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.
You will want to use a Genesis theme if you value stability, simplicity, and focusing on creating content. All sites without third party expert support should use Genesis.
You will want to use a Kadence theme if you want more control over styling and layout, have third party expert support to help you, and don't need theme support. For more information, see our Kadence documentation.
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.
Note
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
I 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.