lets you add the same headers and footers to different pages of your website.
- There is a free version of the tool. Although it’s technically a page builder, it offers global styling.
Cons of Brizy:
- It offers limited third-party tool integrations.
- We didn’t find Brizy’s library of templates as comprehensive as some of the other tools.
Why we recommend Brizy: Overall, Brizy is an excellent theme builder. We recommend this tool if you have multiple WordPress sites and want to sync them to share popups, blocks, or whole pages between them.
6. Elementor
Elementor is a popular WordPress theme builder that comes with tons of different premade templates, customizable elements, and a global styles feature that can apply to all the pages on your website. Since it also has a WooCommerce builder, it’s perfect for building online stores.
Like SeedProd, Divi, and Beaver Builder, Elementor is wildly popular, so we’ve been regularly testing it and staying informed about its features for years. For more details, check out our full Elementor review.
We like that Elementor has a drag-and-drop interface and is super lightweight, helping your website’s speed and performance.
We also appreciate Elementor’s huge and active community. Whether it’s through the official Elementor Facebook group, online forums, or third-party blogs and tutorials, there’s always someone willing to share tips, tricks, and solutions to common problems.
With Elementor, you can create mobile-responsive themes, add nested layouts, and even use dynamic tags to personalize your website’s content.
Pros of Elementor:
- We like Elementor’s WooCommerce builder, which lets you customize the layout of your online store.
- It also has a popup builder, form builder, and loop builder that you can use.
- The tool allows you to set conditions for when to display certain elements on your website.
- There is a free version of the tool.
Cons of Elementor:
- During our research, we discovered that Elementor does not have undo/redo options for theme customization.
- It gives you limited control over the code on your website.
- It can be a bit difficult to navigate for beginners.
Why we recommend Elementor: Overall, Elementor is a good choice for an online store because it comes with a WooCommerce builder, premade templates, and a huge community of users.
Which Is the Best Theme Builder for WordPress?
In our opinion, SeedProd is the best WordPress theme builder on the market because it comes with 300+ premade templates for specific niches, integrations with email marketing services, dynamic content, and over 20 color schemes. Plus, the tool also offers a free version.
However, if you have a WordPress blog and want to build an email list, then Thrive Theme Builder is a good choice because it offers different conversion-focused features.
Similarly, if you own a small business, then Divi is also a great option because it has about 800 templates for different niches.
You can also opt for Brizy if you have multiple WordPress sites or use Elementor if you run an online store.
💡 Is building your own custom theme not worth the hassle?
In that case, consider using WPBeginner’s affordable WordPress Website Design Service. Let our team of experts create a stunning, custom theme for you. We can also make sure your entire website is optimized to offer the best user experience possible. That way, your business can thrive!
You’ll even get to work with a dedicated project manager to help bring your vision to life. Book a free consultation today!
Frequently Asked Questions About WordPress Theme Builders
Here is a list of some of the frequently asked questions from our readers about theme builders.
Why use a theme builder instead of a theme in WordPress?
There are tons of great WordPress themes that you can use on your website. However, when you opt for a theme builder, you get more control over your design and can see all your changes with a live preview feature.
Plus, theme builders are more flexible, allowing you to create different custom designs for all your pages without having to learn and write any code.
Which is the best free theme builder for WordPress?
The average cost for theme builders is about $49 per year for a single-site license and up to $249 per year for a multi-site license.
However, if you are looking for a free solution that lets you create custom themes, then we recommend SeedProd’s free plan, as it has most of the features required to customize a whole theme for your website.
What factors should I consider when picking a theme builder?
When choosing a theme builder, you should consider factors like ease of use, customization options, impact on website speed, integrations, pricing, and customer support. All of these elements will help you pick the best theme builder for your website.
Bonus: WordPress Guides to Help Design Your Website
We hope this article helped you find the perfect WordPress theme builder for your needs. You might also be interested in some of our related guides on WordPress design:
- Elementor vs Divi vs SeedProd (Compared) – Which is the Best?
- How to Customize Colors on Your WordPress Website
- Things You MUST DO Before Changing WordPress Themes
- How to Customize Your WordPress Theme (Beginner’s Guide)
- How to Customize Your WordPress Header
- Key Design Elements for an Effective WordPress Website
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
Jiří Vaněk
Elementor has helped me a lot with my current blog. I previously had a blog in 2009 and was using an old WYSIWYG editor. It suited me perfectly. Then Gutenberg came along and I found working with WordPress complicated and unintuitive. That’s why I kind of resented this system. But eventually I discovered Elementor and it got me back in the game and thanks to it I have a new blog that I enjoy. If someone were to ask me now about the best builder for WordPress, I would definitely say that it is Elementor.
Moinuddin Waheed
I started using the elementor way back since 2017 ever since it was launched and I have witnessed its growth.
No denying the ease of use and user friendliness of this plugin.
But as they started incorporating everything to make the design, it became bulky and I started getting overwhelmed.
it also started getting complicated and performance issue started arising.
I switched to many other alternatives before finally settling to seedprod.
The best thing about seedprod is its minimalistic dashboard with all the powerful features.
This is a theme builder as well.
I am really enjoying this plugin and with the new ai integration, this plugin is super useful.
THANKGOD JONATHAN
Divi Have performance issues and difficult to add CSS codes. SeedPro have limited free plan. Thrive Theme Builder has no free plan and have few pre made templates. Beaver builder is very expensive and not beginners friendly. Brizy limited customization. Elementor it does not tolerate mistakes as there is no redo or undo and editing codes is very restricted. Therefore, if you have a good budget try Seedpro or Beaver.
Jiří Vaněk
What exactly do you mean by Elementor not allowing mistakes? I’ve always found it great to use the CTR+Z hotkey to undo an action. Five steps without problems. And if something really goes wrong, then WordPress has a fairly decent revision system, where you can go back to any original version of the article.
Moinuddin Waheed
seedprod is of course the goto option as for as the page builders are concerned.
But yes elementor had the revision thing and you can always undo and redo for making any unwanted changes.
Konrad
heyy seedprod with its free plan is a game changer
Thank you guys.
A Owadud Bhuiyan
Recently I watched a video regarding the new updated version of WordPress.
Now if I install a block-based theme, I can easily use it like a theme builder.
Does the recent update of WordPress impact on Theme builder or page builder?
Thanks
WPBeginner Support
It would depend on the specific builder you are using for your site, as WordPress changes builders will also change.
Admin
Ahmed Omar
In this comparison seedProd would win the comparison and stay on the top of other theme builders.
I liked how you took this subject between all the competitors.
Thank you
WPBeginner Support
You’re welcome
Admin
Ralph
Long time ago i used Elementor, but it was slowing my website. I have no idea if it was my fault or the plugin itself so i sticked to my theme builder and created basically the same thing i did with elementor.
I’ve heard a lot of good things about Divi. But I’m Curious about what you wrote:
“It even offers built-in SEO features that can help your website rank higher and get more traffic.”
Is it something that Divi just do, or is it more like Yoast and it tells me what to do, but i have to do it myself?
WPBeginner Support
It is something that you would need to enable/modify in Divi itself.
Admin
Moinuddin Waheed
I have used elementor and generateblocks earlier. I was not aware about this much option available for page builders. I had heard about the seedprod earlier but have not used untill now. As you have explained it has theme customisation option which is a great feature as many of the page builders still lack this feature.
I will definitely give a try to seedprod for my new blogs and designs.
WPBeginner Support
We hope you find it helpful
Admin