Salient and Avada are currently the number 1 and 6 on the Themeforest marketplace. These are both bestsellers. There are themes that are sold more often, but not via Themeforest. Let’s start with Salient without saying it would be better.
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
Let’s continue this Avada vs Salient comparison with the Avada theme.
The Avada Theme
One thing is for sure, Avada is the best selling theme on the infamous Themeforest marketplace. Unfortunately I have some doubts about the enormous sales figures since I have been advertising it for years but earn practically nothing from it. I have had the theme in my collection for about 8 years now and have very good experiences with it. It will certainly sell well, but the marketplace where they sell their theme is just very dodgy, which can be clearly seen on the reviews on Sitejabber, for example.
Avada Theme Review Ratings
Avada is a popular theme and has a very good rating, on average 4.77 out of 5. However, there are themes such as Divi that score practically 5 out of 5, and there are also themes on the same marketplace that come above 4.9.
Avada's Page Builder
There are several lesser-known but good page builders that have been developed by the builders of themes themselves. For example, the Flatsome Theme has its UX-Builder and Avada in turn has the FusionBuilder. Below you can see the page builder working on a testimonial. Below that a screenshot of the live visual page builder in action.
Avada's Elements
The Avada Theme gives you more than 120 elements (also called widgets). That is a large number, quite a bit more than most themes offer, and then we are talking about other top themes.
Avada Review: Demo Websites
The number of pre-prepared demo websites or starter templates is also quite high. Choose one of the 86 1-click demos to save a lot of time by not having to start your project from scratch. Below in the image you can see how this works, just select a demo and install it. A mebership license is of course required.
Avada Theme Review: Speed
As can be seen below, Avada shows astonishingly good results in a speed test at GtMetrix. Avada offers you a section in the backend where you can set many factors that influence the loading time of your website, the so-called “Performance Wizard”. For optimal speed it is always important to install one of the best cache plugins.
Avada's Form Builder
Avada actually has everything in it so that you don’t have to buy an extra plugin as seen here is a Form Builder with which you can quickly build exactly the forms you need for information requests or call-to-action purposes. The feature already has a large number of prepared forms that you can get up and running very quickly.
Avada Theme Review Conclusion
As mentioned, Avada is packed with features and it is not for nothing that it is one of the best-selling WordPress Themes, and has been for years. I can certainly recommend the theme as long as it is for only 1 website. The theme has a major weakness and that is the platform on which it is sold. This marketplace has a very bad reputation and takes a very high commission. This means that Avada cannot offer special deals, but requires a separate license for each website you have. This, of course, quickly becomes very expensive. Much cheaper alternatives are, for example, Divi and Astra. These are almost even better and you can use them on as many sites as you want.
Avada vs Salient Conclusion
Salient and Avada have more or less the same thing to offer. Despite the fact that Avada is much more famous, it is clear to me that the Salient is more extensive and better. These are both great themes, but as far as I’m concerned, only if I only need to provide 1 website with a theme. If you have more websites, these themes are too expensive as they require a separate license per website. You are better off with a theme like Astra or Divi that are for unlimited use.