A non-techie guide to Atahualpa alternatives

Many of you techies probably already know this but maybe a lot of non-techies, such as myself, do not know this until I did a lot of research. People on various threads have suggested Divi, Elementor, Beaver Builder, and Thrive Architect as alternatives to Atahualpa.

I want to clarify that all of these are page builder plugins, not themes. So they technically are not alternatives to Atahualpa. To use any of these page builders, you still need to find an alternative theme. That said, Divi comes in the form of a theme and a page builder plugin, but when most people speak of Divi, they are speaking of the page builder plugin, not the theme. Similarly, Beaver Builder also has its own theme, but most people are speaking about the pager builder plugin, not the theme. Elementor is only a page builder plugin and has no native theme.

To use any of these page builder plugins, you still need a theme as the foundation. All of these page builder plugins claim to work well with almost any theme, but some themes are specifically designed to work seamlessly with these pagebuilders. In my research, I found that Astra, GeneratePress, and OceanWP are particularly amazing themes if you plan to use any of these pagebuilder plugins on top of them.

This is what I wanted to share. Beyond this, I wanted to venture into the "opinion" side and share my recommendations below.

The best page builder plugins are Beaver Builder and Elementor for their rock solid stability (non-bugginess) and non-invasive, light code. Divi is notorious for prioritizing design/glamor over non-buggy, solid user experience and the addition of a lot of code that makes it hard for people to transition away from Divi at some point in the future. In fact, many reviewers in my research have told people to stay from Divi because it's just not worth it no matter how glittery it may seem.

Then you have to think about which themes are specifically designed with Beaver Builder and Elementor in mind. My recommendations are Astra and GeneratePress, both of which are head to head with pros and cons to each. Hundreds of thousands of people are very happy with both.