Let’s compare Astra and GeneratePress on 10 different aspects.

Astra and GeneratePress are two of the leading WordPress themes that are very popular for their ease of use, fast site load times, and excellent customization options.

GeneratePress is developed keeping the performance in mind. It doesn’t make your site heavy with a lot of customization options and external integrations. It is less than 10KB. On the other hand, Astra is also a lightweight theme at 50KB that is feature-rich and comes with a lot of integrations to build your website.

Astra provides excellent integrations with WordPress LMS plugins like LearnDash and LifterLMS, an advantage for course creators. Apart from these, it also supports white-labeling; rejoice agency owners!

So, which one should you choose? Astra or GeneratePress?

Product	Astra	GeneratePress
Pricing starts at	$59/year $249/Lifetime	$59/year $249/Lifetime
Sites usage	You can use on unlimited sites	Restricted to 500 sites
Addons available	Ultimate Addons for Elementor, Beaver Builder, Gutenberg Schema Pro Convert Pro Etc	GenerateBlocks
Coding skills needed?	No. You get almost all the features built-in within the theme	Yes. The built-in theme lacks many features.
Integrations	Astra has a good number of integrations. For instance, WooCommerce, LearnDash, Tutor LMS, etc.	GeneratePress doesn’t integrate with other plugins except for WooCommerce.
Explore	Explore Astra	Explore GeneratePress

If you are in a hurry, here is a quick summary for you:

Upfront Bottomline: Astra is very easy to use. It comes with many customization options right out of the bat, unlike GeneratePress which requires some coding knowledge. It is a completely white-labeled solution best for agencies and it supports unlimited websites. It also integrates with WooCommerce and other popular WordPress plugins well.

On the other hand, GeneratePress requires you to have some coding knowledge (especially HTML and CSS) if you want to add some additional features to the theme. It is not a white-labeled solution, it doesn’t integrate with other WordPress plugins, and its premium theme has limited customization options.

Time to make a decision:

➡ Are you a pagespeed freak, who obsesses about some marginal pagespeed gains and also happens to be familiar with coding? Then go with GeneratePress.
➡ Are you an average joe who doesn’t like to waste time coding? Do you expect more easy customization options? Also, would you like to preserve the optionality of integrating your theme well with WooCommerce, LearnDash, and other plugins in the future? Yes? Go with Astra.
➡ Are you already using Elementor Pro? Then, don’t waste time here. Go with Elementor Hello theme and use Elementor’s theme builder. Thank me later. You don’t need redundant features.

If you’re not familiar with coding, and you go with ​​GeneratePress solely for pagespeed, you may:

➡ Waste a lot of time in GeneratePress forums searching for solutions and snippets to add to your website.
➡ Use a lot of other 3rd-party plugins to accomplish small little tweaks thus bloating your website, and defeating the purpose why you chose GeneratePress in the first place.

Let’s get started with the complete review on GeneratePress vs. Astra.

Overview

Astra is an easy-to-use theme developed by the Brainstorm Force, which has developed many other popular products for WordPress. It supports many addons like Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg, Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder, and Ultimate Addons for Elementor to take your page building experience to next level.

You can as well use these Ultimate addon plugins by Astra developers independently.

Whereas with GeneratePress you can use its GenerateBlocks, which gives powerful blocks to design your website. GeneratePress theme is from a solo developer, Tom Usborne. This may explain the reason why the developer is reluctant to create separate plugins or modules to make GeneratePress compatible with other popular WordPress plugins like LearnDash or LifterLMS.

Both Astra and GeneratePress themes are compatible with almost all page builders though.

Astra Pros

• Astra’s starter templates are accessible even if you are on the free version. Apart from normal websites, they have complete WooCommerce sites as well for you to import.
• Astra is a completely white-labeled solution. If you have an agency and manage client websites, you can custom brand them.
• Astra is very easy to use, user-friendly and has good customization options to design your blog and also a WooCommerce store. GeneratePress needs some coding knowledge if you want to add extra features with custom CSS. For example – Astra has built-in features to display read time on posts, highlight some menu item in the navigation bar, etc. to get these features with GeneratePress you need to use custom code snippets in their support forum.
• With Astra’s visual header and footer builder, you can create custom headers and footers by just dragging and dropping the widgets. It’s just more intuitive than GeneratePress which relies on GeneratePress elements (which is kinda geeky).
• Astra allows you to design post structure and metadata of archive pages and WooCommerce product pages. This is lacking in GeneratePress.
• Astra has a few plugins like bulk edit, import/export customizer settings, custom Typekit fonts, etc. which saves you a lot of time in designing the website.
• Astra has integrations with LearnDash, LifterLMS, Easy Digital Downloads, Toolset. I really like when systems integrate with each other as it leads to emergence of new usecases.
• You can use Ultimate Addon for Gutenberg with Astra to design stunning web pages and posts. UAG provides plenty of advanced blocks to take your site design to a new level.
• Astra provides many customization options to design your WooCommerce checkout pages. You can make the checkout in a two-step, add coupon fields and order notes, etc. These WooCommerce features are lacking in GeneratePress.
• Astra ConsAstra’s free version has very limited customization options. If you need more customization options even in the free version, look at Kadence theme*.
• Astra theme lacks the built-in feature to social network profiles. To achieve this, you need to use its Astra Widgets or use custom code with hooks.
• Astra is quite slower than out of the box, but already comes loaded with features. So, you’ll minimize the use of external plugins. This is a benefit in disguise.

GeneratePress Pros

• GeneratePress is a very lightweight theme. To maintain lightweightness, it has not integrated with any other external plugins.
• GeneratePress elements module is a game-changer. With this, you can design custom sidebars, site header & footers, blocks, and hooks
• GenerateBlocks comes with templates for you to design page heros, post navigation, sidebars, etc.

Astra Cons

• Astra lacks a built-in feature to add conditional headers right in the customizer.
• Astra WooCommerce addon is not so feature rich.

GeneratePress Cons

• GeneratePress’ WooCommerce module lacks checkout and advanced cart customization options, unlike Astra.
• GeneratePress doesn’t allow you to design the post structure and the metadata. In case of Astra, you can edit the post structure and the metadata.
• GeneratePress is not a completely white-labeled solution, unlike Astra. But you can make it custom branded though with some coding knowledge. Okay, CMD+F knowledge!
• It doesn’t have any integrations with other plugins like say LMS solutions. Also their WooCommerce integration is pretty limited compared to Astra .

Ease of use and user interface

Astra is really easy to use and is more user-friendly than GeneratePress.

GeneratePress theme lacks some features like displaying reading time on posts. To get this feature you need to use custom CSS. If you are not techy adding extra features to GeneratePress will be a pain for you. It’s a low-code theme vs. Astra which is a no-code theme.

Also, Astra has all the WooCommerce features in its WooCommerce module. While in GeneratePress, some WooCommerce features are available under the layouts section of WooCommerce and some are available in the WooCommerce module, which may not be so intuitive.

In the dashboard, both Astra and GeneratePress have links to the customizer settings for quick access.

Winner: Astra. Astra is very easy to use and the theme has more features built-in and all its features are neatly organized in the respective sections.

Speed and performance

Let’s analyze the performance results of GeneratePress and Astra with GTmetrix.

Test environment:

• WordPress site running on Closte (powered by Google Cloud and Litespeed)
• Tests are run keeping Closte’s CDN server-side cache that includes OPCache and advanced-cache.
• Litespeed cache plugin on WordPress.

GeneratePress free

GeneratePress premium

Astra free theme alone

I have deactivated all the other plugins and have only Astra’s free theme installed.

Performance with Astra Pro

You can analyze from the above tests that both Astra and GeneratePress themes load faster. There are a few milliseconds difference, you don’t need to worry about this. You can have a fast-loading site with both Astra and GeneratePress.

Needless to say, as you add more and more plugins, the page speed performance may drop. With Astra, as there are already a lot of features and integrations built-in, reliance on third-party plugins will be minimal.

Site library (Starter templates)

With GeneratePress Premium, you will get access to its site library of templates.

Astra has a free plugin called Starter Templates. The best thing here is, that even if you are using the free theme of Astra you can use the demo sites provided by this plugin. To access the templates of GeneratePress, you must be its Pro user.

Also, Astra’s starter templates have features like wireframes and patterns. GeneratePress lacks this.

FYI:

• Patterns are the ready-made sections of a web page you can just add them one below the other to build the entire site.
• Wireframes are nothing but WordPress blocks that help you visualize and structure site design before start adding the content.
• You can access Wireframe blocks even in the Ultimate Addons for the Gutenberg plugin.

With both themes, you can import these starter templates with one click. While choosing the templates, you can filter them by the page builder you are using.

Winner: Astra. Astra provides free starter templates to use with the free version. On the other hand, the GeneratePress site library is accessible only if you are its premium user.

Compatibility with page builders

As I told previously, both Astra and GeneratePress work well with all most all the page builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi, etc.

For example, on this site, we’re using the Astra Pro theme along with Elementor Pro.

You need not necessarily use a page builder.

You can even build an entire website only using GeneratePress along with the GenerateBlocks plugin. GenerateBlocks plugin provides various block elements and eliminates the need for page builder plugins.

Similar to GenerateBlocks, Astra has Ultimate Addon for Gutenberg. You can design your entire website with UAG blocks. Each block has powerful customization options.

Winner: Astra. Astra theme is fully compatible compared to GeneratePress. You cannot design GeneratePress elements using page builders, whereas you can design Astra’s custom layouts with your own page builder.

Design and customization

Astra’s customizer is more powerful than that of GeneratePress. Its v3.0 update has improved the customizer loading time by 70% along with releasing a new visual header and footer builder.

Global settings

Both Astra and GeneratePress support Global Colors. Astra even supports global typography, global containers, global buttons. These features save time and make sure you have a consistent design across the site.

Unlike Kadence or Blocksy, these two themes lack a global color palette switch addon using which you can automatically switch between dark/light modes for your website.

Header and footer builder

Using Astra’s visual header and footer builder, you can design the custom headers and footers as you wish with the widgets available. You can choose the header layout and width, make the header transparent or sticky, and much more.

GeneratePress lacks a header and footer builder. To design custom headers and footers with GeneratePress, you need to use GenerateBlocks and GeneratePress elements. Using GenerateBlocks you can design comparable headers and footers.

Both Astra and GeneratePress support mobile headers. With both themes, you can make the mobile headers sticky.

To design the mobile header in Astra, go to Customizer>Menu Plus>Mobile header. In the case of GeneratePress, you can find the option under Customize > Layout > Header.

Sidebars

With both Astra and GeneratePress, you can set the sidebars for the site, blogs, and single posts.

Astra has these sidebar options:

• Default
• No sidebar
• Left sidebar
• Right sidebar

The sidebar options you get in GeneratePress are:

• Content / Sidebar
• Sidebar / Content
• Content (no sidebars)
• Sidebar / Content / Sidebar
• Sidebar / Sidebar / Content
• Content / Sidebar / Sidebar

The sidebar options in GeneratePress are really good. If you have more features and want to display them as sidebars, GeneratePress will make you happy. With Astra, you need to use the custom layouts feature and the Lightweight Sidebar Manager plugin to create fancy sidebars. With GeneratePress also, you can create custom sidebars using its elements feature.

Blog (Archive and single posts)

Astra provides more options to design your blog pages compared to GeneratePress. With both themes, you can display the date, author, tags, categories, and comments for the posts.

Astra allows you to display the read time on archive posts. To achieve this with GeneratePress, you need to use custom codes. If you are not techy, adding additional features to GeneratePress with custom codes will be a bit difficult unless you dig in their community forum for snippets.

Also, Astra allows you to design the post structure and the meta by just dragging and dropping. GeneratePress lacks this feature and you need to follow the default structure unless you know to code.

With Astra, you can also design the post pagination. You can choose the pagination style, add spacing, custom fonts, etc.

For single pages designed with Astra, you can display the related posts and enable the autoloading of previous posts. These features help you in increasing the on-site duration of the users. With GeneratePress you need to integrate it with plugins like WP Show Posts to display the related posts and use any custom solutions to avail auto-loading of previous posts feature.

WooCommerce customizer

I give Astra a big thumbs up here as it has more customization options to design your store compared to GeneratePress.

Unlike GeneratePress, with Astra

• You can choose the grid layout.
• Customize the shop product structure and single product structure.
• Enable Ajax add to cart and cross-sells.

Also, Astra allows you to customize the WooCommerce checkout page.

• You can make the checkout as a two-step.
• Display apply coupon field, display the order note, and much more.
• With GeneratePress you can’t make the checkout as a two-step.

Custom layout options

With GeneratePress elements module you can create headers, custom layouts, hook elements, and block elements. Block elements allow you to create stunning page heroes, site headers, sidebars, content templates, post navigation, etc.

As you already know that GeneratePress lacks a drag and drop header& footer builder. Using GeneratePress elements you can design custom headers and footers to display on your site. To make them more attractive, I recommend you to use GenerateBlocks elements.

Astra’s pro version comes with a custom layout addon for you to create custom headers, footers, hooks, 404 pages, and custom content. You can design these custom layouts either using the default WordPress blocks/UAG blocks or using page builders.

You can also use Astra hooks in the customizer settings by installing Astra Hooks free plugin.

On the other hand, GeneratePress elements can only be designed using the default WordPress or Gutenberg editor.

As a workaround, you can design your custom content using page builder templates (like in Elementor) and then insert the template shortcode using GeneratePress hooks.

Note: You can set the start and the end date/time for Astra custom layouts, this is not possible with GeneratePress elements.

Astra allows you to create custom sidebars using its Sidebar Manager addon. It is a free addon. With GeneratePress, you may need to use a third-party plugin.

If you want to know more about GeneratePress elements and Astra custom layouts and sidebars, I recommend you to go through my in-depth reviews on Astra and GeneratePress.

Winner: Astra. Overall Astra excels over GeneratePress with its customization options. Astra WooCommerce addon, custom layouts, header, and footer builder are more powerful than GeneratePress. Also, you have more design and customization features with UAG. GenerateBlocks is quite limited.

Astra and GeneratePress addons

As of now, GeneratePress has only one addon GenerateBlocks. It enhances the versatility of your Gutenberg editor and assists you in designing stunning web pages without the need for page builder plugins.

GenerateBlocks comes with blocks like containers, grids, headlines, and buttons that help you create stunning websites. Also, you will get some pre-made templates to design the blocks like page hero, post meta, post navigation, site headers, etc.

In the blocks, you can link the dynamic text and dynamic links to trigger the data from posts or pages.

For example – If you are creating a custom block to display all the posts in a category, you can directly pull the title of the posts by linking the dynamic text – “Title”.

Astra also has a few free and paid addons.

These free add-ons enhance the functionalities of your Astra theme.

GeneratePress has built-in features for customizer reset and import/export the customizer settings. It lacks features like customizer search, custom Typekit fonts, bulk edits, etc. These features are a huge time saver.

Astra has paid add-ons like Ultimate Addons for Elementor, and Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder. If you want to enrich your page builder features with these add-ons, you can go with Astra’s growth bundle at $249/year.

Ultimate Addon plugins for Gutenberg

This is a free plugin and comes with various block elements to increase the design freedom of the default Gutenberg editor.

Compared to GenerateBlocks, UAG offers more advanced blocks. These include pricing lists, infobox, post layouts, post and content timeline, and much more. Click here to see all the blocks UAG offers.

For each of these blocks, there are a lot of customization options available. Note that you won’t get any templates to design these blocks.

Winner: Astra. Astra has more number of add-ons (both free and paid) to extend the theme’s functionalities. You can use its free addons even with Astra’s free theme. Astra customizer search and bulk edit saves you a lot of time.

Free vs Pro versions compared

Astra’s free version is generous compared to GeneratePress’s free theme. You can access Astra’s starter templates even with the free theme. Whereas to access GeneratePress’s site library you need to purchase its pro version.

Also, Astra has some free add-ons like Astra Customizer Reset, Customizer Search, Astra Bulk Edit, Astra Widgets, Custom Fonts, etc, extending the functionalities of the theme.

Both Astra and GeneratePress free themes have very limited customization options. These include – limited typography, colors & backgrounds, and spacing options.

If you have WordPress based LMS website and want to integrate Astra with LearnDash or LifterLMS plugins, you need to have Astra Pro.

Also, if you want to integrate these themes with your WooCommerce store, you need pro versions.

Winner: Astra. Astra’s free theme has more features compared to GeneratePress. Astra has a few free starter templates for you to get started, unlike GeneratePress which requires a premium license to access its site library.

Integrations

GeneratePress lacks behind Astra in integrations as it’s from a sole developer.

Astra integrates with LearnDash, LifterLMS, Easy Digital Downloads, and Toolset. That’s it. There are not too many integrations.

In the future, GeneratePress may release a free plugin to add the functionalities of LMS plugins like LearnDash and LifterLMS. But so far, it has been a broken promise.

Winner: Astra offers a few integrations. If you are a course creator, Astra is the go to theme to create an LMS website as it integrates with LMS plugins.

Pricing

Both Astra and GeneratePress have annual and lifetime plans.

Astra’s lowest plan starts at $59/year ($249/lifetime), this plan includes all the pro features.

If you need an ultimate addon for page builder, you can go with Essential Bundle that costs $276/mo (996/lifetime).

If you need all the plugins that Astra offers, you can choose a growth bundle at $523/year (1893/lifetime). This plan gives you access to,

• Convert Pro Plugin
• Schema Pro Plugin
• Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder
• Ultimate Addons for Elementor

GeneratePress annual plan costs $49/year, while the lifetime plan costs $249/lifetime.

You can use GeneratePress on up to 500 websites, whereas Astra supports unlimited site usage.

Winner: Astra. Astra is cheap for the features it offers. You can use Astra on unlimited websites and it has a white labeling feature for agencies.

Support

Both Astra and GeneratePress have in-depth knowledgebase articles and video tutorials to assist their customers.

Astra has a powerful community of its users where you can ask your queries. GeneratePress also has a forum where the support team and GeneratePress users will assist if you run into any issues.

Wrap up

Both Astra and GeneratePress are two of the best WordPress themes. The final choice depends on your use cases.

Choose Astra:

• If you want an easy-to-use theme and you have zero coding skills.
• You are not tech-savvy and completely depend on the theme features to design your website.
• If you have an agency and need completely a white-labeled solution and unlimited site usage.
• If you want to design your own LMS website integrating with LMS plugins like LearnDash or LifterLMS.
• If you have a WooCommerce store and need to customize it the way you need with rich Astra WooCommerce features.

GeneratePress is for you:

• If you don’t want to make the site heavy with external integrations.
• If you are tech-savvy have some coding knowledge and want to keep the theme lightweight.
• If GeneratePress elements and GenerateBlocks are enough for you to design your websites.

I hope you liked this post on Astra vs. GeneratePress helpful.