If you find yourself wanting more control over your website design, you might want to consider using a theme builder. WordPress theme builders let you create every aspect of your website, from header to footer and everything in between – no need to add complicated PHP to theme files. Easily design and manage all templates with the convenient theme builder. In this article, we are going to share some of the best WordPress theme builders in 2023 available for use in your next project.
What is a WordPress Theme Builder?
A WordPress theme builder is a tool that gives you complete control over the design of every aspect of your website or theme on the front end. With the template builder, you can use modules (or blocks) to build custom headers, footers, and templates without having to add custom code to your template’s PHP files
For example, with the Divi template builder, you can design your entire site from top to bottom on the front end. You can build new templates and assign them to any part of your site using a drag-and-drop interface.
Theme builders typically allow you to change the look and feel of:
- Post templates
- Page templates
- Archive templates (category, tags, etc.)
- Search Result Page templates
- 404 Pages
- Headers and Footers
- Custom Post Types
- and more…
Without the theme builder, you are forced to edit templates and other global elements on the backend with custom code that requires child theme creation.
What to look for in a WordPress theme builder?
There are several essential features that you should look out for when looking for the best WordPress theme builder. Focused on looking for the following features:
- Easy to use – Look for a theme builder that has a visual editor and a beginner-friendly interface.
- Pre-designed templates – Most of the tools on this list include templates that you can import and customize to save time.
- Template Terms – You’ll need an option to control where and when your templates display. For example, you may want to use one header for your splash page and another for blog posts.
- Dynamic Content – If you plan to use custom post types, advanced custom fields, etc., you will need a way to import dynamic content from WordPress automatically.
WordPress theme builders vs. WordPress page builders
It’s easy to confuse theme builders with WordPress theme builder because they have similar features. Moreover, many WordPress plugins have the functionality of creating WordPress page layouts and themes.
While many of the tools on this list can do both, it’s important to understand how each tool is different.
The differences between WordPress theme builders and page builder plugins are as follows:
- Page builder plugins allow you to create unique designs for a single piece of content. This is usually for individual pages or blog articles.
- WordPress theme builders allow you to create complete templates that automatically apply to all of your content. For example, you can use custom styling on every post in your WordPress site. Because the template applies to every piece of content, you don’t need to re-create the layout for each new post, which you might need to do with a page builder plugin.
Simply put, page builder plugins are best for customizing a single piece of content, while template builders can customize your entire website.
Other than these differences, template builders and page builder extensions have similar features. Most of them include a drag and drop editor, ready-made templates, and design elements to make your layouts unique.
Why use a WordPress drag and drop page builder?
When beginners start blogging, many of them find it difficult to customize WordPress theme layouts. While many professional WordPress themes come with different page layouts, most of them are difficult to customize for anyone without programming knowledge (HTML / CSS).
For this reason, users often ask questions like, “How can we make WordPress easy to use with drag and drop?” or “Is there an easy drag-and-drop WordPress builder?”
When we talk to people who are making the switch from Weebly to WordPress or from Wix to WordPress, their most common response is, “I wish WordPress had an easy drag-and-drop site builder.”
Well, there are many excellent drag and drop theme builder available for WordPress. It allows you to create completely custom website designs in WordPress without having to write a single line of code.
Since there are many different WordPress theme builder plugins & themes on the market, we decided to compare and rank them in order to choose the right solution for your needs.
Our criteria in comparing these accessories are ease of use, flexibility, and design results.
List of Best WordPress Theme Builders
Now that you know what to look for, let’s dive in and take a look at the best WordPress theme builders.
1. Elementor Pro

Elementor is a leading template builder that does it all. You can create headers, invoices, blog articles, product pages, popups, and more with ease using this tool. It contains over 100 widgets, from basic widgets like counters and tabs to complex ones like price lists and animated titles. Together, these elements can be used to create great templates for all aspects of your website.
Elementor works well for creating custom product pages for your WooCommerce sites. You can create a custom cart page, add additional content to your purchase summary pages, or even build an off-screen cart menu without having to write a single line of code. If you don’t feel like starting from scratch, Elementor has an extensive library of ready-made website packages that you can take advantage of. All of this and more can be done without programming using Elementor’s simple visual interface.
Key Features of Elementor
- 100+ widgets and theme builder website combinations
- Visually create templates for your 404 pages, headers, footers, posts, products, and more
- Custom field integration with Toolset and Advanced Custom Fields and Pods
- Loop builder to create archive pages, products and categories
- Manage all aspects of your website easily within the Elementor All Parts library
Elementor is unique on our list because it can act as a standalone template builder. This means that it does not depend on a specific template to work and can work with many templates available. Hence, Elementor recommends using their Hello theme, which is a basic framework in which you can add everything you need to your theme through Elementor. The Hello Elementor theme is an ideal base to start building your WordPress site, because Elementor’s theme generation power comes alive in this great compatibility.
Elementor is widely compatible with many templates. It is a template builder that you can use with almost any template. There are many templates available that are compatible with Elementor, so if you are undecided about which template to use, choose Elementor to help you build your perfect website.
Elementor Pricing: Free, Paid plans start at $59 per year
2. Divi

Divi is the leading WordPress theme builder designed for those who want to have maximum control over the design of their entire site. Divi is one of the most popular templates in the world, with over 800,000 users. Divi’s template builder allows you to build templates for pages, blog articles, archive pages (including date, category, tag, and author pages), search results, and 404 error page. Divi has over 40 basic modules that you can add to your templates. You can also use Divi’s 20+ LuCommerce modules to build unique pages and templates for your online store, including Shop, Cart, Checkout, and My Account pages.
Template assignments in the Divi template builder allow detailed control over your designs. You can build different hydrates and phases for different moulds. You can set which pages you want to inherit or exclude the designs of your custom templates. With Divi, there is no limit to creativity when building a custom WordPress website.
The Divi template builder supports full site editing on the front end. This means that your template design elements (sidebars, headers, menus, invoices, etc.) are available when using the visual editor on any page or post. You don’t need to go back and forth to make changes to Header or Footer while editing the article.
Divi has over 2,000 free page layouts to get your designs started, plus ready-made headers and invoices, and other downloadable templates from our blog. You can also find more template builder products in our marketplace, including Divi hydrate pack and Divi invoices pack.
Key Features of Divi
- Create headers, footers, 404 pages, archives, blog pages and more visually
- Create an unlimited number of templates for custom pages, posts and post types
- Easy template management with options to edit, duplicate, copy, paginate and hide
- 2000+ layouts are available in Divi Layout Library. Easily import these layouts into pages and templates.
- Save template builder templates to the cloud with Divi Cloud
- Assign templates to anything: pages, posts, categories, custom post types, and much more
- Use Divi’s dynamic content features to pull data from your custom fields to add dynamic content to your templates.
- Conditional logic options can display items based on a set of criteria you specify, which is great when you’re adding member-exclusive content or triggering popups based on page visits.
Divi Pricing: $89 per year
3. Astra

Astra is one of the most popular WordPress theme builders available. It’s fast and highly customizable, and a free version is available in the WordPress theme repository. As a theme builder, Astra has a dedicated header and footer builder. You can easily drag and drop different elements to build your perfect Header and Footer. The Astra theme builder has live editing, so you can see what you’re building during the build process. WooCommerce pages can also be customized using Astra. There are hundreds of options for editing things like the shopping cart icon, layout variations on your products (colors, sizes, etc.), and a lot more. For WooCommerce, Astra focuses on being fully mobile responsive from the get-go, so you can provide a beautiful experience for your customers as they browse your site. Overall, Astra is one of the fastest and best WordPress theme builders available.
Key Features of Astra
- 240+ importable templates for theme building
- cloning, deleting, editing and setting general element presets,
- Easy to access, SEO friendly, and Schema.org ready
- 3 layer header and footer structure to build above and below the header and footer
- Create separate mobile headers and footers
Astra’s checkout page options are a vital feature to note for those looking to build online stores with WooCommerce. In addition to the default WooCommerce checkout process, with Astra you can have a distraction-free checkout process, a multi-step checkout process, and much more. Creating a ready-to-convert checkout can easily be done using Astra as your WordPress theme builder.
If you are looking for a free theme builder that feels like a premium one, use Astra. Even in its free version, you can still build custom hydrates and bills, and if you need more functionality, that’s also an option when you upgrade to a paid plan.
4. OceanWP
OceanWP is the most generous theme builder on our list. It provides a wide range of options that you can work with when using the free version of the builder. You can quickly enable or disable various features of product pages. Choose from a wide range of blog post templates that you can set for all of your blog posts or for a select few. There are multiple pagination styles, adjustable metadata elements, and more. OceanWP has created a collection of packages that can be used to extend the already diverse theme builder with even more features. Ocean eComm Treasure Box is a premium addon for OceanWP geared towards elevating your online store to greater heights. Whether you’re building a blog, online store, or simple informational website, gain control to build a premium website customized to your specifications with OceanWP.
Key Features of OceanWP
- 7 header styles, 4 page title styles, 3 archive page layouts, 3 mobile menu styles, and more
- Set global page layouts, typography, and branding
- Regular or distraction-free checkout for WooCommerce
- Set default styles for all templates on your website
Creating a mega menu for your website is a breeze with OceanWP. Use widgets or create templates in the OceanWP library and easily assign them to your menu to create mega menus without programming or shortcodes.
OceanWP is the best WordPress theme builder for designers who are on a tight budget. Many of the features of OceanWP’s free version are premium options over some of the competitors on our list. So if you are looking to save money while building your next website, choose to use OceanWP to build your site.
5. GeneratePress
GeneratePress is one of the first block-based theme builders for WordPress. It allows you to build anything your website needs using blocks. From articles to metadata, from invoices to custom post types, GeneratePress uses blocks to make building your own website easy. In addition to a strong focus on block-based building, GeneratePress is a fast, secure, and accessible theme builder. If you want to build a website that looks good and works well, especially for those who use the internet in different ways, you should consider building your website with GeneratePress. Although you can code with GeneratePress through dynamic block elements, you don’t have to do so if you decide to use one of their base templates. With over 75 basic websites and GenerateBlocks plugins, there’s no need to build your website completely from scratch. To build a solid website that works perfectly with Gutenberg, trust GeneratePress as your theme builder.
Key Features of GeneratePress
- Block based theme building and full website editing
- Advanced layout system with custom rendering rules
- Well documented, expert level hook system
- Multiple navigation customization such as mobile headers, secondary navigation, unformatted panels, and more
As the image above shows, GeneartePress uses every aspect of Gutenberg in its theme building processes. With GeneratePress, you can define dynamic text (such as a page title) and insert dynamic images (such as a featured image) to create repeatable content elements that you can use throughout your site. You will use this template as a template for all blog articles in a specific category.
As one of the first block-based theme builders, GeneratePress is at the forefront of WordPress theme building. If you love building with Gutenberg, GeneratePress is one of the best WordPress theme builders for you.
6. SeedProd
SeedProd is a powerful theme builder and page builder plugin for WordPress. With the Pro version of SeedProd, you can use a drag and drop page builder and use it to create a custom WordPress theme without having to write any code.
You can easily design different templates for your theme, including header, footer, single post, single page, archive, sidebar, and more.
From there, you can conditionally apply these templates anywhere on your WordPress site. For example, you could have one sidebar for your pages and another for your blog posts.
Unlike other WordPress theme builders that are slow and heavy, SeedProd has site speed in mind. It ensures that your pages are very fast to rank higher in search engines.
The best feature of the SeedProd theme builder is that it does not depend on your existing WordPress theme in terms of style or functionality, giving you complete freedom and control over your site design.
Key features of SeedProd
- A drag-and-drop visual editor
- Themes are ready and customizable
- Create unlimited templates
- View the conditional template
- Template tags for dynamic content
- 150+ templates for the landing page
- Soon built-in and maintenance mode
- Custom 404 and login pages for WordPress
- WooCommerce support for checkout and shopping carts
- Direct integration with popular email marketing services
- Domain designation for landing pages
- Global style settings
- 100% Responsive
The free basic version of the SeedProd plugin is available on WordPress.org and includes several template tags at no cost. However, you will need SeedProd Pro to unlock the theme builder functionality.
SeedProd Pro price: $199 per year
7. Thrive Theme Builder
Thrive Theme Builder is a drag-and-drop page builder designed to make it easy to create custom, high-converting pages and websites with no coding skills required. Featuring a wide range of pre-designed templates, custom design elements, and advanced layout options, this platform allows users to build custom pages, headers, footers, and even fully custom WordPress themes.
In addition, Thrive Theme Builder integrates with other Thrive products such as Thrive Leads and Thrive Architect to provide a comprehensive website building and optimization solution.
Key Features of Thrive Theme Builder
- Build pages with drag and drop technology
- Pre-designed templates
- Custom design elements
- Advanced formatting options
- Build custom WordPress themes
- Responsive design
- Integration with other Thrive products
Thrive Pricing: Paid plans start at $599 per year
8. Beaver Themer
Beaver Themer is an add on to the popular Beaver Builder page builder. Beaver Themer lets you extend the capabilities of the Beaver Builder add-on by adding theme building capabilities to this popular add-on. With Beaver Themer, creating headers, invoices, 404 pages, and more is simple. Its user-friendly interface makes it fast and easy for anyone to build the perfect website for their business or project. It should be noted that while Beaver Builder can work with almost any WordPress theme, Beaver Themer works best with the Beaver theme and a few popular themes. There may be some cases where you may need to use code with Beaver Themer to get the design you want. However, in most cases, you can use its drag-and-drop functionality to create beautiful websites.
Key Features of Beaver Builder
- Create layouts for custom post types, blog and product archives, 404 pages, search pages, and more
- Integration with BigCommerce and WooCommerce for e-commerce customization
- Works with Pods and custom fields for deeper theme customization with dynamic content
- Build partial layouts (called theme parts) such as headers, footers, banners, etc., and control display
Beaver Builder’s Themer Parts is a unique feature that sets it apart from the other builders on our list. Themer parts allow you to place elements and pieces of content in different areas of the page outside of the content area. While a page builder focuses on the content area, and most theme builders focus on areas outside the content area, Themer parts fill in the gaps in both of those when it comes to site building. There is a long list of parts that Beaver Themer provides for adding your own content and designs, making it easier to ensure that you are building the perfect site for your needs.
If you’re already a fan of Beaver Builder, you’ll also be glad to have Beaver Themer to help you fully customize your websites. Consider adding a Beaver Themer product to your web design process and bring full site editing to the next Beaver Builder project you lead.
Pricing: $147 per year
9. Genesis Pro
Genesis Pro is another block-based theme builder. It comes with a library of pre-built sections and custom content blocks that you can add to your theme templates to save you time and effort building your entire site from scratch. You can also create your own blocks and content and build a library of reusable items. Genesis Pro enhances the WordPress editor with its additional free plugins, Genesis Blocks and Genesis Custom Blocks. As a theme builder, Genesis Pro differs from many of the other builders on our list in that it requires a lot of custom programming to change features like headers, billers, and sidebars. Programming will be necessary when using the Genesis Pro. Thanks to that, the Genesis Pro moves faster, is more accessible, and ultimately is a great deal customizable if you’re familiar with programming.
Key Features of Genesis Pro
- It comes with Genesis and Genesis Custom Blocks for easy theme building
- Create visually customized blocks for use all over your website
- A library of code snippets that are in their documentation to aid in custom coding
- Role-based editing permissions to ensure layouts remain on brand
- Pre-built sections and layouts to help with the theme building process
Custom blocks are a powerful feature of Genesis Pro. With it, you are free to use your imagination, program and design the perfect block for your WordPress site. Genesis Pro blends visual design with programming and bridges the gap for those who want to customize to the highest level with custom programming but also want the support that comes with working with a visual builder like Gutenberg.
If you love building with blocks and are good at coding, build your entire site with Genesis Pro. Genesis Pro allows you to quickly program and reuse blocks. It makes it easy to build a custom, lightweight WordPress website by simply combining programming and building blocks together.
Pricing: Free, $360 per year
10. Brizy
Brizy is a relatively new theme builder in the WordPress market. It differs from most of the theme builders on our list as it comes in the form of a cloud platform and also in the form of a WordPress plugin. If you’d prefer to have a managed platform to build your themes on, Brizy can help you with that aspect. Like many other theme builders, Brizy is a visual builder with no coding required. It relies on a library of elements that you can click and drag to build templates for almost any aspect of your website.
In addition, Brizy connects to various marketing tools and email platforms such as ActiveCampaign, Drip, and Calendly, to name a few. Brizy also supports the use of custom fields in its content. So, you can extract dynamic information from tools like ACF, Pods, and Meta Box. If you’re looking for a new way to build in WordPress, consider testing Brizy today.
Key Features of Brizy
- 36+ Powerful Drag and Drop Design Elements
- 500+ beautiful layout templates for pages, blocks, popups or stories
- Visually customize your blog posts, archives, titles, footers, 404 pages, and more
- Global brand identification and printing
- Customizable animation options, including Lottie animations, dialogues, entrance animations, rollover detection, and more
As an agency owner, Brizy has great white abilities. You can invite unlimited team members and assign roles to employees to facilitate collaboration between your team and your customers. You can sync content between sites and still have access to the powerful theme builder that makes building easy with Brizy. Additionally, your platform comes loaded with SEO tools ensuring that you can provide a unique service to your clients.
Brizy is a theme builder best suited for those who want to take advantage of a hosted and managed WordPress experience. You will no longer need to worry about updates or patches. Brizy allows you to build with WordPress with the convenience and security of a managed platform.
Pricing: Free, Paid plans start at $60 per year
11. Oxygen Builder
Oxygen Builder is one of the few theme builders on the market that truly works regardless of the theme used. It does not require a theme at all to work beautifully. Contains a library of design elements and resources for building templates visually. You can use the code to get a pixel-accurate design for your website. You can write custom CSS, PHP and JavaScript directly in the builder and see the direct result of your code. Oxygen has more breakpoints than any other theme builder on our list, so responsive design is easy with this builder. Of course, you can set universal colors throughout your site and use dynamic data within your templates. Oxygen Builder has a more difficult learning curve than other theme builders on our list. However, if you’re not afraid to use coding to build your website, consider using Oxygen as your theme builder today.
Key Features of Oxygen Builder
- Custom header builder element
- Create layouts using both Flexbox grids and CSS
- WooCommerce Universal Styles and styling controls for WooCommerce elements
- Full client access control with creator mode editing only
- Visually editable Gutenberg blocks building
The composite elements within Oxygen take your visual building to a higher level. It allows you to provide multiple Oxygen elements combined together to create beautiful, feature-rich ways to showcase your content. In addition, the code for these elements is light and clean, which means that aesthetics need not be sacrificed for functionality. Mega menus, section indicators, icon buttons, and more are all composite elements that you can find when using Oxygen as your theme builder.
Oxygen Builder is your go-to theme builder if you want to be in complete control of your WordPress site and are knowledgeable and comfortable with coding. Oxygen beautifully blends programming and visual building as a theme builder, making it one of the best WordPress theme builders for those who aren’t afraid to code.
Pricing: Paid plans start at $129
12. Visual Composer Theme Builder
Visual Composer is an easy-to-use WordPress website editor that helps you quickly create custom website layouts, without having to write code. With its theme builder feature, you can completely replace any WordPress theme with custom layouts.
You can build any type of page, post, and archive layouts with the Visual Layout Editor. Plus, it works with your existing theme, or you can start from scratch with a new design.
With the exception of SeedProd, Visual Composer is the only plugin on this list that allows you to modify all aspects of your site, such as the logo, menus, headers, invoices, sidebars, etc.
Key Features of Visual Composer
- Drag-and-drop visual editor
- Create multiple theme parts
- Dynamic content support
- Conditional and global layouts
- Support for the WordPress block editor
Pricing: Paid plans start at $49 per year
Which Is the Best WordPress Theme Builder?
Now for the important question, which is the best overall WordPress theme builder?
Well, I guess a lot of this comes down to your specific feature needs, knowledge level and budget, so I can’t make a single recommendation for all situations. All of these tools have their pros and cons, and they’re all quality tools in their own right (which is why they’re on the list).
For those who want to build their next website without writing a line of code, Divi is the best option. As our top pick theme builder, you won’t have to wade through code to create a beautiful website completely customized to your specifications. Astra is a great freemium theme builder that allows you to create beautiful websites while still giving you the option to upgrade to unlock deeper functionality. It is one of the most downloaded theme builders from the WordPress repository. Finally, if you’re on a tight budget but still want the freedom to create visuals, start your website with OceanWP.
Overall Best Theme Builder for “Most” People
First, I would say that the best overall theme builder for most people is Elementor Pro. I think no other tool can match its feature set. You get tons of widgets, tons of design options, and other useful tools like a popups builder. It is also still easy for beginners to use and because of its great popularity, it is very easy to find help. There are many videos on YouTube and the Elementor Community on Facebook with over 75,000 members ready to help if you run into problems.
Simply put, if you’re not sure where to start, you can’t go wrong with Elementor Pro because it combines features, ease of use, and price so well.
Best Theme Builder for Advanced Users or Custom Content Sites
On the other hand, if you are an advanced user or developer, you will probably prefer Oxygen. While I don’t think Oxygen is the most beginner-friendly tool on this list, it does have several great features, and an impressive ability to produce clean code. If you are one of those people who complain about the code quality in other page blocks, Oxygen is definitely the best tool for you.
Also I would say overall that Oxygen is superior in building custom content sites (with dynamic data from custom fields) due to its features like repeaters, loops, conditional logic, and others. While all of these tools allow you to work with personalized content, Oxygen takes you further.
Best Theme Builder for Beginners
Finally, if you are a complete beginner, Thrive Theme Builder might be the best choice for you because of its method. Unlike all the other tools that act as plugins, Thrive Theme Builder is an actual theme (Divi might be, but it’s different). This, along with the way the templates are used, makes it very easy to get started with a complete site.
However, one of the downsides to this approach is that you lose a lot of the flexibility available in other tools. So, it is suitable for beginners, but not the best choice for people who want 100% flexibility.
Most Affordable WordPress Theme Builder
Finally, let’s quickly talk about price.
If you’re on a tight budget, the two most affordable template builders for one site are:
- Elementor Pro at $59 for use on a single site
- Brizy Pro at $49 for use on up to three sites
And if you’re looking for a lifetime unlimited deal, your options are:
- $99 Oxygen tier for beginners for life on unlimited sites, or $169 for the senior tier (with WooCommerce integration and Gutenberg block builder).
- $249 for a lifetime membership (Divi) for unlimited site use.
- $299 for Lifetime Brizy Pro Membership and Use on Unlimited Sites – Limited time deal, may be gone in the future.
Do you have any questions about choosing the best WordPress theme builder for your needs? Ask your questions in the comments!