We compare JNews vs Astra, two very well-selling WordPress themes. Astra has a popular free version and a pro version, JNews only has a pro version. Let’s start with Astra without this meaning that it would therefore be a better theme.
The Astra Theme
The Astra Theme has been very popular for years. In other words, the free version of Astra is firmly in place on WordPress.org. In addition, Astra also has a very well-selling pro version which is mainly known for its beautiful demo websites that are pre-prepared for various page builders. Over a million websites currently run on Astra. Let’s start this Astra Theme review with its rating as I always do.
Astra's Rating 5/5
Below you can see the fantastic rating and comments that Astra gets from users. Where it says “Astra theme and Element” Elementor is of course meant, indeed a more than great combination to use Astra and Elementor together within 1 website. Obviously anyone giving a 1 star rating to the number one theme on WordPress.org has no clue about theme or works for the competition.
Astra Theme Review Demo Websites
Let’s go straight to one of the strongest points of the Astra Theme, namely the many demo websites. These demo websites, the so-called Starter Templates, are made to further embroider with your favorite page builder. The demos were made with Elementor, Beaverbuilder, Brizy and Gutenberg. Well, I’m not that impressed with the last one, but the others are 3 top page builders. This means that if one of these 3 is your favorite page builder, the Astra theme can be your favorite theme.
As seen above one can just choose for which page builder demo website will be shown. Astra has one of the best full website demo’s that I have ever seen in themes and plenty as for just elementor there should be like 180 different designs already.
Astra's Woocommerce Possibilities
The WP-Astra Theme was built from the start on having super fast loading times and it had to excel in the possibilities and beautiful designs for webshops and that intention has been successful. The options that Astra offers for E-commerce websites are unprecedented and practically surpass any other theme, including specialized Woocommerce themes.
Below I´ll show a few of the many features Astra offers for Woocommerce that make your webshop to a professional looking online store.
Infinite scroll
Off canvas sidebar
Quick view
The Astra Theme has about 15 such features for webshops. It simply has all the gadgets one could wish for.
Astra comes with Schema Mark Up
WP-Astra comes standard with Schema Mark Up which adds rich snippets to your articles. That way your articles will be displayed in Google’s search result in a more effective way as seen in the image below, with or without Schema. I have tried it on an HTML-website, and implementing Schema by hand is just to much work and errors will be made. Astra adds the snippets automatically and if your article changes, so will the Schema Mark Up.
Do you want someting even better than Astra’s basic Mark Up, then go for the more professional version of it:
Astra Speed
WP-Astra’s basic code is only 25kb which makes Astra one of the fastest themes out there, if not the fastest. Have a look at the images below, if necessary give them a click to enlarge them. On the left we see a speedtest done at GtMetrix with stunning results. On the right you see what one of the most famous SEO companies thinks of the speed of the Astra Theme.
Astra Theme Extra Info
If you are planning to set up a website with WP-Astra for teaching courses, it is good to know that the theme is fully compatible with Learndash and LifterLMS. In addition, Astra has an excellent SEO, is 100% responsive on all devices. It’s all too much to explain here in this review so I advise you to take a look at the Astra website itself.
Astra Theme Review Conclusion
The Astra Theme excels on several fronts, including speed, countless options for webshops, beautiful designs that can be installed with 1 click and that for 4 different page builders. In addition, Astra has built-in Schema as standard and is compatible with all commonly used plugins. This makes Astra one of the best-selling themes of the moment and I can recommend it to everyone, especially in combination with Elementor Pro.
Let’s continue this Astra vs JNews comparison with the JNews Theme.
The JNews Theme
The JNews Theme was launched in 2017 and has been doing very well ever since on Themeforest. This theme has recently had a major upgrade and is now completely full of the so-called builders and I can already say that the theme must be one of the best for creating blogs and news websites.
JNews' Rating
JNews has since been sold 17k times and is therefore doing good business. I think this theme will rise in the rankings on Themeforest. It has a very strong rating there of 4.86 out of 5. Few themes exceed that.
Its Loading Speed
Below you can see that the values for speed in Google Page Speed are 99 for mobile and 100 for desktop. I have not tested myself, the builders of the theme indicate this themselves. I assume that at least an elite cache plugin was used for this.
JNews' Page Builders
JNews Theme Review: Header Builder
You can see in the image below how easy it is to place everything in the header in the places you want. All good themes have a header builder and so does JNews. In addition, you can also choose from a large number of standard headers that you can set.
JNews Category Builder
You see, the category builder uses Elementor. Customize your category pages with the greatest of ease. Styling requires no technical knowledge.
Mega Menu Builder
Again with Elementor as the basis, the Mega Menu Builder. You can literally fill in all the boxes with the content you want there. It just doesn’t come easy. A cool tool.
JNews' Style Editor
Right click on any item on the page and you will get many options that you can adjust, for example: margin, background, padding, position, animation and much more.
Demo Websites 67+ and Homepage 150+
The number of 67 for full website demos is more than enough. In the case of JNews, practically all of these demos are for blogs, news websites, podcast websites or video websites. The theme has beautiful layouts available that you can install with a few clicks. There are also 150+ different homepage layouts, so only homepage. You have more than enough choice with JNews.
A Video-Based Site
JNews makes it easy to create a video-based website. This theme includes a lot of features that will allow you to create a video-focused site inspired by Youtube, Dailymotion and Vimeo.
- Thumbnail Preview Video
- Frontend Uploader
- One Video Template
- Video Modules New
- Profil of the User
- Subscribe to User
- Video Playlist
- You can find many more here
Paywriter System in JNews
Let others write for your site. WordPress makes it easy to manage author payments. JNews+ Pay writer system makes it easy to track author’s payments. I would say, this is perfect for the type of website one is going to build with JNews.
Paywall now with Woo-subscriptions
JNews has added a paywall to WooCommerce Subscriptions. This was requested by everyone. JNews Paywall now accepts WooCommerce Subscriptions payments. JNews clearly pays attention to their customers.
JNews Theme Review Conclusion
The Jnews theme is packed with special features for blogs and news sites, which makes this theme simply one of the best of its kind. I can’t show all these features here, you can see the rest on their own website. It should be clear that JNews is an absolute must for people who want to build and run a blog or news website.
Astra vs JNews Conclusion
Both Astra and JNews are very good themes. We only compare the pro versions as JNews does not have a free version. Still, I just want to say that Astra offers the best free WP theme out there. Since Astra offers different packages, that is also a difficult comparison. JNews is somewhat better if we compare it with Astra Pro, but I rate all Astra Bundles higher than JNews. Note: Astra is always for unlimited websites and JNews only for 1 site.