Divi or Astra? We built the same site in both.
Astra is the most-installed theme on this list by a wide margin. I built the same 13-section homepage in it and in Divi 5, copying one stylesheet and one JavaScript file into both without editing either, and measured the difference in pixels.
Astra reproduced the design exactly, across more than 76 million pixels. Getting there took the first ninety minutes of the build, and none of that time went on the design.
This is one of six builds of the same page. The full comparison with every measurement in one place is in the main write-up.
Divi or Astra: which one is better?
Astra reproduced the design exactly. Byte-identical markup, and zero differing pixels across 76,097,716 pixels at six screen widths. Maximum channel difference of zero.
So did Divi. Zero differing pixels at every width tested, from the same prototype files.
Divi scored higher with a perfect 100 on all four Lighthouse categories, and the same design on the page.
Astra’s payload is the interesting measurement, and it is unlike any other in this project. I measured what each platform ships before you write any of your own code. Astra’s entire payload is two requests and 14 KB, and removing it changes the performance score by nothing at all. Stock 98, trimmed 98.
So Astra costs nothing in speed. What it costs is accuracy. Put its stylesheet back and the layout breaks: 0.62% divergence on desktop, and on mobile 13.83% with 40 extra pixels of page height.
For every other platform I measured, trimming the payload bought speed. For Astra it bought fidelity. So the honest summary is that Astra’s defaults are what you’ll spend your time on. Its weight was never the problem. That is a different trade and worth understanding before you assume a light theme is a neutral one.
The specific culprit is worth naming, because it will catch anyone doing this. Astra ships a scroll-to-top control that is on by default. With the theme’s CSS removed it lost its positioning and became a visible block in the flow, adding exactly 16 pixels to the page at every width. The build described it as sixteen pixels of arrow nobody could see, white on white.
What do Astra and Divi cost in 2026?
The Astra theme is free on wordpress.org and that free tier is what this build used. Astra Pro on its own is $69 a year for up to three sites, or $249 once at the current introductory price against a $349 regular price, again for three sites. The bundles that add Spectra Pro and the AI tools start at $99 for the first year and renew at $149.
Divi is $89 a year for unlimited websites, or $249 once for unlimited websites forever. Divi Pro adds the AI and cloud services and is $277 a year.
Those two $249 figures are worth sitting with. Astra’s covers three sites. Divi’s covers every site you will ever build, which is the single biggest difference between these two invoices.
All prices checked on the vendors’ own pages on 13 September 2026: Astra and Divi.
Astra free was not the constraint on this build. The work went into removing Astra’s defaults rather than into missing features, and no paid module would have shortened that.
Who should pick Astra, and who should pick Divi?
Pick Astra if you want the most widely used lightweight theme and a very large template ecosystem, and you are prepared to spend the first part of any bespoke build turning defaults off. Its own verdict was that Astra was a good host, and it was still a host I spent the first ninety minutes evicting.
Astra’s distinctive move in this build is that it never calls the standard header function at all. Its wrappers and skip link are literal markup in the template with no hook to intercept, so they have to be worked around rather than filtered. It also carries a second source of CSS delivered both as a stylesheet and inline, which the other builds did not have to account for.
Pick Divi if you want the builder and the theme to be one product. Divi also shipped its animations in their finished state from the start.
The theme-swap question. Astra independently arrived at the same answer GeneratePress did: replacing the theme underneath this build would take about twenty-four lines. Two builds converging on that number, without talking to each other, is the strongest evidence in the project that for a pixel-exact port of a design you already own, the theme is close to interchangeable.
That is a claim about porting a finished design. It says nothing about designing a site in the theme, which is what most people are actually doing, and which this project did not test.
The rest of the comparison
This page covers one pairing. The same design was built in five other stacks, measured the same way:
- Divi versus Elementor
- Divi versus GeneratePress
- Divi versus Kadence
- Divi versus the WordPress block editor
Along the way the six builds hit the same kinds of problem over and over, and none of them announced themselves. Those are collected in ten silent failures we hit building this.
Zealous Sites will build on whichever theme you want to use, and Divi is what we reach for first. There is more on how we work on the Divi developer page. If you are weighing the two for a project rather than reading the measurements, the Divi versus Astra decision page is the shorter version with the pricing on it.
Divi vs Astra questions, answered.
Is Divi better than Astra?
They are different products for different jobs. Astra reproduced this design exactly and costs nothing measurable at runtime. Divi scored higher on Lighthouse with the same design on the page, and gives you a builder your client can work in immediately.
Is Astra faster than Divi?
Both were fast. Astra’s payload costs no measurable performance at all, which is unusual. The catch is that leaving it in place breaks a bespoke layout, so on a build like this you remove it for accuracy rather than for speed.
Do you need Astra Pro?
Not for a build like this one. The work was in switching Astra’s defaults off, and no paid module shortens that.
How much does Astra cost compared to Divi?
Astra Pro is $69 a year for three sites, or $249 once at the current introductory price. Divi is $89 a year or $249 once, and both of those cover unlimited websites. The free Astra theme is what this build ran on, and it cost nothing.
Can you move a site from Divi to Astra?
Not automatically. Divi stores its layouts in its own format, so a move is a rebuild. Your design transfers cleanly if the CSS and markup belong to you rather than to the builder.
Can a non-technical client edit an Astra site?
Only if it was built for that. Astra itself gives a client nothing; the editing experience comes from whatever blocks the developer registered. Every visible string, link, image, toggle and number on this build is a labelled control a client can find and change. Ask to see the editor before you accept a site. The front end tells you nothing about it.
Would you rather just hand this to someone?
That is the job. Zealous Sites has been building websites since 2010, which is more than sixteen years of handing finished sites to people who then have to live in them. We will work in whichever theme you want to use, and Divi is what we reach for first.
New sites start at $2,400, and you get a fixed price to approve before anything starts, so there’s no hourly meter running while we work out the scope. You can scope your own project on the pricing page, see what we have built, or tell us what you have in mind.