Divi vs Avada: Which One Wins in 2024?

Divi vs Avada: Which One Wins in 2024?

Divi and Avada have established themselves as two of the most widely used and powerful WordPress themes available today. Both offer comprehensive website-building tools that appeal to users ranging from beginners to seasoned developers. 

One of the key reasons for their popularity is that they are both multipurpose themes, meaning they are not confined to a single niche. Instead, they come with a variety of pre-designed layouts and templates that allow users to adapt them to different industries or personal projects. These themes are equipped with drag-and-drop builders, enabling even those with little to no coding experience to create visually appealing and functional websites with ease.

In this article, we’ll delve into a detailed comparison of Divi and Avada by evaluating their user experience, features, performance, and pricing. 

Overview of Divi and Avada

Divi and Avada have earned their place as two of the most prominent and well-recognized themes in the WordPress ecosystem. With millions of users around the world, both themes have become go-to solutions for website designers and developers looking to build anything from personal blogs to complex eCommerce sites. 

Their reputation for flexibility and ease of use has made them staples for those seeking to create professional websites without needing extensive technical expertise. Below, we'll take a closer look at each theme to better understand what makes them stand out in the world of WordPress.

Divi Overview

Divi, developed by Elegant Themes and launched in 2013, is a comprehensive WordPress theme and page builder solution that has gained immense popularity for its user-friendly design and flexibility. 

One of Divi's standout features is its visual drag-and-drop editor, which allows users to design their websites in real-time, providing a highly intuitive experience for both beginners and professionals. 

With a wide range of pre-built layouts and modules, Divi makes it easy to create visually appealing and fully functional websites without needing coding knowledge.

In addition to being a complete theme, Divi also offers a standalone page builder plugin, which gives users the flexibility to use the Divi builder with any other WordPress theme. This versatility is particularly appealing to those who may already have a preferred theme but want to take advantage of Divi's powerful design tools. 

Whether you're building a blog, an eCommerce site, or a portfolio, Divi offers a robust and user-friendly platform to bring your vision to life.

Avada Overview

Avada, developed by ThemeFusion and launched in 2012, holds the title of the best-selling WordPress theme on ThemeForest, with a reputation built on its versatility and extensive customization options. 

Avada is known for giving users complete design control, thanks to its drag-and-drop Fusion Builder, now rebranded as Avada Builder. This powerful tool allows users to create highly personalized websites without writing any code, making it ideal for both beginners and advanced developers who want full creative freedom.

One of Avada’s key strengths is its vast library of demo websites, which covers a wide range of industries and website types. These demos can be imported and customized to suit individual needs, providing a fast and efficient way to kickstart any project. 

Additionally, Avada offers a robust options panel that allows for deep customization of almost every aspect of a website, giving users the ability to fine-tune their site's appearance and functionality with ease.

Divi vs Avada: Which One Wins?

In the following sections, we’ll dive into a detailed comparison of Divi and Avada to determine which theme comes out on top in key areas. 

We will evaluate both themes based on their ease of use, customization options, pre-built layouts, performance and speed, eCommerce compatibility, and pricing. 

Divi vs Avada: User Interface and Ease of Use

When it comes to building a website, the user interface and overall ease of use are critical factors that can make or break the experience, whether you're a beginner or a seasoned professional. 

A user-friendly interface can significantly reduce the learning curve, allowing users to focus on creativity and functionality rather than wrestling with complex design tools. 

We’ll compare Divi and Avada to see how each theme fares in terms of providing a smooth, intuitive user experience for all levels of users.

Divi User Interface

Divi’s user interface is built around its highly intuitive visual drag-and-drop builder, which is designed to offer a seamless experience for users of all skill levels. The builder operates in real time, allowing you to see the changes you make as you design your website. 

One of its unique features is the use of floating panels, which are non-intrusive and can be moved around as needed, giving you complete freedom over your workspace.

At the core of Divi’s design structure are its three main building blocks: sections, rows, and modules. 

Sections serve as the largest containers that hold rows, while rows are used to organize the layout within a section by dividing the space into columns. Modules are the individual elements, such as text, images, sliders, or buttons, that you add to your layout. 

To add a new module, you simply click on the “+” button within a row, which opens a module library. From there, you can select the module type you want and drop it directly into your page.

Inline editing is another highlight of Divi’s interface, allowing you to click directly on any text on the page and start typing right away. 

When you select a module or an element to edit, Divi presents a three-tab customization window: Content, Design, and Advanced. 

The Content tab is where you manage the primary content of the module, such as text, images, or links. The Design tab gives you access to style options, like font sizes, colors, margins, and padding. The Advanced tab is for users with more technical needs, allowing for custom CSS, transitions, or even visibility settings.

At the bottom of the builder interface, you’ll find Divi’s bottom ribbon menu, which provides quick access to essential tools like saving, undoing/redoing actions, switching between wireframe and visual modes, and previewing your site in different screen sizes (desktop, tablet, and mobile).

This menu streamlines navigation and makes it easier to access the main functionalities without overwhelming the user with options. Overall, Divi’s interface prioritizes flexibility and ease, making it an excellent choice for both novice and experienced web designers.

Avada User Interface

Avada’s user interface is designed to offer flexibility with both a front-end live editing interface and a back-end drag-and-drop wireframe version, giving users the choice of how they prefer to build their websites. 

The front-end live editor allows you to design your site in real-time, seeing the changes as they are applied directly on the page. For those who prefer a more structured approach, the back-end wireframe mode provides a simpler view, showing the layout as blocks and rows, which can be dragged and rearranged easily. 

This dual approach ensures that both beginners and advanced users can work in a way that suits their comfort level.

The Avada Builder uses a system of Containers, Columns, and Elements to structure the layout. 

Containers are the largest structural components and can hold one or more columns. Columns, in turn, hold individual elements such as text, images, sliders, or buttons. This system gives users control over the layout of each page, allowing them to divide their content into different sections and customize them as needed. 

Each element is represented by an icon, which appears when you focus on it within the builder. When you hover over this initial icon, additional control icons appear, offering options to edit, duplicate, or delete the element, making it easy to manage the different components of your page.

One of Avada's standout features is its Element Global Options, which can significantly speed up the design process. These options allow users to save and reuse specific design settings across multiple pages or elements. 

For example, if you've designed a particular button style or text box that you want to use repeatedly throughout your site, you can save those settings globally. Once saved, any time you add that element to another page, it will automatically adopt the predefined styles and settings, eliminating the need to recreate the design from scratch. 

The combination of front-end live editing and back-end wireframe options, alongside Avada’s intelligent use of Containers, Columns, and Elements, offers great design flexibility. Meanwhile, the addition of Element Global Options ensures a more efficient workflow.

Divi vs Avada: Design and Customization Options

Modern WordPress builders must offer robust customization options to meet the diverse needs of users, from personal blogs to complex business sites. Both Divi and Avada provide extensive design tools that allow users to tailor every aspect of their website.

Divi Theme Builder and Design Features

Divi’s powerful Theme Builder is one of its standout features, offering users the ability to create fully customizable global elements like headers, footers, and custom templates for various post types and pages. 

Divi’s intuitive setup for handling dynamic data makes it easy to pull in content from WordPress, such as post titles, featured images, and metadata, to automatically populate your custom templates.

Divi also comes equipped with an extensive module library that offers more than 40 content modules, 25 WooCommerce-specific modules, and 3 structural modules. These modules cover everything from basic elements like text, images, and buttons to more advanced features like sliders, pricing tables, and forms. 

For those running eCommerce stores, the WooCommerce modules allow you to seamlessly integrate product grids, add-to-cart buttons, and other key shopping elements with ease. 

The structural modules enable you to create complex layouts by controlling the sectioning and placement of content across the page.

In terms of design, Divi shines with its extensive range of customization options. You can easily tweak fonts, colors, sizing, and spacing for every module. Additionally, Divi includes advanced design features like parallax scrolling, which adds depth and motion to your pages, hover states, where elements change appearance when users interact with them, and shape dividers, which let you add creative and visually appealing transitions between sections. 

These features, combined with the flexibility of Divi’s theme builder, make it possible to create highly personalized and visually dynamic websites without needing to write a single line of code.

Avada Theme Builder and Design Features

Avada’s Theme Builder offers robust design capabilities through its Layout Builder, which supports two main types of layouts: Global Layouts and Conditional Layouts. 

Global Layouts allow users to design headers, footers, and other key sections that can be applied site-wide, ensuring consistency across all pages. Conditional Layouts, on the other hand, provide advanced flexibility by allowing users to create different layouts based on specific criteria. 

Each layout consists of four primary sections: Header, Page Title Bar, Content, and Footer, giving users full control over the structure and appearance of their site.

Avada also excels in incorporating dynamic content into layouts. With this feature, users can pull in data such as post titles, featured images, or other custom fields dynamically, making it easy to build templates that auto-populate content across different pages. 

When it comes to customization, Avada offers a vast library of over 120 design elements, making it one of the most versatile WordPress themes available. These elements include text blocks, images, galleries, videos, maps, buttons, and much more. 

With its combination of dynamic content support, conditional layouts, and a wide range of design elements, Avada gives users unmatched flexibility in creating personalized websites tailored to specific needs and use cases.

Divi vs Avada: Prebuilt Layouts and Templates

Both Divi and Avada offer extensive libraries of prebuilt layouts and templates, designed to cater to a variety of industries and use cases. We’ll discuss the specific offerings of each theme and how they can enhance the overall website-building experience.

Divi Prebuilt Layouts

Divi has an extensive library of over 350+ layout packs, each containing multiple pre-designed pages, with a total of 2,703 individual layouts available. These layout packs are tailored to various industries, including eCommerce, business, health, creative portfolios, and more.

Each layout is fully customizable, allowing users to tweak colors, fonts, images, and content to align with their brand. 

Avada Prebuilt Layouts

Avada offers 108 professionally prebuilt demos, each designed with a specific niche in mind, ranging from business, health, and technology to creative portfolios and eCommerce stores. 

Unlike Divi’s layout packs, which consist of individual page designs within each pack, Avada’s demos are full website templates that come pre-configured with multiple pages, a complete structure, and preset design elements, allowing for faster and more cohesive site creation. 

One of Avada’s key features is the ease with which users can import these prebuilt demos. With just a few clicks, an entire demo can be imported, including all the layouts, design elements, and settings, enabling users to quickly set up the foundation of their website.

Divi vs Avada: Performance and Speed

Performance and speed are crucial components for the success of any website, as they directly impact both user experience and SEO rankings. 

Let’s have a look at how Divi and Avada perform in terms of speed and optimization, giving you a clearer picture of which theme offers a more efficient and streamlined experience.

Divi Performance

Divi is often recognized for being resource-heavy, particularly when working with more complex or large-scale designs. 

Its extensive customization options, visual effects, and modules can slow down site performance, especially on shared hosting environments or when handling numerous high-resolution elements. 

This can lead to slower page load times, which not only impacts the user experience but also affects SEO rankings.

We ran a test to accurately measure the performance of Divi Builder. We ran the test on InstaWP test sites. The first part of the test was performed on a blank WordPress website with the GeneratePress theme without any plugins. Then we installed the builder and ran the test again. Lastly, we created a test page with the following modules: 

• Heading
• Text
• Button
• Image
• Feature section with three Image Boxes.

This test allowed us to understand the performance of the builder in a practical scenario. 

Let’s take a look at the results we got: 

Scenario	Page Size	Requests	Desktop	Mobile
Blank Website	41.7 KB	7	98	98
With Divi Builder Installed	158.4 KB	12	98	94
Test Page	576.4 KB	23	93	89

On a blank WordPress site, Divi recorded 41.7 KB page size and 31 HTTP requests. The PageSpeed Insights scores were 98 for desktop and 98 for mobile.

When we ran the test again with the plugin installed, Divi recorded 158.4 KB as the page size and 12 HTTP requests. The PageSpeed Insights scores were 98 for desktop and 94 for mobile.

For the test page with the modules, the size of the page increased to 576.4 KB with 23 HTTP requests. PageSpeed Insights scores for the test page were 93 for desktop and 89 for mobile.

While the results are not downright horrible, Divi doesn’t really perform great in terms of website speed. The results are average at best. 

Avada Performance and Speed

Avada is optimized out-of-the-box, ensuring that even its pre-built demos and templates are designed with performance in mind. 

The builder’s clean code and streamlined architecture contribute to faster load times, which means users don’t have to invest as much effort into manual optimization. Avada’s pre-optimized templates ensure that the core structure of each demo is already optimized for speed, allowing websites to perform well without requiring extensive configuration or third-party plugins. 

This focus on efficiency makes it easier to launch websites that are not only visually appealing but also fast, contributing to a smoother user experience and improved SEO performance right from the start.

Divi vs Avada: eCommerce Compatibility

Both Divi and Avada are frequently used to build eCommerce stores, thanks to their strong integration with WooCommerce, the most popular WordPress eCommerce plugin. Let’s compare how Divi and Avada integrate with WooCommerce and explore the unique features each theme offers to enhance the eCommerce experience.

Divi and WooCommerce

Divi offers a wide range of WooCommerce modules, allowing users to create custom product pages, unique checkout designs, and personalized shop layouts with its visual drag-and-drop builder. 

These modules make it easy to insert WooCommerce elements like product galleries, add-to-cart buttons, and pricing tables directly into your designs, giving users full creative control over the look and feel of their online stores. 

While Divi is highly intuitive and user-friendly for creating beautiful store layouts, it lacks some advanced eCommerce features, such as granular control over specific WooCommerce elements like product filtering or in-depth inventory management. 

Avada and WooCommerce

Avada takes WooCommerce integration a step further with its more advanced eCommerce features. It includes an advanced product grid builder, which allows users to design customized product layouts and grids, providing more flexibility for showcasing products in creative ways. 

Additionally, Avada offers custom cart and checkout options, enabling users to design fully tailored shopping experiences that match the overall theme of their site. The shop page design tools in Avada also offer greater flexibility, allowing users to customize the structure and appearance of product listings, categories, and shop layouts with detailed controls. 

These advanced tools make Avada a great choice for users who need more control and flexibility over their WooCommerce store’s design and functionality.

Divi vs. Avada: Pricing and Value

With the features out of the way, let’s have a look at the pricing plans for Divi and Avada. 

Divi Pricing Plans

Divi has two types of pricing, yearly and lifetime. For both types of pricing, Divi has two subscriptions named Divi and Divi Pro. The Divi plan costs $89/year and the Divi Pro plan costs $277/year. 

Features like Divi AI, Divi Cloud, Divi VIP, and Divi Teams are only available in the pro version. 

As for the lifetime deals, the basic subscription costs $249. The pro version costs $297, but you need to pay $212 each following year to keep the pro service.

Avada Pricing Plans

Avada’s pricing starts from $69. As it’s basically a theme, you only pay a one-time price. The Regular License comes with 6 months of support, and you can extend it to 12 months by paying $21.38 more. 

The extended license costs $2950, and can be suitable for white label agencies. 

Conclusion: Which Website Builder Wins in 2024?

So, which one wins? Here’s our final thoughts. 

Best for Beginners

For beginners, Avada is the better choice due to its more structured and straightforward approach. Its pre-optimized templates, advanced conditional layouts, and easy-to-import demos provide a smooth learning curve. Avada’s WooCommerce features are also user-friendly, making it easier to launch an eCommerce store right away.

Best for Advanced Users

For experienced developers or power users, Divi is the better option, thanks to its visual drag-and-drop builder and greater design flexibility. Divi’s theme builder offers extensive customization options, and its module library and advanced design effects make it a powerful tool for users who want complete creative control. 

A Better Alternative to Divi and Avada

If you're looking for a more streamlined and efficient website builder, Breakdance is an excellent alternative to Divi and Avada. Breakdance is known for its bloat-free nature, meaning it delivers a fast, lightweight experience without sacrificing design or functionality. Unlike other builders that can become sluggish due to their extensive features, Breakdance is optimized for performance, ensuring fast load times and a smoother user experience.

Breakdance also shines in terms of ease of use. It offers a highly intuitive interface with drag-and-drop functionality, making it accessible to beginners while still providing advanced options for seasoned developers. 

With its powerful design tools, Breakdance enables users to create visually stunning websites without the complexity or clutter found in some other themes. Its emphasis on performance, simplicity, and flexibility makes it a compelling choice for those seeking a modern, efficient website builder.