Which is Better, Atahualpa or Thesis?
Customizable word press themes. That’s what everyone wants, right. There are a handful, the two most popular are Atahualpa (by Bytes for All) and Thesis (by DIY Themes). So… which is better, Thesis or Atahualpa?
Atahualpa is a powerful, customizable, SEO-optimized Word Press theme with excellent user support.
Thesis is a powerful, customizable, SEO-optimized Word Press theme with excellent user support.
Atahualpa is free.
Thesis is not free.
Hmm… Easy decision?
Well, no.
As you might suspect, Thesis really is a better theme. If the amount of “better” is worth the price ($87 for an individual; $164 for a developers license), then you should go with Thesis. If not, Atahualpa is the way to go.
So what does Thesis do that Atahualpa doesn’t?
Among other things:
-“Web 2.0” look and feel.
You can trick out Atahualpa pretty well if you have a mind to and have some patience with CSS, but Thesis was clearly developed by a good designer, not just a good programmer. Thesis sites tend to come out looking a little more contemporary, rich, and dynamic. Without a lot of thought and work (and design sense on your part), Atahualpa sites can come out looking a little “static.”
-Typography
The internet is the bane of all people who care about the way text looks. From available fonts to justification issues to imperfect kerning, browsers just aren’t smart enough to make things look like they should. Other than standard CSS, Atahualpa doesn’t give you any help with typography. Thesis has some great built-in tools to make Typography work better (it’s actually one of their selling points).
-Tutorials and Support
Atahualpa has a fantastic support forum. Almost everything I’ve ever had trouble with, I’ve been able to find out about on the Atahualpa Support Forum. But Thesis goes even further- support, tutorials, videos, guides. And a lot of third party material.
The developers of Thesis were smart enough to create an affiliate selling program, which means that other bloggers and web masters have an economic incentive to get people to use Thesis. That also gives them an incentive to create helpful guides and tutorials.
Without a similar incentive, there isn’t nearly as much third-party help with Atahualpa.
-SEO
Atahualpa is good at Search Engine Optimization, and plays well with SEO plugins like All-In-One or Platinum. The developer of Atahualpa “lived off SEO for several years” (whatever that means). But Thesis creates cleaner, better optimized HTML, which the Google spiders like just a little more. If you’re looking for an SEO edge, Thesis is the way to go.
-Load Time
Because of it’s cleaner code (another Thesis selling point), Thesis pages tend to load a little faster than Atahualpa pages.
-Hackiness
Hackiness is fixing your above-ground swimming pool with duct-tape and a blue tarp. Elegance is an in-ground swimming pool with a screened enclosure.
Both “get the job done” (providing a place for neighborhood children to splash around and pee), but one is much more relaxing, inviting, and attractive.
Atahualpa is like a decent above-ground swimming pool (no blue tarp). It works well, it gets the job done, it seldom floods my yard. But it is a little hacky. Just a little. And tricking it out with a specific visual style and functionality can end up being very hacky. Duct-tape and chewing gum hacky, in some cases.
Thesis is less hacky, more elegant; less blue tarp, more in-ground.
There are other issues as well, and the hard-core Thesis people all have their particular favorite thing that Thesis does.
Overall, the ROI on the Thesis price seems excellent- and if you have any capital at all, I’d recommend going with the Thesis Theme for a business. But if you’re broke, or a hobbyist, Atahualpa will serve very well with no or very few problems.
So which do I use?
As much as I love Thesis, this site runs on Atahualpa, for two reasons:
-This site was designed before Thesis was available. When Thesis became available, I didn’t really want to take the time to redo the layout and visual design.
-Moreover, the use of Atahualpa is a great Bootstrapping example. Social Bootstrap is all about stretching and leveraging of resources. I like to point out what is possible for businesses to accomplish with no or little capital. For some micro-startups or muse projects, even $87 might be too much. For them, I keep using the Atahualpa theme.
If you have additional thoughts about Thesis or Atahualpa, especially technical specifics, website examples, success stories, or tragic episodes- please share them in the comments.
Disclaimer: The links to the Thesis Theme are affiliate links, which means that if you purchase the Theme through a link from this site, I’ll receive a small commission. If you think that makes me a bad person, but you still want to buy Thesis, then close this page and do a Google search for it yourself.
Saw your message at the Atahualpa forums and read this and had to respond.
I agree and disagree. I actually think that if you want flexibility Atahualpa is FAR better than Thesis – although you have to know what you are doing. All the Thesis sites I have ever seen are instantly recognizable as Thesis sites – that is not true for Atahaulpa – although I admit that by far the majority of atahualpa sites are even less custmized than Thesis sites. In other words, Atahualpa has FAR more customization options and possibilities but the learning curve for doing them is higher as well.
I also disagree about SEO – they are both VERY well optimized and the ‘edge’ you give Thesis is so slight that it is far outweighed by whatever steps the author takes on their own for SEO.
Finally, atahualpa actually exposes MORE options to the complete novice than Thesis does – in other words you can change more in atahualpa than in thesis if you know absolutely NO css or php.
Thanks for the input!
I’m actually more conflicted on this issue than the post let on- I go back and forth, and I was in a pro-Thesis cycle when I decided to write it.
Also, I’ve only explored Thesis a bit… whereas I’m at least a Purple Belt with Atahualpa. Perhaps that’s why I understand the “hackiness” factor so much- I wonder if I’d find Thesis to be as much or more so if I was forced to dig in farther to get something done.
Overall- I think that, assuming you can afford the money- The decision should come down to which theme best implements the specific design you have in mind. All those instantly recognizable sites (Thesis/Atahualpa/anything) are caused by people getting the theme out and fiddling with it, as opposed to getting out some colored markers and actually designing the thing.
More importantly-
It doesn’t seem that many people have used both and are talking about it….
If you (any of you) know someone who has, and can talk intelligently about it- Encourage them to write here or post a link to their experiences.
I notice you have your Thesis affiliate link in the article
That is true. In fact, I mentioned it at the bottom of the article.
@ Keith:
I see you spell your name with a ‘K’. What do our comments have in common? Neither has anythnig to do with the subject at hand.
Adam gave a fair and balanced review of each theme and provided it to you for free. Is there any reason he should not receive a little remuneration for his efforts if you decide to buy Thesis?
I’ve been planning to move to Thesis considering the SEO optimization bit. I’m still not sure whether it’s just a marketing gimmick or it will actually make Google happier and brings you more visitors
A lot of people claim that table-less design is inherently better for SEO. If that’s true, than Thesis would get an extra point for that, as Atahualpa uses a big ol’ table for layout.
Also, if you look at the source code for a Thesis site vs. an Atahualpa site, the center content column is further upstream, closer to the top of the page. Again, some people claim this is an SEO advantage.
I have a hard time believing that either of these things is true or that, if true, they would trump things like good content and inbound links.
Completely agree with Owen’s point that all the thesis theme sites are instantly recognizable. But in case of atahualpa theme there is plethora of customizations to make it look completely different from its original looks.
Really …Hats off to Atahualpa Developers!
You guys are doing great job …keep it up!
Good points all -
1) Thesis comes with a cleaner more professional look “out of the box”. HOWEVER if this is your main reason for buying, look at my free Thesis theme look-a-like (based on Atahualpa):
http://wordpressacademy.biz/2010/02/free-thesis-theme-lookalike-based-on-atahualpa/
2)On balance I think Atahalpa has more options. HOwever some of the things that Thesis does are very difficult to replicate without coding
3)Support for both is excellent. Except for Thesis you have to pay for it (can’t get in to support forums without a purchase — not even with a client license, which is a big beef of mine and the reason I no longer sell Thesis client licenses).
4)SEO is a non-issue. Both are fine. (Use All-in-one SEO on Atahualpa)
I am not by any means a “GPL Nazi”. If Thesis does the job for you and you like it, buy it (and use Adam’s affiliate link for chrissake). However if you like to hack start with my free version.
Hey- thanks for the input, and for the atahualpa expansion.
I need to write a followup to this article at some point, since it still continues to be one of my most popular posts.
Briefly, I would say something like:
I still love atahualpa, and am super glad I hacked around with it for as long as I Did, because it taught me a lot about WordPress specifically, and PHP and CSS in general, that I didn’t know when I started.
But for new sites, I’m not using Atahualpa, because I got tired of having to take it apart before putting it back together. These days I’m basically building designs from scratch, using the WP-Framework theme as a starting point.
I wonder how (if?) the release of WordPress 3.0 (with MU built-in) will influence the usefulness of Atahualpa and Thesis?
I have used both the themes atahualpa as well as thesis.
atahualpa has more customization compared to thesis
but if you see no# of queries it makes to database is almost 8-10 times higher.
although i have used atahualpa at lot of places, but if a website is getting high traffic and when you need performance Super Cache may be able to save your life.
another problem i see is correctly pointed by adam “Table” …
adam ! I think using atahualpa to give a demo to client will be awesome, in no time you can give them a idea of colors, how will we place content, etc. may b a slider or something may not function, but a descent demo. followed by a custom theme.
I am a wordpress novice. I do not have experience of code. I have a travel company. I want my site to be have an emphasis on photograhy and galleries. Which should I go for, Thesis or atahualpa?
If you can afford it, Thesis.
looking forward to use thesis, but i read somewhere thesis will not work for WP3-MU Mode. any one has tested ?
After having gone through this dilemma myself, I thought I’d chime in. I wanted to replace our existing site, customized in a particular way, and was trying to improve SEO over our existing site. All blogs said Thesis is easy to customize and had stellar SEO so I bought a stand alone copy; however, as someone with little coding knowledge, I found it incredibly intimidating when I first opened the theme. I quickly realized there would be a huge learning curve in order to get it to look like anything except the out-of-the-box design. There were plenty of tutorials and guides, but some were for older versions of Thesis that were now outdated and all required hours of self-training to get what I wanted.
At the same time I was building a WP site for a non-profit and had chosen the Atahualpa theme (3.5.3) since it was free. I was easily able to create a unique site for them with no coding at all. I returned Thesis (within 30 days) and have since been building the other site with Atahualpa. So far I have been able to create a design I really like, venturing into coding with the help of the support Forum for the items that intimidate me. I hope to have it up within the next week or so (lots of content to generate still).
I know many people swear by Thesis and I am happy for (perhaps jealous of) them. However, if you are not comfortable with coding, I would definitely recommend Atahualpa since 90% of the site can be customized without touching the code. So far I have not found anything that I want done with our site out of my reach using Atahualpa and am learning lots along the way. Maybe some day I’ll feel confident enough to try Thesis again and will rave about it, but for now I would recommend Atahualpa for other novices.
Global warming is real, but I will point you to the scientists data for the facts.
Adam, thanks for putting this together. I’ve been looking for a fair comparison of Atahualpa vs Thesis.
I recently started using Atahualpa for all the reasons people use it for (and I have to say, I have a strong DIY streak – but I always find it to be the greatest education), and I have to say, I like the flexibility, but realize my own imagination and design skills aren’t all that great.
One thing that helped a lot for me was that I found an Atahualpa tutorial on the Warrior Forum. Nope, I’m not affiliated with that vendor, so you will have to search for it yourself, but yes, it was pretty handy and a good way to get started. (but she can buy me a beer/coffee is she sees this
)
Actually, I’ve been wondering about Atahualpa SEO. I’ve used All In One SEO on another blog, and I think it would be nice to have a theme where I can rely on the built-in SEO features rather than use a plugin. So I was happy to see that Atahualpa has some built-in SEO features.
From what I’ve found, people comment that Atahualpa SEO plays well with other plugins, but I haven’t yet heard anyone say with conviction that the Atahualpa built-in SEO is all you need and that you don’t need any plugins.
I normally would just start with what I have and then figure it out later, but I’m aware that once I start SEO-optimizing the different individual posts (e.g. keywords, tags) I can’t really carry that over if I switch plugins later, so I’m trying to figure my plan now before I get started.
So Adam or anyone else, would you use Atahualpa SEO alone, or would you always use a plugin such as AIOSEO or Headspace?
(Hey who let in that spam comment on global warming?
)
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whoah this blog is excellent i love reading your articles. Keep up the good work! You know, many people are searching around for this information, you can help them greatly.
What a fun adventure! Great pics as always!
I like Atahualpa it has all the options I need
I am going to get Genesis
Many Spam comments here.