Head to head
SalientvsHub-ResponsiveMulti-PurposeWordPressTheme
Salient and Hub are both premium WordPress multipurpose themes priced within a dollar of each other, making the choice less about budget and more about workflow and scale. Salient is a long-standing market leader with a massive install base, while Hub is a newer contender built around Elementor with an exceptionally high satisfaction score. Here's how they stack up across the factors that matter most.
Assessed on documented capabilities & licensing · updated
At a glance
| SalientOur pick | Hub - Responsive Multi-Purpose WordPress Theme | |
|---|---|---|
| Made by | ThemeNectar | LiquidThemes |
| Type | Theme | Theme |
| Pricing model | Paid | Paid |
| What you pay for | — | — |
| Best for | — | — |
The breakdown
Target Use Cases
Both themes cover a wide range of project types — portfolios, agencies, blogs, eCommerce stores, and corporate sites. However, their positioning differs in meaningful ways.
Salient leans heavily into creative and visual storytelling. Its listed use cases emphasize animations, photography, SaaS startups, and clean minimal aesthetics, making it a natural fit for studios, photographers, and brands that want motion and visual impact baked into the design system. Its WooCommerce compatibility extends through versions 8, 9, and 10, keeping it current with the latest releases.
Hub covers similar ground but explicitly positions itself around an AI-assisted workflow and Elementor integration — two signals that appeal to freelancers and agencies building sites at volume. Its use-case tags include "ai" and "company," suggesting a slightly more business-process-oriented audience. Hub's WooCommerce support covers versions 5 through 8, which is solid though it doesn't yet list version 9 or 10 compatibility.
Feature Breadth
Salient
- Ships with a customized version of WPBakery Page Builder — familiar to a large segment of WordPress users, though it is an older paradigm compared to Elementor
- Exclusive design elements including shape dividers, cascading images with parallax, and animated page transitions
- One-click demo import across a broad library of niche-specific layouts
- WPML support for multilingual sites
- Lifetime updates included with a single license purchase
The trade-off with Salient is its builder: WPBakery, while powerful, has largely been superseded by Elementor in community mindshare. Buyers who prefer a more modern drag-and-drop experience may feel the friction.
Hub
- Built on Elementor and Elementor Pro, currently the most widely used visual page builder in the WordPress ecosystem
- 100+ pre-built website demos, 1,000+ section templates, and 100+ inner page layouts according to the author's feature list
- One-click demo and section-block import
- Bootstrap 4.x foundation, which benefits developers who want a structured grid baseline
- IE11 browser support — a niche but notable advantage for clients in enterprise or government environments
- WPML support for multilingual builds
Hub's main limitation is maturity: with roughly 20,900 sales compared to Salient's 170,300, it has a significantly smaller community, fewer third-party tutorials, and a shorter track record of long-term support. The WooCommerce compatibility ceiling (version 8) is also a mild concern for stores on the latest releases.
Pricing & Value
At $60 (Salient) versus $59 (Hub), price is essentially a non-factor. Both are one-time licenses with no stated recurring fee. Salient's documented nine-plus years of consistent updates gives buyers more confidence that the $60 represents long-term value. Hub's value proposition rests on the depth of its Elementor-native template library and the faster, more modern editing experience that builder provides.
Buyer Satisfaction
This is where the comparison gets interesting. Salient holds a 4.81/5 rating from 6,900 reviews — a statistically robust sample that speaks to sustained, broad satisfaction across a huge and diverse user base. A rating that high, maintained at that volume, is genuinely impressive.
Hub carries a 4.88/5 rating from 667 reviews — marginally higher numerically, but from a much smaller pool. Early adopters of a theme tend to skew more enthusiastic, and 667 reviews is not yet large enough to smooth out selection bias. That said, the score is a positive indicator and not one to dismiss.
For buyers who want peer-validated reliability, Salient's volume of reviews provides stronger assurance. Hub's score is promising, but the sample size warrants measured expectations.
Maintenance Track Record
Both themes were last updated by their authors in June 2026, which puts them on equal footing for current relevance. Salient's compatibility list includes WordPress 6.4 through 7.0, reflecting active forward-testing across recent and upcoming core releases. Hub's compatibility list spans WordPress 4.9 through 6.9 — a broader historical range that underlines its long support window but does not yet list WordPress 7.0.
Salient's nine-plus years of continuous development is a meaningful differentiator for buyers who plan to use a theme for the long haul and need confidence that security and compatibility updates will keep coming.
The verdict
Choose Salient if you want a battle-tested creative theme with a massive community, proven long-term support, the latest WooCommerce compatibility, and visually distinctive motion features. Choose Hub if your workflow is Elementor-native, you build sites at volume with template libraries, and a marginally higher satisfaction score from an enthusiastic early user base appeals to you. For most buyers — especially those running WooCommerce stores on current versions — Salient is the lower-risk pick.