Jupiter and Astra are sold through different marketplaces and are therefore no direct competitors. Jupiter vs Astra, which is the better theme? We start with Astra which does not mean it would be better.
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 Jupiter comparison with the Jupiter Theme.
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!
Astra vs Jupiter Conclusion
I like Astra better, it is just way better overall. But also, the Jupiter theme wants 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.