Jupiter and Salient are both available through Themeforest and are therefore direct competitors. That is certainly the case since both themes can be used for the construction of very nicely looking webshops. Jupiter vs Salient, which is the better theme? We start with Jupiter which does not mean it would be better.
The Jupiter Theme
The Jupiter Theme has been around since 2013, it is one of the old guard that is still very relevant. Most themes in the top on Themeforest came out between 2013 and 2015 and maintained a very strong rating all those years.
Jupiter's Rating
The Jupiter Theme currently has an average rating of 4.72 out of 5. I estimate that 95% of the themes on Themeforest have a lower rating than Jupiter. The total number of themes sold in the vicinity of 170k is also impressive.
Building Shops with Jupiter
One of the big improvements with the X2 upgrade is the potential for building webshops. Practically everything has been thought of and this makes Jupiter one of the top themes for creating Woocommerce shops in my opinion. The video below lasts exactly 5 minutes and shows you all the latest features at a glance.
Unique Shop Features
With Jupiter has several special features for shop such as Product Loop, Smart Product Lists, and Advanced Filtering. Jupiter X product catalogue uses advanced indexing technology. It filters and returns products in a fraction to seconds and is optimized for large inventories. Also, now you can filter product items by related, upsell, and cross-sell products based on the recent viewed, added, or purchased products.
More Great Shopping Features
Jupiter is packed with great features for your shop such as product image swap effects, side cart view, product quick view, variation swatches (gradient), custom archive page lay-outs, hover effects for product image, wishlist function, and custom templates.
Optimize your Check-Out
You can customize and create all the checkout pages using a 100% visual editor. Drag and drop, or select from one of the many pre-made checkout layouts. Define custom designs for different products. Mobile optimized.
Lightning Fast Check-Out
In the image below you can see what Jupiter has adjusted in the process of checking out so that everything goes very quickly. They have used another Shopping System as an example for this: Shoppify.
Listen, there are many more shopping features, but I’m not going to list them all here. You can admire the rest on their own site. Let’s take a closer look at some other important values for themes.
Jupiter Theme Review: Headers
With Jupiter’s header builder you can create as many different headers as you want, and they can be used on different parts of your website. Layout components can be displayed or hidden based on login status, user roles and other information across the site, or on specific pages like single pages, archives, or shop pages.
Jupiter's Page Builder
Jupiter uses the awesome Elementor page builder. Elementor + Jupiter extra elements give you a total of 270+ elements in the page builder. These are also known as widgets.
Sales Funnels
Sales funnel builder, convert sales with great sales funnels. Drag and drop mobile-optimized sales channels to offer upsell/downsell opportunities and convert visitors into customers.
Demo Websites/Shops
The Jupiter Theme has a very large number of full demo sites to offer, namely 450+. Of this number, 60+ are for webshops. We can only say in this review that this is practically matched by no other theme.
Blogs, Portfolio and Popups in Jupiter
I cover blogs, portfolios and popups together in a chapter here. All these features are, as they should be, very well taken care of in Jupiter. You have several builders available to style both your blog and portfolio exactly the way you want. The popups also work well. All top themes have taken care of these things well at the moment and we can say that Jupiter is one of them.
Jupiter Theme Review Conclusion
For me in this review it has become clear that Jupiter is undervalued at the moment due to the great upgrade X2. The theme can be used for any type of website, but it is just a real Woocommerce theme now. There are simply few themes that offer better conditions for building a shop. Highly recommended!
Let’s continue this Salient vs Jupiter comparison with the Salient Theme.
The Salient Theme
The Salient theme was already released in 2013 and therefore belongs to the old guard of WordPress themes. It is still in the top 5 on Themeforest today which is a very good sign. So we are dealing with a top theme here. The theme is multipurpose but with an emphasis on webshop construction. Let’s start quickly with this Salient review.
Salient's Ratings
Salient has a rating of 4.81 out of 5 as shown in the screenshot above. That is, to say the least, a great rating that few themes have. This is the average rating of votes cast over almost 10 years. This indicates that the theme is stable and will have few or no errors.
Salient + Woocommerce
Salient is very suitable and offers many great options for building webshops. Below is a good example of the new layouts for your products. Photos in the form of a gallery where the product information is always visible. Modern 2-column layouts allow product images to be seen efficiently and keep the information and buying options visible at all times.
Gallery Images
Or this new Woocommerce feature. Your users can scroll through product images without having to stop at the thumbnails and information.
Scrollable Images
As seen in the video below, there is a “show filters” button which makes searching easier. You don’t have to choose between sidebars or full-page layouts for your products. Give your customers the ability to filter when they need it and keep your products focused until then.
New Filer Lay-out
I’m not going to list all Salient’s Woocommerce features here. Take it from me that Salient is a frontrunner in Woocommerce possibilities and if you are going to build a shop, Salient is definitely worth considering. More Woocommerce info can of course be found on their own site.
Salient Review: Demos
The site for Salient talks about 400+ templates they offer. I’m assuming that’s a combination of sections and full site demos. I count a total of 33 full site demos for Salient. That is certainly not a large number, but the demos are really beautiful, time has been spent on them. The demos shown below are demos for webshops.
Salient's Pagebuilder
As a page builder, Salient uses a high-quality version of the WP-Bakery page builder, an old very reliable and good page builder. This visual front-end Builder is tuned with many extra widgets what brings the total amount of widgets to 65+. Personally, I think they would do well to make their demos available for Elementor, the most popular page builder at the moment.
Responsive Editing
As befits a real page builder, you can edit responsively if desired. You can make separate adjustments to the design for mobile phone, iPad and Desktop. Of course all popular page builders can do this, but I’ll just point it out.
Portfolios
Salient is also a very good theme for those of you who want to build a portfolio website. The theme offers countless different layouts for full width, with column and the separate portfolio pages.
Special Features
Divi is no longer the only theme that is packed with features. Most themes have copied the majority of these features and benefit from this well. I’m not going to list all the features here, that would make this article way too extensive which is not necessary. If you want to see more, check out their own site.
Mix text with Images
Scribble Text
Salient's Header Lay-Outs
With just 1 click you can install another header. You can choose from a wide variety of header menus as shown below. Salient also has a header builder that allows you to make further customizations to your header.
Salient Theme Review Conclusion
The conclusion of my review is that Salient is highly recommended and as far as I’m concerned is in line with the 3 top themes on Themeforest. It has everything a good website needs and more. The things you can do with texts in Salient are really great and the theme is perfect for building a shop. The only problem with Themeforest themes is that you would have to buy a separate license for each of your sites. This while themes such as Astra and Divi are just as good and extensive and used on unlimited sites
Salient vs Jupiter Conclusion
I like Jupiter better, it is just a bit better overall. But there is a small problem, these themes want to see a separate expensive license for every website you want to build with it. This will quickly cost you a lot of money. You are better off with Astra or Divi that can be used on an unlimited sites and are also even better and more stable themes.