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Astra and Divi are both very popular and high-quality themes that should give you everything that’s needed to create a professional-looking website with WordPress.
Packed with prebuilt content that’s ready to go, as well as countless customization options to ensure your site meets the requirements of your project, these themes can be used to launch any type of WordPress website.
While it’s great to have two impressive options to choose from, deciding between Divi and Astra can be difficult. As our reviews of Astra and Divi have shown, both are up there with the best themes available for WordPress.
So to help you decide which is best for you, this Divi vs Astra comparison explores exactly what features you get with each theme and looks at how they’ve been implemented so that you can make an informed choice. By the end of this article, you’ll be much closer to finding the perfect theme for your website.
Let’s begin…
About the Astra and Divi Themes
If you’re unfamiliar with these themes, here is a brief overview of Astra and Divi before we get to the feature comparison.
About Astra
Astra is a free WordPress theme with over 500,000 active installations, which can be enhanced by purchasing the Astra Pro license and installing the premium add-on plugin.
There’s a limited free version of Astra as well as more feature-rich premium upgrade options.
Whether you choose the free version of this theme or Astra Pro, you’ll get access to a library of professional-quality prebuilt content for your website. However, upgrading does unlock even more prebuilt content for your website as well as some extra features.
The free version of Astra comes with some impressive website templates.
With both versions of Astra, you can then use the recommended free-to-use third-party page builders to customize that content to create a unique website with WordPress.
We’ll look at the prebuilt content you get access to with both of these themes later in this comparison, but it’s great to see so many impressive and customizable templates available from a free WordPress theme, with even more available for those willing to pay.
About Divi
Divi is the flagship WordPress theme from Elegant Themes, a company with over 600,000 customers to date. Like Astra, it’s a multipurpose theme that can be used to create any type of website with WordPress, providing you with the prebuilt content and tools to launch the type of site your project demands.
Divi is one of the best-selling themes for WordPress.
However, unlike Astra, Divi is only available as a paid theme. While it’s nice to get things for free, this does help to keep things relatively simple as there’s only one version of the Divi theme, rather than the multiple licenses of Astra and the different features they include. So if you decide to purchase Divi, you’ll get access to everything it has to offer, as well as a few other products from Elegant Themes that we’ve reviewed in more detail here.
Divi vs Astra Pricing
Before we get to the features of these themes and the reasons why you might want to choose one over the other, let’s take a quick look at their pricing details for context.
As mentioned, when it comes to Divi, the pricing of this theme is relatively straightforward with a yearly license or a lifetime option, but whichever option you choose, you get access to all of the Divi features and functionality.
With Astra, things are a bit more complicated as, in addition to the free version of the theme, there are also three purchasing options, each with different features.
Before we get to the differences between the Astra packages, here’s a quick breakdown of the main purchase options for both themes:
Both themes can be used on an unlimited number of websites from a single purchase, which is great if you own multiple websites or build sites for clients.
Yearly vs Lifetime Licenses
If you choose the yearly option for either Divi or Astra, you get access to theme updates, customer support, and any new features or products that are added while your license is active.
After the year is up, you can either renew your license or continue using the theme without access to updates and support. Both themes offer an alternative to annual renewals in the form of lifetime licenses with their one-time fees.
Money-back Guarantees
If after reading this Astra vs Divi comparison, you’re still not sure which one to choose, both themes allow you to make a risk-free purchase. With Divi, there’s a 30-day 100 percent money-back guarantee, while with Astra it’s a 14-day guarantee.
Pricing Summary
So which theme is the best value, Astra or Divi?
Aside from the free version of Astra, the entry-level Astra Pro license, which costs $59 a year, is the cheapest way to get access to one of these premium themes.
However, as the $59 Astra Pro license doesn’t include all of the premium Astra features (you’ll need the Agency Bundle for that), the $89 Divi yearly license is the lowest priced way to unlock all of the features of one of these themes.
Also, while the free version of Astra might be tempting, don’t choose the free version just because of its lack of a price tag.
As Kevin mentions in his recent Astra theme review, he thinks most website owners will probably upgrade to a paid version to access the extra features. Due to this, it’s a good idea to take into account the cost of the premium versions of Astra when comparing this theme with Divi.
Now that you know how much these themes cost, let’s see what you get for your money in our exploration of the main features of Divi and Astra.
Divi vs Astra Best Features Comparison
On paper, these themes have similar feature lists, such as lots of high-quality prebuilt website content and plenty of customization tools and settings. However, as we’re about to see, these features have been implemented in different ways.
So to help you decide whether Divi or Astra is the theme you’re looking for, here’s a comparison of their main features and how they work.
Professional WordPress Website Content
When it comes to prebuilt content to help you create your website, Divi is ahead of Astra in terms of numbers. However, the website templates of both themes have been designed to a very high standard.
If you’re looking for a theme that can help you launch a professional-looking website, both Divi and Astra are more than up to the task.
But to give you an idea of which one might be the best choice for your project, here’s an overview of the website templates that you get access to with each theme.
Divi Content
Divi comes with website layout packs, which are sets of templates that should have everything you need to launch a particular type of site. At the time of writing, there are 140 layout packs available for Divi, comprised of 1,036 individual layouts or templates.
Each Divi layout pack includes a set of templates to help you quickly launch your website.
When creating a website with Divi, you can import all the layouts in a pack or mix and match the individual layouts from multiple packs. You can, of course, ignore the templates and use the Divi Builder to create your own unique website, but we’ll cover that later on in this comparison.
You can mix and match the layouts from different packs to create your custom website.
As the Divi layout packs cover a wide range of website projects, including agency sites, online portfolios, and ecommerce stores to name just a few, whatever type of website you’re building, you should find some suitable templates in the library.
If you take a look at the template previews, you’ll see that they’ve all been designed to a very high standard. If you need to make any changes to the prebuilt content, all of the Divi layouts can be personalized through the integrated drag-and-drop page builder tool.
Astra Content
Unlike with Divi, which includes access to all of the templates with any purchase, the Astra version or license you choose will dictate which prebuilt content or Starter Sites you get access to.
Both the free and paid versions of Astra come with website templates.
However, as mentioned, even the free version of Astra comes with customizable prebuilt website demos, with 49 Starter Sites available at the time of writing. Thanks to this, you might find that you’re able to create your ideal website with Astra, without the need to pay for the premium version of the theme.
But if you do decide to upgrade, and you choose the entry-level level Astra Pro license, you’ll get access to over 20 additional Starter Sites. If you skip the entry-level option and choose one of the more expensive licenses, you’ll get access to a further 55 demos.
The Astra website templates cover a wide range of projects.
You can preview the ready-to-import websites on the Astra site and also see exactly which templates you get access to, based on whether you use the free version of Astra, purchase Astra Pro, or choose one of the Astra Agency bundles.
Like the Divi templates, the Astra content can be customized. But as we’re about to see, rather than using an in-house page builder as is the case with Divi, the Astra templates can be edited using the free versions of the Beaver Builder, Brizy, and Elementor plugins.
Winner: Divi. While both themes have lots of high-quality templates, Divi has more to choose from.
Content Importers
Before we get to the page builders, it’s worth exploring the process of getting the prebuilt content into your WordPress website as these two themes take a slightly different approach.
With Astra, you import an entire Starter Site, populating your WordPress website with all the pages that demo contains as well as setting up the widgets and menus. You can also choose to just import the customizer settings, the content, and/or the widgets. If you want to mix and match the individual templates from different demos, you’d need to import all the content from one demo, then delete the pages you don’t need until you’ve assembled your site.
Complete Astra starter site demos can be imported into WordPress in one go.
With Divi, each page from a website pack or demo must be imported individually. This makes it easier to mix and match the templates from different packs, but it’s not as streamlined as the approach taken by Astra.
Divi makes it easy to import the individual layouts from each template pack.
Both methods work though and won’t prevent you from building your site in the way that you want, regardless of whether or not you want to use a complete demo as is or assemble your own set of templates.
Furthermore, both approaches are great improvements on the methods taken by some lesser themes, where you must manually upload and import multiple content and configuration files, before configuring the settings yourself. So whether you choose Astra or Divi, you won’t have any trouble accessing the prebuilt content and laying the foundation for your new site.
Winner: A draw, as both approaches work well but have their pros and cons.
Page Builders
As mentioned, both themes can be heavily customized using powerful drag-and-drop page builder tools, enabling you to edit the prebuilt content or create a unique WordPress website from scratch. Once again though, these themes have different approaches to providing this page builder functionality.
Divi Page Builder
Divi includes a visual editor that, like the theme, has been produced by Elegant Themes. Once you create a page in the Divi Builder or open an existing template for editing, you can start customizing the content through a drag-and-drop visual editor that’s a huge departure and upgrade from the default WordPress editing experience.
Divi has a WYSIWYG visual editor that allows you to fully customize the page templates.
Creating layouts consisting of columns and rows, and then populating those layouts with the large selection modules available in Divi, enables you to create any type of content in WordPress.
Almost everything about Divi can be customized, so whether you want to use the modules in their default state or personalize them, it’s entirely up to you. Thanks to this, as this collection of websites created with Divi shows, no two sites using this theme have to look the same.
With the Divi Builder, you can quickly switch to the wireframe view to see the structure of a page more clearly.
If you’d like to know exactly what this tool can do, you can find out in our review of the Divi page builder that covers all of its features and what it’s like to use. But to summarize, it’s one of the best and most powerful page builders for WordPress.
Astra Page Builder
Unlike Divi, which has an in-house page builder tool, Astra instead relies on some of the popular page builders that already exist for WordPress.
For example, the Astra Starter Sites and their templates have been built to be edited with the third-party Beaver Builder, Brizy, and Elementor plugins, as well as Gutenberg, the upgraded version of the default WordPress editor.
Astra works with popular third-party page builder plugins, including the free version of Beaver Builder, to enable you to customize its prebuilt content.
While harnessing the power of existing page builders, rather than creating a new one from scratch is a good idea, it’s led to a slightly confusing situation as some templates can only be edited with specific page builders. One problem with this is that you might spend time learning how to use Beaver Builder, only to discover that a Starter Site you want to edit can only be customized with Elementor.
To get an idea of how this works and see which Astra Starter Sites work with which page builders, you can filter the ready-made websites on this page according to which tools they can be edited with.
Some Astra templates and Starter Sites can only be customized with specific page builders.
While this does complicate things slightly, it does give you the ability to use your choice of supported page builder. In an attempt to simplify the situation, when you import a Starter Site into your WordPress dashboard, the page builder it can be edited with is activated on your site. It’s also worth mentioning that the Astra theme team is working on creating versions of all of their templates that work with the four recommended page builders.
You can also use the free version of Elementor to customize the prebuilt Astra content.
Astra Page Builder Addons
As mentioned in the pricing section, if you choose one of the top two Astra licenses instead of the entry-level option, you get access to more prebuilt content in the form of the Agency Starter Sites.
As these templates include modules from the Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder and Ultimate Addons for Elementor extensions, you get access to these premium packs as well, enabling you to fully customize the Agency Starter Sites templates. You can also use the modules and add-ons from these packs for Beaver Builder and Elementor to create additional advanced page designs of your own.
We’ve reviewed Beaver Builder and Elementor, and they’re up there with the best page builders for WordPress. Due to this, you should be able to create a unique website with Astra or heavily customize the prebuilt content, depending on your requirements.
Page Builder Summary
The Divi page builder is more powerful than the free versions of the page builders that are recommended for use with Astra, even if you take into account the Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder and Elementor that you get access to on the more expensive Astra licenses.
One example of this is the powerful Divi Leads split testing tool that can help you optimize your website and its content for better conversion rates. Another of these features is the recently released Divi Theme Builder that lets you use the visual editor to create custom headers, footers, and other areas of your website outside of the post and page area.
The Divi Theme Builder lets you create custom headers, footers, and other areas for the different content on your website.
Although you can access some of this functionality that allows you to edit your entire website with some of the recommended Astra page builders, it doesn’t feel as accomplished as the Divi Theme Builder.
However, due to the high levels of creative freedom the Divi page builder delivers, not to mention its long feature list, it does have quite a steep learning curve. If you haven’t used Beaver Builder, Brizy, or Elementor you’ll also need to learn these tools to customize Astra; however, compared to Divi, they are slightly easier to get to grips with.
On the other hand, if you’re already familiar with the page builders supported by Astra, you’ll be able to start customizing the prebuilt content of this theme without delay.
It’s also worth mentioning that as the Divi theme and its page builder have been created and supplied by the same company – Elegant Themes – you’ll have just one point of contact should you need help using the page builder.
There are definitely differences between the page builder functionalities of these themes. However, as the Divi Builder and the third-party plugins compatible with Astra are some of the best content editors for WordPress, whichever theme you choose, your creative freedom shouldn’t be limited.
Winner: Divi, as the page builder is more powerful than the free plugins included with Astra.
Customization Options
Aside from using the page builder tools, both themes allow you to personalize your website in other ways. If you navigate to the Customizer interface inside your WordPress dashboard, you’ll be able to access all of the settings and options that can be used to personalize your website, covering the fonts, colors, layouts, and much more.
Many aspects of your WordPress website can be modified through the WordPress Customizer controls of Divi.
One feature of Astra that’s not available in Divi is the optional free add-on that allows you to search through controls of the interface. As both themes make it possible to personalize nearly every aspect of your website, being able to search the settings does make using the Customizer more efficient.
Almost every aspect of your website can be adapted through the WordPress Customizer with Astra.
Both themes also make it possible to export and import your Customizer settings configuration for easy transfer between WordPress websites.
Winner: A draw, as both themes have impressive settings and controls accessible through the WordPress Customizer.
Support and Documentation
Whether you choose Divi or Astra, you’ll be able to find lots of high-quality resources to help you create your ideal website. The sites for both themes are packed with documentation, tutorials, and videos that explain how to use all of their features. There are Facebook groups for both themes, too, although the Divi groups have more members.
When it comes to getting one-on-one help with these themes, Divi license holders can contact the Elegant Themes support staff via the live chat system or open a ticket via email. Those who choose the free version of Astra can post a question on the WordPress.org support forums or, if they have an active license for Astra Pro, email the help desk.
One area where Divi surpasses the competition in this area is the busy Elegant Themes blog, which features a steady stream of resources to help you get the most out of their flagship theme. Also, if you’d like to network with other Divi users in person, you can attend one of the meetups that currently take place in 16 countries around the world.
Winner: Divi, as there’s more supporting content and a larger user community.
Divi Extras
As mentioned, Divi comes with the Extra WordPress theme as well as the Bloom email optin form and Monarch social sharing plugins, also from Elegant Themes. If you want to start a newsletter for your website then Bloom is definitely worth having. You can read how it compares to the competition in our Bloom vs OptinMonster article. Monarch should come in handy, too, if you want to encourage your visitors to share your content on social media.
Astra Extras
If you purchase the mid-tier Mini Agency Bundle licensee (from $169) then you get access to an additional 55+ Agency starter sites, the WP Portfolio plugin that can help you publish your work online, and either Ultimate Addons for Elementor or Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder.
The top-tier Astra Agency Bundle (from $249) includes all of the above plugins plus the Convert Pro lead generation plugin and access to the SkillJet online courses.
Winner: Divi, as although both themes come with lots of useful extras, you have to choose the mid- and top-level Astra licenses to unlock all of its extras.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, both Astra and Divi are hugely impressive themes, so, unfortunately, declaring one better than the other isn’t possible. However, the good news is, whichever one you choose, you won’t be disappointed.
While Divi and Astra do include all the features you’d expect from a best-selling multipurpose WordPress theme, as this comparison has shown, they do some things very differently, such as their pricing options and how they deliver their page builder functionality. Furthermore, the selection and style of the prebuilt content you get access to do vary from theme to theme.
Due to this, your personal preferences will dictate which theme is best for your website.
So with that in mind, check out the Divi website packs and the Astra Starter Sites to see which ones are most appealing. Taking advantage of the money-back guarantees is also a good idea, as it will give you a chance to try out the page builders to see how they, and the other features of these themes, have been implemented.
Which of these two themes do you prefer? Why?
