Powering a website doesn’t take a web designer anymore. These years everyone from a devoted blogger to a non-techie business owner can launch a website that drives conversions and revenues. If you’re up to launching a website with stunning UI and ample functionality, but have no coding and web programming skills, you can still make it to the top with a website template. What is the right place to grab one? It’s time to determine this by comparing the two of the leading template providers: TemplateMonster vs. ElegantThemes.
We’re about to look into the range, quality, and versatility of the products they offer, as well as into their pricing policy. Are you with us on this? Then, let’s get started!
Table of Contents
TemplateMonster
Sticking to the verge of web design innovation, TemplateMonster Marketplace serves leading themes to the worldwide audience since 2004. Currently, they’ve served more than 2,000,000 clients and have more than 26,000 templates available. Having turned into a marketplace last year, they impose strict quality control on all the world’s best web designers joining in and do a great job delivering you technically advanced products of first-class quality.
What Kinds Of Products They Offer?
Are you wondering whether you’ll be able to find a template that fully meets your needs? The versatility of templates offered in the marketplace pleases the choosiest customers. First of all, TemplateMonster caters for those, who’d like to start a corporate website or a blog, bringing you more than 3,000 WordPress, Joomla and Drupal themes.
Next, they feature a stellar range of e-commerce store designs running on Magento, PrestaShop, OpenCart, Shopify, WooCommerce and other popular engines. What’s more, they bring you high-quality HTML themes that you can take the fullest advantage of with code and prebuilt WYSIWYG editors. And finally, they go beyond offering website themes and bring you PowerPoint templates, social media packs, icon sets, plugins and much more.
Let’s quickly name the most popular website running solutions that TemplateMonster offers themes for:
- WordPress (1871 themes);
- Joomla (1032 templates);
- PrestaShop (982 themes);
- Magento (459 items);
- WooCommerce (435 templates);
- Shopify;
- OpenCart;
- VirtueMart;
- MotoCMS;
- Drupal;
- Muse, etc.
What Features Do They Pack?
Every template that TemplateMonster sells adheres to the golden standard of modern-day web design practice and is:
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- Responsive and Retina-ready
- Cross-browser compatible
- Optimized for SEO
- Enhanced with pre-built WYSIWYG editor
- Thoroughly documented and supported.
When it comes to the templates developed by the experienced in-house team, the company goes an extra-mile and offers you an award-winning, 24/7 Customer Support that has been praised multiple times for saving clients plenty of time. To take advantage of it, a template owner just has to drop a line in Live Chat, give the team a call or reach them out with a ticket.
To give you a clear understanding of what’s inside TemplateMonster themes (WordPress themes in particular), let’s quickly examine one of their bestselling templates, the well-loved Monstroid2 theme.
Monstroid2 is a multipurpose WordPress theme that won multiple awards and enjoys ravishing popularity. Providing for its universality, Monstroid2 greets you with 9 full-blown skins for different industries, such as fashion, web design, fitness, furniture, hotel business, etc. What’s more, it offers you dozens of main page layout options, as well as 7 distinctive header and footer styles.
Secondly, Monstroid2 is a template of unbeatable functionality. With it, you get as much as 20 plugins that power the breathtaking functionality of your website. Among them, you’re bound to gladly embrace such popular solutions as bbPress, BuddyPress, the multi-tier MegaMenu, Booked Appointment, etc. These plugins are accompanied by the exclusive ones: MotoPress Schedule, Cherry Timeline, Cherry Trending Posts, TM Gallery, etc. These plugins let you create stunning galleries, use multiple content types, embrace innovative post filters, power live search on your website and much more.
Needless to say, Monstroid2 is a Bootstrap-based template, developed to seamlessly fit every screen resolution. Its clean and valid coding is SEO-optimized and lets you occupy the duly deserved place on SERPs. What’s more, with Monstroid2 running an e-store is as simple as ABC. The template integrates WooCommerce plugin and is also pre-loaded with a WooCommerce pack, a set of files that lets you take the fullest advantage of this e-commerce platform.
In fact, as you look through the features of Monstroid, it seems they haven’t missed a single feature you might need to successfully power a stellar web presence. Let’s now see if all this greatness is not overpriced when compared to other options.
Pricing
Fortunately, TemplateMonster pricing is transparent and reasonable. Templates are sold based on one-time payment. After you purchase the theme it’s yours for the lifetime. Under the terms of the single-site license, you can use the theme on one commercial website of your choice. If you purchase the theme coming under GPLv3 license, you can install it on as many websites as you wish. A CMS or HTML template costs $45 – 75. E-commerce themes are priced $75 – $140 depending on the template type you choose.
ElegantThemes
Let’s now turn our attention to the second template provider on the list, ElegantThemes. Although they aren’t as large as TemplateMonster, they’ve been serving the worldwide clientele and eliciting positive feedback for 8 years. This provider takes the WordPress-only approach. So, if you’re after the themes for the most popular engine in the world, drop by without a doubt. If you’re after other engines, ElegantThemes is not an option for you.
Products Offered
As we’ve mentioned above, ElegantThemes sell WordPress themes only. There are 88 items in their theme collection that are divided into a number of categories. You can see the breakdown below:
As you can see, the themes offered at ElegantThemes would be ideal for those who want to create a personal WordPress blog, an online magazine or portfolio, a business or e-commerce website and more. That’s not as much as TemplateMonster covers, but it may be the case you’re fine with a smaller set of options.
What Features Do They Pack?
It’s time to see what gets inside the ElegantThemes products. Surprisingly, not all of their themes are responsive. Only 22 items are marked as responsive, which is quite disappointing. At the same time, the majority of the templates they offer come with:
- Cross-browser compatibility
- Secure and valid code
- Complete Localization
- Shortcodes
- Unique color schemes
- Resourceful support.
It’s not the case that the majority of their themes comes with pre-built visual editors. These are just the flagship templates, such as Divi and Nexus, that deliver you such functionality. Let’s examine the latter closer to see what the features it offers are.
Nexus is a feature-rich magazine template packed with custom widgets and content modules for powering a stunning WordPress web presence. It brings you endless color options and a homepage builder. This intuitive editor lets you customize and move the content blocks around in a couple of clicks. To add content to other website pages, you’ll have to work with shortcodes though.
It’s not the case that Nexus features a number of pre-built plugins. On the other hand, it brings you a number of widgets to easily add videos, galleries, advertisements and showcase your social media profiles. Moreover, the theme features a number of pre-made areas for ads on your website, which is a nice extra. Needless to say, Nexus template is responsive and cross-browser compatible. It comes with lifetime updates and user support.
Pricing
With ElegantThemes, you pay not for one template, but for all the themes they offer. You can pay $89 per year and enjoy 365 days of using as many ElegantThemes templates and plugins as you wish. Alternatively, you may want to pay $249 to have a lifetime access to all the themes and plugins in their collection.
Wrapping Up
TemplateMonster and ElegantThemes are both well-established template providers with years-long history. While TemplateMonster is a large marketplace offering more than 25K templates, ElegantThemes is a relatively small provider with 89 WordPress themes on board. In terms of pricing, ElegantThemes is great for developers who need a couple of new templates every month. However, if you need just one template to power your website, getting it by TemplateMonster would be a cheaper option.
Have you purchased templates from any of these providers? If yes, let others know about your experience in the Comments section below.
Stay tuned for more!
