Bricks and Breakdance
The newer builders were designed by people who had watched the older ones age badly. They output cleaner markup and demand more of you — and they make exactly the same bargain about who owns your pages.
The newer builders fixed the output and kept the bargain. Bricks and Breakdance were both designed after a decade of complaints about div soup, bloated stylesheets and unmaintainable sites, and both produce markedly tidier front-end code than the generation before them. Neither has changed the underlying arrangement: your pages live inside the builder, and leaving means rebuilding them.
Decide on that basis, then on the differences below.
What "cleaner output" actually means
The claim is specific and largely true:
- Fewer wrappers. A section is a handful of elements rather than nested containers four deep.
- Class-based styling you can name yourself, instead of generated identifiers attached to inline rules.
- Selective asset loading, so a page loads styles for what it contains.
- Direct control of the markup element — you decide whether something is a
section, anarticleor adiv.
For anyone who has inherited an older builder site and tried to restyle it, that list is worth something real. It makes the CSS maintainable, which is the difference between a site a developer can work on and one they quote a rebuild for.
What it does not do is make a slow site fast. Page weight is dominated by images, fonts and plugin scripts, in that order — see speeding up WordPress and optimising images. A tidy builder on a page with unoptimised hero images is still a slow page.
The theme-or-plugin distinction
This is the most consequential difference between the two, and it is architectural rather than cosmetic.
| Bricks | Breakdance | |
|---|---|---|
| Installed as | A theme | A plugin |
| Replaces your theme | Yes | No |
| Builds headers and footers | Yes, as part of the theme | Yes, through its own template system |
| Works alongside a block theme | No | Yes, with care |
| Migration later means | Changing theme and rebuilding | Removing a plugin and rebuilding |
A builder distributed as a theme owns the whole front end: templates, header, footer, archives. That is coherent and complete, and it means the theme decision and the builder decision are the same decision. A plugin builder leaves the theme in place, which is more flexible and more likely to produce two systems disagreeing about the header.
Neither is wrong. Know which you are choosing, because changing a theme is a different operation from deactivating a plugin.
Licensing
Both are commercial with no free tier, sold per site count. Terms change, so verify at purchase rather than trusting any article's numbers — including this one, which deliberately quotes none.
The questions that matter more than price:
- What happens when the licence lapses — the site keeps rendering, updates stop, and an unmaintained builder eventually meets a PHP release it was not written for.
- How long has the product shipped, and how frequent are releases.
- How large is the ecosystem — third-party elements, agency familiarity, and the chance of finding someone to maintain the site later.
That last point is where the older builders still win. Hiring someone who knows Elementor is trivial; hiring for a newer builder is a smaller pool, and it is a genuine cost on a site that will outlive its current maintainer.
The lock-in, stated plainly
Identical in shape to every builder before them. Layouts are stored in the builder's own format; deactivate it and pages are empty or unparsed. There is no export that produces blocks or clean HTML you could paste elsewhere.
The improvement is on the front end only. Cleaner markup helps whoever styles the site; it does nothing for whoever migrates it. Anyone claiming a builder is "lock-in free" because its output is tidy has confused the rendered page with the stored content — the distinction laid out in page builders.
Where blocks are the better answer
If portability is the priority, the block editor is the only option that stores layout in a format WordPress itself understands. Pages remain readable when a theme changes, and theme.json carries the design tokens — see what a block theme is.
The honest comparison: blocks are more portable and still less comfortable for pixel-level layout work; a modern builder is faster to design in and keeps your content hostage. Sites that will be redesigned every few years should lean towards blocks. Sites built once for a client who wants to edit sections should lean towards a builder.
Common mistakes
- Buying on benchmark screenshots rather than on who will maintain the site.
- Choosing a theme-builder without realising the theme decision is now made permanently.
- Running a new builder alongside an old one during a migration, doubling the assets on every page.
- Rebuilding a working Elementor site for a marginal markup improvement nobody will measure.
- Assuming clean output means portable content.
Deciding
Bricks and Breakdance are good tools, and the case for them is developer experience and maintainable CSS, not performance and not portability. Choose one if you build sites professionally, will standardise on it, and value the output quality enough to accept a smaller hiring pool. Stay with what you have if the current site works — the migration cost is a full rebuild, and there is no version of that which pays for itself in page weight. And if lock-in is the thing you actually care about, the answer was never a different builder. Compare with the older generation in Beaver Builder and WPBakery before deciding the newer ones are a category change rather than a refinement.
Frequently asked
- Their output is generally cleaner — fewer wrapper divs, less inline styling, more control over what is enqueued. That is a real difference, and it is smaller than the difference between a page with three images and a page with thirty.
- Bricks is distributed as a theme, so it replaces your theme rather than sitting alongside it. Breakdance is a plugin that works with a theme you choose. That distinction changes what a future migration looks like more than any feature does.
- No. Pages built in either are stored in the builder's own structures, and removing the builder empties them. Cleaner markup on the front end does not make the stored content portable.