I was looking to buy a premium WordPress Theme for one of my projects a while ago and I came across ThemeForest and WooThemes. There are other premium WordPress Theme stores like Elegant Themes, Templatic, Template Monster, etc, but ThemeForest and WooThemes are leading the market. After looking around for a while, I decided to review and compare ThemeForest and WooThemes.
ThemeForest
Pros:
- Useful interface (you can search themes by criteria, list themes by authors, see ratings for each theme, no. of sales made, etc)
- Cheap (average $25 - $30 per theme)
- Comes with PSD (Photoshop file)
- Lots of variety
- Comments section for each theme allow you to directly communicate with the theme author and ask questions
Cons:
- Customising each theme can be very different because they are built and designed by many theme developers around the globe.
- Support is provided by the theme author rather than the ThemeForest staff
- Mostly English Only
Quality of themes:
Most themes come with Cufon/sIFR Custom font, jquery plugins, pre-installed WordPress plugins like Related Posts, Most Popular Posts, Social Linking, etc.
WooThemes
Pros:
- Great Support / Knowledge Base available to theme users and theme owners
- Standard "Theme Options" in the admin section that is built on a single WooThemes framework to allow you to customise each theme very easily
- Available in multiple languages
Cons:
- No Advanced Interface (eg: You can't browse themes by author or rating or popularity)
- Expensive (average $70 per theme) *Cheaper if you join the theme club
- PSD only included for Developer License (Average price of a Developer License for each theme: $150)
- Fewer themes compared to ThemeForest
Quality of themes:
As with ThemeForest, most themes from WooThemes come with Cufon Custom font, jquery plugins, pre-installed WordPress plugins like Related Posts, Most Popular Posts, Social Linking, etc. The quality of themes from both stores are very similar. Themes from both stores are written in valid XHTML/CSS, compatible with most modern browsers, etc.
Which one to buy?
As I mentioned earlier, if you are looking for a lot of variety and a value for money, ThemeForest is definitely the answer. The pricing is a lot more affordable compared to WooThemes as they have a bigger community. But if you are looking for consistency and a standard framework and are willing to pay more for that, WooThemes is your friend.
i’m still using free wordpress themes, after i read your post… i think must consider. thanks
.-= nyul´s last blog ..About Content Management System (CMS) =-.
I am currently trying to choose a choose a theme for a WordPress site upgrade. I want a blog with a heavily page oriented website [not posts] This is not what Woo Themes do. [They could, but they don’t]
Woo themes give you 3 for 1 for US $70, [unlimited use.]
Themeforest are from $22 to $47 per theme.
The problem with Woo themes is that they are mostly blog or magazine style themes with a CMS Home Page, whereas there are a lot of website themes on ThemeForest that are Website style themes, with a lot more variety.
Also some themeforest themes are of a higher quality.
Also there are many WordPress 3.0 themes on ThemeForest [a few days after the official release].
Woo themes are yet to convert any of their themes, or use the WordPress 3.0 added Features.
One of those features, Menu options, was contributed to WordPress by Woo themes, so Woo themes has this already.
But Custom Posts and Custom Taxonomies are not yet used in Woo themes, but can be found in some themes on ThemeForest. This is the feature that closes the gap with other CMS platforms like Joomla and Drupal.
I have chosen a ThemeForset theme, because it had much more functionality than the Woo themes, WP 3.0 and custom post types included, but works more like a CMS website. with 14 different page styles, four different Home Page looks. It has so many “page” pages, and a blog post “page”. and about 50 shortcodes, so customisation is a breeze.
Lastly the other thing I noticed is that Themeforest have heaps of themes for portfolios, photos and the like, so you have to wade through a lot to find the style you want.
to expensive to me…. i’m just free user
Just my 2 cents: if you’re planning to use the theme on a non-english site, themeforest is a no-go! The company I work for already bought 4-5 different themes from different designers over at TF and *none* of them was ready for tanslation – not only didn’t they include language files but all text in the themes was hardcoded (“Next Article”, “Search”, etc.).
I only checked The Morning After by WooThemes so far and it had similar problems – lots of untranslatable content, bad code-quality, etc. – but at least their support is working hard to fix reported issues.