Arguable the two biggest themes in the do it yourself WordPress catalog at the moment are Thesis and Headway. Both make a world of claims and both have active affiliate programs that muddy the waters even further.
Cost
No surprise here, they are identical. Personal options at $87 and Developer options at $164, both offer free upgrades for life.
The only major difference between the two are that Headway will let you use the personal version on 2 websites. They both require that the personal version keep the footer attribution text – which quite frankly is a punk move.
The two site allowance put headway ahead by an inch
Support
Unfortunately sometimes things go sideways and you need to be sure that the people you paid good money too are going to be around to help. Since we couldn’t even get the folks at headway to return a pre-sales email it doesn’t look good for them – but we like to keep an open mind.
DIY Themes (the people that created Thesis) have a mountain of support and resources available. There is the members forums, answers (basically little how to guides), tutorials, guides and a blog. They also answer emails if it ever comes to that. More importantly the affiliate program surrounding Thesis has built up a large collection of tutorials and walk throughs on other websites.
Headway offer a forum and some tutorials and some video bits and pieces that are very nice – but don’t really have the depth or quality that DIY themes have supplied.
Thesis is clearly better supported.
Search Engine Friendliness (Optimization)
Both themes claim an endless list of search engine features that will presumably improve your website rankings. While we didn’t have time to fully review every single claim and feature we did notice one thing.
The user list for Thesis is a veritable who’s who of the search engine optimization and search engine marketing community. People like Michael Gray, Rae Hoffman, Chris Brogan and Matt Cutts all use (and recommend) Thesis. Unproven feature lists and marketing spiel aside, if you can get people like this to use your theme you can all but guarantee that your theme is the most search engine friendly in the market.
Hands down Thesis on this one.
Page Load Time
We don’t think this one is too important, but Google has flagged it as important so we will give it a cursory review. not surprisingly with the extra drag and drop full layout configuration that headway gives you comes the extra time to render the page. On a site with 20 front page excerpts it took on average 78& longer than Thesis to fully load. It was still within what I would call acceptable limits, but markedly slower none the less.
Thesis in a land slide.
Default look and feel
At some point you are going to just leave the theme as is in a live environment. Even if it is just for a day or two while you get configured and setup you want to be sure that your website is presentable. Both look very similar by default, but the typography (read the fonts, the font colors and sizes) in Thesis really makes it stand out.
Thesis looks better out of the box
Ease of Customization
While both themes are sold as customizable WordPress themes, and both scream the ability to completely customize WordPress without programming or special training we have found that more often than not these claims are greatly exaggerated.
Thesis will allow you to manage column numbers and sizes. Featured posts, a multimedia box and you can manipulate all the fonts and background colors. If you want it to look in any way unique though you will have to write some CSS and upload a file or two using FTP.
Headway uses a visual, drag and drop interface that is very easy and will let the average user control the way their blog looks. You can definitely change more than you can with Thesis and doing it visually will be a lot easier for most mortals. Again, like Thesis you really can make too many sweeping changes, but for the average person it might be enough to get them started.
Headway finally gets a point back on Thesis
Conclusion
Side by side both themes are probably about equal, certainly they are in the price department.
At the moment we are giving the nod to Thesis on two points. It’s SEO pedigree, which is becoming increasingly important and difficult to manage. Thesis also feels a lot more robust. Sorry I can quantify that statement very well, but using both themes (front end and administration panels) I felt Thesis was less likely to crash or cause problems as my blog grew.
Do you have any experience with either theme ? Is there anything you would like to add to my review ? leave a comment, I would love to hear form you.
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I’m looking at both of these themes right now, mainly on points of customization. It seems like it’s a good idea to get a fair grasp of CSS either way if you want to stand out so, assuming I’m going to have to learn some of it anyway, Thesis is, so far, the one I’m leaning towards.
wanted to mention a few pricing differences I’ve noticed as a shopper. I don’t own either as of this writing, but according to the Web sites, Thesis (DIYThemes.com) does charge the developer $40 per client site, whereas Headway for the same developer price of $164 allows a designer/developer to make as many client sites as they want for free. So it isn’t accurate to say the dev price is the same. Over time a small agency might make 100 blogs for clients or more. That would cost $4,000 under DIYThesis, and $0 with Headway. Although DIY does offer a 20% discount for bulk. As of 6/30/10: “A single Client Site Option is $40, but you can also purchase 5 and 10-site Client Options for $36/site and $32/site, respectively.”
A healthy support forum is worth something though to be sure. One might expect to pay $30-$80 a month to be a part of a good support “club,” so there’s value in that. And DIY is the original from what I read, and will be out with 2.0 someday. Talented programmers are good to rally around, and DIY has some great customers. It would reportedly be possible to find some great help on their boards.
A 3rd player in the mix is also frugal themes which offers a similar editable WP interface, but throws in some skins at various greater price points.
If I wanted to learn CSS, I suppose I would just go with any freebee theme out there and customize it (or design my own in Photoshop and other Adobe products, for that matter).
I’ve just installed Headway, and was expecting it to the the “Squarespace” of WordPress. And I am completely disappointed. Until Headway gets more than 5 skins, or pre-made, customizable, themes, I’ll stick with Squarespace for the look and feel of my blog. There, I can easily add a banner graphic, and change may characteristics (colors, fonts, columns, addons) without having to pay another penny.
I personally use thesis on my blog, but from user perceptive Headway it’s way easier for managing, but support yes go to Thesis side I agree with you. I just hope, and how I hear Thesis 2.0 should be way better then Headway. So I’ll wait Thesis 2.0
Regards
Not a bad review. I bought Headway and while I liked the app I found support to be a bit spotty, especially for a beginner. I found the online manual lacking and all the videos that they had for the previous versions were removed waiting for new and improved version 2.0 ones.
They killed the old friendly community like support forum in favor of less user friendly but better for the support staff one. Waited days and even over a week for solutions to things I wanted to do — a couple were never answered. Links to other users sites offering support were given but it seemed odd having to go elsewhere for support. They kept promising that things would improve but I lost patience in waiting.
One thing you didn’t mention about Thesis is that after you buy the developer license, they charge an additional $40 per client site you develop with it. Once you buy the Headway developer license, you’re done. If I buy another foundation it will probably be Headway — in hopes that the promised changes are made.
excellent article andrew. clearly broken down and explained.
i can tell you that thesis has deffinetely improved my search rankings.
this review is posted last january 24, 2010. both frameworks have their updates already and also headwaythemes had their recent update to 3.0.
i hope you can update this review.
Cheers!