Bricks Builder Review 2026: Fast, but Is It for You?

The Bricks editor with its Structure panel, a frame from the official demo video on the Bricks builder page, captured October 2026.

Our verdict: Bricks Builder is one of the best visual site builders for WordPress if you build sites for a living, care about clean code and speed, and would rather pay once than every year. Every plan includes every feature, including WooCommerce, popup and query loop builders, and the $599 lifetime license covers unlimited sites. Skip it if you are a beginner who wants a free version, hundreds of ready-made designs, or a big add-on market. For most of those people, Elementor is still the easier start.

This review covers Bricks 2.4.2 as of October 2026: what it does, what it costs, how fast it is, and how it compares to Elementor.

Bricks Builder Quick Facts

Facts below were checked on bricksbuilder.io, the Bricks Academy docs and the Bricks terms of service in October 2026.

Item	Details
What it is	A WordPress theme with a built-in visual site builder (not a plugin)
Latest version	2.4.2 (released September 28, 2026)
First release	Bricks 1.0, March 15, 2021
Developer	Codeer Limited, based in Cyprus
Price (yearly)	$79/year for 1 site, $149/year for 3 sites, $249/year for unlimited sites
Price (lifetime)	$599 one-time for unlimited sites
Free version	No. A free online playground exists, but it needs an account
Refund	60 days from first purchase (renewals have a 30-day window)
Elements	More than 110 built-in elements
Templates	67 design set and 180 wireframe templates, free in every plan
WooCommerce	Built-in builder for shop, product, cart, checkout and account pages
Support	Email and forum, while your license is active
Best suited for	Freelancers, agencies and developers who build many sites and want lean output

How We Reviewed Bricks

Bricks has no free version, and its online playground asks you to create an account and pass a captcha before you can use it. We did not buy a license or sign up for anything. So the Bricks side of this review is based on:

• The vendor’s own pages: features, pricing, the changelog and release notes, and the terms of service.
• The official Bricks Academy documentation.
• The editor demo video on the Bricks builder page.
• A public template demo site that the Bricks team hosts and runs on Bricks, whose page code we inspected.

For the comparison, we installed free Elementor 4.3.3 on a fresh WordPress 7.1.2 test site and built a small hero section in it. Those Elementor findings are first-hand. Everything about using Bricks itself comes from the vendor’s published details and demo.

What Is Bricks Builder?

Bricks is a theme and a page builder in one. You upload it under Appearance > Themes, not under Plugins. Once active, it adds a visual editor that controls your whole site: headers, footers, single post templates, archive pages, popups and WooCommerce pages.

It launched in March 2021 and has a loyal following among WordPress freelancers and agencies. Its pitch is simple: a fast editor, lean front-end code, and every feature in every plan with no paid add-ons from the vendor.

Because Bricks is the theme, there is no second layer of theme code, which helps speed. It also means your designs live inside Bricks. If you ever leave, you rebuild your pages. Most visual builders lock you in this way, but it is worth knowing before you commit.

The Bricks Editor

The editor is built with Vue.js and runs on the front end. The vendor’s demo shows the usual three-part layout: elements on the left, your page in the middle, and a Structure panel on the right that lists every section, container and element as a tree. In Bricks 2.4 you can move the toolbar and panels to any side and save layouts as profiles for different users.

Class-based styling in Bricks, as shown on the official Bricks builder page, October 2026.

What sets Bricks apart is how much it borrows from real CSS:

• Global classes and variables. You can style elements with reusable CSS classes and variables, then manage them in one place. Change a class once and every element that uses it updates.
• Flexbox and CSS Grid layouts with visual controls.
• Unlimited custom breakpoints, with a choice of desktop-first or mobile-first editing.
• Components. Build a card, a pricing table or a hero once, give it editable properties, and reuse it. Bricks can also turn components into blocks for the WordPress block editor.
• Custom code. Add your own HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP where you need it.

This is why developers like Bricks, and why some beginners struggle with it.

Templates

The official Bricks template library, which listed 67 design set and 180 wireframe templates in October 2026.

Bricks includes 67 design set templates and 180 wireframe templates, free in every plan. Design sets are styled pages that belong to one look (for example a portfolio set with home, about, contact and project pages). Wireframes are plain layouts you style yourself.

That is a small library next to Elementor’s or Divi’s. If you like starting from a finished design, look at BeTheme or Divi instead. If you start from a blank page anyway, it won’t matter much.

One catch: community templates are tied to an active license. If you cancel a yearly plan, you lose access to them.

Features That Replace Plugins

Bricks markets itself as “fewer plugins, less money spent.” Every plan includes:

• Query Loop Builder to list posts, products, users, terms or custom data, with load more buttons, infinite scroll and AJAX filters.
• Popup Builder for promo and signup popups.
• Menu Builder for mega menus, mobile menus and off-canvas menus.
• Forms with actions that, since 2.4, can run only when certain fields match (for example, add someone to Mailchimp only if they tick a consent box).
• Conditions to show or hide any element based on rules you set.
• Interactions to show, hide or animate elements on click, hover or scroll.
• Dynamic data from custom field plugins such as ACF, Meta Box, JetEngine, Toolset and Pods.
• Extras such as maps, coming soon pages and custom login pages.

On a brochure site, that can replace separate forms, popup and mega menu plugins. On sites with custom post types, the query loop and dynamic data tools are the real draw.

What’s New in Bricks 2.4

Bricks 2.4 came out on September 16, 2026, followed by fix releases 2.4.1 and 2.4.2. According to the release notes, the main additions are:

• Bricks AI Abilities. You connect an AI client you already use (the vendor names Codex, Claude and Copilot) under Bricks > AI, and it can create pages, edit content and manage your design system.
• Builder Browser and Media Browser. One place to manage templates, components and media, including a Media Health check for missing alt text and oversized files.
• Global import and export of theme styles, classes, variables, components and templates between sites in one ZIP file.
• CSS Sync, an opt-in, experimental feature that keeps custom CSS and the visual controls in step.

Bricks ships often. Reviewers who manage many client sites say the pace can bring changed workflows and occasional bugs, and Bricks itself recommends testing updates on a staging site first. If your host does not offer one, our guide to WordPress staging plugins covers free ways to set one up.

Is Bricks Fast?

Speed is the main reason people switch to Bricks. The vendor says Bricks sites earn top grades in Lighthouse and GTmetrix out of the box, uses plain JavaScript instead of jQuery, lazy loads images and videos, and outputs clean, semantic markup. We have not benchmarked a Bricks site, so we won’t quote load times.

What we could do is compare the code each builder sends to the browser: a public Bricks template demo page hosted by the Bricks team, and the one-section test page we built in Elementor 4.3.3. They are different pages, so treat this as a rough look, not a benchmark.

What we looked at	Bricks template demo (home page)	Elementor 4.3.3 test page (one hero section)
Builder’s main stylesheet	About 33 KB	About 55 KB
Scripts	About 197 KB (main Bricks script about 191 KB)	About 24 KB in total
Stylesheets on the page	9	11, including two Google Fonts families Elementor loads by default
Heading markup	Heading inside a block, container and section tag	Heading directly inside the flexbox div

Sizes are before compression. Measured in October 2026.

Bricks used semantic tags like section and main and a smaller base stylesheet. But Elementor’s new Atomic elements were lean too: our heading sat directly inside its container with no extra wrapper divs. The old “Elementor div soup” complaint applies mostly to its classic widgets. So Bricks is a fast foundation, not magic. A page full of sliders and large images will still be heavy.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce support is one of Bricks’ strongest points, and every plan includes it. You can design the shop, product archives, single product pages, cart, checkout and account pages visually.

Bricks 2.4 added a WooCommerce setup wizard that can create cart, checkout, account, shop and product layouts in one place. It also added a mini cart builder and experimental v2 cart, checkout and account elements, where you design states like an empty cart or a thank-you page inside one element.

Compare that with Elementor: on our test install, all 25 WooCommerce widgets in the free plugin were locked behind Pro, and Elementor’s cheapest paid plan ($60/year) doesn’t include its eCommerce features either.

Is Bricks Good for Beginners?

Bricks says you don’t need to be a developer to use it. In practice, it suits people who already know their way around a page builder:

• It has no free version to learn on, and the playground needs an account.
• The template library is small, so you often start from a blank page.
• The best features (classes, variables, query loops, conditions) make the most sense if you understand CSS and how WordPress stores content.
• There are fewer add-ons, tutorials and freelancers than for Elementor.

On the other hand, the Bricks Academy docs are detailed, there is a forum and a Facebook group, and at least one testimonial on the vendor’s pricing page comes from a self-described novice coder who moved from Elementor. A patient beginner can learn Bricks, but someone who wants a site up this weekend will do better with Elementor or a simple theme like Astra.

Bricks Pricing and License

The Bricks pricing page in October 2026.

All plans include every feature. The only difference is how many sites you can activate and whether you pay yearly or once. Prices as of October 2026, in US dollars, with tax added at checkout:

Plan	Price	Sites
Starter	$79/year	1
Business	$149/year	3
Agency	$249/year	Unlimited
Ultimate Lifetime	$599 one-time	Unlimited

Details worth knowing before you buy:

• No free version, no download trial. The pricing page says there is no downloadable version. You can try Bricks online at the playground, but only after creating an account.
• 60-day money-back guarantee on your first purchase, which is twice the 30 days Elementor and Divi offer. It does not cover renewals or upgrades; renewals get a 30-day refund window.
• Local and staging sites don’t count against your limit. The docs list localhost, .local and .test domains, dev., staging. and test. subdomains, and staging domains at hosts such as Kinsta, WP Engine, SiteGround, Cloudways and Hostinger.
• Subdomains and multisite subsites do count. Each live WordPress install needs its own activation.
• If you cancel a yearly plan, your sites keep working and you can still edit them, as long as you made at least one full, non-refunded yearly payment. You lose updates, support and community templates.
• Lifetime means as long as Bricks is developed. The terms say lifetime licenses get updates and support “as long as Bricks is in active development.”
• Client sites are allowed on every plan. Reselling the license is not.

Which plan makes sense? For one site, Starter costs $395 over five years, so lifetime only pays off if you build more sites. Against the $249/year Agency plan, the $599 lifetime license pays for itself in under three years; against the $149/year Business plan, in about four.

Security and Updates

In February 2024, Bricks released version 1.9.6.1 as a mandatory security update after a security researcher reported a serious vulnerability. The vendor told users to update all Bricks sites within 24 hours and warned that old backups could bring the flaw back. It said there was no evidence of exploitation at the time of release.

Every popular WordPress product needs security fixes now and then. The lesson is to keep your license active and update quickly when a security release lands.

Bricks vs Elementor

“Bricks vs Elementor” is the comparison most people search for, so we built the same small hero section in free Elementor 4.3.3 to see what the alternative looks like today.

Our hero section in the free Elementor 4.3.3 editor on a test install (WordPress 7.1.2, Hello Elementor 3.5.1), October 2026.

It took a few minutes: a Flexbox container with a Heading, Paragraph and Button from Elementor’s new Atomic elements, then a column layout, a 16 px gap, 48 px padding and a background color. What we noticed:

• Elementor now works more like Bricks. Elementor 4’s Atomic elements have a Classes field, so we saved our styles to a reusable hero-section class. That class-first approach used to be a Bricks selling point.
• The Flexbox defaults to a row, so the heading, text and button first appeared side by side until we changed the direction.
• Many controls are Pro-only. Custom CSS, Display Conditions and custom Attributes all carried a Pro crown. In Bricks, conditions and custom code are in every plan.
• Upsells are everywhere. The free panel listed 143 widgets, and 97 of them were locked, including every WooCommerce widget. The Elementor Quick Start screen alone showed four upgrade prompts.

WooCommerce widgets locked behind Pro in free Elementor 4.3.3 on our test install, October 2026.

Elementor prices below are from its pricing page in October 2026. Bricks details are from the vendor’s site.

	Bricks	Elementor
Type	Theme with built-in builder	Plugin, works with most themes
Free version	No (account-only playground)	Yes, 10+ million active installs on WordPress.org
Cheapest paid plan	$79/year, 1 site, all features	$60/year (Essential), 1 site, no eCommerce, popups or custom CSS
Plan with WooCommerce	Every plan	Advanced Solo, $84/year for 1 site
Multi-site plans	$149/year (3 sites), $249/year (unlimited)	$108/year (3 sites), $204/year (25 sites)
Lifetime option	$599, unlimited sites	No
Refund window	60 days	30 days
Templates	67 design sets, 180 wireframes	Much larger library, plus a big third-party market
Add-ons and hiring pool	Smaller	Largest in WordPress
AI tools	Connect your own AI client (2.4)	Built-in AI on higher plans with credits

Price. For one site with WooCommerce, they are close: $79 vs $84 a year. For many sites, Bricks wins because of the $599 lifetime license.

Ease of use. Elementor is easier to start with: a free version, more templates, far more tutorials. Bricks is easier to keep tidy on big sites once you learn its class system.

Design and features. Bricks includes conditions, custom code, popups, forms and query loops in every plan; Elementor locks many of those behind paid tiers but has more widgets and add-ons overall.

Speed and SEO. Both can produce lean pages now. Bricks has the lighter base stylesheet and no theme layer. Elementor 4’s Atomic elements closed much of the markup gap, but loaded more stylesheets on our small test page.

Ecommerce. Bricks, because the WooCommerce builder comes with every plan.

Ownership and lock-in. Elementor is a plugin, so you can switch themes and keep your pages; with Bricks, leaving means rebuilding. Elementor is also far bigger: its pricing page says it powers over 22 million sites.

Who wins

• Beginners and DIY site owners. Elementor. Start free, upgrade only if you need to.
• Freelancers and agencies building many sites. Bricks, especially on the lifetime plan.
• WooCommerce stores on a budget. Bricks, since store design is included from the cheapest plan.
• Anyone who needs specific add-ons or wants to hire help easily. Elementor.

For a wider view, including Divi, Beaver Builder and block-based options, see our roundup of the best page builders for WordPress.

Bricks Builder Pros and Cons

Pros

• Every feature in every plan, including WooCommerce, popups, forms, conditions and query loops.
• $599 lifetime license for unlimited sites.
• 60-day refund window, longer than most competitors.
• Lean base code, semantic markup and no separate theme layer.
• Powerful class, variable and component system for large or client sites.
• Local and staging sites don’t count against your license.

Cons

• No free version, and the playground requires an account.
• Small template library compared with Elementor or Divi.
• Smaller add-on market and fewer freelancers who know it.
• Steeper learning curve for people new to CSS concepts.
• Bricks is the theme, so moving away means rebuilding your pages.
• Frequent updates can change workflows; test on staging first.

Bricks Alternatives

• Elementor. The best choice if you want a free start, the biggest ecosystem, and a plugin you can use with any theme.
• Breakdance. An easier all-in-one builder with a free version and $199.99/year for unlimited sites, but no lifetime plan.
• Divi. Another theme-plus-builder with a $249 lifetime plan for unlimited sites. It has more ready-made layouts than Bricks, and Divi 5 was rebuilt for speed.
• Beaver Builder. A stable, simple plugin builder with a free Lite version, popular with agencies that hand sites to clients.
• GeneratePress with GenerateBlocks. The lean option if you want to stay in the WordPress block editor. Read our GeneratePress review.
• Kadence. A fast free theme with block-based design tools and starter templates.

Verdict: Is Bricks Builder Worth It?

Yes, for the right person. Bricks is worth it if you build several WordPress sites, want WooCommerce and advanced features without paid add-ons, and like working with classes and clean structure. The $599 lifetime plan is one of the best values in WordPress for agencies, and the 60-day refund gives you two months to decide.

It is not the best pick for a first-time site owner. With no free version, a small template library and a CSS-minded editor, beginners will usually get further with free Elementor. Still deciding? Compare the options in our page builder roundup.

FAQ

Is there a free version of Bricks Builder?

No. Bricks is paid only, with no downloadable trial. You can try it online at the Bricks playground after creating an account. To try it on your own site, rely on the 60-day money-back guarantee.

How much does Bricks Builder cost, and is the lifetime deal worth it?

As of October 2026, yearly plans cost $79 for 1 site, $149 for 3 sites and $249 for unlimited sites. The Ultimate Lifetime license is $599 once for unlimited sites, with updates and support as long as Bricks is in active development. Compared with the Agency plan, the lifetime license pays for itself in under three years, so it is worth it if you build several sites and expect to use Bricks for a while.

Is Bricks better than Elementor?

It depends on who you are. Bricks is better for developers, agencies and WooCommerce builders who want every feature in one plan and a lifetime license. Elementor is better for beginners, for anyone who wants a free version, and for people who need a large add-on market or plan to switch themes later.

Is Bricks Builder fast?

It is built for speed, with plain JavaScript, lazy loading and semantic markup, and its base stylesheet was smaller than Elementor’s when we compared pages. We have not benchmarked a full Bricks site, and hosting, image sizes and caching matter as much as the builder.

Is Bricks Builder good for beginners?

You can learn it without coding, and the docs are thorough. But its best tools assume some CSS knowledge, the template library is small, and there is no free version to practice on. Most beginners will find Elementor easier.

Does Bricks work with WooCommerce?

Yes. Every plan includes a WooCommerce builder for the shop, product archives, single product, cart, checkout and account pages. Bricks 2.4 added a setup wizard that creates these layouts for you, plus a mini cart builder and new experimental cart and checkout elements.