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What's The Best Elementor Add On Plugin?

By James LePage
 on May 9, 2020
Last modified on January 7th, 2022

What's The Best Elementor Add On Plugin?

By James LePage
 on May 9, 2020
Last modified on January 7th, 2022

We got every major Elemenor Addon plugin and tested it so you don't have to.

Introduction

When it comes to Elementor addons there's no shortage of selections. It may be a very good idea to get one of these packs as it offers features, functionality, and design that you otherwise wouldn’t have an Elementor designed website. 

Most feature packs cost around $40-$60 a year. You can opt to start paying after one year, but you would receive no support or updates if you went this route. Because they all cost a similar price, it’s super important to find which offers the best value for your money. It might not always be the one that has the largest quantity of widgets or elements. 

At the same time, poorly designed feature packs will seriously slow down the speed of your website, completely offsetting the good that you do with the design, with a bad SEO and less visitors because of it. The actual coding of the plugin is essential for the speed and success of your website. Do the devs remove unused CSS? Is there no bloat? Are the scripts loaded properly? 

As an agency, we work with many website owners who use Elementor in their websites. We also build many websites with Elementor as it offers clients a visual way to edit page content following their projects. Over the past few years we’ve experimented with many (to say the least) Elementor add-on plugins.

We decided to write his blog post as a comparison between the top seven Elementor addons, discuss the pros and cons of each of them, and try to come to a conclusion of which is the best addon plugin for website owners and businesses looking to bolster their site. 

We ran this test by purchasing the top seven add on packs. They’re listed in the table below. We installed all of these packs onto a local host installation, running to Hello Elementor theme, and the Elementor Pro plugin.

When testing, the said add-on would be the only one active on the website at the time. That means the only four components of the website running at one time are the addon, the Elementor Pro plugin and the Hello Elementor theme and our favorite caching plugin, WPRocket. We included WPRocket to make the website behave more like a production installation.

We used a single, base page to put applicable widgets on.

We made our plug-in selections by running through a short list of the most requested plug-in purchases we get for my clients. This list coincides with some of the hottest add on packs around for Elementor. However, you should keep in mind that it is not exhaustive. There are probably hundreds of add-on packs out there for Elementor. The seven listed below are the most popular, meaning that they probably offer the most features and are the best coded of the bunch.

You can choose to find another pack to compare with these, but at the end of the day, the majority of the packs out there are simply forks of these, which designers have sprinkled with “a little extra you can choose to find another pack to compare with these, but at the end of the day the majority of the packs out there are simply forks of these, which designers have sprinkled with a little extra”. Now, let’s take a look at the top seven Elementor addons, how many widgets they offer you, and what their yearly cost is. 

The PlusDynamic ContentUltimate AddonsPiotnet AddonsPowerPack ElementsJetElementsMightyAddonsEssential Addons
80+ widgets58+ elements40+ elements70+ Elementor widgets70+ Elementor widgets50 content widgets30+ widgets and 100+ sections65+ elements.
$39/yr$42/yr$48/yr$40/yr$69/yr$19/yr$29/yr$39/yr

The remainder of this blog post is going to discuss each adon in depth. We’re going to go through what it has to offer, what the impact of the paid speed is, if you actually need what’s included in the pack, and more. At the end of the post, we’re going to discuss the pros and cons of all of them, review what possible use cases for some of them might be, and figure out which one offers the best value for your money. If you don’t want to learn about each individual pack, simply use the table of contents at the top of this blog post to navigate.

Let's get into it.

The Plus

This one offers a lot. The second cheapest offering out of the 7 most common addon elements has over 80+ widgets.

These widgets cover everything from sign up fields to woocommerce checkouts to off canvas content. Included in this solution are several elements explicitly for 3rd party plugins like Gravity Forms, MailChimp or WPForms.

We found that the speed of our side deteriorated after we incorporated 10 or more widgets from this plug-in into one page. After testing, we found that this was because there was an excessive DOM size which led to slower loading of the web page. This is a really powerful add-on, but it's also a large one, which could lead to slower websites if you're not mindful.

Dynamic Content

Dynamic Content is a bit different from the other plugins mentioned in this list in that it is more focused towards developers and superusers, as opposed to business owners / website owners. However if you know how to use it this is a super powerful tool that drastically extends the things you can do with Elementor Pro.

While a lot of other add-ons focus on including design based elements, light price tables and buttons, dynamic content adds tools that allow you to make your Elementor website, you guessed it, more dynamic.

When you install this plugin, you’ll get another tab in the Elementor Pro page builder tool called visibility. Visibility allows you to define certain specific rules for sections columns and elements that will only show the respective items to certain user groups. You can filter these users by login status to WordPress, device and browser, date and time, and much more. 

A good example of how you could use this would be the following: if you want to display certain content to individual user groups, you can specify through the visibility section of this plug-in. If you were a customer, you would see one menu on a page, if you are a vendor, you would see another menu on the page. This single tool allows you to remove a lot of additional plugins like Paid Memberships Pro, which really impact the loading time of your website (the less code you load, the better). 

In addition to this, they've got about 40 widgets for $42/yr.

These widgets are broken into several categories some of which we will discuss here. 

The SVG category offers some really important and powerful tools that will help you add dynamic visual elements to your site, like an SVG blob, past text, image mask and more. Under your developer category, you’re offered a sweet of powerful tools that allow you to directly include PHP content, and even grab content via APIs. In the past, we’ve actually built a tool that generates reports via Elementor using the remote content widget from Dynamic Content.

If you pair this addon with the theme builder in Elementor Pro, you can pretty much create any type of website you want. This includes blogs, membership websites and more. 

However, it’s important to know that this tool is not really intended to add design elements to your website. Most of the other plug-ins that we mention in this blog post are created to offer you a way to add well-designed elements to your website, think pricing tables and countdowns. Dynamic Content is created to extend the functionality aspect of your website. 

Additionally, because it is so powerful, we’ve found that if you implement it incorrectly, you can seriously impact your website performance (loading time). This offers the proper tools, you just need to know how to use them to get the most out of it.

Ultimate Addons

Ultimate Addons offers 35+ elements for $48/yr.

From the elements we saw, it looks like this offering is tailored towards small businesses. They have pricing tables, team member elements and other business specific widgets.

We liked the included element called business reviews. You can choose from Yelp or Google to source the reviews, and display them on your page. In our opinion, this is super powerful, and saves you from having to get a plugin (prices range from free-$85 for this alone).

UAE also has the cross browser copy paste feature. They also offer both login and registration forms, which saves you from having to install a plugin to do this (Elementor Pro has the login, but not the registration form).

We didn't test this feature in this test site, but from prior use, we've come to find that they have an awesome Gravity Forms styler built in, that allows you to customize everything about Gravity Forms.

In terms of documentation and tutorials, this add on has it down perfectly. The Documentation contains everything you'd want to know about any element, and includes screenshots and steps. It's also in easy to read English.

They're lacking advanced features for dynamic content sites, like blogs or news outlets. If you're looking to expand your Elementor Websites capabilities in this arena, this isn't for you. Furthermore, many of the widgets you're getting with this addon are included in others -- not much differentiating this one.

Piotnet Addons

This is a pretty popular and well mentioned addon plugin for Elementor. We like that it offers a back and section of WordPress where you can toggle on and off the various elements that you want. This declutters your Elementor page builder tool, and makes it load faster.

Backend UI

Like Dynamic Content, this addon adds a fourth section to the Elementor settings box in the page builder. It offers a lot of powerful tools to make your website more dynamic like media query break points, conditional visibility, and form builder conditional logic. This is just a short list of the things you can change.

This addon also focuses heavily on WooCommerce and WooCommerce sales funnels. If you have WooCommerce installed into your website and plan on selling things using Elementor, then the included WooCommerce tools that Poitnet offers might be a great addition to the website. (Note that ThePlus has a competing amount of WooCommerce widgets).

We did notice that the page builder loaded a bit slower, maybe a second more than normal, but the front end wasn't affected at all by a large collection of widgets that we threw on the homepage.

In addition to these specialized tools, they offer the base widgets that everybody else does -- pricing tables, countdowns, fancy buttons and headlines, etc…

PowerPack Elements

PowerPack offers by far the most widgets out of any of the once discussed in this blog post. If you're looking solely for one of the highest widgets to money ratio, this is the one for you (the other would be ThePlus). They offer all the basic widgets that the other plugins do, but include around 20 individually unique ones. These include recipes, team member carousels, device mock-ups, and more.

A little-known feature about this plug-in, one that isn't really advertised and not many people know about is the background effects included in it. If you've ever seen a website with live backgrounds, such as particles.JS, or snowflakes,  it's using the same technology behind the background effects included in PowerPack.

On the website, the lines in the background are moving and receptive to your mouse input.

They offer 9 features base backgrounds with an option to use a custom one.

The differentiating feature of this plugin is the large number of elements that you get with your purchase. They also intersperse little tools that extend the functionality of Element throughout the Builder, like the custom live backgrounds.  But, keep in mind you're paying for all of this and this is the most expensive plug-in on the list coming in at $69 a year. At the same time, ThePlus is a major competitor to this one.

JetElements

JetElements is the cheapest plug-in in this list coming in at $19 (it's 50% less than the second cheapest offering) and one of the more unique offerings. 

This individual plug-in is 1 in a whole collection of them offered by a company called CROCOBlock. CROCOBlock Has built several amazing plugins that completely extend the functionality of Elementor, and offer an ecosystem of installations that focus on different aspects of a website. For example, they have a menu plugin that allows you to make a mega menu, and they have an Advanced Custom Fields competitor specifically created for Elementor.

JetElements, is their plugin that offers about 30 different elements and widgets for Elementor. 

There's nothing really fancy about this plug-in (if you want fanciness you can look at some other CROCOblock plugins) it really only offers very well-designed widgets that extend Elementor visually.

It's cheap and it does what many small businesses are looking for.

MightyAddons

A new addition to the industry, Mighty Addons for Elementor really is mighty.

It ships with 30+ widgets, 20+ template kits and 100+ prebuilt sections. That sounds comparable some other offerings on this list until you take a look at the pricing. Introductory pricing is starting at $19 per year for a single site license, while the normal single site license pricing is $29 per year. Whatever the case is, you're getting a lot of bang for your buck, and they recently developed plugin, meaning that the developers are more receptive to your user input and feedback.

Essential Addons

From solely a download standpoint, Essential Addons for Elementor is the most popular plugin on this list. According to their website over 500,000 people have installed this plugin, which makes it the most popular (don't believe everything you read on websites, we couldn't verify this with anybody else).

However, after taking a look at this plugin and using it on several client websites, we see the reasons behind the fact that this is the most popular addon by downloads. It includes a lot of elements that are specifically created for certain plug-ins. For example, they have a lot of things for form builders, like WPForms. 

We really like this plug-in because you can do a lot of things that would need to be custom coded, or enabled through multiple combinations of plugins. This add-on allows you to do a lot of it simply in Elementor, making everyone’s lives easier.

The Advanced Tab and Carousel widgets allow you to seriously extend the functionality compared to the base elements included in Elementor Pro. Instead of just typing content into the dialogue in the page builder, it allows you to select content from templates that you've built in your Theme Builder.  This allows you to basically tab advanced elementor layouts. 

If you're looking for an add-on pack that has that one element that you need, I would recommend hopping on the Essential Addons website and seeing if they have it. Due to the extremely targeted use cases of the widgets, which is something that a lot of add-ons don't do, you'll probably find something that does exactly what you need. Also note, ThePlus has almost all the same elements that this plugin does.

What's our recommendation?

We went into this experiment expecting to come out with a clear winner. Instead, we came out with a series of insights and recommendations for specific use cases. Our recommendations and insights follow:

We found that this collection of seven plugins were really well-designed, and didn't slow down the front end of the website by a lot. We expected to see major differences between all of them, but didn't. We also analyzed how each plugin was actually built, and looked at the code behind each individual widget. From what we can tell, there was pretty much no bloat which leads to fast loading websites for every single one of the mentioned add-ons.

Note that the two more powerful offerings of the group which are Dynamic Content and Essential Addons may slow down the front end of the website if implemented incorrectly. However, if you compare them to their JavaScript counterparts, which can be easily sourced on GitHub, the performance impacts to the site are pretty much the same. The more powerful the plugin, the greater the impact to the performance of the website. 

When it comes to value for money, there are winners and losers. First, it's important to note that many of the plugins offer a base set of widgets. These base set up widgets include price tables, normal tables, headings, animated content, hotspot images, and more. If you go on each individual website for the plugin, you can find a lot of overlap between them. That means that you're really paying for the 3-5 individual widgets that differentiate the plugins, or for the unique features that the tool offers.

That's when we get into specific use cases, where there are clear winners:

  • If you are looking to extend the dynamic functionality of your website, which would include showing content to specific users, incorporating content from apis, and a whole host of advanced features, then the plugin Dynamic Content is a clear winner.
  • If you are a small business simply looking to extend the functionality of Elementor Pro from a design standpoint, the JetElements plugin offers the "base set of elements" that every one of the other plugins offer for $19 (50% cheaper than most other offerings).
  • If you are an e-commerce website who runs their front end design through Elementor, then the Piotnet Suite of tools might be a good choice for you, as they offer the most advanced features related to WooCommerce out of the bunch. The Plus comes in as a close second.
  • If you are a content site, ThePlus addons offers many awesome listing elements. Also, from a value standpoint they're at the top of the list.
  • If you need specific things, Essential Addons may be a good fit -- you'd need to check if they have what you need on their website. ThePlus may be too, and if it does, it's the most economical option.

And finally, it is worth knowing that many of these companies offer 30-day money-back guarantees, and freemium versions of themselves. This means you can experiment with multiple and choose the one that works for you best. I hope that this article was able to point you in the right direction, and clarify the major differences between these top 7 Elementor add-on plugins. 

As an agency, we'll probably attempt to use JetElements in our Elementor sites going forward, and if JetElements doesn't work, use ThePlus. Of course, this depends on the requirements of the website.

If you would like to ask us specific questions related to this, or have us review additional Elementor add-on plugins, feel free to join our Facebook group using the link below. From there, you can ask anyone on the Isotropic Design team specific questions (free!).

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Article By
James LePage
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James LePage is the founder of Isotropic, a WordPress education company and digital agency. He is also the founder of CodeWP.ai, a venture backed startup bringing AI to WordPress creators.
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