Bricks vs Gutenberg: Which Is Better for Your WordPress Site?

Bricks Builder has become one of the most popular WordPress builders among developers: fast, visual, with real CSS control and dynamic data. The block editor (Gutenberg) is what WordPress itself ships with, and it’s steadily becoming a site builder of its own. Here’s how they compare for the sites you actually build.

What they are

• Bricks is a WordPress theme with a built-in visual builder. You design pages, templates, headers and footers in its own editor.
• Gutenberg is the editor in WordPress core. With a block theme and the Site Editor, you design templates, headers and footers with blocks too.

Side by side

	Bricks	Gutenberg
Design control	Very high, visual CSS controls, classes	High with block themes and theme.json, less visual out of the box
Speed of building	Very fast once you know it	Fast for content, slower for complex layouts
Dynamic data / queries	Built in (query loops, dynamic tags)	Query Loop block, block bindings, custom blocks
Editing for clients	Separate builder, clients can break layouts	The normal editor, lockable patterns and blocks
Where content lives	Bricks’ own format in post meta, tied to the theme	HTML in the post, works with any theme
Cost	Paid license	Free, part of WordPress
Future	One company	WordPress core

Where Bricks wins

Bricks is excellent for designing: the visual controls are precise, the class system encourages clean CSS, and query loops make dynamic sites fast to build. For a developer building a marketing site alone, it’s hard to beat on speed.

Where Gutenberg wins

• Clients. Editors write in the normal WordPress editor. With locked patterns and custom blocks, they can change the content without touching the design.
• Longevity. Content is saved as HTML in the post, not in a builder format. Switching themes or builders later is far less painful.
• Staying in core. New WordPress features (block bindings, Interactivity API, the Font Library) arrive in the block editor first.

The gap: custom blocks

What Bricks developers miss most in Gutenberg is building their own components quickly. In Bricks you create a custom element or a reusable component. In Gutenberg, the official way to make a custom block is a React project with a build step.

FanCoolo WP closes that gap: you build native Gutenberg blocks in PHP, style them with SCSS, and add editor fields with a visual attributes manager. Reusable Symbols work like components, and changes show up instantly with hot reload. Your clients get real blocks in the normal editor, and you never touch React.

Step by step: create a custom Gutenberg block without React.

Which should you choose?

• Bricks if you build design-heavy sites yourself and the client rarely edits layouts.
• Gutenberg if clients edit the site, if content has to outlive any single builder, or if you want to stay close to WordPress core. Add custom blocks in PHP, and many of the reasons to reach for a builder go away.

Already using Bricks? Swiss Knife for Bricks speeds up building, for example by pasting HTML straight in as Bricks elements.