Elementor vs Gutenberg: which should a small business use?

For a small business that wants a designed site it can update itself, Elementor Pro is usually the better choice. For a site that’s mostly a blog or news, the free Gutenberg block editor built into WordPress is often enough, and lighter. We build every WordPress site we make in Elementor, so weigh our view with that in mind, and be wary of anyone who tells you one tool wins on every count.

Both are ways of laying out pages in WordPress. Gutenberg is the block editor that comes built into WordPress. Elementor is a separate page builder plugin with a free version and a paid Pro version. Your hosting, your domain and your content can work with either. The difference is in who edits the site, how much design control you need, and what you’re prepared to maintain.

The short comparison

Each row deserves more than a cell.

Editing experience

This is where most small businesses make the decision, whether they realise it or not.

In Elementor, you click on the page and change it. The heading you’re editing looks exactly how it will look live. For a café owner updating a specials section or a practice manager swapping a staff photo, that visual feedback is reassuring. The downside is the sheer number of settings. Every widget has Content, Style and Advanced tabs, and an owner with time on their hands can change padding, colours and fonts on individual widgets until the site no longer looks like a designed site.

Gutenberg feels more like writing a document. It’s genuinely good for blog posts and text-heavy pages: you type, add an image block, add a heading, and keep going. Laying out a complex homepage is a different story. Without a strong block theme and pre-built patterns, people get stuck trying to put two things side by side and have them stack properly on mobile.

What we see on client sites: owners who mostly write (news posts, articles, updates) are comfortable in Gutenberg. Owners who mostly tweak pages (swap a banner, change opening hours, add a service) are happier in Elementor, as long as the site was built with global styles so their changes stay on brand.

You don’t have to pick one for everything. On many of our Elementor sites, blog posts are written in the block editor and displayed through an Elementor Theme Builder template. The owner gets a simple writing screen; the design stays consistent.

Performance

Gutenberg wins this by default. A page built with core blocks loads less code than the same page built in Elementor, and if speed is your top priority with no other constraints, that matters.

But “by default” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. A Gutenberg site with three block library plugins, a slider plugin and uncompressed photos will be slower than a carefully built Elementor site. In our experience, the gap between a well-built site and a badly built one is much bigger than the gap between the two editors. Oversized images, cheap hosting and plugin clutter cause more slow sites than the choice of builder. We cover the real culprits in why your website is slow.

Elementor has also been working on its output. Containers replaced the old section and column structure, and the newer V4 “atomic” editor is designed to produce leaner pages. That doesn’t make Elementor as light as core blocks, but it narrows the difference.

Flexibility and features

This is Elementor’s strongest ground for a small business without a developer on call.

With Elementor Pro you get, in one place: Theme Builder for headers, footers and templates; a form builder with email notifications and integrations; popups; dynamic content from custom fields; and the Loop Grid for team pages, portfolios and listings. A designer can build almost any layout without writing code, and you can change it later without calling a developer.

With Gutenberg, the core editor handles the basics, and the Site Editor lets you edit headers, footers and templates if you’re using a block theme. For forms, popups and dynamic listings, you add plugins: a form plugin, a block library, perhaps a custom fields plugin. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s more pieces from more vendors to keep up to date and compatible.

If your site is mostly text pages and a blog, Gutenberg’s flexibility is plenty. If you want a distinctive, designed site with lots of different layouts, Elementor gets you there faster and is easier to change.

Cost

Gutenberg is free. Elementor Pro is an annual licence, and the free version of Elementor lacks Theme Builder, forms, popups and the Loop Grid, which are the parts most business sites need. Factor in the renewal every year, for as long as you have the site.

The bigger cost is usually labour, though. A custom design built in Gutenberg often needs a developer to create custom blocks or patterns. The same design in Elementor is usually quicker to build and cheaper to change later. Which one is cheaper over five years depends on how often you change things.

Long-term maintenance

Two points on Elementor you should hear before choosing it.

First, lock-in. Elementor stores its layouts in its own format. If you deactivate it, your pages fall back to basic, mostly unstyled content. Moving away from Elementor means rebuilding the layouts. That’s the price of the flexibility, and you should know it going in.

Second, update cadence. Elementor releases often, and big changes (the move to containers, and now V4) mean some sites need attention over the years. Updates should be tested, ideally on staging, and add-on plugins need to keep up. That testing is the bulk of what a hosting and care plan pays for on an Elementor site. Elementor also needs reasonable hosting, which we cover in will your hosting cope with Elementor.

Gutenberg is part of WordPress itself, so it’s maintained with core. It has its own churn (features moving, block themes and the Site Editor evolving), but there’s no separate plugin licence or compatibility to manage. Both need a host that keeps PHP current; WordPress publishes its server compatibility recommendations for each release.

Who suits which

Gutenberg is probably the better fit if:

• your site is mainly a blog, publication or news site
• you or your team write often but rarely change layouts
• you have access to a developer who knows block themes
• you want the lightest possible site and are happy with a simpler design
• you’d rather not pay an annual licence

Elementor is probably the better fit if:

• you want a distinctive design rather than a theme that looks like a theme
• you’ll update pages yourself and want to see changes as you make them
• you need forms, popups, team pages or portfolios without stacking up plugins
• you don’t have a developer on call, and want changes to be quick and cheap
• your designer builds in it properly, with global styles and clean structure

That last point is the one that matters most. A badly built Elementor site is worse than a decent Gutenberg site, and vice versa.

How we decide

We chose Elementor because most of our clients are small businesses and practices who want a designed site they can update themselves, without a developer for every change. For that reader, it’s the better tool. For a writer who publishes three times a week and never touches the homepage, we’d say so.

Before choosing an editor, get clear on what the site has to do. Our guide to what a small business website should actually do is a good place to start. You can see the kind of sites we build in Elementor in our portfolio, and our web design service page explains what a build includes.