New Visual Composer Vs WPBakery

Are WPBakery And Visual Composer The Same?

Not quite. They come from the same team but do different jobs.

WPBakery is a page builder. It handles the content area of your pages and works inside whatever WordPress theme you are using. Visual Composer is a website builder. It goes further, giving you control over headers, footers, sidebars, and full page layouts, on top of the page content itself.

If you need to edit pages, WPBakery does that well. If you want to build the whole site, Visual Composer is the tool for that.

Visual Composer vs WPBakery Page Builder

In the following sections, we will review each page builder plugin in more detail. 

Both tools come from the same team. They are not competing products. They are designed for different stages of a WordPress build, and understanding that difference makes it much easier to pick the right one for your project.

Visual Composer Website Builder Overview

Visual Composer is a full website builder for WordPress. Using the frontend editor, you can design the entire site: headers, footers, sidebars, popups, and full page layouts.

The theme builder lets you create custom layouts and overwrite your theme's default structure. You are not limited to what your theme allows. You are building from the ground up.

All elements, templates, addons, and free stock images live in the Visual Composer Hub, a cloud-based library. You download what you need for your project and leave the rest. That keeps your site light and your editor uncluttered.

WPBakery Page Builder Overview

WPBakery is the tool that defined drag-and-drop page building for WordPress. The team behind it was the first to bring that kind of editing experience to WordPress users, and that foundation shaped how the whole industry works today.

WPBakery focuses on the content area of your pages. It works inside your existing theme, which means you can drop it into almost any WordPress setup without touching your site structure. Both a frontend and backend editor are available, and many teams prefer the backend editor for its structured, form-based approach to content.

The plugin also sits behind one of the largest third-party addon ecosystems in WordPress. Thousands of developers have built extensions for it over the years, which gives you a wide range of options for almost any use case.

Visual Composer Website Builder Vs WPBakery Page Builder

The names tell you something useful. One is a page builder. One is a website builder. That distinction is worth understanding before you compare features.

WPBakery is designed to edit the content area of your pages. It works within whatever theme you have installed. Your theme controls the header, footer, and site structure. WPBakery handles what goes inside the page.

Visual Composer goes further. It gives you control over the full site structure: headers, footers, sidebars, and page layouts, on top of the page content itself. You can overwrite your theme's default settings and build custom layouts from scratch.

That is a scope difference, not a quality difference. If your theme handles the site structure and you just need to build pages, WPBakery does that job well. If you want to design the whole site from one place, Visual Composer is built for that.

One more thing worth knowing. WPBakery's capabilities can be extended through third-party plugins and addons. There is a large ecosystem of developers who have built extensions for it over the years. Just be selective about what you install. As with any WordPress site, too many active plugins can slow things down.

1. Performance

The technology a tool is built on shapes what it can do and how fast it runs. This is where Visual Composer and WPBakery take genuinely different approaches, and it is worth understanding what that means in practice.

Visual Composer is built with React. That architecture gives it fine-grained control over what gets loaded, when, and why. The result is a faster editing experience and cleaner output on the front end. Combined with the Hub, which lets you download only the elements your project actually uses, your site avoids loading code it does not need. Fewer unused assets means a lighter, faster site.

WPBakery is built on shortcodes. This is a well-established WordPress approach that works reliably across a huge range of themes and hosting environments. If you are working within an existing theme and need page editing that just works, shortcode-based architecture handles that without friction.

Where shortcodes can become a consideration is at scale. If a page accumulates a large number of complex shortcodes, it is worth keeping an eye on load times. That is true of any content-heavy page, regardless of the tool. Good hosting and a caching plugin go a long way.

The practical takeaway: Visual Composer's React foundation gives it a performance edge for full-site builds. WPBakery's shortcode foundation gives it broad compatibility and a straightforward setup. Which matters more depends on what you are building.