TheGem vs Salient Theme comparison [2025] 💥
THE-GEM vs SALIENT
Salient vs TheGem, we compare these popular Wordpress themes on loading speed, the number of demo website and pages, the quality of the demos, the type of page builder they use and how well they are customizable. TheGem and Salient both sell heavily above average and get very good ratings.
THE-GEM THEME (Salient vs TheGem)
The Gem Wordpress Theme it is definitely worth taking a closer look at the theme and writing a review about it. The first thing you notice are the beautiful demos that the theme offers, these are separate and well styled. In total, the theme currently has a sloppy 70-in-1-click demo versions available (they call them creative concepts themselves). There are themes like Be Theme with 600+ demos but they are fairly easy to assemble, The Gem offers a much higher quality. The Be Theme has more sales and is even number 3 on the Themeforest market place. Apparently there are many people who choose the many demos while they can only install one. Anyway, let's talk about The Gem and have a look at some of their demos below.
With a good multifunctional theme, you literally have to be able to create any type of website in order to achieve maximum scores in our reviews. And after playing with TheGem, I can absolutely say it delivers what it promises. TheGem is the latest creation from CodexThemes, well-known in the theme world. I have to say this theme is really versatile. CodexThemes put together some demos for niches ranging from creative agencies to gyms, to restaurants and more. It is definitely a beautiful and functional theme.
Advertisement
TheGem main functions
- More than 70 homemade design concepts for different niches
- Templates for more than 400 pages
- Focus on performance
- Useful custom message types
- Beautiful designs
- Includes Bakery Pagebuilder and Revolution Slider
- Correct code formatting for page speed
- Multi-page and one-page ready
- 2,600+ font icons
If you fancy any of the more than 70 homepage designs, you can easily import all or a certain selection through TheGem's control-board. All you need to do is go to TheGem Import in your admin panel and the wizard will walk you through everything. As for the import process, it couldn't be easier.
Install of TheGem WordPress Theme
After installing TheGem, you must first install all required and recommended plugins. Once you've done that, your admin panel will look much fuller. In addition to all the new plugins, TheGem also gives you many custom post types.
As I mentioned above in this review, you can always import one or more of the 70+ pre-designed design concepts by going to TheGem Import. But if you don't want to use any of those design concepts, you have to go to the theme's customization menu.
Customize TheGem WordPress Theme
TheGem uses its own theme customization manager, not the WordPress Customizer. I understand why themes do this, but I always find it a bit frustrating that I have to keep previewing changes instead of seeing them in real time. I wish there was an easy way to move all relevant options directly to the WordPress Customizer. The admin panel is divided into ten categories.
In general, you set up basic information such as the layout and identity of your blog. There is not much to change outside of your logo and some information about the functionality:
TheGem review headers
Under "Header" you can set every detail of your site's header. This includes layout, alignment and design:
You have a large number of header options thanks to the dropouts with multiple styles. In "Fonts" you can set which fonts your site uses and how big it is. You can go through any class to customize every aspect of your fonts. TheGem has many Google Fonts, so you have plenty of stylish options. And if you want more selection, you can always import new fonts via the included Fonts Manager:
In the "Colors" section, you can set colors for literally every single element on your site. It would take a while to go through and adjust everything, but all options are there if you want them:
TheGem review backgrounds
Just as the name says, "Backgrounds" lets you customize the backgrounds for different parts of your site. You can choose solid colors or upload images.
Under "Footer" you can turn your footer on and off and set custom text. Again, not much about this section. I feel like there may be other valuable options here - like activating / deactivating social icons or links:
TheGem review contact & social
With "Contacts & Socials" you can add address and contact information, as well as links to social icons. These social icons can be displayed in both the header and footer. I have a feeling that this section could be placed in the Header and Footer categories, but a sneak peek of that.
TheGem review back-ups
In this TheGem review it should be mentioned that "Backup" is a wonderful tool to have in it. This allows you to export a backup of all your theme settings. That way, if you ever lose any theme settings, you can easily restore them with the backup feature. Essentially, experimenting with theme settings makes a low-risk action, since you can always fall back on the backup if you need to:
TheGem Custom Post Types
TheGem includes seven custom post types by default. These are:
- News
- Portfolios
- Quickfinders
- Customers
- Galleries
- Teams
- Reviews
Custom fields for posts and pages
TheGem contains a huge amount of custom fields for creating posts or pages. When you add a new post or page, you'll see plenty of options at the bottom of the screen:
You can set everything from video footage to custom clips to custom layouts. For example, if you want to move the sidebar for one post, you can do that with custom fields. If you want to add custom widgets to one post, you can do that too. These custom fields have a lot of versatility. You have plenty of new ways to customize your individual posts and pages with TheGem.
Included is the Bakery Pagebuilder
As I mentioned in the list of features, you also get access to the Bakery Pagebuilder for creating pages. Bakery Pagebuilder is not my absolute favorite page builder, but it is definitely a solid option and includes both front-end and back-end editing. Whenever you create a new page or post, you have the option to enter your chosen Bakery Pagebuilder editor view to create drag and drop designs:
TheGem review Elementor
The Thegem Theme now comes in 2 different versions for a price. That means that you can choose between the Pagebuilder who is used, WP Bakery PageBuilder or Elementor.
TheGem loading time - Good Google PageSpeed
I did my tests on TheGem's demo-site using Google PageSpeed Insights. The score was 84 on desktop without any caching or optimized images. I guess after have fixed those issues the theme would score about 90 on PageSpeed Insights, a very good score.
SALIENT THEME (Salient vs TheGem)
To start with, before the start of this Salient Theme review, I have to tell you that the theme has been in the top of the best-selling themes for years now on Themeforest.net. Okay, currently in 11th place, and highest ranking ever maybe in 4th place. There are much better sold themes but Salient has absolute top features that we will take a closer look at.
As a matter of fact, buyers are more enthusiastic about the theme than they are about any other theme. It has an average rating of 4.8 out of 5 based on 5700 ratings. For a premium theme with many options, it is a super-fast loading theme. The builders of Salient are currently claiming one Google Pagespeed a score of 97%, we will come back to this in a moment.
Salient Pagebuilder Editing
<With the latest version 11 of Salient it now has the front-end page builder of the WP Bakery Page Builder. Themes have to keep up with the times, of course, all toppers have frontend pagebuilders with Thrive Architect with the most impressive I think, followed by Divi and Elementor. Instead of images, we show you below in a video how the Salient page builder works. The WP Bakery Pagebuilder (formerly: Visual Composer) is one of the oldest and best out there, let's say the number 4 right now (my opinion).
Salient Theme: PageSpeed and Y-Slow
I did not check it myself with the speedometers concerned, but they show this on their website. Those are really anti-social good scores for Google Pagespeed and Y-Slow (GT-Metrix). Without a doubt impressive. It is very important for a website that it loads quickly, because visitors are impatient nowadays and are quickly away from sites that do not immediately have something to show.
Importable demo websites
Like every self-respecting theme Salient has beautiful easy to import layouts. At the time of writing it says on their site that it concerns 285+ demo layouts. A nice number but not a leader in this area. The layouts do give a very good impression and in the end 1 layout is enough so we will not give any negatives for this in this review for Salient.
Salient Theme: Lazy loading
Lazy loading means that images are not immediately shown in their full resolution. They appear immediately but cloudy and slowly pull up. This ensures that other elements on the page load faster and the entire website is visible to visitors much earlier. Normally people use a plugin or a CDN service for this, but with Salient this is not necessary although there is nothing better than a professional CDN-service if you want a super fast website.
Salient Theme review conclusion
We are not going to bore you here by mentioning all sorts of things that practically have all themes in this Salient review. We have raised the main plus points of the theme and there are few minus points. This can be seen from the extremely high rating that buyers of the theme gave it. The theme is definitely worth its $ 60 that is being asked for it Themeforest.net. That is a standard price for a good theme. Click on the button below to go to their site for more information. As a web designer, Salient is not one of my favorites, but I also have it in my collection and I sometimes use it for customers. You can find my personal favorites in the best Wordpress themes [2025].
Salient vs TheGem conclusion
First of all, thank you for reading this Salient vs TheGem comparison to the end. Both themes are 100% compatible with Elementor page builder which is great. If you have the money to install Elementor Pro I would , the difference between free and pro is very big. TheGem is a multipurpose theme with a lot of settings, one has to love this, some hate it because sometimes things are so hard to find. Salient and TheGem load about the same speed. Both themes are definitely worth their money, provided it is only for 1 single website.
In case you want to provide 2 or more websites with a theme, I do not recommend both of these themes because then it will be much too expensive, since a separate expensive license will be required for each website. In that case, you can much better use Astra or Divi as it will save you money for multiple sites. In addition, these latter themes are ranked higher in my top 10 themes for [2025] than TheGem and Salient.
Advertisement