2024 Ultimate Review of Top WordPress Themes from Major Developers

This article brings the 2024 ultimate review of top WordPress themes from major developers, or as I call them the big dog themes – the best and most popular themes from major WordPress theme developers. I will follow respective themes development, their user adoption and satisfaction throughout 2024 and will be updating this article at least monthly. The aim is to get “a year in the life” view of major themes, and to see how successful they are in:
1. retaining and increasing their marketshare
2. moving the theme development forward with new innovative features.

Current selection of the themes to be undergoing this review (in alphabetical order) is :

• Astra – 1+ million active installations
• Blocksy – 100,000+ active installations
• GeneratePress – 600,000+ active installations
• Kadence – 300,000+ active installations
• Neve – 300,000+ active installations

The question I want to answer for DigitronicBlog readers and everyone looking to enter WordPress ecosystem is rather a simple one: What is the best WordPress theme on the market today? And what is the best WordPress them for my needes? The answer as always is not a simple one.

If you simply want to know my current WordPress themes recommendation, JUMP TO THE BOTTOM OF THIS ARTICLE.

Overview of top WordPress themes’ pricing

Though all of the brands offer the FREE version of the theme with more or less features unlocked, we always sugges buying the PRO version. The purchase of the PRO version will unlock many helpful features and will at the same time ensure the sustainabily of the product.

Theme	License Volume	Annual	Lifetime
Astra	1 site	$49	$199
Blocksy	1 site	$69	$199
GeneratePress	500 sites	$59	$249
Kadence	Unlimited	$79	N/A*
Neve	Unlimited	$69**	N/A

* Kadence theme – Lifestyle license is only available as part of the Full Lifetime Bundle priced at $799
** Neve theme – to unlock the full value and make it a competitive with other themes, Agency plan is needed requiring the investment of $259/year.

2024 sentiment analysis of the theme ratings data from wordpress.org

We start with the Sentiment Analysis of the themes rating data available on wordpress.org with the goal of detecting positive or negative sentiment to gauge theme reputation among the customer base.

The first thing I are noticing is the significant “Review Data” gap, with Astra having a high number of data points (6,000+), and Kadence on the oposite end having a negligent number of data points (~200). This data disparity should not prevent us from running the Sentiment Analysis, but it rather cautious us that the Sentiment Analyis should be taken as just one of the factors when selecting the theme to go with.

In the approach, I limited the polarity categories to 3 (three):

• Positive – 4 & 5 star reviews
• Neutral – 3 star reviews
• Negative – 2 & 1 star reviews

Knowing that the information collected is fairly subjective, and acknowleging the huge disparity in the number of reviews among the themes of interest, we are still able to to gain quantifiable insights about how positively or negatively the themes are viewed by their users.

While all of the themes have Positive Sentiment in the high ninties, Blocksy comes on top with a 99.62% score, with Neve having the highest Negative Sentiment of 4.40%.

SENTIMENT	ASTRA	BLOCKSY	GP	KADENCE	NEVE
Positive	97.73%	99.62%	99.00%	96.04%	94.31%
Netural	0.44%	0.00%	0.36%	0.50%	1.29%
Negative	1.83%	0.38%	0.64%	3.47%	4.40%

Facebook Community Info

Each of the themes assessed maintains the Facebook community with some of the communities being more active than others. Over the first three monts of 2024, I monitored the communities daily to determine the engagement score, which is in this case a quantitative measure that represents the level of community members engagement within the particular theme’s community. An active Facebook community is beneficial to both the brand and its users, as it allows the brand (aka theme developer) to build connection, trust and loyalty with its client base and help humanize the brand. Hence, it’s not a surprise that all themes examined here leverage their respective Facebook communities as channel for customers to ask questions, seek assistance, provide feedback, faciliate peer-to-peer support and generally have the community members exchange ideas with their fellow users of the theme.

The engagement score produced here is of observational and behavioral nature and was obtained by observing member behavior across five communites, by counting the interactions and participation in activities (general discussions, how-to posts, support tickets, etc) to gauge level of engagement and represent it numerically in he table below. High engagement scores communicate customer satisfaction, enhances the themes reputation and indicates enthusism for the theme.

Blocksy and Kadence themes came up on top with the highest engagement scores, while Astra, considering its community size, suprisingly produced a very low engagement score.

Theme	Approx # of Members	Avgerage Daily Posts	Engagement Score
Astra	58,000	1-5	0.0086
Blocksy	8,000	10-15	0.1875
GeneratePress	10,600	5-10	0.0943
Kadence	13,200	15-20	0.1515
Neve	5,400	0-1	0.0185

Astra Theme Review

Developer: Brainstorm Force

Positive Sentiment – 97.73%
Neutral Sentiment – 0.44%
Negative Sentiment – 1.83%

Astra theme Ratings from wordpress.org

Astra Theme Overview

With over 1 million active installations, Astra is no question the most popular commerical theme ever. The theme earned its place in the WordPress history, and was and still is an entry for many WordPress users.

As far as sentiment anlysis is concerned, Astra’s scores are in the middle, with both Postive and Negative sentiments in the 3rd place among the 5 observed themes. Negative ratings mostly seem to come from the Developer persona type.

Despite using Astra alongside other well-known themes, we find it intriguing that Astra maintains its popularity. Among the five themes we evaluated, Astra consistently ranked towards the lower end. However, it’s important to clarify that Astra isn’t a poor choice for a WordPress theme; it’s a solid product and we would prefer it over many other themes in the market, especially those patterned and Elementor heavy themes on ThemeForest. Nevertheless, when compared to the other major themes, Astra would be our least preferred option or, at best, our second-to-last choice.

The Astra theme’s widespread popularity and adoption could be attributed to Brainstorm Force’s (the company behind Astra theme) agressive marketing efforts and the fact that the theme was and still is heavily promoted and pushed by many affiliate bloggers who have found success ($$$) in endorsing the theme. It’s noteworthy that Astra stands out among the big five themes as the only theme that was once briefly excluded from the wordpress.org repository due to marketing strategies deemed inappropriate and against community norems, such as incorporating undisclosed affiliate links to other brands’ products within the theme.

Still, we are running Astra on some of our static sites, and will probalby continue using it for simple static websites, due to having a well defined and ready to be used Astra blueprint that we can easily apply to fresh WordPress installation, customize it, turn into a static instance, and have the website done in less than a day.

What I like about Astra?

Its Custom Layouts feature which allows you to fully customize the website; define the element and apply it to muliple sections of the website. Having said that, this feature is not unique to Astra, and is offered by all of the major themes.

Out of the box, the website built on Astra performs well. If the website is not too complicated and loaded with extra plugins, and when used in conjuction with a Gutenberg block-based page builder (i.e the sister product from the same company, Spectra), finished website does run fairly fast.

Astra is well paired with Elementor page builder, though the users have reported running into performance issues, which is likely caused by Elementor’s performance.

What I do not like about Astra?

The slow development pace and the impression that Brainstorm Force, the team behind Astra, is more focused on their other products, especially the ones from the SureCrafted family, and are using Astra as a lead-gen engine to cross sell those other products. As such, Astra theme is suffering from development lagging, buggy updates, and sluggish support.

While out of the box, Astra runs really fast, once loaded with plugins, the Astra slows down a bit. On the background preformance side, the Customizer slows down when multiple Custom Post Types (CPTs) are present, and sometimes becomes unresponsive.

The free version of the theme is really limited, though better than free Neve or free GeneratePress version (note that GeneratePress beats the crap out of Astra when it comes to PRO version).

Additionally, Astra starter templates are really generic, outdated and require too much work to be brought to a decent design state. They offer countless variations of the Home Page (font type and color palette changes), with inner pages being more or less the same, dull and boooring. It’s a shame, as the Astra’s customizer istelf offers a lot of good options for defining unique layouts + Spectra page builder could bring those layouts to a higher design level.

Astra theme PROS & CONS

Thoughts on the state of Astra

Let’s admit – Astra was never a ground breaking theme pushing WordPress boundries and bringing new inovative features to the market. From the feature and capabilities perspective, it was and still is playing cath up with other major themes. i.e. we still do not have Astra elements (or patterns cloud) the standout feature of Neve and Kadence themes. Site builder capabilty was released late last year, and it really amounted to rather a cosmetic change applied to the existing Custom Layouts feature, not really pushing the needle forward.

Astra on the other hand was well marketed theme that offerred generous compensation to bloggers for promoting it. It was a good entry point for may DIY users, many of whom with the time moved on to other big name themes. From observing the community, I noticed a significant migration to GeneratePress theme. Astra was never broadly adopted by hard-core developers, as most of those who were looking to transition from the dying Genesis Framework moved on to either GeneratePress or to the BricksBuilder. What was once a theme with lots of potential, is now slowly losing spotlight to other themes.

Blocksy Theme Review

Developer: Creative Themes

Positive Sentiment – 99.62%
Neutral Sentiment – 0.00%
Negative Sentiment – 0.38%

Blocksy theme is one of those WordPress goodies that every time you try it, you want more and more of. With the highest Postive and lowest Negative sentiment, Blocksy theme currently holds the top spot on our Sentiment Analysis chart.

Blocksy theme PROS & CONS

Thoughts on the state of Blocksy

In this era where user experience, be it for the developers or the end users (website visitors) reigns supreme, Blocksy has moved the goal posts forward with its focus on versatility, performance, and impeccable design. Blocksy’s attention to user-friendliness, consistency of admin area design which translates to easiness on your eyes, and overall ergonomics,  is second to none.

Blocksy, in many ways, is a clear leader in the spectrum of classic WordPress themes empowering users to create awesome websites with ease. With its meticulously designed starter templates, well thought-out extensions provided via Blocksy Companion plugin, Blocksy provides the perfect foundation for making SMB owners’ digital ambition come to fruition. Though I wish the Creative Themes team would finally come out with its mythical and long awaited Blocksy Blocks and have the page builder hopping habit put to rest, I want them to remain laser focused on further iterating the Blocksy theme and continuing to expand its capabilities. When thinking about the future of WordPress Classic themes and the themes reviewed in this article, there are three themes that I believe will continue flourishing, and Blocksy is one of them.

GeneratePress Theme Review

Developer: EDGE22 Studios LTD (led by Tom Usborne)

Positive Sentiment – 99%
Neutral Sentiment – 0.36%
Negative Sentiment – 0.64%

GeneratePress theme Ratings from wordpress.org

GeneratePress Theme Overview

A powerhouse of WordPress themes and a true successor to Genesis Framework, GeneratePress offers a lightweight theme developed to give you control over the design of your website without compromising performance. If there is a theme built according to German Engineering principles, GeneratePress is certainly the one. Unlike some of the themes from this review that come bundled with features that you may never use (i.e. barebones Social Sharing element), GeneratePress opts for a minimum set of powerful features that you can enable or disable as needed with a special attention given its block-based Theme Builder. Supplemented with the Dynamic Block Elements, GeneratePress gives the users the total design freedom to create a wide range of websites, from simple blogs to complex business sites.

For developers and power users, or those that have honed their skills and are looking to upgrade from some of the themes in this review, GeneratePress offers a robust framework for building highly customized websites, including the ability to insert dynamic content, custom design elements or custom code snippets. The options are truly endless; build and customize anything  from post meta to site-wide headers and footers, page heroes to author boxes, single post templates to 404 pages,custom post cards, custom info boxes, custom headlines, to custom anything. 

In addition to its native theme building capabilities, GeneratePress is tightly integrated with its sister product, the GenerateBlocks page builder, currently the best block based (aka Gutenberg based) page builder. This pairing offers you further customization options and incredible versatility without bloating your experience with tons of one-dimensional blocks, as is the case with many other page builders. GenerateBlocks brings only a handful of blocks that are endlessly flexible for building any layout, styling any content, and producing impeccable design.

When it comes to the support, GeneratePress’s support is unrivaled in the WordPress community today. With support team members spread throughout the world and across different time zones, the support is fast with queries answered in a matter of minutes although the official policy is to respond to requests the same day. The standout feature is its extremely active Support Forum that goes back in years and as of today lists more than 15,000 topics discussed.  

With the extremely high Positive (99%) and low Negative (0.64%) sentiment, GeneratePress theme is well loved by its user base, I see only a bright future for this theme and I wholeheartedly recommend it. Or as Trump would say, this theme has my complete and total endorsement.

GeneratePress theme PROS & CONS

Kadence Theme Review

Developer: KadenceWP

Positive Sentiment – 96.04%
Neutral Sentiment – 0.50%
Negative Sentiment – 3.47%

Sometimes called the Elementor of the WordPress themes, Kadence theme is standing out with the great polished UI, a rich design options set, excellent and well thought-out starter templates, and a tight integration with its companion Kadence Blocks page builder.

Kadence theme PROS & CONS

Neve Theme Review

Neve theme PROS & CONS

The Theme Feature Ratings

To be more quantitative in this review, I assessed and rated the quality of the themes (and the value for money) across the categories below. Though in my rating I used the 1-5 scale, do note that quite often the particular features looked at across the themes are not that far apart, and that I simply avoided giving the same rating to two themes. I also may have been influenced by personal preference, so keep that in mind as you review the below.

• Free Version – how feature rich is the FREE version of the theme
• PRO Version – how feature rich is the PRO version of the theme
• Site Building – how capable is the theme when it comes to custom site building
• Companion Page Builder – the capability of the page builder (sister product) made by the same developer
• Starter Templates – the design quality of starter templates (not the number of templates available)
• Ecommerce Features – quality of ecommerce features the PRO version of the theme offers (without needing to buy the extra product from the same developer)
• Change Management – how well handled and frictionless theme updates are, major or minor
• Support – the quality of documentation and support that could be received via various channels

FEATURE	ASTRA	BLOCKSY	GP	KADENCE	NEVE
Free Version	3	5	1	4	2
PRO Version	1	5	3	4	2
Site Building	1	2	5	4	3
Companion Page Builder	3	1	5	4	2
Starter Templates	1	5	2	4	3
Ecommerce Features	3	4	1	2	5
Change Management	1	2	5	4	3
Support	1	3	5	2	4
TOTAL SCORE	14	27	27	28	24

A few remarks about the reasoning behind these scores

Free Version – Blocksy is a clear winner here due to the number of features the free version offers along with the great aesthetics. Kadence is a close second, but Blocksy edges thanks to ecommerce feature advantage

PRO Version – This is an interesting one. Neve theme with its Agency plan price at $259/year offers the most, but the value for money is simply not there. Sure, if the money is not an objection, go for Neve, though I would suggest that in this case, you take a closer look at Kadence Full Bundle priced at $219/year and take advantage of other Kadence products (i.e. Kadence AI) that come bundled in. Thus, having the cost aspect in mind, I recommend Blocksy which priced at $69/year brings a perfect balance of features and pricing. 

Site Building Capability – all themes bring great custom site building capability with GeneratePress being most favored among professional developers. The difference between the theme rated 1 and the theme rated 5 is not that far, and you can build rich custom sites with any of these five themes. The difference really comes down to the the page builder you pair the theme with to build your website. 

Companion Page Builder – this is what makes a difference and should be a major factor in selecting the theme you will be using for your website. And this is where GeneratePress + GenerateBlocks combo excels with GenerateBlocks being the best block based page builder on the market today. This is not to say that Kadence Blocks, Spectra or Otter Blocks are not good products. On the contrary, they are great page builders too, but GenerateBlocks with its Class First approach, with CSS Grid and other advanced features that enhance your workflow, wins the contest by a mile. 

Starter Templates – I looked at starter templates that come with the theme and without the need to spend additional money to get access to them. Due to this criteria, I did not look at Kadence AI Starter Templates, nor at Astra’s ZipWP AI Starter Templates. Blocksy wins hands down in the category of native starter templates. 

Ecommerce Features – Again an interesting category where you can create equally satisfying ecommerce websites with all of the themes reviewed. The difference comes to the money that you want to spend. If you want to keep the spend on the lower side, go with Blocksy. If you are willing to spend a bit more money, go with Neve’s “Business Plan” priced at $149/year and which unlocks the “Sparks for WooCommerce” addition with a number of useful features such as Product Comparison Tables, Variation Swatches, Multi-Announcement Bars, and so on. If the money is not an objection, go for Kadence Full Bundle and enjoy the benefits that Kadence Shop Kit brings. Plus, you’ll get access to Kadence Conversions to create interactive elements, Kadence Cloud, and so on. I do however feel that Neve’s middle price point brings the perfect balance of features and pricing, and for those reasons it takes #1 spot in the ecommerce domain. 

Change Management – Updates, updates, updates. We want the theme updates to be well tested before being pushed out for users to update, and this is one area that Astra and Blocksy could’ve done a better job at. While Kadence and Neve themes have solid Change Management practices in place, I feel that GeneratePress takes the top spot mainly due to its slow release cycle which allows for extensive testing, and therefore makes the theme upgrades a painless and smooth experience. 

Support – GeneratePress with its multi-channel support and extremely active user forum is a clear winner in the support category.

Bear in mind, above rating and reasoning was done on isolated categories. The theme however should be looked at as a whole. 

Themes popularity with major influencers

While acknowledging that many bloggers, affiliate marketers and WordPress influencers have developed their websites with the themes other than the ones reviewed here, we will include in our list only the websites built with the 5 themes of interest to us.

BLOGGER/MARKETEER	THEME
Authority Hacker	GeneratePress
BloggingPro	Neve
Ferdy Korpershoek	Astra
LayerWP	Kadence
Niche Campus	Kadence
Niche Site Lady	GeneratePress
NicheTwins	GeneratePress
Online Media Masters	GeneratePress
Post Status	GeneratePress
Shout Me Loud	Astra
The Admin Bar	GeneratePress
The Affiliate School	GeneratePress
The Website Flip	GeneratePress
The WPWeekly	Astra
World of WP	Blocksy
WP Builds	Blocksy
WP Crafter	Kadence
WP Minute	Kadence
WP Launchify	Kadence
WPTuts	Blocksy

GeneratePress theme seems to be the top choice for 40% of the sites reviewed, followed by Kadence theme running 25% of power user websites.

Which theme do I recommend?

With everything above said, the selection of the theme could depend on the use case, the user persona looking for a theme or on your established workflow. In my recommendations, I am focusing on 2 user personas and 1 use case: Developers and General Users (DIY crowd, including newbies to the world of WordPress) and the ecommerce use case.

WordPress theme most recommended for General Public

For General Users, the Do-it-Yourself crowd, those new to the WordPress ecosystem, as well as those who have spent a few years navigating the periphery there of, I recommend the Kadence theme.

WordPress theme most recommended for Ecommerce websites

For small business owners looking to start generating income via ecommerce, I recommend the Blocksy theme. One of Blocksy’s standout features are the WooCommerce enhancements that come with its PRO package. Though from the ecommerce features perspective, I rated Blocksy 4 out of 5 with the top spot going to Neve theme, I still recommend Blocksy due to its impeccable starter templates design and a lower price point.
Word of caution, as Blocksy did struggle a bit in the Change (Release) Management domain, I suggest to prospective Blocksy users to thoroughly test Blocksy updates on the staging website before pushing the change to your live website. When compared to Kadence, both themes have recently gone through major releases adding numbers of new features and significantly improving the themes. Kadence however, did not suffer the site breaking changes that some of the Blocksy users reported. True, Blocksy support team worked tirelessly around the clock to address the issues and help ease the version upgrade for impacted users, even hand holding some of them, and for that they deserve a credit. I believe that future Blocksy updates will offer a smoother upgrade experience to website owners, and in turn, bring Blocksy up to Kadence or GeneratePress level in the Change Management domain.

WordPress theme most recommended for Power Users & Developers

For Developers, and those more technically skilled who may be coming from another frameworks (i.e. Genesis), and for those not afraid of pushing the limits, I recommend the GeneratePress theme. GeneratePress also brings the mastery of Change Management to the table with less frequent but thoroughly tested releases making the themes update a smooth experience.