Despite protestations from the founders, we have little doubt that Oxygen has reached EOL (End Of Life). The upcoming 5.0 release might offer some exciting updates, but the team’s size has wound down, and the founders are focussing on their subscription product, which is aimed at the Elementor crowd.
Bricks, just like pretty much any product, will reach end of life one day, too… But that day is a long, long way away, and we expect the Bricks team to handle it with much more grace if that day does eventually come.
Our advice? Grab and stick with Bricks. It offers a professional workflow, receiving constant updates, with an enthused community and a vibrant ecosystem.
Bricks Builder
Oxygen Builder
Overall Rating
Ease Of Use
Professional Features
Yearly Price
$79
$
LTD Price
$599
$149
Who is it for?
Front-end developers, and users with a basic understanding of CSS.
Seasoned developers
Website Images
Interface
Bricks Builder
Bricks is our current weapon of choice when it comes to building lean, mean, business growth machines.
The builder itself is snappy, and is built on Vue, as opposed to react.js; opening the doors to a wider array of developers to create useful 3rd party functionality.
The code output is pretty much as clean as it gets, when compared to other builders like Elementor, for example; which suffers greatly from ‘Divception’ (simple elements stuck multiple levels deep in code, when really they only need to be a few deep)
We’ve noticed a much faster workflow when using Bricks, and coming back to an old project to make changes is incredibly easy, thanks to the CSS class-based workflow.
The team is very open, and the product is led equally by the userbase and the team itself. There’s an open roadmap and ideas board, and big product updates are arriving almost monthly most of the time.
The future of Bricks is bright, with features listed for the highly anticipated 2.0 release being very exciting indeed.
There are yearly and lifetime subscriptions, and the product never goes on sale.
As is said often in their very busy communities; there is never a better time than now to get into Bricks.
We’re always open to the idea of changing our preferred pagebuilder; but to do so requires a large investment of time and patience.
When we first encountered Bricks, back in 2021, we knew very quickly that the investment would be worth the it, for us and for our clients.
We’ll revisit our analysis of Bricks after the upcoming 2.0 release, but we expect nothing but great things and industry leading innovation from these guys.
Kudos to the Bricks team!
Oxygen Builder
Before this all kicks off; we love(d) Oxygen. When we realised the direction Elementor were heading, we found Oxygen builder, with all its developer-centric features, and felt at home. Oxygen caters to professional web designers and developers, with a class-centric workflow, and clean code output. Just like Bricks; Oxygen does its level-best not to influence your designs, and allows you to build pretty much anything, without having to pick apart arbitrary design decisions (Elementor; we’re looking at you).
There’s a lot to love about Oxygen builder, but these days it’s not as clear cut as it used to be. Between the Breakdance debacle, a slow interface based on older technology, and the behaviour of the founder, we’ve been put off using Oxygen. The founders are now heavily focussed on and invested in Breakdance; their subscription based Elementor competitor, and we simply don’t feel there’s much more coming to Oxygen in the future.
They’re not wrong. Oxygen builder lets you create INCREDIBLE websites. It just has its problems is all.
Breakdance is another story, which we’ll be writing on in another post, but after testing, it’s safe to say we have no plans to move over to them. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a bad platform at all. In fact, in many ways it’s got an edge on Bricks. But it’s not built for developers.
Breakdance is like bowling with the guard rails up. You’re always going to knock something out, but you’re also always stuck in the guidelines and guardrails they put up – So truly unique, modern, interesting and scalable designs are more difficult to achieve.
Breakdance is the new product from the guys behind Oxygen. We feel that it’s a great product for beginners, but has, and always will have severe limitations for complex work.
Bricks, on the other hand, is very dev-focussed. Compared to Oxygen I’d say they’re equally matched in terms of dev functionality and freedom.
Pros:
They’re very well established, with over 8 years in the game. Bricks is on 3-4
They have a huge userbase. While many are migrating to Bricks, many will hang on.
Their WooCommerce integration is still more polished.
There are more community and 3rd party templates.
They’re now much cheaper than Bricks for a lifetime licence.
Unfortunately, aside from the WooCommerce integration, none of these pros are things that Bricks will find hard to eclipse. It’s all time in the game, and Bricks is far ahead in pretty much every other metric.
Conclusion
At WickedPixel, we’re moving away from Oxygen and Elementor to Bricks because it feels like a no-brainer. For us, for our clients, and for the web in general.
If you’re a web designer, or web design agency, we offer web design packages for marketing agencies. You can outsource your design and/or development requirements to us, and we’ll work white label – ie; under your brand, meaning you get all the credit, and all the fame and glory from producing the beautiful websites achievable in Bricks builder, without breaking a sweat.
Are you a web designer or agency looking to outsource?
We offer whitelabel services to other marketing agencies looking to up their game, build their portfolio, or simply gain back some time. If you’d like us to provide any of our services for your clients under your brand name, just get in touch!
