This is the simplest breakdown for the average user:
Use a Genesis theme if you value stability, simplicity, and focusing on creating content. Genesis will save you from most of the nitty-gritty technical issues you'll experience with Kadence. In our opinion, all sites without third party expert support should use Genesis.
Use a Kadence theme if you want more control over styling and layout, have third party expert support to help you navigate issues with pagespeed, accessibility, user experience and mobile optimization, and don't need theme support. For more information, see our Kadence documentation.
Below we'll outline some more of the details behind this.
Genesis and Kadence are "theme frameworks" or "parent themes", which designers leverage when creating a theme.
Feast offers identical themes in both Genesis and Kadence versions, and it makes no difference to us which you decide to use. Here is the major difference between the two:
Kadence has an extensive customizer (Genesis doesn't) which lets you easily style your site to make it visually unique. These customizer settings are not all designed for pagespeed, SEO, accessibility or user experience and may or may not impact your ability to rank in search engines. Using a Kadence theme will cause you more technical issues than a Genesis theme.
The Feast Plugin comes with access to both our Genesis and Kadence themes so that you can change between them as your needs evolve. The setups are different and will require following different setup instructions if changing.
Which is "better"
We see people claim that Kadence is "SEO, pagespeed, accessibility and user experience friendly" and while this may be (but often isn't) true about the base theme they bought, their sites always have issues with one or more of these. Always.
Any theme (Kadence or Genesis) that has been customized will experience issues, and those that don't, are at an advanced level because:
- they're experienced and technical
- they have a husband or family member that helps them fix things for free
- they pay for support from NerdPress or iMarkinteractive or Mike Z
We have never seen a single site ever that has customizations and doesn't fit one of the 3 categories above. The Kadence themes are a good choice for users that fall into one of these.
This does not mean that Kadence is bad in any way. It simply means that the customizer options it provides require a very advanced degree of experience and knowledge in order to use safely and effectively.
When you buy a theme from any theme company, you're purchasing the pre-configured set of options that theme comes with, which are hopefully done with SEO, pagespeed, accessibility and mobile optimization in mind. Any change you made to that theme whether it's using the customizer, custom CSS or third party plugins, creates a new custom theme. You are responsible for supporting your own custom theme, because it's no longer the theme that you purchased.
Block themes
Block themes fully embrace the FSE (Full Site Editing) narrative that WordPress is pushing out. As of 2025, these are premature and will be prone to many growing pains and breakages over the next few years.
WordPress has significantly withdrawn its development efforts in the public WordPress codebase. This is due to a petty conflict between the founder and a third party member of the ecosystem, which is destroying the entire ecosystem.
As of 2025 it's our belief based on statements from WordPress that they're focusing efforts on their own internal company, that the Full Site Editor will be significantly impaired for the foreseeable future.
A "hybrid theme" approach such as the one Feast and CultivateWP are pursuing is the safest path for now.
A framework such as Genesis or Kadence simply adds some functionality and prebuilt options that any single theme developer is incapable of delivering on their own.
What's important with choosing a theme developer is their history and proven ability to deliver support and updates that service their clients. We don't know of any pure "Block Themes" that haven't totally abandoned their previous themes and clients, and wouldn't be likely to do so in the future.