Elegant Themes vs WPZoom
Looking for a nice WordPress theme for your website? Well, you came to the right place. No, not that I have any themes for sale here. I’ll leave that to the many themes designing professionals out there, which I’m sure you’ll notice by now, whose offers range from cheap themes to affordable to those burn-a-hole-in-your-pocket themes.
Yes, there are also those tempting free WordPress themes easily available on the internet. Just a note here that free themes generally are not flexible, has little features and no support. So unless you plan to create a personal blog among your family and some friends, I do suggest that you go for a premium theme.
What I have here is a review, a fair review of two popular WordPress themes providers, Elegant Themes and WPZoom. Both offer feature-rich themes at pretty affordable prices and on top of that, professional support.
Elegant Themes
Elegant Themes was started by this guy named Nick Roach. He is still quite hands-on in creating themes unlike many companies who tend to delegate the job to other designers when business grows. Elegant Themes specializes in simple yet elegant (but of course) WordPress themes that can be customized according to your requirements. You just can’t go wrong with their themes!
WPZoom
WPZoom was launched in 2008 by Pavel Ciorici and has been churning out great WordPress themes since. Their themes are flexible and can be adapted to suit your website’s niche. So far, I see that they have quite a variety of themes from simple blog themes to magazine / news to photography and travel themes.
Let’s compare some important features between these two theme developers.
Elegant Themes Vs WPZoom
Pricing
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Personal package
Elegant Themes doesn’t really sell you just one theme. What they are offering is a membership that comes with 100% access to their whole collection of themes. What’s the membership cost like? Well, it’s $69 per year for the Personal package. Comparatively, this is cheaper than some providers’ single theme cost! And currently they have 87 themes… and counting. So that makes it $0.79 per theme per year!
Also, you get to use it for unlimited websites too. In case you are wondering, there are no registration fees. Just the annual membership fees of $69 for 87 themes!
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Developer package
There’s another package, ie the Developer package, which is designed for professionals. The only difference between the Personal package and the Developer package is that the latter gets access to the Photoshop PSD files. This is mostly used by web designers. These files allow you to make changes to a specific design without having to meddle with the whole theme since the initial design is created on PSD layers.
For $89 per year, it only cost you $1.15 per theme per year. Imagine how significant that amount is to your web projects’ bottom line!
WPZoom, on the other hand, has more options when it comes to theme packages. They offer both per theme and membership packages. Each theme costs $69 one off, with 1 free bonus theme and lifetime support. If you want the PSD Photoshop files, then you can sign up for the Developer Theme, which costs $149.
WPZoom’s Standard and Developer membership packages are billed $9 and $19 on a monthly basis respectively. This means that you can cancel anytime. Do note that there is a one-time sign-up fee for the Membership packages. At the time of writing, they have 53 themes available as opposed to Elegant Themes’ 87.
Check out the following price comparison chart.
Conclusion:
Elegant Themes gives you far more themes for a lower price so they win hands down when it comes to affordability. Even their per year membership price is less than WPZoom’s per theme price!
Features
Elegant Themes is well-known for their flexible and user-friendly features. This is partly the reason why they are popular among beginner as well as more experienced website owners. Their ePanel options panel gives you the power to make various customizations without needing to touch any coding.
You will be able to select color schemes, change navigation settings, adjust site structure, manage ads and many more. Plus, it comes with SEO controls too!
WPZoom’s features are great too, with lots of customizable features that would leave even fussy customers smiling. The WPZOOM options panel allows customization in just a few click of the mouse. You will find features like image and video sliders, multi-tier menus, social networking integration and SEO options among some of their popular features.
Conclusion:
I would say that both Elegant Themes and WPZoom offer fantastic features so it would be a tie in this category. However, if you are looking for an easy-to-use control panel, then I would go for ePanel from Elegant Themes.
Support
Elegant Themes’ support is valid for the duration of your subscription. Once you cancel it, you will still have access to full support till the end of your subscription period, ie there’s no refund for unused period. After that, you will not be able to access new themes, theme updates, technical support and forum. You will however, be free to continue using your downloaded themes!
I have to praise Elegant Themes’ support as the team is extremely fast and helpful. Should you have any questions or need any help, just post your queries in the support forum and you will get a reply promptly.
For WPZoom’s per theme packages, support and updates are lifetime. You are charged a one-time fee only and will get to enjoy these supports as long as you are still using this theme. Similar to Elegant Themes, cancellation of WPZoom’s memberships also means that you will lose access to new themes, updates and support. Re-signing up in future would require you to pay the sign-up fee again.
Conclusion:
Which theme provides better support really depends on your requirements. If you are confident that you will be satisfied with just one theme for the next couple of years, then WPZoom may be a good choice since it allows you lifetime support for that particular theme. But if you prefer to have access to a whole collection of awesome themes and prefer to continuously enjoy support from the developers/designers, then subscribing to Elegant Themes makes more sense!
Both Elegant Themes and WPZoom have a great collection of WordPress themes. They make sure that they had covered a variety of niches to provide a vast choice for their customers. Their support is very professional too. The decision on which provider to sign-up with, would ultimately depend on your web requirements. I would say that both give you quality themes at affordable prices, but Elegant Themes clearly provides you a better deal in my opinion!
