Hyvä vs Luma Magento Theme

2 years ago

Hyvä vs Luma Magento Theme — Which is Better?;

Hyvä is a theme created to improve the performance and speed of your Magento eCommerce store. It is very interesting to compare Hyvä vs Luma to make the right choice depending on the size and goals of your business.

Hyvä vs Luma: What are their differences and which is a better Magento theme?;

When creating an Adobe Commerce powered by Magento eCommerce store (Magento, in brief), the options had long been limited—in terms of themes—and were based on Luma.

However, while it still provides a highly efficient frontend experience, it is scalable and also complex.

For example, Luma is supported by third-party extensions. This may seem like a way to save some money at first, but it comes at the cost of poor performance and SEO. In today’s highly competitive e-commerce world, better site speed and search engine rankings are invaluable.

That's why web developer Willem Wigman created the Hyvä theme, which bills itself as "the Magento 2 frontend with the best performance, best development experience, and fastest loading time on the market.".

The idea behind Hyvä is not to completely revolutionize the classic Magento frontend. Instead of reinventing the wheel, Hyvä takes what works well so far and then improves on the foundation. In fact, most developers with experience in Luma will find it familiar and easy to learn and understand.

Hyvä retains the best parts of the original Magento themes, but removes the need for excessive customizations that can lead to lower performance. The theme is centered around:

Reduced complexity
Better performance
Improved developer experience
Improved development speed
Reduced dependencies
Reduced learning curve

Developers enjoy the fact that it is a PWA-free alternative for those who prefer not to work with JavaScript alone, while marketers enjoy Hyvä because it means easier implementation and maintenance, which ultimately leads to cost savings and a faster-built website.

A typical PWA-based headless website requires a high level of expertise, which means it takes more time and money to create a competitive and successful e-commerce store.

Comparison between Hyvä vs. Luma.

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What is the difference between Luma and Hyvä?;

Luma is the most popular Magento storefront and theme. It is based on PWA for building e-commerce stores, which allows for highly customizable websites, but it lacks in speed and performance. Generally, this is because the use of extra JavaScript tends to cause slower page load times.

Hyvä is here to improve performance by deleting hundreds of JavaScript files and unnecessary CSS and replacing each with an improved framework. The simpler, the faster.

Does this mean Luma is not a good theme?;

Although Luma can be optimized to improve performance and speed, it still doesn't match what Hyvä can deliver — especially on mobile.

And of course, the amount of work required affects the cost, both for short-term upgrades and long-term developer involvement. This is because Hyvä is a much simpler architecture to work with when building and maintaining new and existing Magento 2 storefronts.

Are there any disadvantages to using Hyvä?;

Luma's fund is well known.

The customer experience continues at checkout, and this is one place where you’ll likely need some developer help. Hyvä checkout is built on React. True to its style, it’s all about speed and performance.

There are some gateway limitations that need to be addressed. On the other hand, the Luma-based checkout, which was the standard Magento checkout, can still be used.

Initial code conversion.

One thing to consider is, what happens to all those great customizations and integrations when Hyvä removes the need for them? While modules from third-party services can still be used, some additional coding may be required in Hyvä to ensure the frontend looks and works as intended.

Licensing fees apply.

There is a setup fee for the Hyvä license, which currently runs €1000 (1,147.89 $ USD). The upside is that the one-time license fee includes future updates, as well as Slack support and access to all the code and online documentation.

It only works on newer versions of Magento.

There are older versions of Magento 2 that Hyvä is not compatible with. The downside of this is that the site will either need to be upgraded or remain on Luma. However, the site will see benefits after the upgrade to the latest Magento versions.

Incompatibility with some Magento extensions and B2B module.

While it’s great at making a Magento site load very quickly, the Hyvä Magento theme requires more work to implement initially because not all extensions on the Magento Marketplace are compatible. To overcome this hurdle, a frontend development team that has built the site will need to find solutions to make a specific extension work and fit nicely with the theme.

Additionally, at this time the Hyvä Magento theme is not compatible with the Magento B2B module.

In conclusion:

It is a fact that in today's booming e-commerce industry, customers demand that merchants offer a high-performance and extremely fast online store. Luma cannot compete with Hyvä in this regard.

Hyvä is faster, easier to maintain, and more enjoyable for developers, who can work faster thanks to Hyva's thinner framework.