Hyvä vs Luma: What are their differences, and which is a better Magento theme?
When building an Adobe Commerce powered by Magento eCommerce store (let’s stick with calling it Magento, for short), options had long been limited—in terms of themes—to the Luma-based theme.
However, while still providing a highly effective frontend experience, it’s both extensible yet complicated.
For instance, Luma is supported by third-party extensions. This might seem like a way to save a little money at first, but it comes at the cost of poor performance and SEO. And in today’s highly competitive eCommerce world, better site speed and search engine ranking 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 dev experience, and shortest time to market”.
The idea in creating Hyvä is not to completely revolutionize the classic Magento frontend. Instead of reinventing the wheel, Hyvä takes what works and then improves upon the base. As a matter of fact, most developers with Luma experience find it familiar and easy to learn and understand.
Hyvä maintains 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
- Enhanced developer experience
- Improved development velocity
- Reduced dependencies
- Reduced learning curve
…And more.
Developers enjoy the fact that it’s an alternative to headless PWAs, for those who prefer not to work with JavaScript only. Whereas, merchants 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 site requires a high level of expertise, which means it takes more time and money to build a competitive and successful eCommerce store.
Here’s a quick comparison between Hyvä vs Luma.
What’s the difference between Luma and Hyvä?
Luma is Magento’s go-to storefront and theme. It’s a PWA-based headless approach to building eCommerce stores that allows for highly customizable websites, but at the same time, lacks speed and performance. Generally stated, this is because the use of extra JavaScript tends to cause slower page load times.
That’s where Hyvä comes in: To enhance performance by clearing out hundreds of JavaScript files and unnecessary CSS, and replacing each with one streamlined framework. The simpler, the faster. The faster, the better.
Again; Luma isn’t bad. You can still have a functioning online store, as many businesses do. But there is no comparison when it comes to performance—and especially on mobile devices, where more shoppers are turning.
Does this mean Luma can’t keep up?
Luma’s page load time won’t compare to the leaner Hyvä, as long as its framework remains bloated. Hyvä does a better job of maintaining Magento’s quarterly enhancement releases, too, with minimal disruption.
Although Luma can be optimized to improve performance and speed, it still doesn’t match what Hyvä can put out—especially on mobile.
And of course, the amount of work needed affects your cost, for both short-term upgrades and long-term developer involvement. That’s because Hyvä is a much simpler architecture to work with when building and maintaining new and existing Magento 2 storefronts.
Ready to find out how Hyvä can benefit your Magento store? Contact us for a quote.
Are there any downsides to using Hyvä?
Luma’s classic checkout is familiar.
Customer experience continues through checkout and this is one place where you’ll likely need some developer assistance. The Hyvä checkout is React-based. True to its style, is all about speed and performance.
But as of this writing, there are some gateway limitations to contend with. On the other hand, you can still use the Luma-based checkout, which has been the standard Magento checkout.
Initial code conversion.
One thing to consider is, what happens to all those hefty customizations and integrations when Hyvä removes the need for them? While you can still use modules from third-party services, there might be some additional coding needed on Hyvä to ensure the frontend looks and works as intended.
Licensing costs apply.
You’ll have to pay an installation fee for the Hyvä license, which currently runs €1000 ($1,147.89 USD), on top of any agency licensing costs. On the plus side, the one-off licensing fee includes future updates, as well as Slack support and access to all code and online documentation.
Only works on newer versions of Magento.
By now we hope your online store is not on Magento 1 (if so, contact us about a migration to Magento 2 stat — you’ll thank us!). But there are older versions of Magento 2 that Hyvä isn’t compatible with. The downside to this is that you’ll need to either upgrade your site or stick to Luma. On the other hand, your website will see benefits after upgrading to the latest Magento releases.
Non-compatibility with some extensions and B2B Magento module
Although great at making a Magento website load really fast, the Hyvä Magento theme requires more work to implement initially because not all extensions on the Magento Marketplace are compatible with it. To get around this obstacle, the front-end development team who is building your site will need to find workarounds to make a particular extension work and play nice with the theme.
Furthermore, at the moment the Hyvä Magento theme is not compatible with the Magento B2B module. So, if you are planning on doing B2B via the Magento B2B module, you can’t use Hyvä. In partnership with another agency, Shero is working on making Hyvä compatible with the B2B Magento module and its functionality. We’re not sure when this piece will be ready as it is a work in progress. Feel free to inquire if you’re looking to use Hyvä for B2B.
In Conclusion:
It’s a fact that in today’s booming eCommerce industry, customers are demanding that merchants offer a high-performing, super-fast online store. Luma can’t compete with Hyvä in this respect.
To see firsthand how one of our clients benefitted from Hyvä, view our case study here. This particular company saw their page load time increase from 6 seconds to a 1-second load time.
To put it plainly: Hyvä is faster, easier to maintain, and more enjoyable for developers, who can work faster due to Hyvä’s leaner framework.
Ready to get started with Hyvä? Check out the live demo here, or simply contact us!
Gentian, CSO and co-founder of Shero Commerce, guides the company and client digital strategies. He's an expert in technical SEO, Inbound Marketing, and eCommerce strategy.
