GeneratePress vs Divi: Honest Comparison for 2025

I’ve lived in Divi for over a decade, and I’ve put in plenty of time with HubSpot, Elementor, Squarespace, and Wix. Recently, I’ve been exploring GeneratePress + GenerateBlocks — about eight hours deep so far — and I’m genuinely impressed. This post is an honest look at how GeneratePress stacks up against Divi, based on years of real-world experience and a fresh dive into GP.

That's the lens through which this is being viewed (or written) from. That is to say, I'm far from unbiased, but I'm also a power user of these themes and someone who has built his entire career upon the back of the giants who came before. I'm not including any affiliate links to either Divi or GeneratePress in this article because frankly, that's not the purpose of this. I hope you find this article as helpful as it was for me to write it. 

Divi: A Decade of Dominance

Divi first hit the scene over ten years ago, and I was lucky enough to get in early with Elegant Themes’ forever license. For a couple hundred bucks, I got access to every theme they’d ever release. A few years later, Divi arrived, and it quickly became my default tool.

From 2014 onward, I built dozens (likely hundreds) of sites with Divi. It gave clients something rare at the time: real control over their site, inside WordPress, without needing a developer on call. The visual drag-and-drop builder of sections, rows, and modules felt like magic in an era where making columns meant wrestling with float:right; and tables.

But that magic didn’t come without costs.

Divi 4’s Woes

Divi 4 was powerful, but it was also heavy. Over the years, three big pain points became impossible to ignore:

1. Performance
   Divi sites had a reputation for being slow. The sheer number of modules and the way the builder handled CSS/JS meant extra bloat. Optimizing speed often meant jumping through hoops — minifying, caching, CDN juggling — just to get performance scores up.

2. Code Bloat & Lock-In
   Divi wrapped everything in shortcodes. If you ever decided to move away, you’d be left with a nightmare of [et_pb_text] tags littered throughout your content. It created a sense of vendor lock-in that made developers nervous.

3. User Experience
   While Divi was friendly compared to raw WordPress, it could be clunky. Large pages with lots of sections often felt laggy in the builder. The Theme Builder added flexibility but also extra complexity. And if you had clients with limited tech skills, the number of options could overwhelm.

4. Responsive Design Issues
   Divi often required extra tweaking to look right across devices. The responsive settings existed, but the workflow wasn’t always smooth, and it added more steps to every build.

Despite these flaws, Divi 4 was still one of the best tools on the market because of its sheer versatility. But the cracks showed, especially when speed and simplicity became more important for SEO and user experience.

Divi 5: The Comeback The Rebuild

Elegant Themes knew Divi 4 was carrying baggage, so Divi 5 is a full rebuild from the ground up. It’s not just another update; it’s a re-architecture aimed at solving the pain points that developers and site owners have been wrestling with for years. 

Here’s how Divi 5 is addressing those issues:

• Performance First
  The new version strips out a lot of the bloat. CSS and JS are smarter, lighter, and only load what’s needed. Early tests show sites built on Divi 5 running noticeably faster without heavy optimization hacks.

• No More Shortcode Soup
  The rebuild eliminates the heavy shortcode dependency. That means cleaner code, less lock-in, and a more future-proof setup.

• A Modern Builder
  The visual builder is smoother and more responsive, especially on large, complex pages. They’ve reworked how it handles layout logic, making it less glitchy and more stable.

• Better Responsive Tools
  Divi 5 improves on the device editing workflow, making it faster to adjust layouts for mobile and tablet. Instead of patching the old system, they rebuilt it with responsiveness as a core priority.

I’ve tested Divi 5’s alpha on a few builds. It’s not ready for prime time yet, but it’s already a clear step up from Divi 4. Faster, cleaner, and easier to work with. If Elegant Themes stays on track, Divi 5 might put them back at the top of the builder pile.

GeneratePress + GenerateBlocks

GeneratePress takes a very different approach. Instead of replacing WordPress with its own builder, GP extends the native Gutenberg editor. Think of it as giving Gutenberg the depth and flexibility of a page builder — without the weight.

The workflow feels natural if you’re comfortable in WordPress:

• You create Elements (headers, footers, hooks, layouts).

• You build out designs using GP’s custom Gutenberg blocks.

• You can save and reuse patterns anywhere across the site.

Need a navigation bar? In Divi, you’d fire up the Theme Builder, add a menu module, style it, and maybe tweak CSS in a child theme. In GeneratePress, you go to Appearance > Elements, create a new header, drop in a navigation block, a logo block, maybe a button block, and style everything right inside Gutenberg.

It’s streamlined, and it feels future-proof. You’re still building natively in WordPress, but with the flexibility developers need to create complex layouts.

Developer vs Client Experience

This is where the decision gets tricky.

• As a developer, GeneratePress feels like a dream. It’s lean, clean, and doesn’t fight you. If I want to step out of the block editor and write code, I can do that easily. There’s no shortcode mess or lock-in.

• As a client, Divi still wins on usability. The visual builder is far more intuitive than Gutenberg for non-developers. It’s easier to learn, easier to make quick edits, and less intimidating overall.

That said, Gutenberg is getting better. And because GeneratePress leans on core WordPress features, it benefits from everything WordPress itself improves on. Plus, the built-in revision history makes recovering from mistakes fairly painless.

My Take Moving Forward

For client projects, I’ll still lean on Divi. It’s simply easier for non-technical teams to pick up and run with. The peace of mind that a site can be updated without breaking is huge for small businesses.

For personal or developer-driven projects, GeneratePress has the edge. It’s lightweight, scalable, and much faster out of the box. If I were building my personal site today, I’d go GP without hesitation.

Quick Comparison: GeneratePress vs Divi