Astra Pro vs Astra Free Theme – Upgrade or Stick?

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First, before anything, I must clarify a misconception about Astra Pro vs Astra free theme.

Astra Pro is not another separate product or theme version of the free Astra theme. Instead, it is an add-on plugin that unlocks more design features, customization elements, and control over the free Astra theme. 

So, when you buy an Astra Pro license, you’re purchasing a plugin that unlocks Astra theme premium features, more customizations, and design elements, allowing more control over website design.

In a nutshell, what Astra Pro does is put the free Astra theme on steroids, so the free theme can do more than you can imagine. 

In this article, you will see what I mean by Astra Pro on steroids. And if you want to know if Astra Pro is worth it, you will find your answer in this post. Continue reading.

Astra Pro vs Astra Free Theme

Instead of comparing each feature of the Astra Pro and Astra free theme, I will focus on the features that differentiate Astra Pro from the free Astra theme. 

Listing every Astra theme design element, feature, and customization option in a single post will be impossible or exhaustive. 

The Astra Pro theme packs many features and website design customizations, so it’s more than just visible to list them here. 

From my experience using the free theme and the Pro plugin, significant features that separate them are listed below.  

Custom Layouts

The custom layout module is one of the most significant superior features of the Astra Pro over the free Astra theme. 

This module is only available for activation in the Astra Pro plugin via the Astra theme dashboard.

With the Custom Layout module activated, you can create custom layout designs for 404 pages, page headers, and footers. Add custom content into the content body via hook and use conditions display to show them on the page. 

Furthermore, the Custom Layout module allows you to create custom section layouts with your preferred page builder plugin and import the layout anywhere on the page. 

The display and user conditional setting is another helpful feature in the Pro plugin, which gives you more control over the custom content or layout display. 

It allows you to set the user role, post/page types and specific post types the custom layout/content will display. 

Setting the device visibility display is also available via the WordPress editor sidebar panel. Desktop, Tablet, and Mobile toggle buttons allow you to set device display conditions. 

Additionally, Astra Pro lets you create custom time-sensitive injectable content within posts or pages on your website. This feature can be helpful for news and data-aggregated sites. 

So, creating a unique website design is painless and swift with the Astra Pro plugin. 

Creating custom layouts or content hooks is only possible with the Astra Pro plugin activated on your site. 

WooCommerce Integration

Straight out of the box, the free Astra theme integrates with the WooCommerce plugin, making it easier to customize color, web font, and typography with the Astra theme customizer.

However, Astra Pro extends WooCommerce features and store design, bringing more capability and styling options to design your shop. 

To use this feature, ensure your site’s WooCommerce and Astra Pro plugins are active. Then, go to Astra>Dashboard>WooCommerce and activate the module.  

This action will unlock the Astra e-commerce setting tab in the customizer. The Astra theme design options + WooCommerce default setting is under the same tab. 

Now, you can customize ecommerce pages like:

• Checkout
• Single product page
• Product Catalog 
• Cart page
• Base color and Typography
• Site container 
• Site layouts.
• Products images
• Store notice 
• Misc

LearnDash Integration

In addition to the WooCommerce integration, Astra Pro directly integrates with LearnDash, a learning management system software. 

LearnDash allows course creators to organize online courses effectively, manage students’ profiles, build course materials and assignments, and make more sales through their hard work and knowledge.

With LearnDash integration + Astra Pro, course creators can customize and design unique landing pages, providing a better learning experience for students. 

Customize the learning environments, create optimized checkout pages and beautiful classrooms, organize the sidebar, and design a powerful eLearning website that helps you build your business.

Astra Pro includes premade course themes, enabling course creators to design quickly. 

Easy Digital Downloads

If you plan to sell digital products using the Easy Digital Download (EDD) WordPress plugin, doing so with the Astra Pro EDD add-on can be rewarding. 

Astra Pro further customizes and provides styling options to product pages, archives, checkout, single product pages, site design, and content elements. 

The Astra Pro EDD add-on brings more options to change elements like color, typography, background design, titles, fonts, cart icons, etc. It gives you more control over site layout, catalog appearance, spacing, margins, border and buttons, etc.

Also, Astra Pro has premade templates purposely built to sell digital downloadable products, which makes it quick to build your storefront quickly.

LifterLMS

LifterLMS is an eLearning WordPress plugin that provides a seamless learning experience between course creators and students. 

Astra Pro LifterLMS add-on gives you more styling options, making it easier to design stunning course pages in the LifterLMS platform. 

The benefits include creating clutter-free checkout pages, customizing profile pictures, managing catalog page appearance with columns, customizing user personal account pages, and more. 

With the LifterLMS add-on, you can manage lessons and course page layouts, enable featured images, add course meta info, add a progress bar, enable instructor details, etc. 

In addition, Astra Pro lets you manage other elements like buttons, link appearance, border width, margin and spacing, profile links, and more. 

Blog/Archive Page

Comparing blog/archive page customization in the Astra Pro vs Astra Free theme, one can quickly notice the free theme offers basic features and customization. 

Astra free theme lets you set the blog/archive page container layout, style, and sidebar layout and style. 

Though you can customize the blog/archive post structures like titles, featured images, comments, postdates, breadcrumbs, and container widths, that’s all you can do. 

Astra Pro takes the blog/archives page customization to another level with the Blog Pro Module. 

Go to Astra>dashboard> and activate the Blog Pro Module from the list.

The Blog Pro Module features include an archive blog layouts option, which is available in three types:

• Layout 1
• Layout 2
• Layout 3

Each layout option opens different customization settings within the customizer. 

Depending on which layout option you select, you can enable the date box, set the masonry layout, add space between posts, and remove padding for featured images. 

Astra Pro gives you more styling options to customize the blog page, such as the number of excerpt characters, disabling read more links, setting featured image size, infinite scroll or number for pagination, and setting post pagination styling. 

Switching to the design tab unlocks more customization for elements.

Here, you can customize design elements like content color, post-title font, meta fonts, pagination font, set post spacing – inside and outside – and set pagination. 

Page Headers

The page header feature is part of the Astra Pro modules, which you can activate from the Astra dashboard. It is worth a standalone section in this Astra Pro vs Astra free theme review.

First, the page header allows you to build custom header designs for individual posts, pages, all posts, post types, taxonomies, category pages, etc.

It also lets you set page/post exclusion lists and select the user role to trigger the page header display on the front end. 

You can add site header elements like breadcrumbs and navigation menus and merge the site header with the page header. 

Also, you can add background images, enable parallax scroll, customize the title color, and web font size, add feature images, and add background overlay style. 

When you create a post or pages in the Gutenberg editor, you can add your custom page header to the current post. 

Assuming you’ve built a custom page header for this page, click the Astra icon on the Gutenberg editor, revealing the Astra sidebar panel setting on the editor page.

Select Page Header from the sidebar panel setting list and choose your custom-built page header from the dropdown list.

Your selected page header will go along with that specific page, overriding the default site header when you hit the publish button.

So, the page header feature lets you create custom header designs for different pages/posts or sections on your website. 

Header Customization

Besides adding the site logo, title, primary menu, and transparent header and adjusting margins and width in the free theme, Astra Pro puts the header customization on overdrive.

Astra Pro greatly extends things here with a Sticky header option, language switcher, and many options to customize header elements to fit your website design and brand image. 

More header customization includes site search, off-Canvas menu, toggle button, mega menu, clone and delete elements, and more.

Single Post Customization

Within the Single Post General tab, Astra Pro and Astra Free offer container layout options, container style, sidebar layout options, and sidebar style customizations.

Also, setting the content area’s width to your liking is possible. 

However, Astra Pro put the Single Post customization on steroids, it is one of the key difference between Astra Pro and Astra free theme.

With the Astra Pro plugin enabled on your site, additional features like Astra built-in social sharing buttons, disabling post pagination links, auto loads previous posts, author info box, and the option to remove featured images on single post view are available. 

More settings like customizing the featured image, enabling a single post-read time feature, and adjusting post spacing put the single post layout/design on another level. 

In the Design tab, Astra Pro lets you customize the social sharing button further. 

You can choose between the official social sharing button color type or customize it to fit your blog design. Set the background color and icon spacing from each other, and more.  

Premium Themes

Alongside the free starter templates, the Astra Essential and Growth Bundle license has over 240 premium prebuilt themes for most industries. 

The premium themes are built with Elementor, Brizy, Beaver Builder, and Gutenberg page builders.

So, you can pick your favorite premade theme based on the preferred page builder plugin. 

Astra premium starter themes can help web development agencies save time on design, build faster, improve creativity, and generate more income. 

The free Astra theme also has starter templates; they are limited in customization possibilities and offer basic design features. 

Site Layouts

Another big difference between Astra Pro and Astra Free Theme is the site layout. 

Astra free theme provides minimal settings for container layout only, with no customization option to specify container spacing. 

Whereas Astra Pro offers an additional feature, the site layout, alongside the container layout option. 

Both Astra Pro and Astra Free allow you to set the container style (boxed or unboxed) and adjust the container to wide and narrow. Still, Astra Pro takes it one step further by allowing you to set container top and bottom margins. 

You can choose from Fluid, Padded, Full widths, and maximum widths for your site layout. Customize the outside and inside container spacing in the design tab. 

Full and Maximum widths are straightforward to understand; let’s see how Fluid and Padded design affect site layout. 

Padded

The padded design works with the full-width site layout. It gives a frame-like design across the edges of the website, making the content background area stand out on the page. 

Moreover, you can set the device visibility of the padded layout; this allows you more control over the website user experience based on the device type. 

Fluid

When enabled, the Fluid site layout lets the entire site design display edge to edge on all device browsers, from the header, footer, and content area.

The whole site design will span the user device’s screen area.  

This display can be suitable for content-heavy sites like news sites, service-based websites, and more. Technically, the Fluid layout lets you use the entire site container area to display the website design. 

Sidebar Customization

Apart from the option to set the sidebar layout, style, and widths in the free theme, Astra Pro unlocks the design tab and brings extensive customization elements to the sidebar. 

Now you can set sidebar widgets’ title typography and color, spacing, content typography, and color.

Additionally, you can set the sidebar background color, customize the sidebar title font and widgets font size, and adjust the inner and outside spacing.

White labeling

White labeling the Astra theme and plugins under your brand name is a Pro feature. 

This feature removes any instances of Astra links to the WP Astra website and rebrands the Astra dashboard, theme, and plugins to your agency. 

Web development agencies can sign up through the Astra dashboard via the WordPress admin. And assumes the developer of the theme and plugin while serving clients’ needs. 

Astra Pro License and Price

The premium features of the Astra theme come in three licenses: Astra Pro, Essential Bundle, and Growth Bundle. 

Each license gives you access to specific premium features, other Astra Pro plugins, and customization possibilities, which you can find more details about on the price page. 

In summary, here is what you pay for each Astra Pro license. 

• Astra Pro – $59 for 12 months and $227 for the lifetime license. 
• Essential Bundle – $137 for the annual billing or $677 if you purchase the lifetime license.
• Growth Bundle – $187 for a 12-month license and $937 for a lifetime license.

The Essential Bundle includes your choice of a one-page builder plugin, the Ultimate add-on for Beaver Builder or Elementor, a WP Portfolio plugin, and +180 premium themes.

Growth Bundle comes with Convert Pro and Schema Pro plugins, the ultimate add-on for Elementor and Beaver Builder, as well as Spectra Pro.

All Astra Pro licenses give you access to premium support, unlimited websites, a 14-day money-back guarantee, and extensive product support training.

Should You Get Astra Pro? 

This is a question that you best answer. Only you can provide an answer to the question of whether you need the Atra Pro. 

However, buying an Astra Pro license is worth considering if you want more control, flexibility, and advanced customization features over your website design. 

Also, if building unique website designs will help your business move forward, improve user experience, and drive more conversion, buying Astra Pro is a good decision. 

Conclusion…Astra Pro vs Astra Free Theme 

Which option should you take? 

Well, if you’re a beginner starting your blog and still not earning a decent income from blogging, I advise you to go with the free Astra theme. 

It has sufficient design, features, and customization possibilities to woo your audience with stunning website design. I used the free theme before going Pro, and that was when I had reasons to do so. 

However, if you lack features or certain elements to design your website how you want it, it may be time to consider the Astra Pro plugin addon. The price you pay depends on which license type you need.