Debating Which WP Theme Is Better, Divi 2 Or Salient
Since web design is something people seem more and more interested in, developers have made available an impressive range of products for people to go wild with.
Nowadays, there is quite a variety of tools and resources that a web designer can choose to make work for his clients faster and more efficient, but today I will focus only on two of these, which happen to be WordPress themes.
These themes are not just ordinary ones, they are versatile, having the required structure to create a blog, portfolio, a business site or an online store. Have I mentioned that they can be used even if you have no coding skills?
Divi 2.0
Divi was released by Elegant Themes at the end of 2013, quickly becoming the center of attention in the community. What's interesting about it is that it's easy to use, very user-friendly, but elegant and professional at the same time.
Its interface, which is called Divi builder, offers a simplistic approach to web design at a first glance, due to the fact that it splits the dashboard in horizontal layers, similar to the header, body and footer.
But despite its simplicity, it offers a wide range of elements and options, making web design as fun and dynamic as possible.
If in the first of its version, Divi was focused on what you can do in a page and what functionality it has. Divi 2.0 takes things to the next level.
There are features like enhanced header, better navigation and a lot of layout options that will make it easier for people to create an awesome website.
Once the user decides on the aspect, shape and size, modules can be added, that are very similar to the widgets found in WordPress, but more customizable and dynamic than their predecessors.
It's as if you are able to customize every single brick of a wall. You can do almost everything by the drag'n'drop technique, also having a varied amount of layouts to choose from, making your e-store or blog easy and fun to build from the ground up.
It comes with 10 pre-made layouts, that you can modify as you please. And if not, you are always able to build everything from scratch. All the layouts are compatible with every single type of device the market has to offer, including mobile devices and software.
The price is more than reasonable. For $69 you get a total of 87 themes + full technical support and updates.
Salient
Salient is an eye-catchy theme, quite good-looking. It's very dynamic and responsive, and since it supports Woo Commerce, it seems ideal for freelancing work.
Like most of its competitors, it's a theme very pleasant to the eye, very manageable. And really worth mentioning is that it comes packed with the Parallax home slider, feature I find very useful, since coming across a good sliding plug-in was really a challenge for me.
Another big plus for Salient is the fact that it comes with a big language pack, making it available for everybody that is not fluent in English. So using it would be no problem at all, because you are bound to speak at least one of the many languages it includes.
Salient, however, offers fewer layouts than Divi (only 8 in number). And to customize it, you are required to add lines of shortcodes. But they offer tutorials for support in both video and written format.
But as mentioned before, it's really good-looking, and the customer support service better the average. As far as themes go, you don't get a range to pick from, you get only one for $55.
Conclusion
The two are a couple of the best themes available for people that are looking to build fast a steady and reliable website. They are both versatile on all sorts of domains, but Divi is easier to use, more user-friendly and runs more smoothly (at least for me), without overcharging the processor.
Two more really good themes with support, multiple features and layouts.
http://themeforest.net/item/x-the-ultimate-wordpress-theme/5871901
http://davidwalsh.name/debating-wp-theme-divi-2-salient
Hey David,
Nice article! There is however one vitally important and game-changing thing that you completely left out here.
When you buy a Elegant Themes subscription for 70 bucks per year, you buy the right to use their themes on unlimited sites! While themes like Salient (Which I have used in the past) only allow you to use their theme on ONE site (with the normal 50ish bucks license, extended licenses often cost over 2000$).
May not Sound like much, but to someone who builds ten websites that would be a TON of cash right there!
Have just gone through a similar dilemma, except mine was between Divi and Genesis as a framework to work from. I had already invested a whole lot of time and money into Studiopress’ Genesis themes and the Dynamik Builder from Cobalt Apps that made the choice a little harder. Although I really like what Dynamik Builder / Genesis Extender allows you to do Genesis child themes, Divi2 ended up being my choice. Why? The page builder and pre-made templates drastically reduce the time it takes to create client websites. I just finished a 6 page site last night using Divi in less than 3 hours. To get the same from genesis would have taken many hours longer.
The Elegant Themes support forum is also so much better than the one over at Studiopress. It seems Studiopress are quite content to see many posts go completely unanswered in their support forums. Quite the opposite for Divi.
When it comes to Divi, the price is really right and the support is excellent. I think that’s a winning combination.
I’ve tried pretty much every theme / framework studio going and recently came across Divi v1 and I’m sticking. Super flexible and so far super robust with (what appears to be) very efficient coding on their page builder engine.
Hi David,
If you or your readers like the Divi theme, you´ll like a new site dedicated to Divi I´ve launched a few days ago: http://divi4u.com/
You will find nice free tools and resources there, such as a showcase page displaying hundreds of real sites using Divi, a Divi Theme Detector, a free plugin developed to easily create Divi child themes (Divi Children plugin), a blog about Divi… and more to come.
hi there !
i am also a subscriber of Elegant Themes, i’ve known them since 2011 and i never found better.
And of course their divi release have put them even more on the front of the webdesign scene.
divi is as you already said very easy to use or anyone, we can really focus our work on webdesign and the only limits are ours :)
The problem with most responsive themes I’ve come across is, that they usually take a few fixed breakpoints into account. So, everything between these tend to look awful.
Secondly, for those themes who have a large slider area with text/C2A’s on top: These look nice on laptop/desktop, but on tablets (portrait) and mobile, the image area is reallly small (including the text/C2A’s) – while the othee elements in the layouts are bumped up in size – which really breaks the proportions.
Ideally, I’d like to see more options for elements like this. The possibility to choose focal point/crop area as well as selecting a different image format for portrait viewports (in case you want your “hero”-area to have more impact or take up more real estate vertically).
So, I’m still looking for a theme that does this. Until now, it’s either doing a lot of manual tweaking or coding something yourself. Or use Squarespace, which have slightly better optimized templates for mobile.
Hi,
Both themes are great, I don’t think you can go wrong with either.
The Divi theme though is $69, the Salient theme is $55. Whilst Elegant Themes offer more themes in addition to the Divi theme for the $69 most frankly are not really worth having and also the support is limited to 12 months.
That said, the Salient theme authors aren’t obliged to provide support at all and could just as easily disappear tomorrow so the extra price seems worth paying.
Point well made above though about using the theme on only one site.
I suspect the differences will be different for web designers than they would be for an individual looking for one theme for one website.
I prefer Divi out of choice :o)
I don’t think you’ve worked with Salient enough. If you had I think your conclusion would have been different. I stared in Salient but due to the significant price difference when building multiple sites I’m trying to use Divi 2.
So far Salient rocks. Divi’s speed when designing a page is superior to Salient but that’s the only place I’ve seen where Divi exceeds Salient. Salient’s typography, full width support, row options are better to name a few.
Salient may cost more but I’m going to have to see the benefit in Divi to stick with it. Maybe I have a similar issue in that I’m new to Divi but I’ve seen the typography for instance and it’s crippled compared to Salient. Divi has two font settings, Header and body font, Salient has 72 and I think the more I dig the greater the differences will be.
A couple of corrections:
Elegant Themes offers lifetime support and downloads for a one time fee of $249, no more yearly fees.
That seem to be the best deal between these providers all things being equal
I read many positive reviews about the Divi Theme and decided to give it a try. The Page Builder is really nice, you can build all kind of cool page layouts in no time.
However I didn’t realize that PAGE Builder means that all this great possibilities are just and only for pages. You can not use it for blog posts or custom posts, which means that you can’t even insert a slider oder a simple image gallery in a post by default. And this is a big downside for me.
How should I explain my clients that for pages they have all the great features of the Page Builder and for posts there are just the most basic layout options.
Another problem I experienced is that the Page Builder pages are using different templates than posts or non Page Builder pages, which depending on your styling makes them look quite differently. So I ended up tweaking the CSS for posts and non Page Builder pages to have the same styling as the rest of my website.
I can hardly imagine why elegant themes does not seem to take this problems seriously. I hope they will do something about it in future versions.
I have to add to all…their customer service is HORRIBLE!!!!!
I am new and thought it looked easy…Never would I suggest it to anyone who does not know coding. Once you get it…you are on your own. It has help me up weeks getting my site finished enough to publish..to Me Great customer service is the key to great success with any product.
Although I continue to find Salient a stronger theme all around, I’ve found Elegant Themes support to be very helpful. Plus their daily blog email contains very high quality material for someone like me who’s in the process of learning WP from a developer’s perspective.
PS. I like the ability of using modules, because I am new and am unfamiliar with coding and just learning. Designing is fairly easy. I feel I could have progressed a lot quicker along the way, if I could have had a few questions answered (that would have taken someone who knows the program, only a few minutes of their time to answer). Maybe all programs are like this…I am not sure. When I updated a couple of days ago, it made changes on my site, I did not know how to alter. I was told to use Child Themes. Well that opened a can of worms, since I do not know coding. I believe a company should not advertise customer support and it not be adequate. Forums are not direct support, because there is no one obligated to answer your question.
Hi Halayna,
You can use my Divi Children free plugin to automatically create Divi child themes, and even to customize them, without having to care about coding: http://divi4u.com/divi-children-plugin/
For a look at what Divi theme can do, check out the Divi theme showcase at http://www.divithemeexamples.com
some very nice Divi sites !!
Hi –
Some questions.
1. If I use the DIVI2 or any of the other elegant themes for building my client’s websites, what happens after my yearly license expires and I do not renew (and WordPress updates from 4.0 to 4.1).
2. Is DIVI2 SEO optimised.
3. If I have to switch from DIVI2 to some thing other than Elegant themes, is it easy or I have a major cleanup to do (Shortcodes all over the site in the raw and code showing up in the body of posts)
Thanks for help.
I’m curious about Divi2’s SEO optimization as well. When I view the source code of many of the ElegantTheme demo’s, I don’t see proper use of H1 tags.
We’ve been using Salient for most of our blogs and have got used to how it works. But yeah, a lot of short codes and my main issue is that its bulky and slows down the loading time of my website. I will give Divi a try but the learning curve may stop me from completely adopting it.
Sorry to see that this article is strongly biased.
– it was written by an sponsored and unknown source
– it has no preview images nor listing of Salient’s excellent (page composing) design options
– Salient has an excellent visual composer, far more intuitive than Divi(2)
– Salient’s support is pretty awesome.
– Check http://www.themeforest.com for a more honest view of Salient reviews.
There are many issues that have not been addressed in this article. I am a hybrid designer developer and have had problems with both themes that could be easily resolved if Divi just had a little more flexibility.
Divi is great to get a website up and running without any thought on designing with full-with elements and customization of the design of the site itself. Salient is packed with customize-able options (like full width column design! C’mon Divi). Now, this is not a bash on Divi because i am in limbo as to which to choose still.
Salient is a multi-purpose theme (kind of like Divi), but it is heavily bloated with code that you will not even use on one single project. Are we missing one of the most important parts of web-development…THE PAGE LOAD SPEED!!!! It is utterly horrible, and that is where Divi shines. It loads extremely faster than Salient.
By conundrum: Why can’t I have a flexible theme like Salient to create AMAZING designs, but leverage the clean code of Divi to allow the users to access the pages quicker?
Dont trust reviews that focus solely on the design aspects of Salient instead of load time, and dont trust reviews of Divi that focus solely on the ease of use instead of flexible building with thoughtful design.
Yep, Divi is its own an all in all theme although its the smartest elegant theme of Elegant designs i also admire the same that you mentioned in this post. Well written post that i completely agree. I would like to inform one small thing that i also organised a giveaway of divi theme on my blog if you wish to take a look it would be a pleasure of mine. Thanks
If I have to choose I would go for Divi because it is easy to operate with and it does not require so much professional knowledge to adjust it the way I want. It looks classy and elegant at the same time. A great comparison, by the way!
I have a free child themes for Divi @ http://www.divithemeexamples.com/divi-child-themes/
A blank started child theme and a coffee shop style child theme. free. ejoy :)
The only issue I take up with Divi 2 (a theme which I use regularly, by the way), is that at the time when a WordPress website needs to grow beyond Divi, switching themes leaves your pages and posts covered in walls of shortcode garbage instead of real information.
I wonder how difficult a script plugin would be to search and recognize the Divi shortcodes and remove them when you want to switch themes. Researching Divi now for a client and this issue with shortcode bloating your entire site if/when you want to switch themes could be a gamebreaker.
I’m having this problem now. When Divi upgraded to 2.4, it changed the way my site had displayed, and the tickets I left on the support forums were left unanswered. Now, switching themes has become difficult. Never again will I use a theme that locks me into using it, it’s just headaches down the road.
I must say that I am impressed by Divi, how it tries to act and behave like a more regular or traditional CMS. If you want a flexible theme with a lot of building choices, this is the one to go with. The support from the team is great as well. But in the end, it’s all about how the “feeling” or atmosphere of the site corresponds with the needs of a client, or what kind of homepage you make. Neither of these themes might be the best ones for your own purpose. You need to find the answer in your heart. What theme do you like the most? What “feeling” do you want to achieve.
Having designed a couple of sites each using Salient and Divi, I find Salient a more impressive theme, with better typography, full width support, row options and generally less irritations/limitations. Salient’s page builder, based on Visual Composer, is better though Divi’s is good too – both very intuitive. Divi continues to improve and has a good support community around it (lots of . I’ll continue to consider both themes in the future as they are two of the best around at present.
What I don’t like in Divi is that if you decide to change the theme for some reason and shift to uploading a different template you have to manually fix all the error shortcodes that you get on all the pages. This can be pretty irritating. So I would personally go for Salient!
My vote goes to Divi. The theme is very flexible and it’s getting better everyday. The biggest selling point of Divi is the support Elegant themes provide with their support forum. I have a subscription of Elegant themes from past 3 years and my experience is great with them.
I will rate Divi 5 out of 4.9 due to his smoothness and fast loading time. Divi never makes me bore because it has incredible integrated features. Nice Work Elegant themes, Keep it up!
Salient leaves behind the same mess of shortcodes if you ever decide to change themes as well. This is due to their customized version of the visual composer.
The only way to avoid that is to use the official version of the visual composer (which works in Salient but I haven’t tried in Divi). You can download it here for $35: http://codecanyon.net/item/visual-composer-page-builder-for-wordpress/242431?ref=kyle89. It is lacking in some of the areas that make Salient so awesome, so you’re probably better off sticking with the built in version and crossing the shortcode mess bridge when/if you come to it.
You can do so much with Salient the only reason I can think to change themes is if you want to improve loading times.
I was wondering … one of the strongest point of Sailent is its Devices MENU CANVAS interface extremely fluid innovative and very easy to use on older generations can i have the same on divi?
Thank you
Mark
Just for clarification, one of the scary things about Divi is if you ever switch frameworks/theme creators–down the road, and contingent upon how much content you have–the proprietary Divi builder will mean your content will not migrate well to a new theme. This will require an enormous amount of time to edit all the old content. With that said, however, Divi gives many newbies, the fortitude to create a custom built blog, and modify it at will, without paying an expensive developer. I may have to pay for it later, but for now, I’ll stick with Divi. FYI: this Blog post was written in May, 2014. A prior commentor stated that the Divi builder can’t be used in blog posts. I have been with Divi for about 1.5 months now, and the Divi builder “does” work in posts (perhaps an theme update after the before-mentioned comment was made).
Hi,
Like many others in the comments, i have a subscription at ElegantThemes and i never been happier with one theme : Divi.
This theme is easy to handle for beginners and powerful enough for power user ! A must have