What Is Monarch, and Why Should Divi Users Care?
If you’re running a WordPress site built with Divi, chances are you already know about Elegant Themes. They make the Divi theme, Divi AI, and a handful of other tools designed to make your website life easier. Monarch is one of those tools — and it’s the one that handles social sharing and social following on your site.
But here’s the question we’re answering today: in a world full of free social sharing plugins, is Monarch still worth your attention in 2026? After spending serious time with it across multiple sites, I can give you a clear, honest answer. Let’s dig in with this full Monarch plugin review.
What Monarch Does (The Feature Breakdown)
Monarch is a premium WordPress social sharing and social following plugin from Elegant Themes. It’s included free with every Elegant Themes membership — so if you already use Divi, you already have access to it. At its core, Monarch lets you add social sharing buttons and follower count displays to your site in a variety of smart, attractive placements.
Sharing Button Placements
This is where Monarch genuinely shines. Most free plugins give you one or two placement options. Monarch gives you five distinct placement types, all of which can run simultaneously:
- Floating Sidebar: A vertical bar of sharing buttons that follows users as they scroll. You can dock it to the left or right side of the page, and it stays visible without being obnoxious.
- Above and Below Content: Classic inline sharing buttons that appear before your post starts, after it ends, or both. Clean, familiar, and effective.
- On Images: Hover over any image on your page and sharing buttons appear as an overlay. This works especially well for visually-driven content and photography sites.
- Pop-Up: A sharing prompt that appears based on triggers you define — time on page, scroll depth, inactivity, or a combination. Done tastefully, this can genuinely boost shares.
- Fly-In: Similar to the pop-up but less intrusive. A small panel slides in from a corner of the screen, encouraging shares without interrupting the reading experience.
The ability to use all five simultaneously — with different networks on each — gives you real flexibility to test what works for your audience.
Supported Networks
Monarch supports over 35 social networks. We’re not just talking Facebook and Twitter/X — the list includes LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, WhatsApp, Telegram, Buffer, Pocket, Flipboard, Mix, and many more. For most content creators and bloggers, you’ll never feel like a platform is missing.
Pinterest fans will appreciate the dedicated Pinterest hover feature. Enable it and a “Pin It” button automatically appears on images when users hover, making it dead simple for readers to save your content to their boards. If Pinterest is a traffic source for you, this feature alone is worth having.
Share Count Display
Monarch can pull and display real share counts from your social networks, showing readers how popular a piece of content is. There’s also a minimum count threshold — so you can hide counts until you hit a number that doesn’t look embarrassingly small. That’s a small but smart UX touch.
One caveat: Twitter/X no longer provides public share count data via API (a platform-wide change that affects all social sharing plugins, not just Monarch). For every other major network, counts work reliably.
Social Follow Widget
Beyond sharing, Monarch also functions as a social follow plugin. You can display follower counts from your social profiles — Facebook page likes, Twitter followers, Instagram followers, YouTube subscribers, and more — in a widget, shortcode, or inline placement. This is great for building social proof and growing your audience across platforms simultaneously.
Design and Customization Options
Monarch’s buttons look polished out of the box. The settings panel (accessible directly from your WordPress dashboard) gives you control over:
- Button shape (rounded, square, circular)
- Color options (network colors, custom colors, or a minimal monochrome style)
- Button size (small, standard, or large)
- Label display (icon only, icon plus network name, or icon plus share count)
- Animation styles for pop-ups and fly-ins
The design options are clean and more than adequate for the vast majority of websites. That said, if you’re looking for granular control — custom CSS per button, A/B testing built in, or pixel-perfect spacing tweaks — you’ll hit Monarch’s ceiling faster than you might with Social Warfare Pro.
Monarch vs. Social Warfare vs. Shareaholic
No honest review skips the competition. Here’s how Monarch stacks up against two popular alternatives.
Monarch vs. Social Warfare Pro
Social Warfare Pro is the sharing plugin most often mentioned in the same breath as Monarch, and for good reason. It’s well-built, fast, and highly customizable. In a direct feature comparison:
- Customization: Social Warfare Pro wins here. It offers more granular styling options, custom share counts via UTM tracking, and tweet-specific content that differs from your meta description.
- Price: Social Warfare Pro starts at $29/year per site. Monarch is included in your Elegant Themes membership alongside Divi, Bloom, Divi AI access, and all future products — making the value per dollar significantly better if you’re already in the ET ecosystem.
- Design: Both look great. Monarch arguably looks more modern with less configuration required.
- Network Support: Monarch supports more networks overall.
The verdict here: Social Warfare Pro is a better standalone sharing plugin. But if you join Elegant Themes for Divi and get Monarch included at no extra cost, there’s no real reason to pay separately for Social Warfare.
Monarch vs. Shareaholic
Shareaholic has a generous free tier and includes content recommendation features alongside sharing buttons. However, the free version is ad-supported and includes third-party content recommendations in your sidebar — something many site owners find problematic from a branding and performance perspective. Monarch has no ads, no third-party content injection, and no freemium limitations. It’s a cleaner, more trustworthy tool.
Performance: Does Monarch Slow Down Your Site?
This is a concern with any third-party plugin, especially one that loads scripts and makes API calls. In my testing, Monarch is genuinely lightweight. It loads assets efficiently, and on a well-optimized Divi site, the impact on page speed scores was minimal. The pop-up and fly-in features add a small JavaScript overhead, but nothing alarming by modern standards.
If you’re using a caching plugin and a CDN (which you should be), Monarch performs well alongside both.
Monarch Pros and Cons
What I Love About Monarch
- Included with ET membership — no extra cost if you already use Divi
- Five placement types that can all run at once
- Pinterest hover feature
- 35+ supported networks
- Clean, modern design that fits virtually any site style
- Fast and lightweight with minimal page speed impact
- Social follower counts built into the same plugin
- Regular updates from a trusted development team
Where Monarch Falls Short
- Fewer styling customizations than Social Warfare Pro at the granular level
- No built-in A/B testing for button placements
- Twitter/X share counts unavailable (a platform-side limitation, not Monarch’s fault)
- Analytics are basic — you won’t get deep sharing attribution data without connecting external tools
Who Is Monarch Best For?
Monarch is the obvious first choice for anyone already using or considering an Elegant Themes membership. If you’re paying for Divi anyway, adding Monarch to your stack costs you nothing extra and covers your social sharing needs for the vast majority of use cases.
It’s also a strong pick for:
- Bloggers and content creators who want a polished sharing setup without plugin overwhelm
- Small business owners who need sharing buttons that look professional without custom development
- Pinterest-driven sites that benefit from the automatic hover-to-pin feature
- Anyone who wants social following widgets alongside sharing buttons from a single, unified plugin
If you’re running a large media publication with a dedicated growth team that needs deep social analytics and click-level attribution, you might outgrow Monarch and benefit from a more specialized enterprise tool. But for the overwhelming majority of WordPress sites? Monarch handles everything you need.
How to Get Monarch
Monarch is available exclusively through an Elegant Themes membership. There’s no standalone purchase option — it comes bundled with everything else ET offers: the Divi theme and page builder, Bloom email opt-in plugin, Divi AI, access to the Divi Marketplace, and ongoing updates and support.
Elegant Themes offers two membership tiers:
- Annual membership — access to everything for a yearly fee, fully renewable
- Lifetime membership — a one-time payment for lifetime access to all current and future ET products
If you’re planning to use Divi long-term (and most people who try it do), the Lifetime license is genuinely excellent value. You pay once and never worry about renewals again.
Final Verdict: Is Monarch Worth It in 2026?
As a standalone social sharing plugin competing against free alternatives? Monarch would have a harder sell. But that’s not the right way to evaluate it. Monarch is one piece of a broader toolkit that Elegant Themes provides to its members — and within that context, it’s an absolute no-brainer.
It’s well-designed, regularly maintained, fast, supports all the networks your readers actually use, and adds social proof features that a lot of competing plugins charge extra for. The pop-up and fly-in placements work well when configured thoughtfully, and the Pinterest hover feature alone makes it worth activating for visual content sites.
If you want granular styling control above all else, Social Warfare Pro edges it out on that specific metric. But for everyone already in — or considering — the Elegant Themes ecosystem, Monarch is the social sharing plugin you should be using. Full stop.
Ready to get started? Try Divi and Monarch today with Elegant Themes — membership includes a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can explore everything risk-free before committing.
