There’s no doubt about it that Astra and OceanWP are two of the most popular WordPress themes available today. Both these themes are excellent in terms of customization options, offer professional designs, and can be downloaded free of charge as well.

But this article is focused on seeing which one is the best between these two by comparing them with each other and looking at their strengths and weaknesses. Let’s take each notable feature at a time and analyze it.

Prebuilt Professional Designs

One reason for these two themes to be the most popular is due to the inclusion of professional prebuilt designs. Though their names are different, that is pre-made designs are called ‘Starter Sites’ in Astra and ‘theme demos’ in OceanWP, they serve the same purpose for both the themes.

Astra offers 70 designs, of which 35 can be downloaded for free whereas OceanWP offers 73 designs, of which only 13 can be downloaded for free. Astra’s quality of coding is excellent and evidently visible in its designs. Moreover, Astra being an AMP-ready WordPress theme, even Google promotes its design, thus helping users create fast-loading web pages.

However, OceanWP clearly wins in terms of customizing different areas of your design as it provides you with a higher number of settings to make changes to your website than Astra.

Thus, it’s really difficult to come up with one name in this field because both are equally doing well in a few aspects of design. Therefore, this leads to a tie between the two!

Built-in Features & Settings

With these two themes by your side, creating modern websites will be a child’s play for you. Both themes come with great support for drag and drop page builders, are optimized for fast-loading websites, SEO-friendly markup code, and have support for WooCommerce.

There are a lot of features that are common to both of them. The difference just lies in their highlighting tactic. For example, you’ll see Astra highlighting that no jQuery was used in the theme and that it was created with hooks and filters requiring 50KB of resources to load.

On the other hand, OceanWP stresses more on their ‘Market-Leading WooCommerce Integration’. OceanWP definitely gives you more control over your website design. However, the main Astra theme options page takes you directly to the WordPress theme customizer wherein you’ll be allowed to make changes to your website and preview it in real-time.

So, Astra has it all to let you customize your designs but OceanWP does it a little better than the former with a dedicated theme settings area within the WordPress theme customizer. Another interesting thing you’ll find in OceanWP is the Scripts & Styles Panel which allows you to enable and disable the CSS and Javascript powering your website design.

Certainly, there’s no question of going wrong with these two brilliant themes by your side but when it comes to essential WordPress features and settings, more customization features are offered by OceanWP than Astra. Therefore, OceanWP is the winner here!!

Free Plugin Extensions

Plugin extensions add functionality to your website. A total of 9 free plugin extensions are offered by Astra. Out of these, four are specifically designed for Astra to enhance the theme customizer whereas the other five plugin extensions are designed by the developers of Astra, Brainstorm Force, to help them in promoting their products.

On the other hand, OceanWP recommends you install Ocean Extra, Elementor, and WPForms upon activation. But here you need to take note that Ocean Extra isn’t just any other recommended plugin, it is a mandatory one as you won’t be able to access the main theme control panel or run the setup wizard without activating it.

Both these themes promote plugins that aren't specifically designed for the theme and should have been integrated into the core theme instead. Both Astra and OceanWP are head-to-head in this one resulting in a tie.

The takeaway

Two ties and one win for OceanWP. However, you cannot necessarily declare OceanWP the winner here because there are a variety of other factors that would change depending upon the user’s needs and wants.

In addition to that, if you talk about the cost, then OceanWP is definitely at a lower pricing point at $39 for a single license that would unlock all these features. However, Astra Pro is no less either because there’s no restriction on usage here. So, many web design companies and agencies have been seen leaning more towards Astra Pro.

Thus, it after all depends on each individual’s choice. Take my word for it that both of them are the masters of this web design game and won’t give you a chance to complain.