Breakdance vs Oxygen: key differences and how you should choose

Oxygen vs Breakdance

Welcome to a detailed exploration of two powerful platforms in web design: Oxygen and Breakdance. Whether you are a seasoned developer or a beginner in website creation, understanding the core functionalities and ideal use cases of each tool can greatly enhance your decision-making process. Let’s dive into the key differences that set Oxygen and Breakdance apart, helping you determine which builder suits your skills and project needs best.

Oxygen is a developer-first platform, prioritizing a fundamentals-first approach to website building. The goal with Oxygen is not to simplify everything. Rather, it’s to make your workflow faster by providing visual tools to manipulate the code you’d have to write by hand otherwise. With Oxygen, you build out of fundamental HTML elements and style them with CSS classes, all from a visual interface that offers 1:1 abstractions that align closely with the underlying HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP.

Conversely Breakdance is engineered to be exceptionally user-friendly regardless of technical knowledge, meeting the needs of both non-technical users and seasoned WordPress professionals who seek powerful functionality without delving into code. It offers a streamlined, element-based interface that simplifies the web design process without sacrificing capability. While advanced functionality and coding options are available, they are not the primary focus and are not required to achieve professional results. Indeed, the functionality within Breakdance allows non-technical users to achieve in minutes using visual tools what might take a coder days to create manually.

While many discussions about builders talk about flexibility and power, the reality is that platforms like Oxygen and Breakdance offer comparable capabilities, allowing you to create the same types of sites with similar functionalities. They’re both equally powerful. In fact, you could even build the same site with the same functionality with Elementor (if you installed enough add-ons). However, the fundamental difference lies in the methodology each platform employs—the how of building your site is fundamentally different when comparing Oxygen and Breakdance.

Building Methodology: Elements vs. Divs/Classes

Oxygen is designed for developers who are proficient in coding. It offers a visual interface that mimics writing code, where websites are constructed using fundamental HTML elements like divs, and styled with CSS selectors and classes. The UI is basically a 1:1 abstraction over hand-coding HTML and CSS, and allows users to manipulate code directly within a visual interface.

Conversely, Breakdance features an element-based interface that simplifies the web design process, eliminating the need for any HTML or CSS knowledge. Users can quickly assemble pages with pre-built elements, making it user-friendly for beginners and non-technical users.

For instance, creating a pricing table in Oxygen involves manually adding and styling numerous HTML elements with CSS classes. In contrast, Breakdance allows you to simply drag in a Pricing Table element. This element comes with extensive customization options for structure and appearance, enabling easy content integration and design adjustments. Additionally, Breakdance includes over 140 such elements for various common website components, each customizable, with any design you create for one element reusable on another of the same type to make it easy to maintain design consistency across the site.

While Breakdance also supports fundamental HTML element construction and class styling deep within its UI, such features are not the main focus and are nestled deeper within the interface. Breakdance is optimized for simplicity and speed using its pre-configured elements, and though it still offers the flexibility to insert custom code or tweak styles manually for more detailed customization, it’s not the primary focus of Breakdance and the UI and workflow are not optimized for it.

Oxygen, on the other hand, puts CSS capabilities like nested selectors and CSS variables, front and center in the UI. This platform assumes you’ll primarily construct your site using fundamental HTML elements, and features functionality related to that such as grouping nested selectors within a parent selector, organizing selectors into collections, and categorized CSS variable management.

Though you can use element packs in Oxygen – Breakdance Elements for Oxygen includes most of Breakdance’s elements – the native environment of Oxygen doesn’t prioritize this, emphasizing instead a more granular control that aligns with a traditional coding methodology.

Required Technical Knowledge

Oxygen is tailored for users with a solid understanding of HTML and CSS, as it mirrors the intricacies of coding within its visual interface. This makes Oxygen an ideal tool for web developers and advanced users who are already comfortable with hand-coding. The platform operates as a visual equivalent to coding, utilizing familiar HTML elements and CSS properties. For those who know how to code, Oxygen presents a minimal learning curve compared to other visual tools, because it integrates the concepts and elements they already use regularly. Additionally, understanding JavaScript and PHP enhances its utility. However, for those new to web development, mastering Oxygen is effectively synonymous with learning HTML and CSS, presenting a significant learning curve.

In contrast, Breakdance is engineered to be exceptionally user-friendly, making it accessible to non-technical users who need powerful functionality without the complexity of code. Breakdance offers a streamlined, element-based interface that significantly simplifies the web design process. The platform is designed to enable users to achieve professional results quickly, using visual tools to create what might otherwise take days of manual coding. By abstracting the complexities of HTML and CSS away, Breakdance allows users to build sites without needing to understand the underlying code.

Breakdance’s layout engine eliminates the need to manually manage CSS properties like flexbox or grid, replacing them with intuitive visual controls that let users easily craft any layout. This approach does not just cater to non-technical users; even those familiar with HTML and CSS may find Breakdance’s departure from traditional coding refreshing. The platform does not focus on individual CSS properties but instead provides a set of specific settings that enhance usability and intuitiveness. Breakdance has garnered acclaim for its ease of use, demonstrating that it’s possible to abstract the power of HTML and CSS into a user-friendly interface without sacrificing the capability or power of the final product.

Limitations & Challenges of the Div/Class Based Approach

Oxygen offers a robust platform tailored for those with a deep understanding of HTML and CSS, yet its methodical approach can make certain tasks particularly time-consuming, even for advanced users. Below we’ll compare creating complex mega menus in Oxygen vs Breakdance.

Challenges with Oxygen’s Approach:

• Complexity: Constructing a mega menu in Oxygen necessitates a detailed understanding of divs and classes. Users must meticulously structure each element, which can be both time-consuming and error-prone, especially when dealing with designs that include multiple layers and sub-menus.
• Time-Consuming: The process requires a precise arrangement of components and often needs custom CSS and JavaScript to achieve full functionality. Adjusting each layer individually to ensure responsiveness and interactivity can significantly extend development times.
• Required Knowledge: While this method provides high levels of customization, it requires a detailed focus and a strong grasp of web layout principles, which can slow down even the most experienced developers.
• Accessibility Concerns: Navigating the complexities of creating accessible mega menus in Oxygen also requires careful attention. Ensuring that these menus are fully accessible, including keyboard navigation and ARIA attributes, adds another layer of complexity to the development process. This can further extend the time and effort needed, demanding a sophisticated understanding of accessibility standards alongside HTML and CSS.
• Mobile Responsiveness Challenges: Ensuring mobile responsiveness when building a mega menu in Oxygen requires additional customization and testing. Developers must manually adjust settings to ensure optimal viewing and functionality on various devices, which can be a meticulous and time-consuming task.

Breakdance’s Simplified Solution:

Conversely, Breakdance tackles these challenges by including a built-in Menu Builder element that simplifies the creation of complex navigation systems. This tool makes building sophisticated menus fast, easy, and requires no technical knowledge.

• User-Friendly Interface: Breakdance’s menu builder features a drag-and-drop interface that eases the construction of mega menus. Users can visually set up their navigation, incorporating various elements and sub-menus without the need to build out each component manually.
• Rapid Development: Customizations that could take significant time in Oxygen’s class-based system can be completed very easily in Breakdance.
• Advanced Features: Despite its simplicity, Breakdance does not compromise on functionality. The menu builder includes options for adding images, icons, and other elements within the menus, enhancing both the aesthetic appeal and the functionality of the navigation experience.
• Built-In Accessibility: Breakdance’s menu builder incorporates accessibility features by default, ensuring that menus are usable for all visitors, including those relying on screen readers or keyboard navigation. This integration streamlines the development process by automatically handling aspects like ARIA roles and attributes, eliminating the need for manual adjustments and specialized accessibility knowledge.
• Automatic Mobile Responsiveness: Breakdance’s menu builder automatically adjusts for mobile responsiveness, providing a consistent and user-friendly experience across all devices. It eliminates the need for manual configuration, allowing creators to simply build their menu without ever thinking about the intricacies of mobile compatibility.

It could be argued that Oxygen offers more customization and flexibility compared to Breakdance’s menu builder, given its foundational approach that allows for deep control over every aspect of web design. While this is true, it’s important to consider that Breakdance has effectively solved the challenge of creating effective and functional menus. If you need a robust menu, you could invest considerable time and effort into designing one from scratch in Oxygen, applying the same level of detailed thought and planning that the Breakdance team has already put into their menu builder. Alternatively, you could leverage the Breakdance menu element, which likely includes all the features and functionalities you would need. This approach simplifies the development process and ensures that you benefit from a tested and optimized solution right out of the box.

On the other hand, for those who primarily prefer building with divs and classes but recognize the benefits of pre-built elements for tackling complex structures, third-party element packs for Oxygen offer a perfect solution. Notably, almost all of Breakdance’s elements, including the acclaimed menu builder, are available as an add-on for Oxygen.

Global Styles vs. CSS Selectors & Variables

Oxygen eschews a predefined list of global style controls entirely, opting instead for a system that leverages CSS variables and selectors for global styling. To style all your headings, for example, you would create selectors for h1 through h6 and assign font-size properties using variables established in the variables panel. This method extends to styling elements across any part of your site, including WooCommerce components. Oxygen’s approach allows developers to use CSS selectors and variables to establish and manage consistent styles across the website, a technique well-suited to those familiar with modern web development practices.

Breakdance, on the other hand, employs a set of predefined global styling controls that simplify the application of uniform design elements throughout a website. This system provides a visual interface that covers 99% of the global styles typically needed, including settings for forms, buttons, and brand colors. These global styles automatically propagate to Breakdance’s extensive library of 140 elements, ensuring visual consistency across the board without any additional setup. Additionally, Breakdance excels in its WooCommerce integration, where the global styles extend seamlessly to WooCommerce. These styles are all moderately opinionated, are based on best practices, and offer just the right amount of customizability.

If you have a different opinion, you can certainly work around it in Breakdance by setting up custom selectors, but doing so would negate the benefits of its streamlined global styles, particularly how they integrate seamlessly with WooCommerce and built-in elements. And, you might just prefer to use Oxygen and not work around Breakdance’s global styles in the first place.

Design Reusability – Presets vs. Classes & Components

Breakdance simplifies design reusability with its preset system, allowing you to save design settings for elements like pricing tables, headings, menus, or icon boxes as a preset and then apply that preset to other similar elements throughout your site. When you update a preset, all elements using that preset automatically update too, which saves time and keeps your site consistent. You can create different presets for the same type of element to meet various design needs—for example, a “Big Image Box” preset for large image boxes and a “Small Image Box” preset for smaller image boxes.

Oxygen allows design reusability through CSS classes. You define a class with specific styles like font size, color, or margin, and then apply this class to any element on the website that should share these styles. This method ensures that all elements with the same class will look consistent and any changes made to the class will automatically update all associated elements. This requires understanding how CSS works in Oxygen, as it’s essential for managing your site’s overall look and ensuring styles apply correctly across different sections.

Using CSS classes in a platform like Oxygen offers powerful control over your site’s styling, but it can also introduce complexities, especially when making changes to a class that’s widely used across the site. When you modify a CSS class, the changes immediately affect every element assigned that class. This can be incredibly efficient if you want to update your site’s design uniformly. However, it can also be a bit daunting because a small tweak in one class could alter the appearance of parts of your site unexpectedly. For instance, increasing the font size in a general paragraph class to improve readability on one page could lead to text overflowing in another section where the same class is used but wasn’t intended to be altered.

This interconnectedness demands that you be very intentional about how you use classes throughout your site. When managed correctly, this approach forms the backbone of a scalable, class-based design system that can bring significant efficiency and consistency to your web development. However, if not handled carefully, it can lead to complications, as unintended changes can propagate across various parts of the site.

Oxygen’s Components feature also allows developers to save complex assemblies of HTML and CSS elements as single reusable units. This enables entire sections of a site, including layout, styling, and embedded functionality, to be replicated and reused across different pages or projects. When a component is updated, all instances of it across the site automatically receive these updates, ensuring consistency and simplifying the development process. Content can be overridden on a per-component basis, while design remains the same. This powerful toolset allows Oxygen users to maintain high standards of design quality while efficiently managing site development.

Interactive Elements

Oxygen and Breakdance offer contrasting approaches to incorporating interactive elements like tabs, sliders, and accordions into websites.

Oxygen does not include built-in interactive elements. Instead, it provides a platform for developers to create custom interactions from scratch. Using Oxygen’s visual interface, developers can set up event listeners for clicks, mouse movements, and other actions. They can then define the responses, such as toggling a class or executing custom JavaScript. This approach offers unlimited flexibility, allowing developers to design any interaction they can envision, but it requires a solid understanding of web technologies and more time to implement.

In contrast, Breakdance includes a suite of pre-built interactive elements that are ready to use. These elements, such as tabs and sliders, come with accessibility and functionality already integrated. Users simply drag and drop the elements into place and populate them with content. This approach eliminates the need for manual configuration, making it possible to set up complex interactive features quickly and efficiently, and is suitable for most use cases.

While Oxygen allows for the creation of any type of custom interaction, Breakdance covers all common interactive needs with its built-in elements.

Breakdance’s interactive elements are available as an optional add-on for Oxygen.

Minimalist Oxygen vs. All-In-One Solution with Breakdance

Oxygen and Breakdance take fundamentally different approaches to website building. Oxygen is built on a minimalist foundation, providing only the essential tools for developers who prefer complete control and customization. Breakdance, on the other hand, offers an all-in-one approach with a rich set of built-in features designed to simplify and speed up the web design process.

Oxygen: The Minimalist Approach

Oxygen includes only the fundamentals of web development—just a handful of core elements like divs, headings, and images that can be used to build anything. There are no built-in forms, no built-in popups, no global styling presets, and no pre-designed WooCommerce elements. Instead, Oxygen assumes that developers have preferred third-party tools for these functions and want the flexibility to integrate and style them manually. This approach provides maximum customization but requires more technical expertise and time to set up.

Breakdance: A Comprehensive Yet Modular Solution

Breakdance takes a different approach by providing built-in solutions for nearly every common web design need. It includes a powerful form builder, a popup builder, full global styling controls, pre-designed WooCommerce styles, and 140+ built-in elements for creating rich, functional websites quickly. While still allowing for third-party integrations, Breakdance eliminates the need for additional plugins in many cases, as the included features cover most standard use cases. Despite its extensive feature set, Breakdance remains modular—it only loads what’s used on the page, ensuring performance remains on par with Oxygen.

Choosing Between Oxygen and Breakdance

If you want a stripped-down environment where you can carefully select and integrate every tool yourself, Oxygen is the way to go. It’s ideal for developers who prefer to build everything from the ground up and don’t mind the extra setup time. If you want a platform that includes nearly everything you need right out of the box, Breakdance provides a much faster workflow with powerful built-in features. Both platforms deliver excellent performance and flexibility, but the best choice depends on whether you want a minimalist toolkit for complete customization or an all-in-one builder that streamlines the web design process.

Key Advantages of Both Platforms Over Competitors

When comparing Oxygen and Breakdance to other web design tools, both platforms offer significant advantages that set them apart from competitors. While they take different approaches to building websites, they both prioritize performance, flexibility, and clean code output—something many visual builders fail to achieve.

Flexibility and Control

Oxygen provides an unmatched level of control, closely adhering to standard web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Unlike many traditional page builders, Oxygen does not impose unnecessary constraints or force users into a rigid design system. Developers can build fully custom layouts, style elements with CSS variables, and fine-tune every aspect of their site without dealing with bloated, auto-generated code.

Breakdance, while not as granular in its customization, is still far more flexible than other visual builders. It provides extensive design controls and 140+ pre-built elements that can be customized extensively without touching code. While it abstracts the complexity of web development, it doesn’t limit users the way most drag-and-drop builders for WordPress do.

Speed and Efficiency

Breakdance is designed for speed, allowing users to build fully functional, visually stunning websites in a fraction of the time it would take with a traditional developer workflow. Its built-in features, like forms, popups, and WooCommerce styling, eliminate the need for additional plugins and complex integrations, reducing the time spent on setup and troubleshooting.

Oxygen, on the other hand, optimizes efficiency for developers who prefer to structure their sites from the ground up. Since Oxygen does not impose design restrictions, experienced users can build highly customized websites with performance and scalability in mind from the very beginning.

Performance and Clean Code Output

Unlike most visual builders, which are notorious for generating bloated, inefficient code, both Oxygen and Breakdance prioritize performance. Oxygen and Breakdance are known for producing some of the cleanest code output of any visual builder, as they both directly map to standard web development practices. Breakdance, while including many built-in features, only loads the resources necessary for the elements used on a page—ensuring that sites remain fast and lightweight.

Dynamic Data and Advanced Functionality

Both platforms excel at handling dynamic data, making them ideal choices for building complex, data-driven websites. Whether working with custom post types, advanced queries, or integrations with third-party APIs, Oxygen and Breakdance provide the necessary tools to create highly functional, dynamic websites without relying on unnecessary add-ons.

Breakdance: Guardrails, Oxygen: No Guardrails

Breakdance and Oxygen take fundamentally different approaches to web design. Breakdance is built to guide users toward best practices, preventing mistakes that could break a layout or impact performance. Oxygen, on the other hand, provides unrestricted access to every design control, assuming the user has the knowledge to structure everything manually.

Breakdance: Built-in Safety Nets

Breakdance includes guardrails that help users avoid common design pitfalls. The platform assumes that not everyone using it is deeply familiar with HTML and CSS best practices, so it removes complexity where possible, ensuring users build layouts the right way without having to think about technical details.

One of the most noticeable safeguards is how Breakdance handles spacing. It does not provide easily accessible horizontal padding and margin controls for most elements, because misusing these settings often results in unintended layout issues—such as elements overflowing off the screen on mobile. Instead, Breakdance encourages users to use its intuitive layout controls, which are not direct 1:1 CSS inputs but are designed to be impossible to misuse. These controls allow users to adjust spacing, alignment, and positioning without the risk of breaking layouts or causing unexpected behavior. Under the hood, Breakdance automatically generates the correct CSS, ensuring a responsive and properly structured design. Unlike in Oxygen, where a misplaced padding or margin setting can easily lead to layout issues, Breakdance minimizes the chances of making accidental mistakes while still giving users the flexibility to customize their designs effectively.

Similarly, Breakdance automatically places elements inside sections that manage width and responsiveness for you. If a section isn’t present, Breakdance adds one automatically. This ensures that content is always contained within the proper constraints and scales correctly across devices. Users don’t need to think about adding containers or configuring layouts manually—Breakdance takes care of it.

For those who do want deeper control, advanced settings are available but hidden behind additional menus to prevent accidental misconfiguration. This strikes a balance between ease of use and flexibility, allowing advanced users to tweak their designs without exposing casual users to settings that could break their layout.

Oxygen: Ultimate Flexibility, No Constraints

Oxygen offers no guardrails—it assumes the user knows what they are doing and provides direct access to every setting from the start. There are no automatic constraints, no enforced layouts, and no hidden controls. Every aspect of a page’s structure must be manually created and configured.

Instead of automatically managing spacing, Oxygen gives users full control over padding, margins, and positioning. This allows for unlimited flexibility but also means that misusing these controls—such as adding excessive horizontal padding—can easily cause layout issues, particularly on mobile. Users must manually adjust spacing to ensure a responsive design.

Similarly, there are no auto-generated sections—if you want content contained within a section, you must add a div, apply a class, and structure it accordingly. This means Oxygen users must create their own design system, managing width, responsiveness, and nesting entirely on their own. While this provides ultimate customization, it also requires careful planning to avoid inconsistencies.

Oxygen’s approach is completely hands-off—there is nothing stopping you from building a site exactly how you want, but there is also nothing preventing you from making mistakes. This freedom makes Oxygen extremely powerful for experienced users who understand how layouts work, but it also increases the risk of design inconsistencies if not carefully managed.

Choosing Between Control and Convenience

Breakdance is designed to stop users from making common mistakes by enforcing best practices for spacing, layout, and responsiveness. It removes settings that could lead to broken designs and ensures users build sites the right way without needing extensive technical knowledge.

Oxygen, on the other hand, provides absolute freedom. It expects the user to know what they are doing and gives them complete control over layout and styling. While this makes it one of the most flexible tools available, it also means that users must be intentional about structuring their sites correctly.

If you want a guided, foolproof design experience that ensures best practices without requiring deep technical knowledge, Breakdance is the better choice. If you prefer full creative control with no restrictions, Oxygen gives you the freedom to build exactly how you want—but only if you have the expertise to do so properly. That being said, the final design is not limited by the builder you choose. You can create the exact same website, down to the pixel, in both Breakdance and Oxygen. Breakdance’s guardrails do not impose any design restrictions—they simply ensure that the correct approach is used under the hood, preventing common mistakes while still allowing full customization. The difference is not in what you can build, but how you build it.

Why Two Builders Instead of One?

With both Oxygen and Breakdance coming from the same development team, it’s natural to wonder why they aren’t combined into a single product. The reason is simple: they serve fundamentally different types of users. While they share the same commitment to performance, flexibility, and clean code, the workflows and target audiences of these two builders are completely distinct.

Oxygen is designed for developers who want full control and prefer working with fundamental HTML, CSS, and JavaScript concepts. It assumes the user has technical knowledge and is comfortable structuring sites manually with classes, divs, and custom code. Adding Breakdance’s pre-built elements and guardrails into Oxygen would undermine its purpose as a developer-first tool.

Breakdance, on the other hand, prioritizes ease of use, speed, and visual simplicity. It includes the pre-built features, opinionated global styles, and UI constraints that many users prefer in a visual builder. If Breakdance adopted Oxygen’s deep technical approach, it would lose what makes it so approachable and efficient for non-coders and those who simply don’t want to hand-build every aspect of their site.

By keeping Oxygen and Breakdance separate, each tool is free to excel at what it does best, without compromise. Users can choose the tool that aligns with their needs rather than being forced into a one-size-fits-all solution.

Conclusion: Choosing the Right Builder

Both Oxygen and Breakdance are powerful, high-performance builders that outshine traditional WordPress page builders by focusing on clean code, efficiency, and flexibility. However, the way you build a site in each tool is completely different.

• Oxygen is for developers who want complete creative freedom, a stripped-down environment, and full control over every aspect of their site’s structure and styling. It is a class-based, fundamentals-first builder that assumes the user has technical knowledge.
• Breakdance is for users who want speed, efficiency, and ease of use. It includes everything needed to build a professional site right out of the box, with built-in forms, popups, WooCommerce styling, and 140+ elements—all without requiring any code.

The final result? You can build the exact same site, with the exact same design and functionality, in both tools. The difference is how you get there. Oxygen gives you complete control but requires technical knowledge. Breakdance ensures best practices automatically but provides an easier workflow.

At the end of the day, the best choice depends on your workflow, skill level, and how you prefer to build websites. Whether you want the blank-slate power of Oxygen or the structured efficiency of Breakdance, both platforms give you clean code, high performance, and total flexibility.