Neve Vs Astra: Which Theme Should You Choose?
Neve and Astra are two unimaginably powerful WordPress themes that can accentuate your website design to a large extent. However, many people find it difficult to choose between Neve and Astra since both seem to be equally good.
If you are a bit stuck with Neve Vs. Astra, this is the right post for you since, in this post, I am going to give you a deep analysis and comparison of both the themes.
Neve Vs Astra Overview
Neve is an amazing WordPress theme powered by Themeisle that allows you to create and grow your website really fast with a mobile-first approach, AMP compatibility, and popular page builders support. We have been using Neve Child Theme on our company website, Ploxim, ahead of Astra.
Astra is the fastest growing WordPress theme with more than 1 Million downloads. Actually, Astra is the only third party theme to achieve these feet. This lightweight theme helps you create the most exquisite websites with the greatest ease and offers unparalleled performance and flexibility.
Neve Vs Astra Features
1. Performance
Performance is the most important factor when choosing a theme, and it essentially means the loading time of a theme. If the performance is not up to the mark, every other aspect will fall flat on its face.
Neve is just 28 KB, and on top of that, it comes with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) support. Astra is performance-focused with optimized code, no jQuery, and a size less than 50 KB.
How good is the real-world performance? I installed two demo sites on my Cloudways Linode server with the same setup and installed Neve & Astra on each site.
The Neve site loaded in 464ms with 8 requests, while the Astra site took 1 second (1000ms) to load with 10 requests.
Most people think of Astra as the fastest theme, but Neve was even faster in our tests.
2. Page Builder Support
We are all pretty much aware of how important Page Builders are in web designing, and you can possibly work with any theme with the greatest ease as long as you get to use your favorite page builder.
Neve supports page builders including Gutenberg, Elementor, Brizy, Beaver Builder, Divi, and Thrive Architect.
Astra integrates seamlessly with Beaver Builder, Elementor, Brizy, and Gutenberg.
- By including page builder support for Divi and Thrive Architect, Neve provides best value for money.
3. Starter Sites
Both Neve and Astra offer pre-built templates to speed up your work. Neve includes 80 pre-made templates (now it's 350+). You could import any template easily by installing Neve and importing a template from the Site Library under the Appearance tab.
Astra offers a huge range of templates, too, and they are all conversion-optimized. For importing one of these templates, you will have to activate the Starter Templates plugin, choose a page builder, and click on “Import Complete Site.”
Builder | Neve | Astra |
Elementor | 132 | 124 |
Gutenberg | 65 | 20 |
Brizy | 48 | 40 |
Beaver | 97 | 103 |
Divi | 10 | 0 |
Thrive Architect | 10 | 0 |
The message is clear here with Neve leading the edge with starter sites.
Personally, I feel the Neve theme work just out of the box. Each of their themes is unique, while most Astra starter sites will look similar in design.
I use a Neve Starter theme for our company site Ploxim, and I don't find a similar good-looking design with Astra even on their Growth plan.
Thoughts
- With Gutenberg's rising as a non-bloated page builder and Core Web Vitals going to be a ranking factor in 2021, I'm mostly ditching Page builders' usage to fix the Largest Contentful Paint Issues in WordPress.
- With that in mind, Neve got a large section of Gutenberg-based themes, while Astra lags with Gutenberg is a big thing you need to focus on before finalizing between two.
Pricing
Neve plans are:
- Personal: $59 per year.
- Business: All in Personal + Premium starter sites, WooCommerce booster, $99 per year.
- Agency: All in Business plan + Priority & live chat support, $159 per year.
All the plans come with 1-Year of support and updates for unlimited sites and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
>> Pay $59 instead of $86 on Neve
Astra plans are:
- Astra Pro: All Astra Pro Features, 20+ Free Starter Templates, $59 per year
- Essential Bundle: All in Astra Pro + 55 Agency Starter Templates, $169 per year.
- Growth Bundle: All in Essential Bundle + Access to other Astra products, $249 per year.
>> Check Official Astra Deals page for new coupons
You can also look for Astra Theme Black Friday to enjoy up to a 30% OFF seasonal discount. Astra comes with 14 days money-back guarantee and includes 1-year of support for unlimited sites.
Both Astra and Neve allow customers to buy any of the above plans for a lifetime by paying a one-time price.
WooCommerce Integration
Neve offers seamless WooCommerce Integration and you can integrate WooCommerce with Neve using the Neve pro add-on called WooCommerce Booster which can be used alongside the free WordPress WooCommerce plugin.
As you use them together, it allows you to customize the Page Layout, Product Card, Card Image to Site Tag, Title, Meta, and Checkout page.
However, Astra offers WooCommerce Integration even on the free version with clean and Intuitive design, countless options to build your online store and brand that comprises
- Enhanced customization for individual products.
- Quick View option for products.
- Check out page optimization.
- Gallery options for product images.
- Infinite scroll options to display products.
- Dropdown Cart to show users the products.
- Sales Bubble Style options.
Neve and Astra Common Features
1. Accessibility Ready
Both the themes are accessibility-ready, which means any user, be it a newbie or expert, will find it pretty user-friendly to use.
2. SEO Friendly Markup
Neve and Astra take good care of the SEO friendliness aspect backed by schema.org markup and clean and optimized source code for a strong online presence.
3. No jQuery
Neither Neve nor Astra uses jQuery to avoid render-blocking issues, and instead, both use Vanilla JavaScript that helps them be pretty lightweight and fast.
4. Easily Customizable
Neve and Astra offer many handy options like starter sites and page builder support to help users with easy customization.
5. Translation & RTL Ready
Neve and Astra allow you to translate your website into any RTL language to help you reach your target audience in a more meaningful way.
Which Theme is Good for You?
If you are a blogger who runs multiple websites, then choose Neve. They offer fast loading sites, variety of starter sites.
If you are an agency, choose Astra for maximum savings.
While Neve Agency plan doesn't offer access to their plugins, Astra Growth provides access to all their plugins like Convert Pro, Schema Pro, etc.
