Oxygen Builder vs Gutenberg: Core Philosophy and Approach

Understanding the core philosophy behind each tool can reveal how well it aligns with different design needs and workflows. Gutenberg and Oxygen bring distinct approaches, reflecting unique design priorities and user types.

Gutenberg’s Block-Based Approach

The concept behind Gutenberg is that each page element is a block that you can stack, rearrange, and customize to create your ideal page layout as it integrates directly with WordPress themes, it keeps layouts consistent, allowing users to focus on content rather than technicalities.

With Full-Site Editing (FSE), Gutenberg has extended beyond page content to enable full website layout control, including headers, footers, and templates. This accessibility offers more design flexibility for a wide range of users, whether they’re managing content or creating designs without the need for custom code.

Recognizing Gutenberg’s flexibility and the extensive out-of-the-box features it provides, it’s important to highlight its high extensibility through code, enabling the creation of virtually any layout imaginable. This flexibility has led to a large plugin ecosystem, giving users easy access to many blocks to suit almost any website need. This makes it much simpler to create custom web designs without starting from scratch.

Oxygen’s Visual Site-Building Approach

Oxygen Builder takes an approach that eliminates the need for WordPress themes. Acting as a comprehensive site editor, it completely overrides the WordPress theme, allowing users to design every aspect of their site within its editor. While Oxygen offers a wide range of custom tools, such as animations and styling options, it lacks flexibility in extensibility, which can lead to vendor lock-in.

Although Oxygen allows the creation of custom blocks using PHP, CSS, and JS, this functionality is limited to its editor, reinforcing its proprietary approach and making it harder to distribute customizations outside of the Oxygen ecosystem.

We will discuss each of these points in detail below.