Oshine vs. Divi… which is better for you?

The short of it is that Oshine is a lot more intuitive, but Divi allows for more customization. If you’re a tinkerer and are willing to take the time to learn a new WordPress theme, Divi is probably the right choice for you.  If you just want to get up and running and get your site up quickly, my recommendation is that you go right for Oshine; rest assured that it is an easy alternative to Divi. Let’s get into some of the details.

A Sagapixel Website Is Built with Oshine or Divi

WE BUILD LOTS OF SITES AND NEED TO GET THEM DONE FAST

We build a large volume of websites for small businesses in NJ. The majority are have small budgets, which means that we need to get them up quickly and efficiently; if we don’t, we either a. don’t make any money or b. have to jack up the prices to levels that are unaffordable for most of our clients.  For this reason, we use Oshine and Divi.  Both feature visual pagebuilders that allow us to see what we’re doing as we do it, greatly speeding up the development process—no need to keep a separate window open to check edits.

THEY COME WITH MOST OF THE PLUGINS THAT WE NEED

Both themes come packed with most of the modules that we would ever need to build a site.  I like this particularly because I don’t like relying on third-party WordPress plugins; often, you don’t know what you’re getting when you install them.  By having a suite of modules and plugins preinstalled with Oshine or Divi, we decrease our reliance on third-party plugins and decrease the security risks associated with them.

OSHINE AND DIVI MAKE IT EASY FOR OUR CLIENTS TO EDIT THE SITES THEMSELVES

Most clients don’t like the idea of being entirely reliant on a developer to edit text or images on a site.  Many WordPress themes can be a pain to make such edits to, resulting in diminished abilities to split test landing pages, longer times to get new content up, and major headaches if they ever need to change developer.  With Oshine and Divi, we can provide tutorials that show clients how to make edits to their own sites, allaying any misgivings that they have about being reliant on a developer to edit their sites and enabling them to be more proactive with editing their websites to support their marketing.

THEY CAN BE FAST WHEN OPTIMIZED

We regularly get Google Pagespeeds of 80+ and even up to 100 with both themes, so people that claim that they are “bloated and slow” simply don’t know how to optimize them.  Compress all of the images, minify the CSS, Javascript, and HTML, set up a good caching plugin, get good hosting, and you’re going to have a fast site.

How Are Oshine and Divi Similar?

• Both contain visual pagebuilders
• Both come with tons of modules to add features and effects to your site
• Both come with importable demos that can serve as a starting point for your website
• Both allow for tons of menu layouts

What Does Each Theme Have That the Other Doesn’t Have?

OSHINE

• Background overlay option.  Oshine allows you to add an overlay to any section or column; this can allow you to add some color to a photo without putting it into Photoshop.  Divi has a similar feature, but it affects the entire column, including any text that you may have included.  This is how we get the effect to right.  You can get the same results with Divi, but it is way more complicated than it is with Oshine.
• Way more portfolio options.  Portfolios are where Oshine really “shines” (funny, huh?)  Just go to the Oshine website and take a look at all of the different beautiful layouts that you can use for your portfolios.
• Minification by checking a box.  This is a newer feature, but I love that Oshine enables CSS, Javascript, and HTML minification by checking a box.  All WordPress themes should have this.
• Slider Revolution.  The free version comes with the theme, which is really nice.  Granted, you can always download it and install it with the Divi theme, but it’s nice to have it already there when you install Oshine.
• Setting an entire column as a clickable link.  I really like being able to set an entire column as a link (similar to the image above, only something that you can use to click to another section on the site).  An example of this would be what we did with section on the home page.

DIVI

• Photoshop-like editing of photos.  Divi basically comes with a “Photoshop-lite” module that allows you to adjust saturation, hue, brightness, and a bunch of other attributes of images on the site.  Oshine only allows you to adjust the darkness of the image through the overlay feature.
• Custom Login.  Divi allows you to customize the login screen; Oshine does not (you need a 3rd party plugin)
• Blog modules can be set by category. Oshine is very limited in its blog module.  Divi allows you to organize a blog by category; in other words, you can set a module in one column to only feature posts from one category and allow another column to be about another category.  Oshine does not have this feature.
• Audio player.  Oshine doesn’t have this feature.
• CSS modules per section and column. Oshine does provide a custom CSS module under the theme options, but Divi gives it to you right in the editor.  This is nice since you don’t have to continuously switch between tabs or screens.
• Cool section transitions. This is probably the coolest design feature that Divi has and Oshine needs.  Divi allows for sections to have cool geometric transitions between sections, freeing designers from having to do custom CSS to get away from the 90° angle rectangular section transitions.  Styling a section transition as seen below can be a major pain in Oshine, but is a breeze in Divi:

Divi has many more features, but Oshine is easier to use

Most experienced web designers will likely prefer Divi, but Oshine is probably better for the novice that wants to take a step up from paint-by-numbers WordPress templates. It’s comparable to a Wix or Weebly that enjoys the flexibility of WordPress.